The Month That Was - January 2010: It is viciously cold. The thermometer reads 8, but the wind swats away those eight degrees like Rosie O'Donnell swatting away a dinner salad. Only an idiot would live in this climate and I am that idiot.
Any readers who visited this site on or around the 29th may have been freaked out a bit by the layout here. I was messing around with updated Blogger templates. There are a couple of bad habits I have developed over the years that have not played out well. Specifically, the way I have incorporated the post title in the body of the post means that the title appears twice in the RSS feed (once as the title and once in the post). I also cannot easily reformat the labels post footers now that I have finally started using labels. Anyway, an updated layout would sort that out, but I was unable to get one looking right (something with margins or padding, I'm not sure which) so I backed off. I may give it another shot next month.
No travel this month. I am writing this during a long weekend in Binghamton, NY (with a side trip to Ithaca) which I'll discuss next month. It's viciously cold here, too. In the meantime I did get photos from Valley of Fire, Zion, and Bryce Canyon up over at Smugmug. Some very cool ones. Take a look.
Misspent Youth is currently in the hands a known and trusted professional editor. I should be using this time to do things like writing the jacket copy and various synopses and such, a thing I hate doing and so am procrastinating. But generally I feel cautiously positive about have a genuine tactile retail copy in my hands by the end of 2010, then I have already got thoughts on a couple of other projects and novel number four in my head. God help me.
[Movies] Flick Check: Throw Momma From the Train
[Football] My Self-indulgent Super Bowl Post
[Rambles] No Apologies
[Books] Book Look: The Mezzanine
[Good Links] It's All Fun nd Games Until...
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
[Movies] Flick Check: Thorw Momma From the Train
Flick Check: Throw Momma From the Train: It had been years since I'd seen this film when I stumbled across it on one of the 937 TV channels I get. I know I liked it back in the day, but my esteem has risen greatly. It is that rarest of things, a quality comedy for grown-ups. The majority of film comedy is in the toilet, at least with respect to its subject matter. Stupid gross-outs and infantile pranksterisms abound; that includes films from the likes of Sasha Baron Cohen or Seth Rogan. There are plenty of teen comedies, but even the good ones are, well, for teens. The rest of what passes for comedies are formulaic chick flicks. Sharp, exquisitely crafted originals like Throw Momma... are true treasures.
A satire based on the excellent Hitchcock film, Strangers on a Train, Throw Momma... is one of the very few spoofs that is even finer than the original. (Airplane!, as a spoof of the low grade Zero Hour and Airport '75, comes to mind, but those films aren't remotely as high quality as Throw Momma/Strangers.)
Billy Crystal is Larry, a two-bit novelist who had his manuscript stolen by his ex-wife and nemisis, played to perfection by Kate Mulgrew. She is now rich and famous and he is stuck teaching creative writing to a class full of dweebs and dolts, one of whom is Danny DeVito's Owen, a slow-witted nebbish who is constantly bullied by his horrible, hideous and hostile momma, Anne Ramsey. At one point, when discussing mystery writing, Larry suggests Owen go see a Strangers on a Train to understand the need to eliminate the motive. Owen mistakes this as an offer from Larry to kill his mother, if Owen kills Larry's ex-wife. Criss cross. Hilarity ensues.
Above all else in this film, the humor itself is near perfection. The script from Stu Silver is just dripping in high comedy all of it delivered with impeccable timing from Crystal and Devito. Seriously, this stuff is worthy of Phil Silvers or Mel Brooks. Beyond that, the characterizations of Larry and Owen are fully formed. As slightly absurd caricatures in a comedy, most scripts would probably pay lip service to fleshing them out. But it's the telling little scenes that humanize them and make us care, despite the fact that they are borderline cartoonish. Larry's hopeless ineffectuality is highlighted when his best friend is being interviewed by the police. "So you don't think Larry killed his wife?" "No way." "Why?" "Larry never did anything." There's your character. Or Owen showing Larry his coin collection, which consists entirely of change that his lost beloved father let him keep as a child. Perfectly understated yet effective characterization.
DeVito also directed and gives the film a pace that Billy Wilder would envy, all the while managing to lovingly use Hitchcockian visual devices without going overboard. As far as I know Throw Momma... won no awards but if you look at IMDB's list of films from 1987, it measures up to the best of them. If there is any justice, retrospective should give us a new appreciation of it. If you haven't seen it, treat yourself via Netflix or whatever.
Oh, and if you find a copy of Pinsky's book. Please forward the link.
A satire based on the excellent Hitchcock film, Strangers on a Train, Throw Momma... is one of the very few spoofs that is even finer than the original. (Airplane!, as a spoof of the low grade Zero Hour and Airport '75, comes to mind, but those films aren't remotely as high quality as Throw Momma/Strangers.)
Billy Crystal is Larry, a two-bit novelist who had his manuscript stolen by his ex-wife and nemisis, played to perfection by Kate Mulgrew. She is now rich and famous and he is stuck teaching creative writing to a class full of dweebs and dolts, one of whom is Danny DeVito's Owen, a slow-witted nebbish who is constantly bullied by his horrible, hideous and hostile momma, Anne Ramsey. At one point, when discussing mystery writing, Larry suggests Owen go see a Strangers on a Train to understand the need to eliminate the motive. Owen mistakes this as an offer from Larry to kill his mother, if Owen kills Larry's ex-wife. Criss cross. Hilarity ensues.
Above all else in this film, the humor itself is near perfection. The script from Stu Silver is just dripping in high comedy all of it delivered with impeccable timing from Crystal and Devito. Seriously, this stuff is worthy of Phil Silvers or Mel Brooks. Beyond that, the characterizations of Larry and Owen are fully formed. As slightly absurd caricatures in a comedy, most scripts would probably pay lip service to fleshing them out. But it's the telling little scenes that humanize them and make us care, despite the fact that they are borderline cartoonish. Larry's hopeless ineffectuality is highlighted when his best friend is being interviewed by the police. "So you don't think Larry killed his wife?" "No way." "Why?" "Larry never did anything." There's your character. Or Owen showing Larry his coin collection, which consists entirely of change that his lost beloved father let him keep as a child. Perfectly understated yet effective characterization.
DeVito also directed and gives the film a pace that Billy Wilder would envy, all the while managing to lovingly use Hitchcockian visual devices without going overboard. As far as I know Throw Momma... won no awards but if you look at IMDB's list of films from 1987, it measures up to the best of them. If there is any justice, retrospective should give us a new appreciation of it. If you haven't seen it, treat yourself via Netflix or whatever.
Oh, and if you find a copy of Pinsky's book. Please forward the link.
[Football] My Self-Indulgent Super Bowl Post
My Self-Indulgent Super Bowl Post: I've done good until now. I have resisted the urge to inflict a football post on you all year. No matter how badly I wanted to lambaste Brett Favrerer for his tomfoolery I held my tongue. No matter how desperately I wanted excoriate the bad plays, moronic coaching, and lame officiating, I stayed reticent. No matter how stupid I thought the decision to abandon the undefeated season was for the Colts, I...well, since we're talking about a team in the Super Bowl, I'll start there. Move on now if you have no interest in the NFL.
The call to take a dive had to come in from Colts team President Bill Polian. Had to. Peyton was livid about it and there is no way coach Jim Caldwell made that call because if he did Peyton would have just laughed his ass off and went back in the game. It's an open secret that Peyton is actually running the team and Caldwell is a cardboard cut-out they dust off and set up on the sideline every Sunday. It had to come from higher up and it was a horrendous decision because:
And I think they will win. Back in Super Bowl XLI, the Colts came in with a newbie running back, riding a wave of late-season defensive resurgence that came from nowhere, and took the crown. This year they have a pair of newbie wide receivers and are riding a wave of late-season defensive resurgence that came from nowhere. Peyton is just too good to only have one ring.
For their part, the Saints can bite me. Oh I'm OK with Drew Brees from back when he was with San Diego and got his pants dissed off, first by a futile attempt to draft Eli Manning, then a successful attempt to get Philip Rivers. Then the Dolphins picked Daunte Culpepper over him (as a Fins fan, my eye still twitches when I write that). Brees didn't complain, didn't whine to the press, didn't ask for a government bailout. He just picked things up with New Orleans and hit the heights beyond anyone's imagination. Great work from a class act. The perfect way to make people eat crow -- by your actions on the field.
But the rest of the team, come on. Reggie Bush? Way to hammer your alma mater for years to come. Jeremy Shockey? Needs lessons from Peyton on how to be a lovable character instead of just annoying. That and a haircut. Then their defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, goes off on a live mike as to how they are hoping to give Peyton some memorable hits and if they have to take a roughing the passer call, well, he just hopes it knocks Peyton out of the game. The only thing that statement achieved was to put the refs on high alert. Any Saints pass rusher who neglects to genuflect before tackling Peyton is going to get flagged now. Good thinking, Einstein.
Worst of all, why are we still talking about Hurricane Katrina? New Orleans has had five years and untold piles of money thrown at them and they still cry about being victims. Remember that asinine wank-fest for the first post-Katrina home game in New Orleans, starring Bono? Wretch-inducing, but apparently that was just the start. A couple of years ago I went down for Mardi Gras and they were still wandering around wearing anti-FEMA t-shirts. OK, we get it. It was bad. You had a rough time. But you've had half a decade and well into the billions in aid to sort yourselves out. Why are we being subjected to this city-revives-through-its-football-team schlock? Will your football team really be your ultimate savior? It makes me long for a story about how Jerome Bettis is from Detroit. Maybe they are just setting themselves up to plead for government assistance to recover from Peyton.
Colts for the win is what I'm driving at here.
Topic change: A brief comment about the other end of the NFL spectrum. Bill Simmons recently posted a list of "tortured" sports franchises, the Chicago Cubs rightly at number one. But there is one team conspicuous by its absence: The Detroit Lions. Yep, in his list of the top twelve tortured franchises he completely omitted the single worst sport franchise extant. I don't blame Simmons. The Lions are so awful that they have simply slipped out of the consciousness of sports fans. They don't really exist. If they are on your schedule it is like bye week, you just don't even think about it as an actual game. Remember that episode of the Twilight Zone where the punishment for a crime was to be completely ignored by everyone and everything. That's what it's like to be the Lions. You don't even make Worst Of lists. You're not even good enough to be bad.
The call to take a dive had to come in from Colts team President Bill Polian. Had to. Peyton was livid about it and there is no way coach Jim Caldwell made that call because if he did Peyton would have just laughed his ass off and went back in the game. It's an open secret that Peyton is actually running the team and Caldwell is a cardboard cut-out they dust off and set up on the sideline every Sunday. It had to come from higher up and it was a horrendous decision because:
- A team wins the Super Bowl every year but a chance to go undefeated comes along once in the lifetime of a franchise. You have to go for it. Look how long the '72 Dolphins have milked their perfect season. The Super Bowl is a career pinnacle. Going undefeated sets you up for life.
- The NFL has a huge problem with phony games. When I wrote my football column I referred to the final week of the season as the Week of Shame -- when locked in teams lay down and played their scrubs, screwing fans and gamblers in the process. It was especially awful this year as teams like the Colts were locked in to playoff positions weeks in advance. (A related symptom is the long-running joke that is the Pro Bowl. David Garrard played in the Pro Bowl this year. David Garrard. Think about that.) This is really undermining the integrity of the NFL. If I was Roger Goodell, this would be job one...after a new labor agreement, anyway. This was a remarkably high profile example of a phony game. Ugly for a league that supposedly values integrity.
