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You Are a Tree |
 You love every part of the holidays, down to the candy canes and stockings. And you’re goofy enough to put a Christmas tree ornament on your tree! |
Archive for December 18, 2008
What Holiday Ornament Are You?
Tuesday Trivia: All solved
I thought you were going to need hints, but you came through.
Tuesday Trivia: All Quotes
1. “God bless Mama, Poppa, Captain Midnight, Veronica Lake, and the President of the United States.”
Solved by George (comment #2).
2. “Play that song about the Irish chiropodist.”
Solved by Melville (comment #4).
3. “I got nothing particular against hanging a murdering rustler; it’s just I don’t like doing it in the dark.”
Solved by Tom Hilton (comment #1).
4. “Good-looking people don’t have any spine. Their art never lasts. They get the girls, but we’re smarter.”
Solved by Hogan (comment #6).
5. “I’m on my feet all day long listening to women talk and they only talk about one thing: How some guy fucked them over.”
Solved by George (comment #5).
6. “Can’t trust a woman in a pants suit. Men wear the pants. The world doesn’t need anymore Hillary Clintons.”
Solved by Barbs (comment #7).
7. “Automobiles are a useless nuisance. Never amount to anything but a nuisance and they had no business to be invented.”
Solved by George (comment #2).
Monday Movie Review: With a Friend Like Harry
Harry un ami qui vous veut du bien (With a Friend Like Harry) (2000) 8/10
Michel (Laurent Lucas) and his wife Claire (Mathilde Seigner) are driving to their summer home with their three young daughters when they meet, by chance, an old schoolmate of Michel’s at a rest stop. Harry (Sergi López) remembers Michel very well, although Michel barely remembers him at all. Soon Harry and his girlfriend Plum (Sophie Guillemin) are staying with Michel and Claire, and it seems that Harry has very specific ideas about how to improve Michel’s life.
It’s a hot summer day. The baby in the car seat cries ceaselessly. The other kids argue and yell. The parents are harassed, worn. A hand-held camera captures the immediacy of this until you want to pull the car over your damn self. Just make it stop. It is everything that sucks about domestic bliss.
When Harry arrives, really, it’s such a relief. It mostly seems like Michel doesn’t remember him because he’s too worn out to think straight. Once they decide that Harry and Plum will follow Michel and Claire to their summer house, the next step is to have the baby travel in Harry’s air-conditioned car. No longer overheated, she is calm and adorable. How easy to solve problems when you’re independently wealthy!
Because Harry is living large on inheritance, he sees problem-solving as just that easy. Michel and Claire don’t want his charity, but they are certainly beaten down by a lack of time and money, and Harry just wants to help. Are things more sinister than that? The soundtrack music certainly suggests it. In scenes that might otherwise be innocent, some very old-fashioned Hitchcockian violins work to create tension.
And you have to ask, what’s up with this guy? He has memorized a poem that Michel wrote in high school. Look, Michel doesn’t remember him, and Harry is reciting Michel’s poetry. That’s just not right. Things aren’t going to go well.
I was stunned by Sergi López in An Affair of Love, and then read a favorable review of this film, and added it to my “To See” list. But the list grows at a rate faster than I watch movies, and I forgot about it. It is worth remembering. Naturalistic, chilling, smart, and understated, With a Friend Like Harry is a graceful bit of domestic horror. It does a good job of combining the ordinary horrors of life: Crying children, overwork, demanding elderly parents, with a little something more. Harry is smart, and spoiled, entertaining, and demanding. He seems a little like a comedic Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave. By the time things take a dark turn, you might have let your guard down, or thought things would go in an entirely different direction. Yet everything in the plot had been meticulously set up. In the end, you’re left wondering what mark Harry has left on this family, and what was under the surface that you never got to see.
My moment of fame has arrived
It’s Episode 41, part B. Most of it is in Malayalam, and I arrive at the very end.
Edited to add: The page linked to above is the home page for the TV show. The one shown on top is Episode 40. All episodes are directly below it.
