Ephemeral Isle
Archives
Tuesday
1 June 2004
Gothic Bathroom Horror Department
"Come on! The rest of us have got to go too, you know!"
I Won't Dance, Don't Touch Me.
Alice and Fenton's tango routine would have got them into the finals if it hadn't been for their pathological fear of germs.
Thursday
3 June 2004
Man in Space
Walt Disney was a true man of the Space Age, even if he did have a reputation for hanging around with dwarves, fairies, and some of the most saccharine cartoon animals ever to blight the silver screen. Say what you like about him, he may have been a control freak, treated his animators like coolies, had a tendency to latch on to beloved stories and palm them off as if he’d written them himself, and, of course, there was the lemming incident, but he was a genuine optimist.
You can see that in the original layout of Disneyland, which we tend to think of as a theme park, but to Disney it was a permanent World’s Fair that he designed with a mind that was equal parts Henry Ford, Hugo Gernsback, and a small Midwestern American boy. When you walked through Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland you weren’t just strolling through themed sections of a park, you were inside how Walt Disney viewed an ideal America from its beginnings, through its Golden Age, its folklore, and its painfully bright future. He had boundless faith in the ability of SCIENCE to lead man into the millennium and was eager to use his influence as a filmmaker and theme park entrepreneur to help usher the future into American homes.
Then maybe they’d forget the lemmings.
This is the reason why Disney has released Man in Space as part of the Tomorrowland DVD set. Man in Space was Uncle Walt’s contribution toward helping sell an aggressive space programme to the American public and in Disney’s introductions to the three-episode series he makes no bones about it. This was something that he keenly believed in and he was putting the resources of his studio to push it along. In fact, he was so keen that he was even willing to let his animators slip their leads for a bit and dump all the annoying mouse and duck in a sailor suit bit in favour of something a bit meatier. And for Disney, who fired Robert Heinlein after one day for making rude jokes about Mickey and Minnie, that was a major concession.
Each episode of Man in Space followed a similar formula. There was a potted science lesson, an introductory cartoon about the history of the subject of the evening, experts brought in to discuss the technical aspects of space travel, and finally a dramatic depiction of a future space voyage.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m no fan of Disney or the company that bears his name. I always found the animated features cloying, the short cartoons unfunny, the live action films tepid, and that mouse downright frightening. You wander into the kitchen at two in the morning and come face to snout with a four-foot mouse wearing red shorts, amorphous boots, and four-fingered gloves and tell me that you wouldn’t go for the fire irons too. Worse, I lived through the Great Fallow period of Disney that spawned such horrors as The Boatniks, Herbie Goes Bananas, and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. I still can’t hear that bomp bomp bomp bomp bomp brass riff without having flashback episodes. That being said, I actually enjoyed Man in Space for much the same reason that I enjoyed 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; it was a project that excited Disney so much that he didn’t feel compelled to drown it in Disney treacle. The special effects are top-notch, especially when you consider that they were being done for television, the animation has a lively, surreal quality that one doesn’t associate with Disney, and it manages to convey some fairly dense popular science lessons that are still very entertaining.
For example, the first episode, called Man in Space (what are the odds!), explained the basics of space flight using not only animation, but loads of nifty clips from Georges Melies’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon), Frtiz Lang’s Frau im Mond, and Lots of cool shots of V2 launches and a cavalcade of ‘50s rockets that was like a vintage air show for old Space Race buffs such as myself. This was followed by Willy Ley giving a lecture on basic rocket design with the BIGGEST piece of chalk I have ever seen. This is so weird that they quickly shift to cartoons. I particularly liked Heinz Haber’s description of space medicine. His delivery was pure common or garden-variety lecture stuff, so it was spiced up with a cartoon describing the effects of spaceflight on the human body that can only be described as gleefully sadistic. Of course, they couldn’t leave out live subjects. Let’s check out explosive decompression!
Then came the big guns. Enter Werner Von Braun giving a lecture on manned rocket design. This is a popular programme intended to sell an idea, so he glosses over the huge problems that needed to be overcome. Remember, it wasn’t certain if a man could even survive in free fall or that a giant rocket capable of reaching space could be safely assembled. Economics aren’t even mentioned. This is the set up for the finale, which is a “How It Could be Done” cartoon that was pure drama and actually quite riveting. It looks like some of the best magazine illustrations of the times brought to life. Okay. It looks COOL! The shuttle depicted is sleeker and more elegant than the Collier’s deign crammed with futuristic gear that is obviously a single step from ‘50’s technology. More details are thought out than in the Collier’s design and it looks like a somewhat larger Dynasoar. Why the blazes didn’t real spacecraft look as exciting as these do?
The next episode, Man and the Moon, follows the same pattern; intro cartoon, potted science, etc., though this time the writers are stuck on the fact that even though the Moon is a pretty cool destination, it’s actually a pretty dull topic of conversation; especially in the ‘50s when all that was known was that the Moon is dead and airless. Try stretching that out for an hour.