- Worst of all, if the Colts win, it is ruined it for everybody. In the uber-cautious, superstitious NFL, every time the chance for an undefeated season comes up, every coach will take the secure way out and lay down in a late season game because it worked for the Colts where as it failed for the Patriots a couple of years earlier. Sample size = 2, but that's all you need for NFL coaches. It will be etched in stone that if you try to go undefeated you will not win the Super Bowl. "Lay down for a loss as soon as you can" will be the decision that won't get a coach fired and that's that. The '72 Dolphins are set for life and well beyond.
And I think they will win. Back in Super Bowl XLI, the Colts came in with a newbie running back, riding a wave of late-season defensive resurgence that came from nowhere, and took the crown. This year they have a pair of newbie wide receivers and are riding a wave of late-season defensive resurgence that came from nowhere. Peyton is just too good to only have one ring.
For their part, the Saints can bite me. Oh I'm OK with Drew Brees from back when he was with San Diego and got his pants dissed off, first by a futile attempt to draft Eli Manning, then a successful attempt to get Philip Rivers. Then the Dolphins picked Daunte Culpepper over him (as a Fins fan, my eye still twitches when I write that). Brees didn't complain, didn't whine to the press, didn't ask for a government bailout. He just picked things up with New Orleans and hit the heights beyond anyone's imagination. Great work from a class act. The perfect way to make people eat crow -- by your actions on the field.
But the rest of the team, come on. Reggie Bush? Way to hammer your alma mater for years to come. Jeremy Shockey? Needs lessons from Peyton on how to be a lovable character instead of just annoying. That and a haircut. Then their defensive coordinator, Gregg Williams, goes off on a live mike as to how they are hoping to give Peyton some memorable hits and if they have to take a roughing the passer call, well, he just hopes it knocks Peyton out of the game. The only thing that statement achieved was to put the refs on high alert. Any Saints pass rusher who neglects to genuflect before tackling Peyton is going to get flagged now. Good thinking, Einstein.
Worst of all, why are we still talking about Hurricane Katrina? New Orleans has had five years and untold piles of money thrown at them and they still cry about being victims. Remember that asinine wank-fest for the first post-Katrina home game in New Orleans, starring Bono? Wretch-inducing, but apparently that was just the start. A couple of years ago I went down for Mardi Gras and they were still wandering around wearing anti-FEMA t-shirts. OK, we get it. It was bad. You had a rough time. But you've had half a decade and well into the billions in aid to sort yourselves out. Why are we being subjected to this city-revives-through-its-football-team schlock? Will your football team really be your ultimate savior? It makes me long for a story about how Jerome Bettis is from Detroit. Maybe they are just setting themselves up to plead for government assistance to recover from Peyton.
Colts for the win is what I'm driving at here.
Topic change: A brief comment about the other end of the NFL spectrum. Bill Simmons recently posted a list of "tortured" sports franchises, the Chicago Cubs rightly at number one. But there is one team conspicuous by its absence: The Detroit Lions. Yep, in his list of the top twelve tortured franchises he completely omitted the single worst sport franchise extant. I don't blame Simmons. The Lions are so awful that they have simply slipped out of the consciousness of sports fans. They don't really exist. If they are on your schedule it is like bye week, you just don't even think about it as an actual game. Remember that episode of the Twilight Zone where the punishment for a crime was to be completely ignored by everyone and everything. That's what it's like to be the Lions. You don't even make Worst Of lists. You're not even good enough to be bad.
[Rant] No Apologies
No Apologies: An article in the WSJ highlights a new internet phenomenon: finding a long lost acquaintance to whom you have done some wrong and making an unsolicited apology decades after the fact. (I'm not sure this is a phenomenon in any serious sense of the word. That's more likely just journalistic hyperbole.) The author seems to think it's the result of our over-therapised, self-help loving, navel-gazing culture, but I'm not so sure. Although I haven't joined this phenomenon I think I understand the regret one can carry over what were probably minor slights from childhood or early adulthood, and the desire to right the wrong; and nobody would accuse me of being a new age namby-pamby. Hell, I refuse to wear a bike helmet and I still dive head first into the pool.
First, let's point out we are talking about small cruelties here. Petty stuff. The sort of thoughtless and mean-spirited slights that young people habitually dole out, intentionally or not. I think I can honestly say, as I look back on my younger days, that I truly regret inflicting this minor pain on others. In a larger sense, I have come to truly regret any unwarranted pain in have caused in my life. On balance, I think I'm OK on this score; I've probably received more cruelties than I've given (although as I think further, that's quite possibly self-delusion). Still, the older I get the more I have come to realize how much the little cruelties inflicted on me added up. Little injustices, insults, exclusions, bullying -- I certainly suffered my share of it. And I remember it to this day, without smiling. Such occurrences are inevitable; they are part of everyday life for Homo sapiens and probably always will be. But when you are young and just building your picture of the world, they are fresh and infuriating. Think of the first time you were ever laughed at or excluded or belittled. This could have been any point from your childhood to your twenties depending on how long you were able to stay in a bubble of loved ones or ingratiate yourself with the cool kids. In adulthood this pettiness is no big deal because you are more self-possessed and you know there are really no such thing as cool kids, but the first few times it happened -- when you had to face the possibility that you could be treated unjustly without consequence or that you were of lesser value than some others -- was gut-wrenching. The first time I remember experiencing this, I didn't leave my room for two days.
Have I ever been the one to inflict this on some poor soul? I don't recall, but it's possible; in fact, it's probable. And though it was going to happen to the poor soul eventually, I would absolutely hate the idea that I was the one that caused that kind of pain. And I feel that way only now, after seeing and feeling the full consequences and understanding that the pain doesn't necessarily disappear over time, it just gets re-situated in your psyche. I'm not a parent, but I can only imagine that re-living these feelings through your own children would be harrowing. When faced with that realization, the impetus to apologize seems natural. So I would argue that such regrets are timeless. I'm not so quick to dismiss this as a by-product of the wussification of contemporary society or an "Internet phenomena," although the Internet makes it more possible and visible. But it does beg the question of the purpose of apologies in general.
Let's point out that we are talking about actual, sincere apologies. Not customer service-style "I'm sorry there was a dead rat on your pizza, here's a coupon" apologies. And not "Forgive me for embezzling your life savings, please give me a reduced sentence" apologies. We are talking about apologies that truly stem from remorse.
The model exchange is apology and acceptance. The apology, in theory, mitigates the pain inflicted upon the victim by acknowledging the injustice and signaling that the apologizer feels he was degraded by his own act (and implicitly elevating the injured party in a moral sense). The injured party accepts the apology, tacitly acknowledging that, as the moral superior with respect the incident at hand, the apologizer has suffered sufficient guilt.
What a complicated dance of emotion. I can't imagine that ever working in any methodical sense. Upon receiving an apology, the victim has to:
The apologizer is in a somewhat better position. From the article:
The practical absurdity of the entire process causes me think of it as evidence that the need for justice, and therefore a form of morality, is intrinsic to human nature. I just can't imagine such behavior developing as a learned trait, because there is so little measurable, observable evidence to provide a positive feedback loop for apologies over the course of one person's life. When simply assessing the pluses and minus of apologies as one walks through life, it would be a rare person who felt as though they balanced out to a net individual benefit on a regular basis. Yet we still dance the apology dance. Why? Presumably, because apologies are our somewhat irrational attempt to maintain a fa‡ade of fairness for the good of the human race as a whole. Without it a much larger portion of our lives would be given over to revenge and suspicion, our circle of trusted contacts would be smaller. Having a mechanism such that there is an innate disincentive to those who would simply march thru life domineering and offending others at will encourages cooperation which permits us to progress despite the fact that we are all constantly jostling conflict for status and position. You could take a religious stand on this and say we have been given this sense of justice by God and in our souls we know we will be judged on it. Or you could take a biological stand and say the evolution has selected a sense of justice as a benefit to survival or the species. Either way, apologies are clearly of time-tested value.
In any event, just in case anyone from my past does a Google search on that assclown David Mazzotta who picked on him many years ago, as I said above, I sincerely regret any unwarranted pain I have caused in my life. If it helps you know that, great. But, despite the risk to civilized humanity, please don't accept my apology. Things would work better if apologies were not to be accepted and we did not assuage our guilt by apologizing. We are not small tribes anymore; much better to go forward being careful not to accumulate any more contacts to whom we need to apologize. That will require us to keep our regrets alive and clear in our minds to guide our actions going forward.
And if you are one of the assclowns who picked on me, don't bother to apologize. I already feel morally superior to you and really just don't care enough about you to accept it. That is, unless you are offering money.
First, let's point out we are talking about small cruelties here. Petty stuff. The sort of thoughtless and mean-spirited slights that young people habitually dole out, intentionally or not. I think I can honestly say, as I look back on my younger days, that I truly regret inflicting this minor pain on others. In a larger sense, I have come to truly regret any unwarranted pain in have caused in my life. On balance, I think I'm OK on this score; I've probably received more cruelties than I've given (although as I think further, that's quite possibly self-delusion). Still, the older I get the more I have come to realize how much the little cruelties inflicted on me added up. Little injustices, insults, exclusions, bullying -- I certainly suffered my share of it. And I remember it to this day, without smiling. Such occurrences are inevitable; they are part of everyday life for Homo sapiens and probably always will be. But when you are young and just building your picture of the world, they are fresh and infuriating. Think of the first time you were ever laughed at or excluded or belittled. This could have been any point from your childhood to your twenties depending on how long you were able to stay in a bubble of loved ones or ingratiate yourself with the cool kids. In adulthood this pettiness is no big deal because you are more self-possessed and you know there are really no such thing as cool kids, but the first few times it happened -- when you had to face the possibility that you could be treated unjustly without consequence or that you were of lesser value than some others -- was gut-wrenching. The first time I remember experiencing this, I didn't leave my room for two days.
Have I ever been the one to inflict this on some poor soul? I don't recall, but it's possible; in fact, it's probable. And though it was going to happen to the poor soul eventually, I would absolutely hate the idea that I was the one that caused that kind of pain. And I feel that way only now, after seeing and feeling the full consequences and understanding that the pain doesn't necessarily disappear over time, it just gets re-situated in your psyche. I'm not a parent, but I can only imagine that re-living these feelings through your own children would be harrowing. When faced with that realization, the impetus to apologize seems natural. So I would argue that such regrets are timeless. I'm not so quick to dismiss this as a by-product of the wussification of contemporary society or an "Internet phenomena," although the Internet makes it more possible and visible. But it does beg the question of the purpose of apologies in general.
Let's point out that we are talking about actual, sincere apologies. Not customer service-style "I'm sorry there was a dead rat on your pizza, here's a coupon" apologies. And not "Forgive me for embezzling your life savings, please give me a reduced sentence" apologies. We are talking about apologies that truly stem from remorse.
The model exchange is apology and acceptance. The apology, in theory, mitigates the pain inflicted upon the victim by acknowledging the injustice and signaling that the apologizer feels he was degraded by his own act (and implicitly elevating the injured party in a moral sense). The injured party accepts the apology, tacitly acknowledging that, as the moral superior with respect the incident at hand, the apologizer has suffered sufficient guilt.
