Ephemeral Isle
Archives
Sunday
1 August 2004
Surgery Update
In answer to your many requests, I am posting this photo of myself after the ingrown toenail surgery. As you can see, the doctor got a tad carried away.
Monday
2 August 2004
Sports Department
The ultimate in extreme sports: Deep-sea diving armour trampolining!
Tuesday
3 August 2004
Motoring Department
"Okay, Phil. Next time it says 'low clearance,' PAY ATTENTION!"
4 August 2004
Home Improvements Department
When ceiling fan installations go horribly wrong.
Thursday
5 August 2004
Creepy New Merchandise Department
Girl in a Can: Now available at sleazier shops everywhere.
Breaking News
Friday
6 August 2004
My Life is a Wet Bunny
When I was in postgraduate school I imagined that I'd be a lot of things by the time I hit my mid forties; some good, some bad, some indifferent. What I did not anticipate was being a nursemaid to a wet bunny. Of course, I wasn’t bargaining with the logic of a two-year old.
One of the things that endears us to our offspring is how cute they are; the cherubic smile, how innocent they look while sleeping, their attempts to struggle with the basics of language, or their attachment to favourite toys. There is nothing quite so much the stuff of greeting card moments as watching a little girl hugging a stuffed animal as she toddles off to bed. The stuffed animal is the totem of childhood; the beloved reminder of innocent years soon to be lost forever.
It’s also a pain in the arse.
My daughter Emma has a favourite animal. It’s a floppy purple bunny with a ribbon tied ‘round his neck and an expression that can only be described as one of startled resignation. It was never one of those overstuffed animals that feel like Styrofoam pillows with limbs. From day one Bunny had the feel of an animal that had one scoop of stuffing held back so he sqooshed just right when hugged by tiny arms. When Emma started to gravitate toward Bunny as her favourite about a year and a half ago, we thought it was one of those moments that would become the cliché of anecdotes and photo albums.
As kids do, she started to carry Bunny around the house and leave him in odd places, which made Hunt the Bunny one of our daily rituals. Then as she got older she started taking Bunny with her when we ran errands or visited the zoo, and as time went on Bunny got dirtier and dirtier until he took on a strange lighter yet darker shade of purple. Soon Bunny was at the beach and came home covered in sand and seaweed. Then he went to school and came home coated with finger paint and playground dirt. He had soymilk on his lips and ears from playing Feed the Bunny. And could we wash him? Only with the greatest stealth and timing. God forbid that Bunny should be in the dryer when he was missed.
The worst part was this morning when Emma was having her bath and insisted that Bunny join her. Bunny, as you may have guessed, is not waterproof. Nor does he float. He soaks up water like a sponge and sinks like a stone; a waterlogged stone at that. So, there we were with a small child trying to pick up a beloved stuffed animal that now weighs eight pounds and sticks to the bottom of the tub like it’s nailed there. In fact, Emma is yowling “Buppee! Buppee!” and is convinced the “Buppee” has been nailed to the tub by nefarious and ill-identified forces.
Up until this point in the proceedings, I’d been in the kitchen trying to make my synapses fire enough to make the tea when the “Buppee” alert started and I staggered into the bathroom without caffeine-less. There was Emma trying to raise Bunny from the depths, my wife trying to explain to her that Bunny was too heavy, and me trying to figure out what the Hell was going on. Then my wife turns to me and says that she’s going to let me take over. What she meant was that she was going to work and Emma would be handed off. In my semi-wakened state I thought it meant that the handover was immediate, which made me blanche in confusion and horror because a) without tea I was mentally overmatched by a preschooler and b) I wasn’t the one who instigated the bath time in the first place.
Five minutes later, Emma was sitting on the couch wrapped in a towel watching The Wiggles. “Buppee” was in her arms also wrapped in a towel— eventually two, as he was leaking all over the place. With judicial care and low cunning it was then a matter of distracting her with the Wash Our Hands and Brush Our Teeth game followed quickly by a distracting dinosaur book that allowed me to get her out the door to school sans soggy Bunny.
“Buppee” is now banned to the deck, where he is hanging on the rail catching the breeze. My duty is to make sure that he is duly rotated and checked periodically for requisite dryness so that he will be at the ready if needed for afternoon naptime.
Yup. That’s what one slipped by me in postgrad: my future as a “Buppee” rotator.
Saturday
7 August 2004
Jonny Quest
I just finished watching the complete first season of Jonny Quest the other day, though I think a bit disingenuous to call it the “first” season, since the second was a cheap CGI rip off from the ‘90s. It was what I call survival viewing; a cartoon that will keep Emma entertained, yet won’t drive Daddy totally up the wall after hearing the score of Disney’s Hercules for the 768599th time.