So, it’s a lot of filler about tides, eclipses, folklore, proverbs, and comic songs of a lunar nature followed by Von Braun explaining how the first space station would be built. It’s basically the Collier’s station with a nuclear reactor instead of solar generators. At first, I was going to peg this as the weak sister of the series until the climax, which was a live-action mini drama about the first mission to orbit the Moon that would actually have made the basis for a decent science fiction film complete with the federally mandated meteor shower sequence and alien base discovered on the far side of the Moon. The ship is marvellous. It actually looks like a pretty good design; simple and efficient, but so different from the Apollo CSM design that I could smile at the naiveté and howl with frustration that the real thing wasn’t closer to the prediction. This thing has a missile battery, dammit!
Episode three, Mars and Beyond, was a Paul Frees festival with the veteran voiceover actor doing every character voice in the film from Garco the Robot, who introduces Walt Disney, to the entire pantheon of Greek philosophers.
By this point, the intro cartoon was well established, but as a historian I was getting a bit cheesed off with the depiction of Ptolemy as a wild-eyed fanatic and the description of the middle ages as a time of “Stupidity, superstition, and sorcery.” This was not made up for by the heroic view of the work of Copernicus and Galileo, which in reality was not quite the sudden Burst of Truth as popular science imagines them to be.
What really set Mars and Beyond apart was that in this episode was the one where the animators must have barricaded the door against Uncle Walt while they cranked out some of the wildest stuff to come from the Magic Kingdom. There were take offs on H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a flat-out space opera spoof that gave me nightmares as a child. When they set out to show what life on Mars might look like, they just took the blue pill and went to town. They showed off every sort of speculative life form they could think of in vivid and dramatic detail. There were migrating plants, plant-eating plants, autocannibal plants, super-insulated animals, underground life, dust-eating life, rock-eating life, giant flyers, balloon jet creatures, harpoon animals, solar-beam killers, gas killers, ultrasonic killers, Silicon life that made self-shattering spires, and totally gonzo life that defies description because everything went all Stanley Kubrick on me.
Finally, there was a description of a mission to Mars using an ion drive leading to the conquest of Mars and the Ultimate Conquest of the Universe yada, yada.
Not only did I enjoy it, but also it passed the Emma test. The toddler sat through 90% of it without fussing, which is unprecedented for anything this side of Mary Poppins. The fact that I now have a DVD that I can watch with my daughter that does not have dancing penguins in it is solace against the fact that it may be some time before I can see Zulu again.
Friday
4 June 2004
“They play with us for their sport”
I sometimes suspect that God looks down upon me from His throne and says, “What is Szondy doing? Does he really think he gets to have three hours straight to just sit and write? I don’t think so!” And with that, He bowls me a googly that knocks my Thursday straight into the hazard, if I may mix my sporting metaphors.
Emma has started going to preschool three days a week, which meant that on those three days I would have three solid hours of non-toddler, non-errand-running time to bang out some words. Oh, I knew that I would have a couple of weeks of clean up time to deal with as I bashed away at the LIST, with its demands for merchandise to be loaded into the shop, annoying phone calls to make, and chores left over from the MOVE that could only be done without a toddler underfoot, but I figured that I’d still have time to crank out a column, get a few pages done on the new Future Past sections (coming soon!), and even start outlining a new play. Of course, I also thought that I’d be the first man on Mars, have the net worth of Luxembourg in my current account, and have to explain to my wife why Sandra Bullock is stalking me, so what do I know?
When I got up this morning, I was figuring on a pretty straightforward day: post office, drop Emma off at school, a couple of calls to our aggravating cable and cell providers, and then a quiet midday with quill pen hovering over foolscap as I stared at the bowl of roses on my writing table. Of course, that was before I discovered that we had run out of freezer bags that my wife needed for the cookies that she bakes for the concession stand at her theatre and which she needed NOW, that we were running so late that I would have to swing by Jack in the Box to pick up breakfast for the family while said wife went to work, and that the engine light would come on while I was buzzing around town tending to the above. So, it was buy freezer bags, grab breakfast, drop off Emma at preschool, hand wife breakfast (she is managing director at the preschool, which is handy), deal with sudden bout of separation anxiety on the part of daughter, wolf down my breakfast in car, and cross my fingers as I drive to the dealer in West Seattle to get the Cruiser fixed.
All part of life’s rich tapestry, as they say.
I am now ensconced with the laptop in a coffee shop a couple of streets from the dealer wondering whether the car will be ready in time for me to pick the sprog up, or if there will be a further development in the complications of the day.
Oh, here’s one. I’ve just discovered that my cell phone is dead, and as this shop doesn’t have wifi, I am incommunicado. So, the wife does not know that I took the car to the dealer, the dealer cannot contact me, and I am faced with a very uncertain afternoon.