What a complicated dance of emotion. I can't imagine that ever working in any methodical sense. Upon receiving an apology, the victim has to:
- Believe that it is sincere.
- Determine that the apologizer has suffered sufficiently.
- Value some kind of emotional closure more than the leverage that the moral high ground would provide in current or future interactions.
The apologizer is in a somewhat better position. From the article:
When an old high-school rival of Kathy Somes contacted her through Classmates.com last March, Ms. Somes, 46, apologized for her behavior years ago, which included putting gum in the girl's hair, shooting her with a rubber-pellet gun and blowing a trumpet into her ear during band practice.I suspect most people would agree with Ms. Somes and say they would feel better anyway. So even if the injured party doesn't come through with acceptance, it's still a plus for the apologizer. Isn't there a problem with that? If you are going to feel better anyway, really what is the cost for you in apologizing? What is the value of your apology if there is no downside? You feel better because by your judgment you have done enough, but who are you to decide that? The other guy is the one who was in pain.
"I didn't really care if she accepted my apology or not," says Ms. Somes, an investment analyst in Kirtland, Ohio. "I felt better." (And, she says, her classmate did accept her apology.)
The practical absurdity of the entire process causes me think of it as evidence that the need for justice, and therefore a form of morality, is intrinsic to human nature. I just can't imagine such behavior developing as a learned trait, because there is so little measurable, observable evidence to provide a positive feedback loop for apologies over the course of one person's life. When simply assessing the pluses and minus of apologies as one walks through life, it would be a rare person who felt as though they balanced out to a net individual benefit on a regular basis. Yet we still dance the apology dance. Why? Presumably, because apologies are our somewhat irrational attempt to maintain a fa‡ade of fairness for the good of the human race as a whole. Without it a much larger portion of our lives would be given over to revenge and suspicion, our circle of trusted contacts would be smaller. Having a mechanism such that there is an innate disincentive to those who would simply march thru life domineering and offending others at will encourages cooperation which permits us to progress despite the fact that we are all constantly jostling conflict for status and position. You could take a religious stand on this and say we have been given this sense of justice by God and in our souls we know we will be judged on it. Or you could take a biological stand and say the evolution has selected a sense of justice as a benefit to survival or the species. Either way, apologies are clearly of time-tested value.
In any event, just in case anyone from my past does a Google search on that assclown David Mazzotta who picked on him many years ago, as I said above, I sincerely regret any unwarranted pain I have caused in my life. If it helps you know that, great. But, despite the risk to civilized humanity, please don't accept my apology. Things would work better if apologies were not to be accepted and we did not assuage our guilt by apologizing. We are not small tribes anymore; much better to go forward being careful not to accumulate any more contacts to whom we need to apologize. That will require us to keep our regrets alive and clear in our minds to guide our actions going forward.
And if you are one of the assclowns who picked on me, don't bother to apologize. I already feel morally superior to you and really just don't care enough about you to accept it. That is, unless you are offering money.
[Books] Book Look: The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker
Book Look: The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker: I have often complained about how novelists have pretty much abandoned the idea of documenting life, instead resorting to various magic realist fantasies or, worse, lurid tales of societal outliers. (I feel less strongly about this than I used to.) As if in response, fate -- by way of assorted Internet recommendations -- brought me to The Mezzanine, which I have come to see as a reductio ad absurdum of a response.
There isn't really any story going on here. A young-ish, male semi-professional, Howie, is returning from lunch and riding an escalator to his workplace on the mezzanine of a sizable office building. We are given 130 pages of every single thought that goes through his head, a stream of consciousness only broken by brief moments where he must actively think about the actions he is going to take in the external world. Basically, it amounts to few minutes immersed inside this man's head.
The reflections are minutiae -- utterly mundane, with long footnotes cascading off as he follows his thought chains. His thoughts are centered on how he has just spent his lunch hour -- quick and superficial interactions with co-workers, a quick snack of popcorn, buying and eating a hot dog, cookie and milk, stopping at CVS to get replacements for his broken shoe laces, subtly awkward encounters with co-workers in the men's room, trying to read a bit of his Penguin Classic paperback copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Seemingly the stuff of nothing, most of which chains off into equally nothing memories from his past.
Baker has an ungodly capacity for description and the precision in vocabulary to pull it off. For example, he refers to the covering of an un-popped Jiffy Pop pan as a "maelstrom" of aluminum foil and describes the perfection of its design of a self contained cooking vessel whose handle doubles as a loop for hanging in stores. He laments the degradation of milk delivery as it went from capped glass bottles, to plastic containers, to paper quarts, to nonexistence, documenting the aesthetic losses at each step, yet also praising the wax paper carton that replaced it and how in opening it creates its own spout.
Here's a long passage regarding shampoo:
And, yes, it was a commercial for Prell.
After a hundred and thirty pages of this, the dominant impression is one of wonder at the strange world we have created where even the most basic items and transparent actions are boundlessly complex and rife with hidden meanings, and what oddly gifted creatures we are that, through nature or conditioning, we navigate this world without a second thought. In that sense, The Mezzanine can be thought of as a very indirect work of sociology.
The question I always try to answer for my readers is Should you read this book? The answer for most people is going to be no. There is no plot, no action, and no characters in the conventional sense. The sentences are long and elaborate. There is no dramatic payoff or closure of any sort. I suspect many (if not most) would give it a furrowed brow and a loud "Who cares?" after a few pages. On the other hand it works well for aesthetic folks with an actively curious intellect and a strong tendency to live inside their own heads. (Clearly I fit that category.)
My favorite blogger, Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias, has argued that in a time frame of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, humanity will almost necessarily return to a subsistence-level (though not unhappy) lifestyle, and that these folks will look back on our inscrutable and elaborate world as a sort of dreamtime. The Mezzanine is a distilled document of a moment in that world. It is the internal monologue of dreamtime.
There isn't really any story going on here. A young-ish, male semi-professional, Howie, is returning from lunch and riding an escalator to his workplace on the mezzanine of a sizable office building. We are given 130 pages of every single thought that goes through his head, a stream of consciousness only broken by brief moments where he must actively think about the actions he is going to take in the external world. Basically, it amounts to few minutes immersed inside this man's head.
The reflections are minutiae -- utterly mundane, with long footnotes cascading off as he follows his thought chains. His thoughts are centered on how he has just spent his lunch hour -- quick and superficial interactions with co-workers, a quick snack of popcorn, buying and eating a hot dog, cookie and milk, stopping at CVS to get replacements for his broken shoe laces, subtly awkward encounters with co-workers in the men's room, trying to read a bit of his Penguin Classic paperback copy of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Seemingly the stuff of nothing, most of which chains off into equally nothing memories from his past.
Baker has an ungodly capacity for description and the precision in vocabulary to pull it off. For example, he refers to the covering of an un-popped Jiffy Pop pan as a "maelstrom" of aluminum foil and describes the perfection of its design of a self contained cooking vessel whose handle doubles as a loop for hanging in stores. He laments the degradation of milk delivery as it went from capped glass bottles, to plastic containers, to paper quarts, to nonexistence, documenting the aesthetic losses at each step, yet also praising the wax paper carton that replaced it and how in opening it creates its own spout.
Here's a long passage regarding shampoo:
Yet emotional analogies were not hard to find between the history of civilization on the one hand and the history within the CVS pharmacy on the other, when you caught sight of a once great shampoo like Alberto VO5 or Prell now in sorry vassalage on the bottom shelf of aisle 1B, overrun by later waves of Mongols, Muslims, and Chalukyas -- Suave; Clairol Herbal Essence; Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific; Silkience; Finesse; and bottle after bottle of Arabesque Flex. Prell's green is toosimple a green for us now; the false French of its name seems kitschy, not chic, and where once it was enveloped in my TV-soaked mind by the immediacy and throatiness of womanly voice-overs, it is now late in its decline, lightly advertised, having descended year by year through the thick by hydroscopic emulsions of our esteem, like the large descending pearl that was used in one of its greatest early ads to prove how rich and luxurious it was. (I think that ad was for Prell -- or was it Breck, or Alberto VO5?) I remember friends' older sisters who used those old shampoos -- one sister especially, fresh from using Alberto VO5 and Dippity-do, with her hair rolled up in a number of small pink foam curlers and three RC cola cans, sitting down at the kitchen table to eat breakfast while we (nine years old) ate raw Bermuda onions from lunch, reading Fester Bestertester paperbacks. I think of the old product managers staring out the window like Proust, reminiscing about the great days when they had huge TV budgets and everything was hopping, now reduced to leafing through trade magazines to keep up with late breaking news in hair care like outsiders. Soon, nobody would know they had introduced a better kind of plastic for their shampoo bottle, a kind with a slight matte gunmetal dullness to it instead of the unpleasant patent-leathery reflectivity of then existing efforts at transparency; that with it they had taken their product straight to the top! In time, once everyone had died who had used a certain discontinued brand of shampoo, so that it passed from living memory, it no longer would be understood properly, correctly situated in the felt periphery of life; instead it would be one of many quaint vials of plastic in country antique stores -- understood no better than a ninth century trinket unearthed on the Coromandel coast.This is an especially wonderful passage as it draws a contrast between the relatively short set of memories young Howie has, mostly concerning self-discovery, and the more elegiac, reflective memories of an "old product manager". But more broadly, all this extended observational trivia works because of the recognition it triggers: the bits where the reader thinks "I know exactly what you mean," or "I remember that."
And, yes, it was a commercial for Prell.
After a hundred and thirty pages of this, the dominant impression is one of wonder at the strange world we have created where even the most basic items and transparent actions are boundlessly complex and rife with hidden meanings, and what oddly gifted creatures we are that, through nature or conditioning, we navigate this world without a second thought. In that sense, The Mezzanine can be thought of as a very indirect work of sociology.
The question I always try to answer for my readers is Should you read this book? The answer for most people is going to be no. There is no plot, no action, and no characters in the conventional sense. The sentences are long and elaborate. There is no dramatic payoff or closure of any sort. I suspect many (if not most) would give it a furrowed brow and a loud "Who cares?" after a few pages. On the other hand it works well for aesthetic folks with an actively curious intellect and a strong tendency to live inside their own heads. (Clearly I fit that category.)
My favorite blogger, Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias, has argued that in a time frame of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, humanity will almost necessarily return to a subsistence-level (though not unhappy) lifestyle, and that these folks will look back on our inscrutable and elaborate world as a sort of dreamtime. The Mezzanine is a distilled document of a moment in that world. It is the internal monologue of dreamtime.
[Good Links] It's All Fun and Games Until...
It's All Fun and Games Until...: For your reading pleasure, check out this Wikipedia entry on the late, great Action Park, a New Jersey-based amusement park that redefined amusement -- redefined it to mean horrific and life threatening. Some choice quotes:
Many of Action Park's attractions were unique. They gave patrons more control over their experience than they would have at most other amusement parks' rides, but for the same reason were considerably riskier.Even to a bare-headed cycler/head-first pool-diver like me, some of that stuff seems just a tad ill-considered.
Its popularity went hand in hand with a reputation for poorly-designed, unsafe rides; inattentive, underaged, underpaid and sometimes under-the-influence employees; equally intoxicated and underprepared visitors...
---
The park's fortunes began to turn with two deaths in summer 1984 and the legal and financial problems that stemmed from the lawsuits. A state investigation of improprieties in the leasing of state land to the resort led to a 110-count grand jury indictment against the nine related companies that ran the resort and their executives for operating an unauthorized insurance company.