The thing that makes life worthwhile are pleasant little surprises; the things that you don’t anticipate, yet bring a smile. It’s what you get when your daughter says “yellow” for the first time, or when the steak is just that much more tender, or when a cartoon series that you haven’t seen since 1964 is even better than you remember it.
I was a big Jonny Quest fan when it first came out. This was a time when cartoons were as rare as hen’s teeth and if there was anything animated going, you sat through it. Crappy Disney stuff, cheap retreaded cinema shorts, movie intro credits, East German propaganda pieces; it didn’t matter. It was a cartoon, so you watched it. One of the advantages of having so little choice was that you were forced to endure everything, and without the ability to pick and choose you developed your tastes pretty fast. Even at the age of a six I could tell crap animation when I saw it. I could also tell good.
And Jonny Quest was great.
I think it’s a good thing that I haven’t seen the series for so long, because when I watch the disks I can still recapture exactly what I felt when I first saw them. I can still feel that thrill in my spine when the jazz score started and the montage of savage natives, pterodactyls, robot spies, mummies, sinister henchmen, and laser cannons flashed across the screen. You knew from the first three bars that you were in for one hell of a good time. And it was like that all the way through. I still can’t see that robot spy open its eye for the first time without getting the creeps.
The writers also understood their premise and their audience. Young Jonny Quest was the son of famous scientist Dr. Benton Quest (what his field was is never made clear). Accompanied by Jonny’s bodyguard/tutor “Race” Bannon and Indian friend Haji, the Quests travelled to exotic places all over the world to confront sinister supervillains, invisible monsters, spies, Nazis, and assorted mad scientists. That sounds like the premise of many another imitator, but Jonny Quest was different in that it strove to be much more realistic. The Quests were not supermen, but perfectly ordinary people (though Hadji was a dab hand at magic tricks). The technology depicted was borderline science fiction, but looked plausibly available in the 1960’s. And the writer’s understood the dynamics of the main characters. Jonny was the boy that the kids in the audience could identify with. Hadji was the coolest best friend you could have. Race was big brother that you wanted to grow up to be. And Dr. Quest was the father you’d pick if you had the choice. No girls, of course. It may not be PC, but it would have been a speed bump in the stories, which the ‘90s revival proved correct when it introduced Race’s daughter. But the writer’s were under no illusions about how to sell the Quests to the audience. Unlike today where the boys would have been the centre of the stories, Dr. Quest and Race did the heavy lifting when it came to fighting the baddies. Jonny and Hadji’s role was largely to act as real, though incredibly resourceful, eleven year-old boys would really acted; by sneaking about, lending a hand where appropriate, and keeping out of the way when the shooting started. There also weren’t any neat little “lessons” such as you’d see today, unless you count the recurrent themes of the courage, decency, and loyalty of the Quests as opposed to the callous treachery of the villains.
And the shooting! Jonny Quest was famous for having the villains actually dying, and often in very nasty ways that they wholly deserved whether it was having a glacier fall on them, being dropped in a pool of lava, or crushed under a pile of rubble while being strangled by a mummy. It’s the realism that Jonny Quest brought to the monsters and the villains that is the only caveat that I have with the series. This is not a show for very young children. The climax of the yeti episode, for example, is genuinely scary to watch even for an adult and the episode with the pteranadon was one I had to switch off because it started to disturb Emma, who is now old enough that she’s beginning to understand monsters.
Jonny Quest was Hanna Barbara’s fourth outing in prime time animation, but where their previous efforts were the slap-dash limited animation of the Flintstones, Jonny Quest was an attempt at raising the bar. There they were trying to get around the boundaries of limited animation and present an action adventure series in the tradition of the great old comic strips like Terry and the Pirates. Heck, it even had newspaper comic pro Doug Wildey to help with the style.
And what style! This was the best-looking television animation ever made and it still stands head and shoulders above anything being produced today. The backgrounds and often the characters were done with incredible detail; there was all this use of dark shadow that gave everything a sense of depth. And the explosions were impressive. True it was still limited animation and it was painfully evident when the bits of the characters that actually had to move would suddenly turn to putty, but given a television budget, it was pretty darn good. Remember, these were very realistic characters and just getting them to turn their heads without dissolving into blobs was a major achievement for even the most elaborate animation studios in those days.