Here’s a direct link to Episode 41, Part B.
Edited for more info: The show is a sitcom about Indians from the state of Kerala (who are known as Malayalee) living in the U.S. As I understand it, the plot of this episode involves a visiting uncle from India, who is an intellectual obsessed with Mark Twain. He is eager to have an authentic American experience, but everywhere he goes, he meets Malayalee. Finally, he meets an America woman (me), and she turns out to be eager to speak Malayalam.
Flair
So I was out in the mall, and we stopped at Friday’s for a drink, and there’s a guy in the back with a weird tie-dye shirt. It’s catching my eye because it’s so weird, and I finally realize, he’s got a big rectangle of tie-dye stitched to the back of his Friday’s shirt. He’s wait staff or something, and he’s wearing a red Friday’s polo shirt, but the entire back, shoulders to waist, is this patch of tie-dye.
I can’t stop staring. It’s cheesy fake pre-printed tie-dye, with pre-printed peace signs on it. The guy has a big beard and looks kind of hippie-freaky, but this is sort of an appalling shirt. On the other hand, it’s a tie-dye uniform. I can’t stop staring. it’s just too weird.
My date is not as compelled by this as I am. He is perplexed that I am even interested in discussing it. It’s a tie-dye shirt, so what? But I can’t stop staring and I can’t figure out why it’s sewn to his work shirt.
Then I start looking around, and I notice that all the employees have customized their work shirts. One has a number on the back and a Yankee’s logo on the front, painstakingly done in fabric paint, and if I knew baseball I’m sure I’d recognize the number. One girl has an exquisite full-back rendering of Mighty Mouse, apparently in Sharpie. But one is kind of half-ass, indicating to me that this is some sort of requirement.
It’s flair. Fake individuality.
I actually checked Friday’s website, there’s nothing about this. It must be unique to this particular location.
The whole thing about “flair,” if you’ve seen Office Space, is that fake individuality is not individuality. Corporations co-opting your ability to express yourself is only an ugly reminder that you’re not really to express yourself.
And yet, the shirts are…really something.
Damn. I forgot trivia.
You guys must hate me. Checking back here all day, and finding nothing. I suck.
Okay, here’s a day-late starter, play amongst yourselves:
He tells the story of being embarrassed by an erection at a school age pool party.
Today’s movies all start with “F” (not counting “the” etc.).
Go!
Monday Movie Review: Murderball (rerun)
This is a re-run of a movie review I wrote two years ago. It’s a documentary; the kind for which Netflix exists—it has become one of my all-time favorite movies. I am just swamped today and have no time to write up any of the movies I saw this week. Sorry.
Murderball (2005) 9/10
Quad rugby (“murderball”) players are followed from the World Championships in 2002 to the Paralympics Games of 2004. Quad rugby, or wheelchair rugby, is played by quadriplegics in specially-adapted and reinforced chairs. (Documentary)
In the movies, people in wheelchairs are a finite number of things. They are tragic, uplifting, inspiring, angry, brave, hopeful, or heartwarming. In Murderball, they’re guys. (Women in wheelchairs are seen only peripherally in the film.) Specifically, they’re guys on a sports team. In fact, if you want to generalize, they’re more typical of what you may think about athletes than of what you may think about the disabled. They’re interested in playing hard, proving themselves, partying, and picking up girls. They pull pranks, they roughhouse, they boast. They’re guys.
In a way, I realized, this is an obvious and overlooked aspect of quadriplegia. Many such injuries are acquired in typically macho ways: Extreme sports, bar fights, pranks gone wrong, drunk driving, war. We see the way that the injured have to rebuild their self-image, and nothing makes more sense than that they rebuild the macho part as well.
The basic story follows two men. Mark Zupan is one of the stars of the U.S. quad rugby team. One day he was out partying and fell asleep, drunk, in the back of his friend’s pickup truck. Later his friend, driving drunk, and with no idea Mark was in the back, crashed the truck. Zupan was thrown sixty feet and hung onto a tree in a canal for thirteen hours until someone heard his cries for help. We meet his girlfriend, we attend his high school reunion, and ultimately, we meet the driver of the pickup truck.