---
Action Park's alpine slide descended the mountain roughly below one of the ski area's chairlifts, resulting in much verbal harassment and sometimes spitting from passengers going up for their turn, who would often be entertained by the accidents they witnessed while at the same time hoping to avoid similar fates.
The sleds themselves were a large factor in the injuries. A stick that was supposed to control speed led, in practice, to just two options on the infrequently maintained vehicles: extremely slow, and a speed described by one former employee as "death awaits."
---
[Go karts] were meant to be driven around a small loop track at a speed of about 20 mph (32 km/h) set by the governor devices on them. But park employees knew how to circumvent the governors by wedging tennis balls into them, and were known to do so for parkgoers. As a result, an otherwise standard small-engine car ride became a chance to play bumper cars at 50 mph (80 km/h)...
---
[LOLA Cars] were miniature open-cockpit race cars on a longer track. Extra money was charged to drive them, and they, too, could be adjusted for speed by knowledgeable park employees, with similarly harmful consequences to riders... [A]fter the park management briefly set up a microbrewery nearby, employees looking for after-hours fun would break into it, steal the beer, and then ride the cars on Route 94.
---
Super Speedboats: These were set up in a small pond, known by staff to be heavily infested with snakes.
---
Tank Ride was one of the most popular... In a chain link fence-enclosed area, small tanks could be driven around, for a fee, for five minutes at a time, with tennis ball cannons that enabled riders to shoot at a sensor prominently mounted on each tank. If hit, the tank stopped operating for 15 seconds, while other tankers often took advantage of the delay to pepper the stricken vehicle with more fire. Visitors on the outside could also join in the fun through less costly cannons mounted on the inside of the fence. When workers had to enter the cage to attend to a stuck or crashed tank, which usually happened several times a day, they were often pelted with tennis balls from every direction despite prohibitions against such behavior that could result in expulsion from the park.
---
The first patron death occurred [at the Tidal Wave Pool] in 1982; another visitor would drown in this common water-park attraction five years later. It was, however, the number of people the lifeguards saved from a similar fate that made this the only Waterworld attraction to gain its own nickname, "The Grave Pool."
---
[The Tarzan Swing] was a steel arch hanging from a 20-foot-long cable over a spring-fed pool. Patrons used the ride properly, but then were surprised to find out the water underneath was very cold. It was cold enough, in fact, that the lifeguards sometimes had to rescue people who were so surprised by the sudden chill they couldn't swim out.
---
[The Surf hill] ride, common to other water parks at the time, allowed patrons to slide down a water-slick sloped surface on mats into small puddles, until they reached a foam barrier after an upslope at the end. The seventh lane was known as the "back breaker," due to its special kicker two-thirds of the way down intended to allow jumps and splashdowns into a larger puddle. Employees at the park used to like eating at a nearby snack bar with a good view of the attraction, since it was almost guaranteed that they could see some serious injuries, lost bikini tops, or both.
---
Super Speed Water Slides: Those who made it to the bottom found their progress arrested by water, which made a large splash, and then a small pool. The speed at which riders met the end resulted in many getting wedgies and enemas from the experience.
---
The Looping Water Slide [is] the one ride that has come to symbolize Action Park and its extreme thrill-seeking was almost never used.
In the mid-1980s GAR built an enclosed water slide, not unusual for that time, and indeed the park already had several. But for this one they decided to build, at the end, a complete vertical loop of the kind more commonly associated with roller coasters. Employees have reported they were offered hundred-dollar bills to test it.
It was opened for one month in summer 1985 before it was closed at the order of the state's Advisory Board on Carnival Amusement Ride Safety, a highly unusual move at the time. One worker told a local newspaper that "there were too many bloody noses and back injuries" from riders, and it was widely rumored, and reported in Weird NJ, that some of the test dummies sent down before it was opened had been dismembered. A rider also reportedly got stuck at the top of the loop due to insufficient water pressure, and a hatch had to be built at the bottom of the slope to allow for future extrications.
Saturday, January 02, 2010
The Month That Was - December 2009
The Month That Was - December 2009: Kiss another decade goodbye. I almost certainly have fewer ahead than behind at this point. I'm still waiting for that mortality vaccine, and really, what is the hold up on that?
I finished yet another revision of the manuscript that will become Misspent Youth and now it's time to set it aside again and clear my mind of current preconceptions. Perhaps one more revision before we get to the final publishing sequence (which in itself will require at least two revisions beyond that). Until I'm ready, I'll go back to working on some ancillary writing projects that may or may not ever see the light of day.
As promised, I'm laying off the city of Detroit for this month. Detroit...lay off...there is a joke in there somewhere, but making it would break my vow. I finally finished Cloud Atlas; you can find my extensive comments about it below. I've since moved on to The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which appears to consist entirely of the thoughts going through a man's head as he rides an escalator back to his office after lunch. "Oddly compelling" is an insufficient description. More next month. My one bit of travel was to spend the long Christmas weekend at The Greenbrier -- a seriously high-end resort in the West Virginia Appalachians. I'm still way behind in photos; I got Tulum and Delray Beach up, but I haven't yet started Valley of Fire/Zion/Bryce Canyon, and now I have Greenbrier to do. I may never catch up.
Oh by the way, I have gone back and added labels to all the posts I made for 2009. At the end of every post you will now see the assigned label(s), such as 'Travel' or 'Books'. If you want to read more of that type, just click the label and they will all come up. I figure this brings me up to about 2003, technologically speaking.
Now bravely onward to 2010.
[Books] Book Look: Cloud Atlas
[Travel] Dressing for Dinner
[Movies] Suburban Samuel Clemens
[Cars] Automachinations
[Movies] Last Word on The Phantom Menace
I finished yet another revision of the manuscript that will become Misspent Youth and now it's time to set it aside again and clear my mind of current preconceptions. Perhaps one more revision before we get to the final publishing sequence (which in itself will require at least two revisions beyond that). Until I'm ready, I'll go back to working on some ancillary writing projects that may or may not ever see the light of day.
As promised, I'm laying off the city of Detroit for this month. Detroit...lay off...there is a joke in there somewhere, but making it would break my vow. I finally finished Cloud Atlas; you can find my extensive comments about it below. I've since moved on to The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, which appears to consist entirely of the thoughts going through a man's head as he rides an escalator back to his office after lunch. "Oddly compelling" is an insufficient description. More next month. My one bit of travel was to spend the long Christmas weekend at The Greenbrier -- a seriously high-end resort in the West Virginia Appalachians. I'm still way behind in photos; I got Tulum and Delray Beach up, but I haven't yet started Valley of Fire/Zion/Bryce Canyon, and now I have Greenbrier to do. I may never catch up.
Oh by the way, I have gone back and added labels to all the posts I made for 2009. At the end of every post you will now see the assigned label(s), such as 'Travel' or 'Books'. If you want to read more of that type, just click the label and they will all come up. I figure this brings me up to about 2003, technologically speaking.
Now bravely onward to 2010.
[Books] Book Look: Cloud Atlas
[Travel] Dressing for Dinner
[Movies] Suburban Samuel Clemens
[Cars] Automachinations
[Movies] Last Word on The Phantom Menace
[Books] Book Look: Cloud Atlas
Book Look: Cloud Atlas: If you troll for book reviews on the web, looking to fill out your reading list, you will inevitably stumble across a lot recommendations for Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell. As a monumental work of imaginative fiction that garnered short listings for the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi awards, it's not surprising that it would appeal to webheads. But it also won the British Book Award for literary fiction and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, so it's no genre baby either.
The book consists of a set of six novellas in a structure that is most aptly described as a Russian Matryoshka doll. You get the first halves of novellas 1-5 in order, then the entirety of novella 6, followed by the second halves of novellas 5-1 (reverse order). The effect is like a palindrome, or the winding and unwinding of a yo-yo, or perhaps the expansion and contraction of the universe. A short description of the six novellas:
Cloud Atlas is a tour-de-force of writing skill, as I will get to briefly. But it is marred -- jarringly so -- by one serious flaw. The morality behind it is utterly infantile. Mitchell has stated that the primary theme of Cloud Atlas is predation; individual on individual, tribe on tribe, race on race, culture on culture. Fair enough, but every predatory situation is portrayed as perfectly black and white. The bad guys are all violent, conniving, and unremorseful and pretty much avowedly evil or nihilistic or narcissistic. The good guys are all victims and underdogs and prone to hand-over-the-heart nobility.
Before I go further, I'm going to start to get a little more detailed into the stories and there is the possibility of spoilers, although I will try to be circumspect. I should also note that this isn't a thriller with a secret twist at the end; even if I generate some spoilage it will not likely diminish your reading experience, but if you want to be especially careful stop reading now.
Story by story, let's briefly describe the bad guys and good guys.
Not a shade of gray in that list. Snidely Whiplash and Dudley Doo-right would fit in perfectly. The bad guys have no redeeming qualities, and the good guys are all noble, righteous, and pure. Not only are the normative ethics simplistic, but some of the cliches are so long in the tooth they're only worthy of MST3K.
Now, while the core morality of a work of fiction is very important, a book can succeed without a solid one, and Cloud Atlas does. But that is precisely the reason the childish philosophy behind it is so jarring. With respect to any other aspect of fiction, Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece.
The sequencing of the stories through history and into the future, something that most writers would have ham-fisted, is handled elegantly: implicit reincarnation, both subtle and direct repetitions from one story to another, circuitous returns to familiar places. The plot structure is surpassingly excellent.
For me, the most impressive aspect of Cloud Atlas is the mastery of writing styles. And not just the writing styles in themselves, but capturing the transformation of the English language as a by-product. From historic styles of 19th century formality, to Edwardian insouciance, to hardboiled potboiler, to irony and satire, then into the future through the dystopian corporate speak, and further to post-apocalyptic pidgin -- this transformation, happening as it does at the point of communication between writer and reader, adds a primal sense of realism that informs the experience of reading at a very deep level. This, to my mind, qualifies as genius. (Long time readers know how enthralled I am by contemporary attempts to use language in something other than a purely utilitarian way.)
Despite the formulaic nature of the characters, I cared about some of them. Frobisher was fun; and Cavendish. And despite the horrors and tragedies that are inflicted upon the good guys in "Sloosha's Crossin'..." and the unadulterated, shameless emotional button pushing, I found this story the most affecting of all. It may have been button pushing, but it was awesome button pushing. (I actually had to set the book aside and spend some time with the deliriously happy characters in Misspent Youth, to clear my palate before going on.)
So, as with all my book reviews, that leaves the question of whether you should read the book. Let me draw an analogy.
Suppose it was discovered that Rembrandt went off into his studio and began working on a new portrait. It was a work of astounding creativity. It drew on everything before it, but also looked to the future and used materials in ways they had never been used before. The quality craftsmanship was unprecedented. The vision and scope was as broad as humanity itself. It was a work likely to profoundly affect you for a long, long time. But the subject...well, the subject was: a velvet Elvis. A shatteringly beautiful velvet Elvis. Would you still want to see it?
By the way, the film rights have been locked up by the Wachowski Brothers, the duo behind another mind-blowing ride with a simpleton's core: The Matrix. Hmm.