The only low point of the series if Bandit. Okay, I know that he was there for comic relief and to break the tension between dramatic moments, but he is undoubtedly the first of the cartoon mutant dogs that have come to plague animation for decades. Even as a kid I began to wonder whether Bandit was exceptionally smart, or if he was the product of one of Dr. Quest’s weirder gene manipulation experiments.
The world may never know.
Sunday
8 August 2004
Trouble in the Valley
The Jolly Green Giant's dandruff problem was causing great hardship for the villagers..
Monday
9 August 2004
Better Late Than Never
"Oh! First light the match, then turn on the gas!"
Tuesday
10 August 2004
Great Moments in Catering
Prof. Philpot looks on with pride as his greatest invention is unloaded: a tea urn large enough to serve all of Shropshire at one go.
Wednesday
11 August 2004
Awkward Moments Department
Most people didn't know how to react when Norman introduced his imaginary friend.
Thursday
12 August 2004
Automotive Safety Department
NEVER let Bertram into a motor car after a curry buffet.
Friday
13 August 2004
Happy Tridecaphobia Day!
Dental Department
I have the best and worst luck when it comes to teeth. Mine have always been relatively healthy and haven't required much in the way of drilling and such, but I've also spent so much time without dental insurance or travelling in areas where you get a free case of AIDS with every check up that I haven't been to a dentist in way too long and recently I've developed an inflammation that has the needle on my panic meter slamming against the peg.
At any rate, I'm off to the dentist in less than an hour and I thought I'd better get something down for today's column before I go in, as I'll probably be so doped on painkillers when I get back that I shan't be able to provide anything more coherent than "BLAAHHGGHRRRNNGGHHARRRNN," or words to that effect.
I don't have the best of luck with dentists either. I've never understood why they have to be so proprietary about my mouth. The number of times I've been lectured as if I'd borrowed the dentist's car and came back with a dent in the wing are legion. You'd think I was renting my teeth from them the way they glower at me. And when they aren't glowering they're trying to extract my impacted wisdom teeth, which have never given me a day's trouble, or fobbing off plastic coating or occlusion realignment procedures that make me suspect that they've been looking at those cabin cruiser catalogues again.
Then there was that dentist in Milton Keynes who checked my teeth and seemed downright sullen that he couldn't find a thing wrong with them. He ended up grumbling that I should floss more often and then asked me to help him fix his x-ray machine. How he deduced I knew anything about rewiring x-rays made me suspect that the man was in the wrong profession.
I sometimes think that there must be some strange psychological quirk that makes someone become a dentist. Is it an inferiority complex about physicians? Something to do with the days when barbers used to pull teeth in between trims? Some bizarre compulsion to stare into other people's mouths? A fetish about twenty-year old copies of Punch? All I know is that I've never been to a dentist who didn't look as though he were slightly mad or thought I was. I'd enquire into this, but I've learned long ago that one does not ask awkward questions of a man who is poised over some of the most delicate, nerve-infested tissues of one's body with needles, pliers, and other instruments that one generally associates with Boris Karloff rather than a minister of healing.
Ah, well, time to have needles jabbed into my gums. I'll continue this on the flip side if I'm not in a morphine coma.
But if he asks me if it's safe, I'm out of that place like a rocket.
"Is it safe?"
Update: No morphine, curse it. Just four more appointments to have someone scrape at my gums with sharp instruments.
I was actually pleasantly surprised by this dentist. He was friendly, yet businesslike, and understood that a clean and a shot at HIV was a good reason to dodge regular check ups in Zambia. He poked at my dinner tackle, which, no surprise, were as solid as whale ivory. The gums were a horror, but the bone was nearly solid, so all that I really need is getting rid of the calcium deposits and a round of special mouthwash. Sounds simple, but so does "Jab in the eye with a blunt needle." So, it's to be an uncomfortable month of scrapings, mumbling through anaesthetics, and severe discomfort when the juice wears off.
At least it's an excuse to lay in more brandy for the duration.
Saturday
14 August 2004
Spot the Kangaroo
(Beginner's edition)
Yes, it's time once again for our spot the kangaroo competition. All you have to do is look at the picture above and... Spot the kangaroo! Careful, because they get harder as we go along.
Sunday
15 August 2004
Spot the Kangaroo
(Intermediate edition)
Think yesterday's challenge was hard? Well, try this one on for size. Remember, you have to spot the kangaroo.
Hint: He's not on top of Nelson's Column.
Monday
16 August 2004
Spot the Kangaroo
(Advanced edition)
Here's where we separate the men from the boys, the women from the girls, and the larvae from the pupae. Now, spot the kangaroo!
Tuesday
17 August 2004
Spot the Kangaroo
(Expert edition)
And now the biggest challenge: Spot the kangaroo! (Naming the street is not sufficient).