Joe Soares had childhood polio. He was a star of the U.S. team for years. When he was cut from the team (a coach says simply that age slowed him down) he sued, unsuccessfully, to get back on. Now he coaches the Canadian team and the rivalry between his former and current teams runs deep. We meet Joe’s wife and his son. The younger Soares is interested in music and academics, not sports, which creates tension between the two.
We also meet a recently injured man, Keith, who is first learning to face his injury. We follow him from the early days of rehab, through a meeting with Zupan at a presentation on quad rugby, where Keith is excited by the freedom and strength he feels in the rugby chair.
Murderball is a masterful film. The editing seamlessly carries you through a huge range of facets of the lives of these men. Just writing this up made me realize how very much I’d seen. We are educated about spinal cord injury, we traverse family relationships, sexuality, competition, guilt, friendship, family, remorse, anger, and play. The competitions are exciting, there’s humor, there’s even heartwarming stuff. We are allowed to draw conclusions without being pushed.
The meeting with Keith brought up the eternal question about documentaries; who are the documentarians, and what are they doing? Clearly, the filmmakers arranged for Zupan to make a presentation where Keith would be present, but how did they pick Keith in particular? How did they decide he would ultimately be excited about quad rugby? Did they follow several recently injured people in the hopes that one of them would be? These are the sort of questions I wish documentaries in general would answer.
I hate Fanty
So the Gang of Two consists of Mingo and Fanty. Mingo has some annoying eccentricities, but is basically the ideal pet. Independent yet affectionate, he’s even a good mouser.
His sister, on the other hand, is here on earth to drive me mad. And she’s succeeding. She’s so nervous that if you walk near her she runs and hides, and yet so demanding that she will cry near your hand until you pet her, and cry whenever you stop, for hours. (But only your hand. She’s terrified of being picked up.)
Fanty has occasional seizures (I know, I know). Previously, they’d been every couple of months, but then she had three in four weeks, so we decided to medicate her. Problem is, she’s nervous, so I was very concerned about giving her pills. My vet gave me Pill Pockets. You put the pill inside the treat and squish it closed. The first one, she refused to eat, and I had to force it down her throat. The second one, she ran from me when she saw it, and forcing it down her throat was harder. Somehow, though, she realized they tasted good, and the next dose she ate readily when I left it on the floor by the spot where she comes to cry at my hand, and soon she was begging for them.
The problem is that I have to get Mingo out of the way because he doesn’t have seizures and shouldn’t have phenobarbital.
This morning it was complicated. Mingo was in the bedroom and Fanty was not. I couldn’t get Mingo out, and then Fanty went into the bathroom, and I thought ‘Fine, I’ll give it to her there’ and shut myself and a pill in with her, but she became upset and cried. So I opened the door, got Mingo out, and shut us into the bedroom.
But now she was already upset and just cried and cried and cried. I put the pill/treat on the floor on her spot and dangled my hand, but she was having none of it, and just kept crying. So I thought I’d ignore her so she could relax, and started fiddling with my cellphone.
At which point, she got up on my bed and let loose a long, angry stream of urine.
Peed.
On my bed.
Sort of “Welcome to Monday” writ large.
What a great day
I never left the house yesterday. I have been so busy, I don’t know the last time I had an un-booked-up weekend. It was glorious.
I did a great deal of writing on a new book, I did work for the Mad Men blog, I mopped the front hall, did laundry and dishes, watched a movie, played computer games, caught up on a couple of TV shows, shaved my legs, listened to music, prepared my Christmas list and organized the presents I’ve already bought, and did some cooking. Very productive, very relaxing, very exactly what I wanted.
It felt great. It felt like me owning my life.
By the way, anyone who emailed me on Thursday, all my mail went away. Just for about six hours in the middle of the day, anything that arrived then went poof.