The book consists of a set of six novellas in a structure that is most aptly described as a Russian Matryoshka doll. You get the first halves of novellas 1-5 in order, then the entirety of novella 6, followed by the second halves of novellas 5-1 (reverse order). The effect is like a palindrome, or the winding and unwinding of a yo-yo, or perhaps the expansion and contraction of the universe. A short description of the six novellas:
- The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing. The time is the mid-nineteen century and story that of an American notary trying to make his way back across the Pacific to his home in San Francisco, written in the style Herman Melville. Along the way Ewing encounters savagery from both native and civilized men and experiences a brutal shipboard existence.
- Letters from Zedelghem. We move forward in time to Europe between the wars. This one is written in a droll Edwardian style. Driven, talented, but unknown and ne'er-do-well English composer Robert Frobisher flees debt and family shame in England by weaseling his way into becoming the assistant to a world renowned composer in Belgium. What starts out as the good humored, narcissistic romp of a young rake, turns serious. All this is told in the form of a series of letters written by Frobisher to his best friend back in England, Rufus Sixsmith. During his time in Zedelghem, Frobisher discovers and reads Adam Ewing's published journal and finds some sad poignancy.
- Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery. Set in the '70s and told in the flat, unadorned style of a flavor-of-the-month mystery. Crusading reporter Luisa Rey is investigating an uber-powerful nuclear power company that is covering up how unsafe their latest reactor is. Nefarious conspiracies, dastardly assassination attempts, death defying action, and criminal corruption clash in this pulse-pounding potboiler. You get the picture. The connection is that Luisa Rey's inside source is none other than Rufus Sixsmith. In the process, Luisa finds herself in possession of Sixsmith's most cherished possession, the letters Robert Frobisher sent him decades earlier.
- The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish. We have reached roughly contemporary times (maybe y2k) and so are given a big ol' dose of irony and satire. Cavendish runs a small-time vanity publishing house which has produced the autobiography of a powerful mobster. Things go sour, as they will when mobsters are involved, and Cavendish must flee for his life. He goes to his brother for help and his brother seems to contrive to have him committed to some sort of asylum, possibly as retribution for cuckolding him some years past. While trapped in the asylum, Cavendish suffers a stroke and struggles to simultaneously escape the institution and regain control of his body. All along, Cavendish, is evaluating 'Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey' mystery for publication.
- An Orison of Somni-451. We are now in the future where we find a Blade Runner-esque dystopia. The prevailing culture is a Korean Corporatism that has environmentally trashed the world and created a slave race of highly specialized clones. This story is told in the form of a final confession and explanation of a rebel clone, Somni-451, given to her legal representative before her execution. In the course of Somni-451's transformation from subservient clone to self-valuing humanity, she is exposed to a holographic movie of The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish.
- Sloosha's Crossin' and Ev'rythin' After. Now we move yet further into the future and have gone from dystopia to full-on post-apocalypse. We are back in the Pacific at a time when the world has almost totally fallen back to tribalism and subsistence living. The story centers on Zach'ry, a young member of one of the more advanced tribes (although still quite primitive). His family and tribe, along with others, live in constant threat from the Kona, a savage tribe that hunts, kills, and enslaves others. Zach'ry's tribe takes in a strange visitor from the final remnants of a technologically advanced civilization (which maintains a Star Trek-ian prime directive of sorts). Things go from bad to worse for Zach'ry and humanity. We discover that Zach'ry's tribe worships a deity based on Somni-451.
Cloud Atlas is a tour-de-force of writing skill, as I will get to briefly. But it is marred -- jarringly so -- by one serious flaw. The morality behind it is utterly infantile. Mitchell has stated that the primary theme of Cloud Atlas is predation; individual on individual, tribe on tribe, race on race, culture on culture. Fair enough, but every predatory situation is portrayed as perfectly black and white. The bad guys are all violent, conniving, and unremorseful and pretty much avowedly evil or nihilistic or narcissistic. The good guys are all victims and underdogs and prone to hand-over-the-heart nobility.
Before I go further, I'm going to start to get a little more detailed into the stories and there is the possibility of spoilers, although I will try to be circumspect. I should also note that this isn't a thriller with a secret twist at the end; even if I generate some spoilage it will not likely diminish your reading experience, but if you want to be especially careful stop reading now.
Story by story, let's briefly describe the bad guys and good guys.
- The Pacific Journal...Bad guys: Native slaveholders, corrupt British profiteers, a nihilistic murderer, greedy Christian missionaries, shipboard child rapists; Good guy: A na‹ve, purehearted American who falls victim to his own trusting nature.
- Letters...Bad guys: a plagiaristic domineering composer, his amoral wife, upper crust society in general by scornfully eschewing talented bad boy. Good guy: the bad boy talent, his brother who died in WW1 to no good purpose.
- Half-Lives...Bad guys: Greedy capitalists, corrupt politicians, hired assassins. Good guys: Stalwart whistleblowers, a crusading reported who fights corruption in the memory of her father -- a good cop who stood up to bad ones.
- The Ghastly Ordeal...Bad guys: a mob boss (cut straight from a Guy Ritchie film) and a Nurse Ratched knock off. Good guys: a mildly disabled third rate book publisher and a pack off sweet oldsters who only want to be treated with respect.
- Orison...Bad guys: owners of McDonalds style restaurant, spoiled and carelessly murderous well off college kids; Good guys: A clone fighting for human rights, members of secret society dedicated to the same cause, a poverty swamped society of outcasts living outside the culture and on their own terms.
- Sloosha's Crossin'...Bad guys: Sadistic genocidal enslavers; Good guys: a peaceful and idyllic tribe; the last remnants of civilization fighting to preserve itself.
Not a shade of gray in that list. Snidely Whiplash and Dudley Doo-right would fit in perfectly. The bad guys have no redeeming qualities, and the good guys are all noble, righteous, and pure. Not only are the normative ethics simplistic, but some of the cliches are so long in the tooth they're only worthy of MST3K.
Now, while the core morality of a work of fiction is very important, a book can succeed without a solid one, and Cloud Atlas does. But that is precisely the reason the childish philosophy behind it is so jarring. With respect to any other aspect of fiction, Cloud Atlas is a masterpiece.
The sequencing of the stories through history and into the future, something that most writers would have ham-fisted, is handled elegantly: implicit reincarnation, both subtle and direct repetitions from one story to another, circuitous returns to familiar places. The plot structure is surpassingly excellent.
For me, the most impressive aspect of Cloud Atlas is the mastery of writing styles. And not just the writing styles in themselves, but capturing the transformation of the English language as a by-product. From historic styles of 19th century formality, to Edwardian insouciance, to hardboiled potboiler, to irony and satire, then into the future through the dystopian corporate speak, and further to post-apocalyptic pidgin -- this transformation, happening as it does at the point of communication between writer and reader, adds a primal sense of realism that informs the experience of reading at a very deep level. This, to my mind, qualifies as genius. (Long time readers know how enthralled I am by contemporary attempts to use language in something other than a purely utilitarian way.)
Despite the formulaic nature of the characters, I cared about some of them. Frobisher was fun; and Cavendish. And despite the horrors and tragedies that are inflicted upon the good guys in "Sloosha's Crossin'..." and the unadulterated, shameless emotional button pushing, I found this story the most affecting of all. It may have been button pushing, but it was awesome button pushing. (I actually had to set the book aside and spend some time with the deliriously happy characters in Misspent Youth, to clear my palate before going on.)
So, as with all my book reviews, that leaves the question of whether you should read the book. Let me draw an analogy.
Suppose it was discovered that Rembrandt went off into his studio and began working on a new portrait. It was a work of astounding creativity. It drew on everything before it, but also looked to the future and used materials in ways they had never been used before. The quality craftsmanship was unprecedented. The vision and scope was as broad as humanity itself. It was a work likely to profoundly affect you for a long, long time. But the subject...well, the subject was: a velvet Elvis. A shatteringly beautiful velvet Elvis. Would you still want to see it?
By the way, the film rights have been locked up by the Wachowski Brothers, the duo behind another mind-blowing ride with a simpleton's core: The Matrix. Hmm.
[Travel] Dressing for Dinner
Dressing for Dinner: What's most astounding about this trip is that nothing went wrong. The travel plans were to fly out to DC on Christmas Eve (Thursday), drive 4 hours into the West Virginia mountains on Christmas Day, drive back then fly home on Sunday. In that span of days, apart from the standard holiday madness, there was a terrorist bombing attempt and a quasi-riot at JFK airport yet I skated through both ends of my air travels with nary an incident. That includes flying Delta (the airline in both the attempted bombing and riot incidents) in and out of Detroit (the destination of the would-be bomber). I must say, I noticed no security histrionics except for a polite TSA officer checking IDs and boarding passes at the gate, with an obvious goal of visibility rather than any sort of rule enforcement. I'm may be in the minority, but I think TSA did OK this time around.
The Greenbrier is a storied and venerable luxury resort in the Appalachians just across the border form regular Virginia into West Virginia, in the remote town of White Sulphur Springs. The name should tell you that mineral baths were how the town got its start back all the way back in the late 18th century. It's a small town; approximately two-thirds of the local residents are employed by The Greenbrier which was, and probably still is, the most high-society destination in the South and it is consistently revered by eminent luminaries and various species of the Southern hoi-polloi.
There's a fascinating social dynamic behind this long-term hospitality excellence. It's not easy for an organization to maintain stratospheric levels of service for decades on end. You can probably count the number of such places in the world on your fingers (and maybe toes). One strategy for doing so is to create an entire community, including history and culture, dedicated to the mission. Think of Disney essentially building Orlando in their image of service and magic (although the city has progressed way beyond just Disney). The relationship between the Greenbrier and White Sulphur Springs is almost the same, except that it arose organically and locally over more than a century. Generations of solid West Virginians in the area have devoted healthy portions of their lives to The Greenbrier and have never misstepped to the point of allowing it decay or even fall out of favor. That's a remarkable achievement.
This motivation to service apparently extends beyond the functioning of the resort since the Greenbrier was retasked as an Army hospital throughout WW2 and subsequently was the site of a top secret fallout shelter during the Cold War years (more on that later).
What's it like to stay at Greenbrier? It's nice. Very nice. But you must be comfortable with a certain old world formality in the atmosphere. This is reinforced from the moment you enter the grounds. The main building is an enormous antebellum castle of a structure. Horse drawn carriages would not be out of place pulling up to the entrance. The furnishings are ornate, gilded, and garishly colorful. The interior was designed by Dorothy Draper, who also did the similar Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. You won't see a lot of plastic or aluminum or kid safe decor.
Like most historic properties, the rooms are outdated and a bit worn; there is only so much you can do to renovate centuries-old architecture and plumbing. Water pressure is anemic and electrical outlets are dear. But unlike some such rooms I have stayed in, the heat functions well and there doesn't seem to be a problem with noise (although that may be because of the high-end patronage). The bed is plush and comfortable and there is a walk-in closet. All in all, about as good as you can expect from a historic property.
The indoor pool is another beauty. (There is an outdoor infinity pool too, but of no use in December.) It is Olympic-sized with a deep-end depth of nine feet. And it is tiled -- not concrete, with stair step platforms into the water. The only thing missing for a full-on 1930's era swim experience were full coverage bathing suits and shower caps on the women. That and a diving board. I absolutely hate that lawyers have done away with diving boards and criminalized diving in general, so I took the opportunity for a few head first plunges into the nine foot end when the lifeguard's back was turned. There is a sort of faux sun-deck with lounge chairs and a separate area for patio furniture style chairs and tables where you can dine from the uncharacteristically substandard snack bar. There are fine locker room facilities available, associated with the spa, which is important because the idea is to bring your swimwear to the pool area and change there as opposed to wandering through the lobby in your bathing suit like common rabble. Anyway, I was really digging on the pool.