This is the reason why I get so many strange looks from people in the summer. No matter what the weather, I am always clad in a leather, tweed, or silk jacket; usually the leather, because it’s the toughest. This isn’t so odd in the winter, but in the summer this is the stuff of comment even in Seattle. I don’t do this out of style (well, not entirely. Middle age spread makes jackets more and more of an option as Father Time slices away), but because I need all the pockets I can get. I spend so much of my time running about on errands, at playgrounds, the beach, the zoo, or just on toddler detail in general that I have to do what work I can on the hop. So, I am always toting about my notebook and pen in one pocket, my handheld in the other, my digital recorder on top of that, my phone, hands free set, and anything else I happen to need so that I can scribble or dictate the odd paragraph as time allows. This doesn’t even take into account that as husband and father I am required to carry all keys, watch, pocket knife, pocket torch, cash, cards, mini toolkit, matches, compass, and magnifying glass that we might need on the off chance as we go about our day. No wonder I always look so baggy and keep listing to one side whenever I’m within a mile of an electromagnet. How the Hell Batman manages to squeeze all his kit and about a quarter of a mile of rope into that thin belt of his I am staggered to imagine.
And now I’m adding another seven pounds of laptop and carry bag to all that. Yes, it’s the geeky writer’s exercise programme! Load yourself up with gear and stomp around a hilly city in search of caffeine while your car is being worked on. Then, for that full-on aerobic workout, chase a toddler around all of creation until she turns and decides that Daddy is now a trampoline. You’ll either end up with a physique like Hercules or so pummelled into the ground that the Fates will take pity on you and let you put your feet up with a DVD of The Eagle has Landed and a pint of Guinness for the evening. The physique is unlikely, the pummelling is a dead cert, and the DVD and Guinness are a forlorn hope.
Still, to quote Zaphod Beeblebrox, anything for a weird life.
Saturday
5 June 2004
No column today due to dealing with *%&&$% bandwidth issues.
Sunday
6 June 2004
Ronald Wilson Reagan (1911-2004)
Fortieth president of the United States, Ronald Reagan passed away yesterday at the age of 93. Hated by some and loved by others, he was certainly one of the most important figures of the Cold War and not a man who will fade from the history books very quickly.
Monday
7 June 2004
Technological Dead Ends Department
People quickly tired of Bruce's constant enquiries of "Can I open that pickle jar for you?"
Tuesday
8 June 2004
One Day on the Underground Department
Beatrice and Fiona couldn't help but be drawn like moths to a flame by Mr. Millmoss's fierce animal magnetism.
Wednesday
9 June 2004
Buyer's Remorse Department
"Oh, sure, they're cute when they're little, but..."
Thursday
10 June 2004
Day of de Code
I am down with another one of those vile rotating family colds. First Emma gets it, with all the post-nasal nastiness that that implies, and then I'm laid low. Or rather, I wish I were laid low. With my insane schedule it's more like shot through the lungs and then limping through the day. It's been coming on for a while; the growing lassitude, the feeling like my head is filled with cotton, sinuses filling with gunk, and the final joy: Inner ear infection! Oh, that was a pip. I woke up with ears feeling like bales of cotton and when I rub them in my half sleep the combination of infected eardrums and wax build up suddenly seals up my auditory canal. I can could barely hear out of one ear and I was stone deaf in the other. Worse, the deaf one was beginning to hurt... a LOT!
I was in such bad shape that my wife had to take Emma to the office with her while I stayed home in a Nyquil induced stupor until my afternoon doctor's appointment. I had so little energy left that I put in a DVD of The Blood of Fu Manchu and zonked on the couch.
If you haven't heard of this film, you are exceedingly lucky. Christopher Lee, who plays the title role, had to be incredibly down on his luck to make this heap of seagull offal. Now, I have something of a liking for the better known Fu Manchu films starring Lee. The Face of Fu Manchu and The Brides of Fu Manchu had a silly pulp quality to them that neatly captured the tone of Sax Rhomer's novels, but Jesus Franco, the director of Blood, delivers such unbridled schlock that I can only assume that he trousered the money and ran for it. It isn't that the acting is bad, or that the roles, except for Lee and Tsai Chin as Lin Tang, are so badly cast, it is that the plot makes no sense. Fu Manchu kidnaps a load of women so that he can infuse them with "enough poison to kill a regiment" and send them off as human poison vials to literally kiss Fu Manchu's enemies to death. Far enough. Poison damsels are well known in history, so it's a legit premise, but at first the women are terrified captives cowering under whips and trying to escape at every turn, then for no readily apparent reason they're all fanatical followers. Then Fu Manchu sends one of the women to kill his arch enemy Sir Dennis Nyland Smith, but it turns out that she's infused with a weaker poison and Nyland Smith is only blinded because it will take him six weeks to die. Why didn't Fu give him the full juice? So our hero can have a chance to cure himself and come a-calling?