Wednesday
18 August 2004
Broadway Blues
I
left a bit early to pick up my daughter at school this afternoon because I
wanted to drop by the bookshop; partly so that I could have a break and
partly so I could conveniently say, “Well, while I’m here, why not pick up
those Doctor Who tapes I saw last time.” Unfortunately, the car park was
full as in SUVs were double parked blocking everyone in, so I abandoned my
original plan and swung through the Capitol Hill district for no particular
reason other than it would kill twenty minutes and I hadn’t been there in a
while.
When I first moved to Seattle, Capitol Hill, and especially its main drag of Broadway, was the bohemian district of the city. It was a part of town that was once so down at heel that the city father’s never even bothered to fix the pavements after they’d buckled in an earthquake decades earlier, but in the ‘80s had been adopted by the homosexual community as the Puget Sound version of the Castro District and gradually became a strip of gay and lesbian bars, restaurants, trendy shops, sex toy outlets, alternative weekly publishing offices, leather “accessories” retailers, Trotskyite coffee houses, and the sort of trendy neighbourhood that fringe theatre thinks is just the spot to hang its black curtains. It was a place where the freakier segments of society could hang out, where poseurs could strike poses and pretend they were above those sorts of things, and where middle class citizens and tourists could get a mild thrill from gawking at the transvestite in its natural habitat.
Seattle, being a “progressive” city (i.e. self-consciously leftist, but still so insecure of its creds that it bends over backwards to present them at every opportunity), was delighted with Capitol Hill. It was hip, it was gay, it was grungy, it was fringy, it was procrusteanly “tolerant” and it was “diverse” in that “You can have any flavour of ice cream you want, but you’re out of luck if you don’t like ice cream” sort of way. It was just what the doctored ordered and Seattle was delighted when it got into the guidebooks. They were less than delighted when the WTO rioters took refuge there in ’99 and teargas wafted over the brownstones, but that’s another story. At the turn of the century, Capitol Hill looked set to being another Fremont. Like Capitol Hill, Fremont district was a disreputable neighbourhood, which had grown prosperous, then fashionable, attracted businesses, went through redevelopment, watched as the artists, bikers, and dope addicts shuffled away, and is now a fairly nice area with a sprinkling of art studios, an arts & crafts market on Sundays, and a yearly “solstice” parade with naked cyclists that reflects its bohemian past like Delhi architecture does the days of the Raj.
It’s a classic pattern that I’ve seen repeated time and again in London, Paris, Copenhagen, Edinburgh, New York, San Francisco, and in just about any university town that you can name. Every major metropolis or other place that attracts bohemian wannabes generates its rive gauche that combines a dash of sexual perversion with a tantalising debauchery and tamed revolution that turns occasionally from its nihilistic revels and casts its disaffected eye on the world as it flicks the ash from its metaphorical Gauloises. It would curl its lips into a wry, knowing smile at the naiveté of outside world, if it could be bothered, which it can’t.
It’s all terribly sophisticated, but it’s also ephemeral. Or rather, it’s as unstable as an Iranian mullah in a Victoria’s Secret. The essential element of a Capitol Hill or its spiritual brethren in Soho or Greenwich Village of yesteryear is that its nature depends on a flirtation with decadence. It’s what makes it titillating, yet worthy of overt displays of “tolerance.” It’s a safe level of corruption that allows the participant to be a non-conformist, the mere observer “broad minded,” and neither feeling more than somewhat soiled by the experience. But in the end that requires holding at a certain level of badness and, as G.K. Chesterton pointed out, “That road goes down and down.” Inevitably, the Capitol Hills of the world must change their characters. They must either gentrify (or "sell out," depending on you point of view) or decay. For the first couple of years that I lived in Seattle, the former seemed to be the way the district was going. New businesses were moving in; displacing the bizarre little shops. Existing establishments were refurbishing and expanding. The homosexual crowd was growing greyer and moving on to greener pastures. The general population was getting older, more married, and a few prams and strollers were starting to be seen here and there.
That seems to have changed recently. According to the Seattle PI, Capitol Hill has undergone a turn for the worse. Businesses are closing or being replaced by the seedier variety, shoplifting is rampant, and “camp” has given way to darker tastes. Beggars, tramps (Ah ha! Thought Crime!), drug addicts, and drunkards have taken over the pavements, the parks are too disgusting for anyone to approach, toilets are filled with used hypodermic needles, crime is on the rise, and the whole atmosphere of the place is becoming scarier. As I drove through I saw very few prams in evidence and more than a few people who needed moving on; in fact, for a street with so many people milling about Broadway looked as dead as a suburban strip mall at midnight. It was clear that the gentrification had ended and the long slide into decay was in earnest.