The grounds are lovely and roll gently through the Old South round-top mountains with footbridges across broad and shallow streams. One suspects fall and spring are stunning. In the current day, that spells real estate opportunity and the surrounding areas are filling up with tasteful rental properties starting at around $2 million and going up as high as you like from there. What real estate crash are you talking about?
I can easily see the attraction of a home in the area, especially a vacation home or summer estate, thanks to the activities available at The Greenbrier. These include: fly-fishing, skeet shooting, wing shooting, off-road driving, falconry (yes, the big scary birds that can peck your eyes out), hiking, biking...all offered with tours and instruction as needed. Tennis is big, but even bigger is golf, what with the Greenbrier hosting a PGA tournament. It is clearly a place you could go year after year to get your recreational fix. The Snowshoe skiing resort is a little over an hour away, but I suspect the warm months are prime time here. For an empty nester with means, not only would this be a fine semi-retirement but it would serve as a draw to get a far-flung family together every now and then.
Sadly, holiday scheduling and time constraints kept us from doing any of the activities, but we were able to take a fascinating tour of the bunker. What is the bunker you ask? The story is that back in the duck-and-cover fifties, President Ike determined that in the event of a nuclear attack, an effort should be made to save the legislative branch of government and keep it functioning in the post-apocalyptic world. Nowadays we know better and would readily offer them up as sacrificial lambs, but it was a simpler time. Plans were laid and palms were greased and construction of said fallout shelter began at the Greenbrier under the auspices of adding a new wing to the resort.
It was quite an undertaking and scores of Greenbrier employees had to be in on the secret to keep it going. After it was complete the fallout shelter's service staff doubled as Greenbrier staff to maintain the charade. Cover was finally blown in 1992 in a hubristic report in the Washington Post that justified itself by claiming the shelter was insufficient and needed to be exposed as such. The tour guides proudly point out that no Greenbrier employees had broken under questioning, it was a unnamed former government functionary who coughed up the validation.
The tour itself is interesting as a window on to how the government thought about survival back then. There was only room for legislators -- no families, and the military was empowered to forcibly remove the legislators and leave their families to deal with the apocalypse on their own if need be. The congresscritters would then be ensconced in dormitory style bunks, 60 to a room, fed military rations, and be serviced by a single assistant each until it was presumed safe to exit. Tellingly, at some point in the seventies, the leaders of both chambers contrived to have VIP suites where they could stay in a modicum of comfort while the rest lived on like college freshmen. No reason status symbolism should be affected by a little thing like nuclear war, after all.
The tour is loaded with little gems of information, especially for those of us who lived through those times. (It remains unsettling for me to hear events I have lived through and recall referred to in historic tones.) I highly recommend the tour. It's an interesting little distillation of a Cold War vignette.
One question that can be reasonably asked about The Greenbrier is whether it is timeless, or merely nostalgic. I'm not sure, but I'm leaning toward timeless. I don't think they set their policies based on a desire to reproduce the thirties, either 19- or 18-, they just seem to like the genteel formality of it all. Dressing for dinner is a perfect example. There is no attempt as far as I can see to generate some sort of old school dining experience. The waiters don't display any antebellum affectations and they don't force their employees into any of those embarrassing historically accurate costumes. Wi-fi is ubiquitous, though there are draconian filters in place. The main bar is no different from a nice comfy lounge you might find in any better hotel in NYC, except everyone is wearing coat and tie instead of metrosexual gear. They certainly don't stop folks from getting tipsy. One particularly sloshed woman attempted to engage me in conversation by asking, "So what's your fancy pants?" I plan to use that question on future job interviewees to see how they react to confusion. Turns out this woman was drinking herself silly in the bar while her husband was off in the casino losing a small fortune. Oh yes, there's a casino (coat and tie recommended). What could be more timeless?
One area where they keep scrupulously modern is food prices. Sweet Fancy Moses! You'd think you were at Wynn Las Vegas. A bottle of water is $2.50, entrees in the cheapest restaurant start at $20, and a mixed drink will run you around $15. And there is really no opportunity to be fugal since the nearest restaurants outside the resort are a significant drive off. I would rate the food good (in the cafe) to excellent (the main dining room), the service average but consistent.
Between the price and the formality, Greenbrier will only appeal to a select audience. If you can afford it, Greenbrier is a fine experience. It would work best if you could sync it up with your love of golf or tennis or fishing or wing shooting. Or at least you should give yourself enough time to sample the activities. It makes a great respite from the commotion and strife of the uncouth modern world. Just don't forget your Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. And your wallet.
The Greenbrier is a storied and venerable luxury resort in the Appalachians just across the border form regular Virginia into West Virginia, in the remote town of White Sulphur Springs. The name should tell you that mineral baths were how the town got its start back all the way back in the late 18th century. It's a small town; approximately two-thirds of the local residents are employed by The Greenbrier which was, and probably still is, the most high-society destination in the South and it is consistently revered by eminent luminaries and various species of the Southern hoi-polloi.
There's a fascinating social dynamic behind this long-term hospitality excellence. It's not easy for an organization to maintain stratospheric levels of service for decades on end. You can probably count the number of such places in the world on your fingers (and maybe toes). One strategy for doing so is to create an entire community, including history and culture, dedicated to the mission. Think of Disney essentially building Orlando in their image of service and magic (although the city has progressed way beyond just Disney). The relationship between the Greenbrier and White Sulphur Springs is almost the same, except that it arose organically and locally over more than a century. Generations of solid West Virginians in the area have devoted healthy portions of their lives to The Greenbrier and have never misstepped to the point of allowing it decay or even fall out of favor. That's a remarkable achievement.
This motivation to service apparently extends beyond the functioning of the resort since the Greenbrier was retasked as an Army hospital throughout WW2 and subsequently was the site of a top secret fallout shelter during the Cold War years (more on that later).
What's it like to stay at Greenbrier? It's nice. Very nice. But you must be comfortable with a certain old world formality in the atmosphere. This is reinforced from the moment you enter the grounds. The main building is an enormous antebellum castle of a structure. Horse drawn carriages would not be out of place pulling up to the entrance. The furnishings are ornate, gilded, and garishly colorful. The interior was designed by Dorothy Draper, who also did the similar Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. You won't see a lot of plastic or aluminum or kid safe decor.
Like most historic properties, the rooms are outdated and a bit worn; there is only so much you can do to renovate centuries-old architecture and plumbing. Water pressure is anemic and electrical outlets are dear. But unlike some such rooms I have stayed in, the heat functions well and there doesn't seem to be a problem with noise (although that may be because of the high-end patronage). The bed is plush and comfortable and there is a walk-in closet. All in all, about as good as you can expect from a historic property.
The indoor pool is another beauty. (There is an outdoor infinity pool too, but of no use in December.) It is Olympic-sized with a deep-end depth of nine feet. And it is tiled -- not concrete, with stair step platforms into the water. The only thing missing for a full-on 1930's era swim experience were full coverage bathing suits and shower caps on the women. That and a diving board. I absolutely hate that lawyers have done away with diving boards and criminalized diving in general, so I took the opportunity for a few head first plunges into the nine foot end when the lifeguard's back was turned. There is a sort of faux sun-deck with lounge chairs and a separate area for patio furniture style chairs and tables where you can dine from the uncharacteristically substandard snack bar. There are fine locker room facilities available, associated with the spa, which is important because the idea is to bring your swimwear to the pool area and change there as opposed to wandering through the lobby in your bathing suit like common rabble. Anyway, I was really digging on the pool.
The grounds are lovely and roll gently through the Old South round-top mountains with footbridges across broad and shallow streams. One suspects fall and spring are stunning. In the current day, that spells real estate opportunity and the surrounding areas are filling up with tasteful rental properties starting at around $2 million and going up as high as you like from there. What real estate crash are you talking about?
I can easily see the attraction of a home in the area, especially a vacation home or summer estate, thanks to the activities available at The Greenbrier. These include: fly-fishing, skeet shooting, wing shooting, off-road driving, falconry (yes, the big scary birds that can peck your eyes out), hiking, biking...all offered with tours and instruction as needed. Tennis is big, but even bigger is golf, what with the Greenbrier hosting a PGA tournament. It is clearly a place you could go year after year to get your recreational fix. The Snowshoe skiing resort is a little over an hour away, but I suspect the warm months are prime time here. For an empty nester with means, not only would this be a fine semi-retirement but it would serve as a draw to get a far-flung family together every now and then.
Sadly, holiday scheduling and time constraints kept us from doing any of the activities, but we were able to take a fascinating tour of the bunker. What is the bunker you ask? The story is that back in the duck-and-cover fifties, President Ike determined that in the event of a nuclear attack, an effort should be made to save the legislative branch of government and keep it functioning in the post-apocalyptic world. Nowadays we know better and would readily offer them up as sacrificial lambs, but it was a simpler time. Plans were laid and palms were greased and construction of said fallout shelter began at the Greenbrier under the auspices of adding a new wing to the resort.
It was quite an undertaking and scores of Greenbrier employees had to be in on the secret to keep it going. After it was complete the fallout shelter's service staff doubled as Greenbrier staff to maintain the charade. Cover was finally blown in 1992 in a hubristic report in the Washington Post that justified itself by claiming the shelter was insufficient and needed to be exposed as such. The tour guides proudly point out that no Greenbrier employees had broken under questioning, it was a unnamed former government functionary who coughed up the validation.
The tour itself is interesting as a window on to how the government thought about survival back then. There was only room for legislators -- no families, and the military was empowered to forcibly remove the legislators and leave their families to deal with the apocalypse on their own if need be. The congresscritters would then be ensconced in dormitory style bunks, 60 to a room, fed military rations, and be serviced by a single assistant each until it was presumed safe to exit. Tellingly, at some point in the seventies, the leaders of both chambers contrived to have VIP suites where they could stay in a modicum of comfort while the rest lived on like college freshmen. No reason status symbolism should be affected by a little thing like nuclear war, after all.
The tour is loaded with little gems of information, especially for those of us who lived through those times. (It remains unsettling for me to hear events I have lived through and recall referred to in historic tones.) I highly recommend the tour. It's an interesting little distillation of a Cold War vignette.
One question that can be reasonably asked about The Greenbrier is whether it is timeless, or merely nostalgic. I'm not sure, but I'm leaning toward timeless. I don't think they set their policies based on a desire to reproduce the thirties, either 19- or 18-, they just seem to like the genteel formality of it all. Dressing for dinner is a perfect example. There is no attempt as far as I can see to generate some sort of old school dining experience. The waiters don't display any antebellum affectations and they don't force their employees into any of those embarrassing historically accurate costumes. Wi-fi is ubiquitous, though there are draconian filters in place. The main bar is no different from a nice comfy lounge you might find in any better hotel in NYC, except everyone is wearing coat and tie instead of metrosexual gear. They certainly don't stop folks from getting tipsy. One particularly sloshed woman attempted to engage me in conversation by asking, "So what's your fancy pants?" I plan to use that question on future job interviewees to see how they react to confusion. Turns out this woman was drinking herself silly in the bar while her husband was off in the casino losing a small fortune. Oh yes, there's a casino (coat and tie recommended). What could be more timeless?