Mind you, this is the coherent part of the plot. After this the action switches to South America where we run into an agent of Nyland Smith, a nurse, a load of Mexican banditos who are trying way too hard to be "colourful," and a load of pointless subplots involving a village being raided by the banditos, Fu killing said banditos, and such a great deal of running about that I completely lost sight of what the deuce was going on. So, it seems, did the director, because he can't even keep Fu Manchu's dastardly scheme straight. One minute he's out to kill his ten worst enemies, the next minute he's preparing to wipe out whole cities with chemical weapons. He can't even keep the time period straight. It's clearly established early in the film that it's supposed to be the 1920s, yet when Fu Manchu's women go on their murder spree we see bodies strewn in clear view of very modern architecture.
Finally, there is more running about, Fu Manchu's jungle lair is destroyed in a explosive climax that is so cheap that it looks like the stage hands were just kicking the set, and we are threatened with a sequel.
Needless to say, after that load of misery I was more than happy to go to the doctor's. There I had my ears syringed and the wax plug squirted out of my ear (gad, it looked disgusting) and toddled off with my hearing restored, the pressure relieved, and a prescription for antibiotics clutched in my fist.
I still feel like yesterday's dog's dinner, but at least Emma recovered enough that I could get a full night's sleep. Now all I need to do is keep my eyes screwed tight shut while I convalesce so I can't see the appalling mess the flat has fallen into.
Friday
11 June 2004
Reagan
As I've said before, I tend to shy away from politics because I haven't really got the taste for it, and I'm such a reactionary conservative that I'm still seething that Queen Victoria renounced her claim to France, so I don't find political discussions very interesting for lack of common ground.. But I do sometimes enjoy watching the political debates, especially when they revolve around what are essentially nonpolitical events, such as the funeral of Ronald Reagan. I haven't followed the funeral procession that much. Like a lot of stories, it's one of those that I bump into as I go through the day rather than seek out. Some aspects I find interesting, most of it is predictable and boring, and some I am appalled by.
I lived through the Reagan years, and as it was a time when I was bumping around the world in pursuit of my academic career I had the chance to encounter just about every point of view about Reagan that there was. I met some people who regarded him as the greatest president since Abraham Lincoln and others who hated him in a manner that bordered on mania.
I suppose in some ways it was like the polarisation of opinion about George Bush Secundus, though in Bush's case I've never been able to understand the sheer depth of the hatred he instills in some. Oh, I know that you can make a good case for opposing him on this or another of his policies, and I've heard some very sound arguments against him from either side of the political divide, but what I can't fathom is the visceral, personal hatred of Bush that blinds some people to any rational view of the man. I mean the sort of "Bush lied!" hatred that would gleefully see terrorists running rampant with tens of thousands of American casualties at home and abroad as a fair trade for getting Bush out of office.
"Bush lied!" is the slogan I chose to illustrate this hatred because it is so peculiar, and it is peculiar because it is contradictory. Those who claim that "Bush lied!" are the same who dismiss him as an idiot who goes blundering forward out of sheer single mindedness, yet this idiot is supposed to be capable of weaving an incredible conspiracy of lies to further his dark agenda. That's a very impressive sort of idiocy. This isn't just a charge which is contradictory, it is out of sorts with the man's personality. The claim that Bush is simple minded could be put forward as plausible because Bush is a simple man in many ways and not notable for intellectual achievements. I'm not saying that that makes him a chinless wonder, but it at least makes such a charge within the realm of plausibility. I would certainly be one to admit that if it hadn't been for the war, Bush would have had a fairly tame term of office. The idea that he is a liar, however, is one that just doesn't fit Bush's profile. If anything, I'd say that Bush is far too open and honest for a politician. He is one of those men who has a disturbing tendency to make his intentions too transparent to everyone at the table. When he says something, I may not believe it, but I certainly think that he does. Now, I think he may be capable of overemphasis, he may be capable of wishful thinking, bad judgment, or even willful blindness, but outright lies? That's like telling me my Aunt Harriet was a sex fiend.
I think the basis for my puzzlement is that I have seen many politicians hated in the past and I can usually fathom a pattern to that hatred. I can understand why someone might hate Nixon or Clinton simply because of their personalities; Nixon was a sullen paranoid while Clinton came off as a sleazy case of arrested adolescence. It's a small, petty hatred, but understandable. Others you could have a very hard time hating, however much their beliefs or actions might repel you, such as Woodrow Wilson or Kennedy or Eisenhower. They came across as decent men for the most part and whatever they achieved, they left the body politic pretty much as they found it.
And then there are those you can hate despite their personalities.
Ronald Reagan falls into this last camp. If the current hatred of Bush on the part of some puzzles me, I can understand perfectly why some still hate Reagan with a passion and hope that he is roasting in Hell. It isn't because Reagan was hateful personally. To do that is possible, but it requires considerable focus and application. What made it possible to hate Reagan was that he was so effective.