The article was pretty much what you’d expect from the PI; there were as many interviews with heroin addicts as shop owners and the emphasis on solutions revolved around redevelopment areas, rezoning, increased police patrols, restricting the sale of alcohol, and the like, but in toto it came off like an account of a burst water main that ignores the house being on fire. The thrust of the piece was a regret that it may not be possible to save Broadway from becoming skid row without losing the “funky” character of the neighbourhood. Fair enough, but that is merely to be blind to the fact that it is in its being so bohemian that Capitol Hill carries the seeds of its own destruction.
The attraction of districts like Capitol Hill lies in being just so decadent and no more. The problem is that the very things that make it so have a logical conclusion that is not particularly attractive. Bohemianism is by its very nature non-conformist and a thing of the fringe. It is a rejection of the norms of society and for a city government to try to keep Capitol Hill “funky” means to turn it into a museum or to embrace the values expounded by Capitol Hill and merely spread the destruction to the rest of the metropolis. Furthermore, it is one thing to, for example, embrace the gay chic that is so fashionable today, but the very things that make a district attractive to certain sexual tastes also attract much nastier elements and ceaselessly indulging self-consciously non-conformists provides a magnet for the out right anti-social or even criminal that even the most “tolerant” person will blanche at. This is not to condemn what Capitol Hill was or the people in it (Heck, I happen to believe that the avant garde is one of the things that makes the big city worth living in), but it must be said that a neighbourhood that specialises in fetish implements and where the local Anglican Church flies a rainbow gay rights flag is not going to end up in the same place as a neighbourhood noted for shipyards and populated by conservative working-class Scandinavian immigrants. This is exacerbated by the very “progressive” attitudes that Seattle prides itself on but which makes the local government reluctant to grab the problem by the horns. Part of the difficulties that Capitol Hill faces is that the drug addicts et al haven’t sprung spontaneously from the pavements of Broadway, but have been shunted there from other parts of town. What has happened to Capitol Hill has happened before in the University district and Pioneer Square and each time the Seattle solution has been to drive the undesirable elements to somewhere else in town, so the problem is never solved, only passed on from one decaying neighbourhood to the next. This is a far cry from the methods of other cities which have involved cracking down when the rot sets in and dealing with undesirables by confronting them with the harsh choice between being shown the city limits as vagrants, checking into a help facility away from the general population, or facing serious gaol time.
I sometimes suspect that city governments live in a vacuum. It’s the only way that I can account for how Seattle seems doomed to face the same harsh lessons that Amsterdam, Zurich, London, New York, and others have gone through where it was imagined that a red light district was as stable as residential street and where turning a blind eye to drunkards in the park soon turns it into a public lavatory and a no go zone. You’d think they’d learn from the experience of others.
Thursday
19 August 2004
Seafood Revenge
It was clear that Gorgo had never forgotten his brief stint in the "Pick Your Own Lobster" tank.
Friday
20 August 2004
Our Old Friend Mr. Server Problems
We are experiencing technical difficulties. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.
Saturday
21 August 2004
Driving Without a Clue
It was painfully obvious that Leslie would never be one of technology's masters.
Sunday
22 August 2004
Column Crash
Column crash today. The world has conspired against a posting.
Monday
23 August 2004
Column Crash
We're in the middle of a minor revamping here at Ephemeral Isle. Because weekends at Chez Szondy have been declared Official Family Time, Saturday and Sunday updates are being discontinued. Since this has just been implemented, today's column has been bumped, but EI will continue from Monday through Friday.
On the positive side, I'll have more reading time, so new site sections will be appearing that much quicker.
Tuesday
24 August 2004
This Boots Were Made for Kicking
My two-year old daughter has reached the stage where she has discovered clothes. Previously, dressing her was simply a matter of picking the appropriate frock, wrestling her limbs through the appropriate holes, do the snaps, and Bob’s you uncle. What you dressed her in was largely a matter of a) the weather b) what matches c) what fits d) what’s clean. Now it’s a become a negotiated process of persuading her to take off what she has on, presenting choices of ensembles so she won’t demand to just have her old clothes put back on, and fighting a rear-guard action as she rummages through her dresser and comes back with additional garments that she wants to wear. The latter is particularly daunting, as there have been days when she’s ended up looking like a party coloured Michelin man from the multiple blouses and jumpers she’s wanted on. Not to mention the day she ended up wearing her old hospital gown and a top pressed into duty as a pair of breeches, which made me fear for her sanity.