One area where they keep scrupulously modern is food prices. Sweet Fancy Moses! You'd think you were at Wynn Las Vegas. A bottle of water is $2.50, entrees in the cheapest restaurant start at $20, and a mixed drink will run you around $15. And there is really no opportunity to be fugal since the nearest restaurants outside the resort are a significant drive off. I would rate the food good (in the cafe) to excellent (the main dining room), the service average but consistent.
Between the price and the formality, Greenbrier will only appeal to a select audience. If you can afford it, Greenbrier is a fine experience. It would work best if you could sync it up with your love of golf or tennis or fishing or wing shooting. Or at least you should give yourself enough time to sample the activities. It makes a great respite from the commotion and strife of the uncouth modern world. Just don't forget your Sunday go-to-meeting clothes. And your wallet.
[Movies] Suburban Samuel Clemens
Suburban Samuel Clemens: I didn't post anything the month John Hughes died because everybody else in the world already did, but he was always one of my favorites. Lost in the standard view of his films as sweet-and-sour adolescent comedies was his oblique appreciation of suburban middle-class life. It's not obvious what a radical concept this is until you give some consideration to how middle-class life is constantly portrayed in art as empty and phony. If you live in a nice middle-class neighborhood Hollywood will portray you as closet sexual deviant or a secretly violent criminal, or, God help you, a Christian. At best you'll be a repressed corporate stooge in dire need of some spiritual enlightenment.
I would guess at least 90% of the current inhabitants of the world, and probably 99.9999% of everyone who ever lived at any time in human history, would view middle-class suburban life as an outright utopia just on the basis of safety alone, never mind comfort and convenience and economic opportunity. But we sneer at it. We refuse to believe we are safe, expecting our children to be kidnapped at any moment or fall and bump their heads if they are not wearing a helmet. We spend our time perfecting the aesthetics of our yards or shuttling kids to soccer games or running home businesses on the side because we can grab a quick bite of fast food and find everything we need in one trip to Costco, but we decry the consumerist society that makes that possible.
There's a reason our culture has organically evolved the middle-class as it has, and it is because it's the exactly the life we have wanted; the best that flawed human nature has ever achieved. Appreciate it. Celebrate it. Enjoy it. John Hughes did. He laughed at it because, as a product flawed humanity, it will have its' share of absurd irrationalities. He found drama in it because, as a product of flawed humanity, there will be conflict -- pain and pleasure. But he also saw what a great achievement it is.
You certainly don't see a lot of that in the arts. The old TV show Wonder Years (oddly unavailable on DVD) comes to mind. And more recently the wonderful pop band Fountains of Wayne seems to take that tack, especially on their Utopia Parkway album. I am trying to hit that chord also in Misspent Youth; we'll see if I succeed. But for the most part cynicism and negatively rule the day.
All this came to mind when I happened to stumble on Sixteen Candles for the nine-millionth time, but the first time in ages uncut with no commercials -- 25 years old and it hasn't aged a day. And I saw that a new documentary about Hughes and his abrupt disappearance from Hollywood in 1991, Don't You Forget About Me, recently hit cable (haven't seen it, reviews mixed). For some reason, they neglected to interview me for it, but if they did I would have told them that I think Ferris Buellar's place in the Pantheon is right next to Huckleberry Finn, and the suburbs and the Mississippi aren't all that different.
I would guess at least 90% of the current inhabitants of the world, and probably 99.9999% of everyone who ever lived at any time in human history, would view middle-class suburban life as an outright utopia just on the basis of safety alone, never mind comfort and convenience and economic opportunity. But we sneer at it. We refuse to believe we are safe, expecting our children to be kidnapped at any moment or fall and bump their heads if they are not wearing a helmet. We spend our time perfecting the aesthetics of our yards or shuttling kids to soccer games or running home businesses on the side because we can grab a quick bite of fast food and find everything we need in one trip to Costco, but we decry the consumerist society that makes that possible.
There's a reason our culture has organically evolved the middle-class as it has, and it is because it's the exactly the life we have wanted; the best that flawed human nature has ever achieved. Appreciate it. Celebrate it. Enjoy it. John Hughes did. He laughed at it because, as a product flawed humanity, it will have its' share of absurd irrationalities. He found drama in it because, as a product of flawed humanity, there will be conflict -- pain and pleasure. But he also saw what a great achievement it is.
You certainly don't see a lot of that in the arts. The old TV show Wonder Years (oddly unavailable on DVD) comes to mind. And more recently the wonderful pop band Fountains of Wayne seems to take that tack, especially on their Utopia Parkway album. I am trying to hit that chord also in Misspent Youth; we'll see if I succeed. But for the most part cynicism and negatively rule the day.
All this came to mind when I happened to stumble on Sixteen Candles for the nine-millionth time, but the first time in ages uncut with no commercials -- 25 years old and it hasn't aged a day. And I saw that a new documentary about Hughes and his abrupt disappearance from Hollywood in 1991, Don't You Forget About Me, recently hit cable (haven't seen it, reviews mixed). For some reason, they neglected to interview me for it, but if they did I would have told them that I think Ferris Buellar's place in the Pantheon is right next to Huckleberry Finn, and the suburbs and the Mississippi aren't all that different.
[Cars] Automachinations
Automachinations: It's getting close to my traditional car buying year. The first new car I ever bought was a bright red stripper 1984 Toyota Celica (no a/c, power nothing, manual trans) -- an awesome little scootmobile in comparison to the hand-me-down domestics I had been driving up until then. It locked me in as a Toyota loyalist for a quarter century. Historic note: I was not allowed to drive it to a UAW presentation given at Solidarity House for a business school class outing back around '88, as they believed drivers of foreign cars were moral criminals. They got the pusillanimous pleasure of causing me inconvenience and in return never even considered buying a union built car for over 25 years. I guess they showed me.
After nine Michigan winters and countless road trips to Florida and DC, I gave it up and bought a new '93 Camry. It was a car more fitting my 30-something lifestyle. It had a/c and power and even a CD player, but the amazing revelation I got from it was the quiet. It was absolutely dead silent. A gas-powered tomb. I would go on long Saturday afternoon drives to little out of the way Michigan towns just to enjoy the existential peace of the smooth, easy ride.
Next time, again nine years later, I was a home-owner and had a little discretionary income and so decided to upgrade to a new Camry, an '02, purchased over the web. It has been a good car, perhaps a few more squeaks and rattles than the previous, but reliability has been literally perfect. Yet unlike the previous two, it hasn't been a revelation. Other than the creature comforts I could afford, it does nothing better than the previous Camry as far as I can tell. No shame in that for Toyota -- I mean, how much more seamless can the act of driving be.
So with my unplanned, but now traditional, nine year cycle coming up, I am informally in the market, but not absolutely locked into buying Toyota again. One option is Hyundai, what with them being the new Toyota and all. Both my Mom and my little brother have Hyundais and like them a lot. The other option is Ford. I know all the domestic makers have gotten government aid in one way or another, but at least Ford didn't participate in that hideous bailout. The new Taurus is getting good reviews and will likely be cheaper that the comparative 'yota, and the scuttlebutt is that Ford quality is now comparable to Toyota and Honda.
If I was really keyed in on the best deal I would likely be looking at a Saturn or Pontiac right now since GM is offering huge incentives to clear the lots of these now obsolete brands. But since I have a policy of paying outright for the car then keeping it for nearly a decade, saving a few bucks up front is not my primary concern. For now the Camry is still running fine, and I am putting miles on it at a much slower pace than previously. I guess I don't feel any hurry to keep to my nine-year plan, but I will likely be getting more familiar with the market and that means you'll be hearing about it.
By the way, if I had a single piece of advice to give to a young person starting out in life it would be: Do Not Have a Car Payment. I have seen people graduate from college and the first thing they do when they finally get a job is lock themselves into a five-year car loan for 20% of their take home pay. Avoid this any way you can. Buy used. If you must get a loan, buy a car you can drive for ten years but have it paid off after two. Remember, you might be dropping $1500 a year on insurance anyway (and maybe parking, too). Not having a car payment is a huge source of peace of mind and lifestyle flexibility when you are just starting out.
Oh, and one other thing: Get Off My Lawn! Damn Kids.
After nine Michigan winters and countless road trips to Florida and DC, I gave it up and bought a new '93 Camry. It was a car more fitting my 30-something lifestyle. It had a/c and power and even a CD player, but the amazing revelation I got from it was the quiet. It was absolutely dead silent. A gas-powered tomb. I would go on long Saturday afternoon drives to little out of the way Michigan towns just to enjoy the existential peace of the smooth, easy ride.
Next time, again nine years later, I was a home-owner and had a little discretionary income and so decided to upgrade to a new Camry, an '02, purchased over the web. It has been a good car, perhaps a few more squeaks and rattles than the previous, but reliability has been literally perfect. Yet unlike the previous two, it hasn't been a revelation. Other than the creature comforts I could afford, it does nothing better than the previous Camry as far as I can tell. No shame in that for Toyota -- I mean, how much more seamless can the act of driving be.
So with my unplanned, but now traditional, nine year cycle coming up, I am informally in the market, but not absolutely locked into buying Toyota again. One option is Hyundai, what with them being the new Toyota and all. Both my Mom and my little brother have Hyundais and like them a lot. The other option is Ford. I know all the domestic makers have gotten government aid in one way or another, but at least Ford didn't participate in that hideous bailout. The new Taurus is getting good reviews and will likely be cheaper that the comparative 'yota, and the scuttlebutt is that Ford quality is now comparable to Toyota and Honda.
If I was really keyed in on the best deal I would likely be looking at a Saturn or Pontiac right now since GM is offering huge incentives to clear the lots of these now obsolete brands. But since I have a policy of paying outright for the car then keeping it for nearly a decade, saving a few bucks up front is not my primary concern. For now the Camry is still running fine, and I am putting miles on it at a much slower pace than previously. I guess I don't feel any hurry to keep to my nine-year plan, but I will likely be getting more familiar with the market and that means you'll be hearing about it.
By the way, if I had a single piece of advice to give to a young person starting out in life it would be: Do Not Have a Car Payment. I have seen people graduate from college and the first thing they do when they finally get a job is lock themselves into a five-year car loan for 20% of their take home pay. Avoid this any way you can. Buy used. If you must get a loan, buy a car you can drive for ten years but have it paid off after two. Remember, you might be dropping $1500 a year on insurance anyway (and maybe parking, too). Not having a car payment is a huge source of peace of mind and lifestyle flexibility when you are just starting out.
Oh, and one other thing: Get Off My Lawn! Damn Kids.
[Movies] Last Word on The Phantom Menace
Last Word on The Phantom Menace: It's been making the rounds on numerous web sites but I would be remiss if I didn't recommend this seven-part video takedown of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) over at YouTube. (There is some naughty language and a hint of perversion, so be advised.) Narrated by a tightly twisted and deeply disturbed geek character, they are a total stitch. It bogs down in the middle but the start and the end are priceless, and behind the over-the-top psycho-nerd shtick is a truly righteous understanding of why the movie sucked so awfully. Yes, it's an old film from a previous century, but its continuing place in pop culture makes it relevant. Enjoy.