If you listen to the rhetoric revolving around Reagan at his death, you'd swear that they were often talking about two completely different people. To some, he was a political saviour and to others he was a reckless, unqualified destroyer. But this polarisation is only possible if you look on the Reagan years as simply dropping out of history as a self-contained unit without roots or past. What many of his admirers and detractors often forget is that Reagan gained the presidency at the end of that stomach flu of a decade; the 1970s.
When Reagan came to office, the United States and the West in general were in a horrible state. The economy was in a shambles. Inflation was a constant menace. The industrial world was reeling from oil embargos and the Soviet Union strategically dumping crude on the market. The Communist sphere of influence was expanding. Southeast Asia was a charnel house, Cuban troops were running about Africa with such abandon that even Moscow was telling Castro to tone it down. Afghanistan had been invaded. And America was suffering the humiliation of having fifty two of its citizens held hostage by a lower division third world dictatorship. The American ambassador to the UN routinely condemned his own country in tones one would expect from an enemy. There was a pervasive air of doom and fatalism in the air that was not helped by the outgoing president blaming the American people for their "malaise." There was a sense that the West was in decline and that any attempt to reverse this would only make things worse. It was a time that had all the dreadful stability of a terminal ward.
Ronald Reagan came into office with a firm resolve to change things and he did so with an unalloyed sense of optimism. More than that, he was profoundly unorthodox in his methods that made those on either side of the aisle often throw up their hands in horror.
I've never taken any real interest in American domestic politics, but I was fortunate to have had a diplomatic history professor who was so high up in the State Department that Henry Kissinger used to sub for his lectures, so I did get some neat insights into how Reagan handled the Soviets, so I'll let that serve as my example. The Soviets were masters at negotiation and in sixty years of dealing with the West they had honed their technique to an art. The Soviet way of negotiating was to show up at the table, scream horrible invectives at the Western delegates, make impossible demands, and then sit back and wait for the Westerners to woo them back to the table with concessions. Well, the first time Reagan sat down with the Soviets they rolled out the old screaming and demands and when they finished, Reagan just got up and left.
The Soviets sat dumbfounded. No one had ever done that before and they didn't know how to handle it. And that was pretty much how it went between Reagan and the Kremlin from then on. The Soviets tried to throw a bridle over Reagan's head, but he never stood still long enough to get caught.
One thing the Soviets couldn't grasp was that Reagan had a sincere hatred of nuclear weapons and couldn't abide the then doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, which he saw less as a strategy to keep the peace than as an admission of failure. That was the reason he was so dead keen on his Star Wars project.
Now, Star Wars, from a technical point of view, was a gamble of high odds. Given the technology of the time, there was little hope of it acting as a shield against incoming missiles and its critics were quite right when they said that it was a waste of money-- from a military point of view. But from a diplomatic point of view it was a brilliant stroke. The Soviets knew that Star Wars couldn't stop a preemptive strike from getting through, but it could certainly blunt it; and with the dodgy state of the Soviet missile forces, that was putting the odds a bit too high for comfort. Worse than that, there was no way that the Soviet economy would allow them to even pretend to match such a system with one of their own and failure to do so was an unmitigated admission of defeat in the arms race. And to add insult to injury, Reagan not only intended to deploy Star Wars, he offered to give the technology to the Soviets for their own defence. It was an offer that was both magnanimous and fatally humiliating.
The point of all this is not what Reagan achieved, which was considerable from the first chink in the Berlin Wall to the collapse of the Communist Empire, but that he did it in the face of both friends and foes who claimed "You can't do that!" He ended up bursting so many long held bubbles, gored so many people's oxen, and generally kicked over the traces in so many areas that he committed the one unpardonable sin; he upset the status quo. There hadn't been such a huge shift in American politics since the days of Roosevelt. The New Deal had moved the centre well to the left and conservatives fumed for generations about it even as they adopted many of Roosevelt's principles. Reagan did the same thing, only this time it was the liberals and the champagne communists of Europe who were doing the fuming, though they recognised that it would be political suicide to turn back the clock to 1979.
Long story short, Reagan left behind a very large footprint. You can love him or hate him, but like Lincoln or Roosevelt (Two other presidents who elicited love and hate galore), his achievements don't leave much of a middle ground.
Saturday
12 June 2004
WISSENSCHAFT!
Science proves: Dogs understand German!
Sunday
13 June 2004
The Dare
It was dawning on Tom that Deirdre and Adrian were calling his bluff about drinking his own ear wax.
Monday
14 June 2004
Worst of the Season
This year's Henley regatta turned out to be something of a disappointment.
Tuesday
15 June 2004
Great Advertising Slogans
Is your laxative TOO fast acting?
Wednesday
16 June 2004
Flightless no longer!
For your historical edification we are proud to present the Bell flying belt; suitably modified for penguins.
Thursday
17 June 2004
Six Million Dollar Penguin
We can rebuild him; we have the technology.