Her latest mania is shoes. It’s become her favourite new word and she has developed very firm opinions as to which shoes she is going to wear and when, which has lead to some interesting tantrums when she found an old shoe in her toy box and refused to acknowledge that it was too small by half for her foot. Ever see a toddler limping around the house like Long John Silver with an infant shoe crammed over her toe? It’s disturbing. Not to mention the time she fell in love with her jellies and refused to remove them morning or night for a fortnight and even insisted on being bathed in them until I started remembering those stories I read about French peasants who wore their Wellingtons 24/7 until they developed gangrene.
Her current love is a pair of tall boots that we bought her at the weekend. They’re as adorable as all get out and they’re half a size too large for her still, so she wobbles a bit as she walks, but she won’t have them removed for worlds. We put them on her for the first time last night, which was a mistake as we ended up putting her to bed in them like she was a Yukon gold prospector. At least we had the good luck to put her in her pyjamas first or I don’t know what we’d have done.
Okay, all this is weird, but we can live it; or could, if it weren’t for the fact that she regard our bed as hers and her own as a mere staging area. Come 5 AM she is up and determined to crawl in with us. This would be very charming, except that my daughter is the biggest bed hog in Christendom. The instant she falls asleep she turns perpendicular and shoves with all her might until Mama and Daddy are exiled to the outer frontiers of the mattress. I swear that she can stretch as well, because I can’t find any other explanation for how a two-foot tall human being can cover so much real estate. Now add into that a pair of calf boots with dirty hard soles and I arise in the morning looking like I’ve gone eight rounds with jack Dempsey.
I think that’s the reason why I had the dream that I had. As I was pushed and pummelled until I felt like a sleep-deprived veal cutlet, I dreamt that the major newspapers and weblogs the world over had rallied to Mama and Daddy’s cause and had joined hands to run stirring editorials to bring the weight of public opinion down on my daughter to persuade her to be nicer to us in bed, or even decamp back to her own room like a good girl. On all the networks and cable shows pundits were debating how best to convince my daughter that she was not being nice to her parents, yet all agreed that Something Had to Be Done. I think it even became the stuff of party conferences and may have had a bearing on the American presidential election. In the end, it seemed to be having some effect, but reality started to press in just then. You have no idea how disappointed I was when I woke up.
Still, there is hope. If you happen to be the editor of the Times you could be the one to get the ball rolling and get my daughter to at least take her blasted boots off at bedtime.
Wednesday
25 August 2004
Like Clockwork
The wife and daughter were up at Grandma and Grandpa's house the other day, leaving me home to get some work done and take care of the sort of maintenance and heavy cleaning that you can't do when you're trying to keep a two-year old from drinking the cleansers or swallowing screws. Since a lot of this was of the mindless variety, I figured I'd pop in a film to keep the old gulliver occupied. At first I toyed with one of the original Thunderbirds features, but in the end I opted for the one film I could definitely only see with the women of Chez Szondy out of the house: A Clockwork Orange.
I have a rather mixed relationship with Kubrick films. Three of them, Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned How to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 2001: a Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, are ones that I enjoyed and even regard as being among the best films ever made. The rest I regard as being so dreadful that for a time "Kubrick" was used to mean "toilet" in my household, as in, "Excuse me, I have to use the Kubrick." I'm also put off Kubrick's monumental cynicism which, lacking the acerbic bite of a Billy Wilder, lays over his entire view of the human race like a gigantic, grey lead blanket. He's a great cinematographer and a brilliant visual story teller, but I've never seen a single Kubrick film where mankind didn't come off as not just as fallen, but as hopelessly worn out and for which a nuclear holocaust would be a blessed relief. I suppose that it's an attitude that gives the solid satire of Strangelove and the sense of a dead-ended humanity in 2001, but when the ultimate cinematic cynic Kubrick was teamed posthumously with Hollywood Happy Fun Ball Speilberg it created that weird train wreck that is AI.
A Clockwork Orange is probably the film where we get the clearest view of how Kubrick viewed the fate of his fellow man; floundering with irreversible social decay in an amoral world where the solution to evil is not to conquer it, but to sidestep it entirely by committing the greater sin of removing freewill and making a man's guts his gaoler. And Kubrick spares no pains to show us just how nasty the world will be once we slide into the pit as our host, the bestial yet strangely cultured Alex, gives us a tour where his kind on one side and a neofascist government on the other squeeze and corrupt what little is left of decent society in the middle.