Friday
18 June 2004
Preschool & Plays
Just got back from dropping off the daughter at preschool. That sentence always sounds so domestic and even placid with its vision of walking Emma down a shady lane to a picturesque school to be met by a smiling teacher and happy playmates. Well, it’s mostly true. We do walk down a shady lane, though that’s after the five-mile drive from our place; the school is picturesque in that it’s located inside a Methodist church next to a neighbourhood library; and we are met by a smiling teacher and happy playmates. What isn’t visible is the frantic two hours that preceded all of this that explains why I look like I’ve pulled backwards through a hedge.
First, there’s waking up, which is ideally a pleasant drift into consciousness or the anticipated yowl of the alarm clock; unpleasant, but braced for. What I wasn’t expected is my daughter howling “No! No! No!” at the top of her lungs at 6AM. I bolt into her room and find her clutching Bunny and staring into the middle distance in stark terror. Great. Nightmare time. That’s what I get for letting her watch Finding Nemo the day before. Wonderful film, but I have learned lately to skip past the first quarter of it, as everything up to and including the sharks in Carnivores Anonymous is way to scary for the toddler. After consoling Emma and plunking her down in our bed, I try to get an hour of power sleep in before it’s officially time to get up.
The first half hour up is the usual bleary struggle to get my wife ready and the daughter awake while I try wrestling tea down my throat while glancing at the e-mail and checking the BBC to make sure Al Qaeda didn’t nuke the Space Needle while we were sleeping. It was during this phase that my wife uttered the dreaded words, “Can you pick me up breakfast on the way in?”
I have never understood people who eat breakfast first thing. Having lived in the country, I am much more used to getting up with a cup of tea, reading the paper, getting a bit of work done, and then sitting down to a huge English breakfast somewhere around nine or ten. The idea of even facing food before then revolts me and the American habit of grabbing fast food at the dash as a substitute seems only slightly more appealing than the French breakfast of black coffee, Gauloises, and disaffection. My wife, on the other hand is truly American and is very comfortable with fast food. For her, it is entirely logical to hit the drive through for a bag of caloric intake. For me, it’s a bit of very large grit dropped into the delicate clockwork of my schedule.
Those of you who wander over to the shop section of the site know that I do a bit of online selling, though the davidszondy.com site only shows of fraction of what I sell. I also carry merchandise on Amazon.com and ebay, so on a good week I’m down the post office every day with a stack of parcels. Like a general preparing for battle, I’d gauged the available time, my resources, and the tasks before me and concluded that I could get Emma cleaned, dressed and fed; the items marked for today’s shipment located from stock and packaged; hit the post office; and get to preschool with minutes to spare. If I was going to negotiate the iron queue at the Jack in the Box I was going to have to book it hard, so after my wife left it was a thirty second shave, a rinse with hydrogen peroxide in lieu of brushing teeth, a wet wipes wash for Emma, hunting for my emergency pair of clean socks, distracting Emma with The Wiggles on the telly while I got the packages together, and everyone out the door.
A quick glance at my watch told me that I wouldn’t make the post office, so I would just have to eat into writing time by doing it after drop off, so it was on to Jack in the Box. Of course I should have foreseen that since I’d cut out the post office the queue would be nonexistent and I breezed through in record time. So, I end up at preschool early and harried, but Emma has half a hash brown inside her.
Happy ending? No, you poor deluded fool. You forget The Bunny Factor. Emma had left the house with Bunny in a death grip that had not relaxed for one second from the moment we left home to the point where we were reunited with Mama at the preschool. Fearing that Bunny might get lost, we tried to extricate said Bunny from the child’s grip only to elicit a noise that suggested to the world that we were disembowelling our only child with a blunt pen knife. I suggested a couple of stratagems for getting Bunny away, which my wife shot down, and we ended up letting Emma take Bunny to class while we prayed that it wouldn’t get lost; the consequences of which I couldn’t bear to contemplate.
So, I sit in front of the laptop, my second cup of tea of the morning finally drunk, and I contemplate two futures before me like the divergent courses of two parallel universes. In one, Emma and Bunny come home together and all is well. In the other, Bunny has been kidnapped by an international gang (it’s always an international gang) and is being held for several dollar’s ransom while I contemplate joining the Foreign Legion and wrap my head in a towel to keep out the inappeasable screams of a two-year old denied the company of her one and only true friend.
I believe that this is what is called the Joys of Fatherhood.
The one bright spot on the horizon is that my play Circling the Drain is opening at the Burien Live Theatre on Friday for a limited run as part of their playwright’s festival. I’m actually quite excited about going, as I know the director and trust him with my script, so I haven’t felt the need (or had the time!) to sit in on any of the rehearsals. So far I’ve only seen this play performed at readings and the idea of people actually getting up and moving around while saying the lines without a script in one hand is definitely something to look forward to. It’s also a bit scary, because I know that what the writer sees when he puts the words on paper is not necessarily what the director sees when he puts actions on stage. Fair enough, but there’s always the worse possibility that what gets on stage will be hamstrung by something out of anyone’s control, such as a desperate lack of actors for the roles and I could end up with the ingénue being played by a forty-year old mother of five or the urbane Shakespearean going to the guy who played Neumann on Seinfeld. Believe me, I have seen far worse casting atrocities in my time from overweight Cordelias, to Agatha Chrisites with British accents so bad that the action had to be moved to Louisiana, to high school students In Grease with paunches and bald spots, to Van Helsings in Dracula who were so drunk that they literally couldn’t stand upright.
Not that I believe that any of this is going to happen, but it isn’t only skydivers who jump out of the plane wondering if their chute pack isn’t filled with camping gear.
Saturday
19 June 2004
Computer Woes
“Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care, The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, Chief nourisher in life's feast….”
And so on. Clearly, the Thane of Cawdor ran a web site. I know exactly how Macbeth felt, considering that I only got five hours of pretty ratty sleep last night. It’s bad enough that my daughter has inherited my night owl gene, which makes it impossible to get her to sleep before midnight some nights. I am also walking proof that tech problems never emerge at convenient times. I’d just uploaded yesterday’s Ephemeral Isle when I noticed that there was a heck of a lot of pages uploading; pages that I hadn’t modified. So, I checked the site after the load and what do I see; One of those inexplicable nightmares that only a computer can give birth to. The most obvious thing was that part of the navigation bar had changed from vertical to horizontal and was now sticking out into the content area like a pier. Not only that, but a button mysteriously appeared for a section of the site that wasn’t supposed to be in the navigation yet. Worst of all, none of this was visible in the WYSIWYG pane of my editor. So, I had a jolly few hours listening to BBC 7 while I went over all four hundred pages of the site; repairing them one by one. This does not constitute what I would call a good time. In fact, it’s pretty much the high tech equivalent of perforating your own lavatory paper.
It’s no wonder I was feeling so ratty this morning and even now I feel like I haven’t had my first cup of tea yet.
Emma is off with Grandma & Grandpa this weekend, so I was able to run my errands in record time and bring my wife her lunch at the preschool, where I’m on a modest retainer as their IT expert. Now, I treat computers like the expensive, cranky, and not very robust devices that they are. I have never used my laptop as a cutting board or a PC as a doorstop, but not everyone shares this regard— certainly not preschool teachers who have to keep a PC in the storage/work room. Somehow they’d managed a spectacular stumble and ended up literally ripping the keyboard out of the PC socket. The board was completely US, so they replaced it with an old one that looked like it had done service at the bottom of a birdcage and I was informed that the PC was “broke,” to use a technical term. This was not surprising. They may have fine teachers and administrators at the school, but their computer ignorance is something shocking and I have spent any number of man-hours hunting down viruses, killing spy ware, reviving dead wireless networks, and generally de-blue screening machines for them. It wasn’t too hard to get the PC in question up and running again. It turned out that the keyboard wasn’t the problem, but that they kept turning the PC off against my express instructions and so the maintenance programmes, which are scheduled to run at night, hadn’t been running since last April, so I spent a couple of hours staring at the screen while I ran repair programme after repair programme, modified various settings to avoid more spy ware infestations, updated their user accounts, and wrote a posted a notice to remind people not to turn it off.
Speaking off, I’m doing so now. My play opens tonight in Burien, Washington and I have to be there with my hair in a braid. If you’re in the Seattle area, it will be running on Saturday and Sunday at the Burien Live Theatre. Tickets $5.
Here endth the plug and the column.
Sunday
20 June 2004
Happy Father's Day
Or happy non-Father's Day, depending on how you look at it. I've just got home from the second performance of my play Circling the Drain and I was about to polish up an account of opening night that I'd written earlier. It was going to be a very insightful and terribly witty piece with all sorts of urbane remarks about the writer's profession, what a thrill it was seeing a play that I'd lived with for six years finally getting its chance on stage, and what I thought of the job that the director, cast, and crew did, and my rather crass head scratching about where the heck I was going to hang my prize certificate.
That's pretty well gone by the wayside. For the same reason, I'm also in no real mood to write about Father's Day, which would seem to be a natural topic; and it's not because my Father's Day had pretty much gone up the spout. True, my wife and daughter are off with the grandparents at their condo in Leavenworth, so I won't be seeing them in the morning, and I had the last performance of the play scheduled for the afternoon, so I thought that that was out, and my wife had a board meeting in the evening , so I wouldn't be seeing her then either but with our insane commitments I'm used to days being shot.
Nope, what killed my column topics was the phone call from my wife when I stepped in the door telling me that Emma had had another asthma attack and they were in the casualty ward waiting to find out whether or not Emma was going to be hospitalised.
Oh, Joy! The first time in a year that Emma has been allowed to be any distance from home without both of us in attendance, and this happens. My plan to kick back and watch bad movies while sipping champagne after putting this to bed has been tainted by waiting for the dreaded phone call that will tell me whether my daughter is coming home tomorrow, or if I'm going to be driving off into the hinterland to sit by her bedside.