What's impressive about the film for me is that Kubrick was able to produce such a graphic depiction of such a violent, sexually degraded place and still make it utterly repellent, as opposed to so many modern films where you feel as if you'd been dropped into a gladiatorial arena right before the Christians versus Lions featurette with the Applause sign flashing. There's nothing in here of the lovingly lingering shots of pain and degradation of today's kiddie matinee bloodfests. There's nothing to invite you toward a vicarious participation. It's all presented in a way that makes you nothing more than a cold witness to horrid, yet banal crimes that any sane person would shy away from. It's no wonder that Kubrick was so rattled when some people were actually drawn to his images to the point of imitation and he withdrew the film from British release for his lifetime out of fear for his family's safety.
Curiously, if you've seen the movie, you have not seen the whole story. When Anthony Burgess sold the novel to America the publishers cut out the last chapter. Kubrick's adaptation is actually quite faithful to Burgess, but since Kubrick was working with the American edition of the book, he unknowingly left out the ending as well. In the movie, Alex goes full circle and is back to his old ultra violent ways, but in the book he grows older and eventually chooses to reform himself, thus making the Burgess's point that real progress comes through free will, not coercion, while Kubrick leaves the matter of free will as a point so removed from events as to be academic. For Burgess, it is important that Alex is not free to good, but for Kubrick we only see that Alex is not free to do evil. The good is academic; the evil is concrete. I often wonder if Kubrick would have made the film if he'd read the last chapter first. Doesn't really fit in with his style at all.
Still, Orange is a classic example of cinema as pure social commentary and visual exposition of the alienation of the individual from society in a post-bourgeois milieu.
Not to mention, a viddy of this with a couple of droogs while peeting molko plus is really horrorshow to sharpen you up for a bit of the old ultra violence, oh, my brothers.
Thursday
26 August 2004
Screw the Days of Summer
Fog yesterday; wet mist and drizzle today. Dame Weather is a cruel mistress and she likes to taunt us with her promises of better things before she drops her sodden blanket on the campfire of life. It looks like the Seattle summer is officially over and I will now stand up and say that I'm glad of it. That may sound like heresy in a society where Southern California is seen as the ideal climate and where grown men who should know better run around in much too large footer bags in the dead of winter in the vain hopes that Puget Sound will suddenly morph into San Trope, but if there's one thing that Ephemeral Isle represents for it's taking a firm stand on the issues of the day.
To be honest, I've never really understood the attractions of summer. I hate being hot, I hate sweating, I hate being forced to sit about in shorts and a tee shirt because the alternative is hyperthermia (actually, I hate shorts and tee shirts full stop); and I can't stand having the windows wide open so that every street noise comes in the living room like it had an open invitation. I also can't understand the attraction of most outdoor summer activities. Sailing I can fathom, because the temperature drops twenty degrees when you're out on the water; and scuba diving is nearly perfect, because you can escape the whole question of summer by bunking off to another world. But hiking? I enjoy that, but not when carrying a rucksack is combined with heat and humidity more suitable for the Bataan death march. Beach volley ball? Yes, that makes sense. Let's rush about in the sun on sand so that every ultraviolet wave is reflected onto our flesh as the heat waves rise from our personal Dutch oven.
And could someone explain sunbathing? I have had more fun on the beach this summer than I have for years, but that's because I can go beachcombing in the tidal pools and I have a two-year old that I can watch while I drink beer from the comfort of my adequately shaded beach chair. Yet for the life of me I cannot understand sunbathing. The few times I've been persuaded into doing it I've felt as though I'd been shanghaied by some cult that was into self-mortification combined with terminal boredom so that they could become one with a McDonald's hamburger's life under the heat lamp.
It isn't just the heat either. The explosion of the insect population makes life like a clip out of Starship Troopers with ants underfoot and wasps overhead making a co-ordinated attack. Even the plants seem to turn against me. The tender, green shoots of spring with their promise of new life have turned to dark, heavy boughs groaning under fruits and leaves as if to say, "For God's sake, let's get to autumn already!"
Maybe my attitude toward summer was formed by my years living in the tropics or maybe it was my time as an archaeologist when hot, sunny days were an omen of sweaty labour, rock-hard soil, and everything dried out so that the subtle colours and textures that are the road map to the past are bleached away.
Or maybe I just like an excuse to stay inside with a nice fire and a brandy reading Homer with a sniper rifle at the ready against interruptions.
Okay, typical tweedy Englishman you say. True and I even have suede elbow patches to prove it. That was even the reason why I moved to Seattle. I'd been stuck in Polynesia for several years and couldn't take the azure skies, white sandy beaches, or swaying palms in the light tropical breezes another second. Leave that to Michner, I say. Give me England's wet and drizzly shores any day. Give me cool overcast days with a fair chance of rain and the prospect of winters that turn beaches into stretches of quiet contemplation.
I remember the day I first drove into Seattle. It was a chilly November. I was coming up from San Francisco and there was a pea soup fog that made everything beyond one expanse of swirling cotton. I went straight through the city centre and never made out a single building. I drove over the Lake Union bridge and didn't even know it. I couldn't even tell you when I pulled off the motorway, because not a landmark was to be seen and I had to hunt down an hotel in the fog like a character out of an old Universal monster picture of the '30s. As night fell, the fog remained, only this time it glowed a strange orange from the street lamps which didn't so much dispel as accent it. I didn't get a chance to see anything of the city until the fog lifted the next day.
And it rained.
I couldn't have been happier.
Friday
27 August 2004
The Duel Continues
Once again Howard managed to thwart his dentist.
Monday
30 August 2004
Support the Troops
The Hensons took supporting the troops a bit too personally.
ELEKTRO, MANSFIELD’S INTERNATIONAL CELEBRITY, COMES HOME
The Mansfield Memorial Museum is proud to announce a public display of ELEKTRO, the amazing mechanical man. This will be the first exhibit of ELEKTRO’s story since his untimely retirement and mysterious disappearance in 1960. The exhibit will open to the public on September 7 and continue until November 20.
Built in 1937/38 at the Westinghouse appliance plant in Mansfield, Ohio, ELEKTRO made his sensational debut at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. He returned to New York in 1940 with his new companion, SPARKO, a mechanical dog. Standing over 7 feet tall and weighing in at 300 pounds, ELEKTRO thrilled thousands of people with his ability to walk, talk, raise and lower his arms, turn his head and move his mouth as he spoke. At the peak of his popularity, he had a vocabulary of over 700 words and a vast repertoire of one-liners. ELEKTRO and his operators performed a 20-minute show every hour during the Fair’s two-summer run.
In storage during World War II, ELEKTRO returned to service in 1950, to tour North America, as a promotion for Westinghouse appliances. In 1957 with appliance sales dropping Westinghouse sent ELEKTRO to Palisades Park in Ocean Side, California. There he was set into a static display at the amusement park for several years, appeared in a few movies, and then returned to Mansfield where he was disconnected from his controls and placed in storage. A few years’ later ELEKTRO’s head was given to a local resident who retired from his position as a Westinghouse engineer and ELEKTRO’s body was sold for scrap.
Fortunately he survived the scrap pile. Today ELEKTRO remains as a symbol of the world’s growing dependence on electrical energy. ELEKTRO represented Westinghouse’s prediction to remote-controlled appliances of the future. Built in human form, to cook our food, do our laundry, entertain our children and if needed, be our companion. ELEKTRO the personal robot would have been The Ultimate Appliance.
ELEKTRO will be exhibited along with many other artifacts associated with his private and public life. The exhibit will feature copies of the design and engineering drawings presenting his fabrication, artifacts from the 1939 World’s Fair and many posters and publications used to promote his appearances. Photographs of Mansfield people who worked in the Westinghouse Pavilion at the 1939 and 1940 Fair will be especially interesting to Mansfield residents.
The Mansfield Memorial Museum, housed in the Mansfield Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Building, is the oldest museum in Richland County. Founded in 1889, the Museum houses a wide variety of historical artifacts from Richland County and around the world. The Museum’s collections include 19th and 20th century military uniforms, and items from the lives of Native American, Slave, African, Mansfield and Richland County residents, Natural history specimens include animal life and several large trees planted by Johnny Appleseed during the early 1800’s. The Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Building is the oldest Memorial building still used by Veterans in the state of Ohio and has not changed architecturally since its opening in 1889.
Mansfield Memorial Museum, 34 Park Avenue West, Mansfield, Ohio 44902
419-525-2491
The Museum will be open Tuesday through Sunday 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Closed Monday. The Museum can be opened for groups of 20 or more in the evening by appointment. The Museum will be open some evening hours beginning in September.
Please check with the Museum staff.
The Mansfield Memorial Museum is a 501-C3 and any donations to the museum are tax deductible
Mansfield Memorial Museum, Scott Schaut / Director 419-524-9924
or by email sschaut@richnet.net
Tuesday
31 August 2004
Dental Agony
Just came back from the first of THREE (!!!!!!!) dental surgery appointments. The anaesthetic is just starting to wear off, so I'm cutting this short and making for the brandy.
Ephemeral Isle