I think I'm going to hunt up my birth certificate and give it the once over. Last time I checked, my name wasn't Job, but now I'm not so certain.
Monday
21 June 2004
Xanadu; and not the good one!
“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.”
These immortal words of Coleridge will always touch a deep, resonating spot in the centre of my being; first, because of their wonderful timeless, yet ethereal quality; and second, because they served as the inspiration of a film so bad that it could give buzzards dry heaves. I speak, of course, of Xanadu (1980); the film that stampeded a thousand audiences out the door.
It’s also one of a handful of films that I cannot possibly watch unless my wife is out of town because she will tease me mercilessly about it, so, what with wife and daughter at the grandparents last night, I felt safe to sneak the DVD out of its lead-lined hidey hole.
Xanadu is one of those films that you have to be in the right mood to enjoy. It’s usually watched best late at night with the better part of a bottle of wine inside of you; preferably the bottle of champers left over from the theatre premiere the night before. This serves the same purpose as a slug of redeye to steel yourself for digging the bullet out of your own arm. For those of you who have not seen Xanadu, I would caution you that this is a very close analogy.
Xanadu is justly famous for being one of the worst films ever made, but strangely, it has a certain sentimental charm for me. Back in the summer of 1980 I was on one of my first really big archaeological excavations down in Sussex and BBC One was playing “Magic” from Xanadu on what seemed like a continuous loop with “Modern Girl” by Sheena Easton and it became something of the unofficial theme of that summer— much in the same way as air raid sirens and the scream of falling bombs was the unofficial theme of the Blitz.
Now, there are many kinds of bad movies, but Xanadu is one of those rare gems; a movie which is magically bad, transcendentally awful, so flawed on the most basic of scales that it becomes an object lesson in film making. Do you want to make a good, nay, great film? Then watch this film and you will know everything not to do.
What was the least successful film genre of the day? Musicals. So, let’s make this a musical. Which musical genre was on the outs? Disco. So, let’s make a disco picture. Better yet, we’ll make it roller disco. And who should direct it? You need none other than Robert Greenwald, the master of the silver screen who gave us the epic Flatbed Annie & Sweetie Pie: Lady Truckers. Now we need leads. How about Olivia Newton John & Michael Beck? That should have all the heat of a campfire caught by a high tide. Also, neither can dance a step, which should make the choreography interesting as we try to hide this from the audience. Just to make sure, let’s bring in a great veteran like Gene Kelly so we can end his career on a real low note while constantly reminding the audience that they could be watch An American in Paris instead of this dreck. But we still have a chance of actually making a good movie, so let’s start filling the lifeboat up with lumber. Let’s see… Ah, yes. Music by ELO for that painful ‘70s touch; drag in the Tubes for no particular reason other than to mix watered down rock music and ersatz big band in a number than they should have been ashamed of; force Kelly into an utterly bizarre dance number where he has to run around a cheap set decked out like a pinball machine; toss in a painful animated sequence by Don Bluth that must have been a real speed bump in his resume; saddle every scene change with budget-busting transition effects that will annoy the hell out of people; and, finally, end the whole mess with a ridiculous finale that is a montage of random, dying musical styles and pepper it with dancers that stumble about the stage like the crowd scenes from Reptilicus.
This isn’t a musical; it’s an unauthorised remake of The Producers without Zero Mostel.
It’s particularly fitting that this abomination was released in 1980. After all, it missed the tail end of every ‘70s fad that it tried to hop on, so it’s only meet that it should miss the decade as well. It also acts as a wonderful bookmark in history. If the ‘80s began with Xanadu, at least we can take comfort with knowing that it ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
It’s not much comfort, but it’s some.
Tuesday
22 June 2004
Unforeseen Parallels Department
It is generally agreed that J'onn J'onzz is the Dr. Zoidberg of the Justice League. Don't believe me? Just check out the Martian Manhunter at a buffet.
Wednesday
23 June 2004
Great Moments in Invention
After twenty years of non-stop work on his invention, Bob was forced to admit to himself that he hadn't the slightest idea what it did.
Thursday
24 June 2004
Unfair Advantage
"Anyone want to arm wrestle? C'mon, I'll take you all on!"
Friday
25 June 2004
Plus Ca Change, Plus
C'est la Meme Chose.
Francine was painfully aware that despite living in a highly advanced society of the 25th century, Bill was still having trouble holding his gut in.
Saturday
26 June 2004
Poor Conceived Sales Promotions
Every new 1946 Nash Coupe comes with its own killer robot. Nobody knows why.
Sunday
27 June 2004
First Contacts are a Disappointment
Science had a great deal of crow to eat when it was discovered that the Umvarti family was about as exotic as extraterrestrial life got.
Monday
28 June 2004
But it seemed like a good idea.
After that, they went straight back to St. Bernards.
Tuesday
29 June 2004
Home Appliances Department
When water heaters go bad!
Wednesday
30 June 2004
A Public Service Announcement
Get out of there! Get out of there!
Ephemeral Isle