Saturday, December 05, 2009
The Month That Was - November 2009
The Month That Was - November 2009: Boy, am I late this month. That's because of all the travel. I cruised through warmer climes then did my annual Turkey-day pilgrimage to Vegas. Both trips are described below, sans photos. Travel went up the very end of the month and it will still be some time before I have prepped all the photos I took. If I get them done before the end of the month I'll update the posts, otherwise next month for sure. This leaves me with one last trip left this year, something as yet unplanned for the Christmas/New Year timeframe. Funny, earlier in the year I fretted that I would not get anywhere.
The past couple of months have been short on Book Looks and long on Detroit slams. I'm afraid that continues this month. I've been reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and I'm not quite done (it's really six novellas in one, which is to say: it's long). I'll have quite a bit to say about it next month, but for now it gets a qualified recommendation. Qualified, because a) I haven't finished it, and b) I don't like to give Boolean thumbs up or down. I would rather try to identify what type of person might like to read the books I discuss. This one will take some significant nuance, but I feel safe expressing a broadly positive judgment.
And yes, I will slam Detroit one more time, mostly because a couple of articles worthy of note came up this month. I vow, barring extreme events, that I will not slam Detroit for December -- Christmas spirit, and so forth.
[Travel] Sailing to Mexico, Sort of
[Travel] Home for Thanksgiving
[Travel] See the U.S.A.
[Detroit] Worse? How Could it be Worse? Jehovah!
[TV] Men, Slightly Less Mad
The past couple of months have been short on Book Looks and long on Detroit slams. I'm afraid that continues this month. I've been reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell and I'm not quite done (it's really six novellas in one, which is to say: it's long). I'll have quite a bit to say about it next month, but for now it gets a qualified recommendation. Qualified, because a) I haven't finished it, and b) I don't like to give Boolean thumbs up or down. I would rather try to identify what type of person might like to read the books I discuss. This one will take some significant nuance, but I feel safe expressing a broadly positive judgment.
And yes, I will slam Detroit one more time, mostly because a couple of articles worthy of note came up this month. I vow, barring extreme events, that I will not slam Detroit for December -- Christmas spirit, and so forth.
[Travel] Sailing to Mexico, Sort of
[Travel] Home for Thanksgiving
[Travel] See the U.S.A.
[Detroit] Worse? How Could it be Worse? Jehovah!
[TV] Men, Slightly Less Mad
[Travel] Sailing to Mexico, Sort Of
Sailing to Mexico, Sort Of: [[update: Tulum photos and Delray Beach photos now available]]
Well, not actually sailing. More like staying at a floating resort hotel in the Caribbean. And Mexico in name only and for but a few hours. Still: my first cruise. I have always been marginally negative regarding cruises. My reasons were three fold: 1) I usually travel alone. Cruises, like most packaged travel, are designed for couples. There is a premium for the solo traveler and that makes me feel as though I am being punished. 2) They are more expensive than they advertise. I find the strategic nickel-and-diming in the travel industry to be tawdry, and cruises with their captive audience are prime examples. Not that they are rapacious, but the whole giving you a fixed price then nailing you for extras offends my hopelessly middle-class frugality. 3) You only get a few hours in port. Typically you dock in the early AM and embark in the early PM. If you pull into an interesting place, you have little chance to get a feel for it. You have no chance to look around and figure out what's good, what's bad, what works, what doesn't. So you end up taking a packaged excursion, or shopping in the chinchy portside shop and drinking in the tacky portside bars.
Having now been on a cruise I see other limitations. Obviously you won't be residing in any sort of luxury dwellings. The staterooms are nicely done but cramped (it's a boat after all) -- this ain't a suite at the Mandarin Oriental. The pools are small, and crowded. The spa facilities are small and limited. The all-inclusive eating is decent and the specialty restaurants (extra cost, of course) can be very good, but availability is a question. The bars are plentiful, but rather pedestrian in quality; I ordered an Old Fashioned and got bourbon awash in maraschino cherry juice. The larger point is that while they certainly have everything and some of it is good -- none of it is truly great. You will not get pampered like you would at Canyon Ranch. You will not eat like the Vegas Strip. You will not have Manhattan-level night-life. And you will not get any sort of genuine appreciation of a destination, unless you count the boat as a foreign country.
But then, that's kind of the point. You don't get anything great, but you do get everything. You don't have to worry losing your wallet, dealing with potentially surly natives, arranging safe transportation, Montezuma's revenge. The risk is basically eliminated. That's nice. Very nice. It's especially nice if you get two weeks vacation a year and, though you may miss out on the chance of truly great experience, it's more important to be assured not wasting your limited time off on a bad trip. It means it works well for frenetic families who aren't going to have a chance to fall into the local rhythms anyway and would prefer not to worry about constantly keeping the kids on a leash. It also works for older travelers who are less mobile and, not to put a fine point on it, more easily flustered. (On this cruise, folks in their 40s qualified as youthful.)
So, I am now OK with cruising as a concept. I would do it again. I would not, I think, do it alone. It's geared for groups of two or more, there is no denying that. And since I am not immobile or easily flustered, I think I could do better on my own. But in the company of others, as I was for this cruise, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Kicking off from Ft. Lauderdale (I will get to Ft. L shortly), this was, in cruise lingo, a four-day Western Caribbean cruise: Set sail from Ft. L Thursday night, Friday at sea, Saturday in port at Cozumel, Sunday at sea, disembark Monday AM back in Ft. L.
The days at sea were about what you'd expect. Roll out of bed. Snag some breakfast of the buffet, then down to the pool to read or swim or work on one's tan. A light lunch. An afternoon nap or, in my case, an extended session at the bar, the group I was with being essentially a pack of high functioning alcoholics. Dinner. Night caps. Back to bed with the balcony door open to sleep to the real life wave machine. One night was a formal night, and I was looking all James Bond in my formalwear. Good times. No pressure.
You are provided with a menu of what must be 50 options for planned shore excursions on port days. Based on internet research and my desire for photography opportunities I chose to take a trip to the Mayan Ruins at Tulum, which also included some swimming time at a nearby private beach club. Much of this excursion was taken up with ancillary transportation. From the dock in Cozumel, take the ferry to Playa Del Carmen on the mainland (30 mins), then a bus ride to the ruins (40 mins). Along the way goods are hawked, naturally. Not hard sell in your face; polite, but pretty much constant. Folks will be pushing hats, sunglasses and trinkets pretty much everywhere. (In my case that was good because I needed a hat and sunglasses.) On the bus we were offered an opportunity to buy an official Mayan birth certificate for $20. At the entrance to the ruins the bathrooms are strategically located inside a jewelry shop where your group will be given a warm welcome and a pitch for a genuine Mayan pendant of some sort before being directed to the facilities. None of this is a bad experience because from what I could see, the folks doing the hawking were uniformly polite and friendly.
The ruins themselves, despite being accessed through the tourista infrastructure, still give one the impression of an ancient oasis in the feral tropics. Just before the entrance a group of folks were staring into the trees. I joined them to see that a good-sized snake had managed to snag and half swallow a bird although the bird was still flapping a wing in a vain attempt at escape. Don't be fooled by the happy cerveza huts, my friend, you are in the jungle; burning sun, dripping sweat.
The ruins themselves are grand stone structures spread out over what I would guess to be about ten acres. They are the exactly the sorts of buildings you picture Mayan ruins to be. Pyramidal and ornately squared off in an almost art deco-ish manner. Inlay some colorful tiles and Frank Lloyd Wright would be proud. We only had about an hour in the ruins area proper and I was really not interested in the detailed history our guide was providing so I broke off or some independent photography. And man, did I get some great shots. Unlike other Mayan ruins in Mexico, Tulum is right on the seaside, perched on a cliff. This makes for some dramatic images of the ruins with the sea in back drop. An hour my not seem long, but that's all you really need; it's just not a large area to cover and in that span I think I took close to a hundred pictures.
Back on the bus for about 15 minutes south, passing all sorts of little beachside resorts, to a pretty decent private beach club where there is a thatched roof dining area, changing rooms, and lounge chairs in the sand. We all ate fresh but nondescript Mexican buffet food, chatted briefly, then hit the beach for a little over an hour.
The beach in Tulum is as beautiful as they come. The sand is the same soft powdery variety that you get on the Florida gulf coast. The water is exquisite Caribbean turquoise; not too warm, not too cool. I wasted no time in getting in the water and swam and bobbed about, completely losing track of time. Fortuitously I finally trudged back to shore about five minutes before we were scheduled to leave, or I might still be there to this day. I was in the water for well over an hour.
Now we reversed the journey through Playa Del Carmen, a place I wish I had had more time to explore as a potential future destination, back to Cozumel and onto the ship to set sail. Thus completing my first trip to Mexico. I could handle some time in Tulum, it seems fully chilled out. Still, as I mentioned above, I have no sense for anything beyond the beach.
The reversal continued aboard, setting sail in the early evening, then another day at sea, where I availed myself of the ship's spa. It was...meh. Then back in port at Ft. L for an early morning disembarkation.
We all bee-lined for the airport, but my flight wasn't until 7 PM, so I snagged a rental car with a plan to explore Ft. L. It seemed there is a decent sized art museum currently running a Norman Rockwell exhibition so I shot over to it and dropped some cash to park only to find the museum was closed on Mondays. Great. I hoofed it along the riverwalk for a while but, while parts of the city seem quite lovely, and they have a loud and ritzy beach area, I just didn't see anything the made me feel comfortable with the place. Maybe it was the busy city streets, or the awkward shadows cast by the tall downtown buildings, or the fact that you have to cross a busy four lane thoroughfare (A1A at its ugliest) to get to the beach. It's a disharmonius juxapositon of city development and beach resort town. After about an hour I decided Ft L wasn't for me.
So I headed north on A1A; a fascinating drive through the social strata. Beyond the big hotels, Ft. L is characterized by what I would guess are '70s era apartment/condos, and they are getting long in the tooth. But pretty much the instant you cross into Deerfield Beach and Boynton, things start to steadily and obviously move upscale. By the time you hit Boca Raton, you know you have arrived. Keep going far enough and you'll go over the top in Palm Beach.
North of Boca and south of Lake Worth and Palm Beach is the town of Delray Beach. It is about perfect. It's an upscale beach town that doesn't take itself too seriously. There is clearly an emphasis on the active life. Apart from a handful of open air cafes along A1A, the action centers along Atlantic Avenue for four or five blocks perpendicular to the shore. The usual shops and cafes and some interesting restaurants. Nice and laid back. And the Florida oceanside beach is the same as the one I still idealize from age 11. Delray Beach was the discovery of the trip and it goes on the list for my habitual Florida travels.
I could have spent a couple of days here, but I had to hightail it back to FLL and wing it home because I had for a quick turnaround before my next journey...
Well, not actually sailing. More like staying at a floating resort hotel in the Caribbean. And Mexico in name only and for but a few hours. Still: my first cruise. I have always been marginally negative regarding cruises. My reasons were three fold: 1) I usually travel alone. Cruises, like most packaged travel, are designed for couples. There is a premium for the solo traveler and that makes me feel as though I am being punished. 2) They are more expensive than they advertise. I find the strategic nickel-and-diming in the travel industry to be tawdry, and cruises with their captive audience are prime examples. Not that they are rapacious, but the whole giving you a fixed price then nailing you for extras offends my hopelessly middle-class frugality. 3) You only get a few hours in port. Typically you dock in the early AM and embark in the early PM. If you pull into an interesting place, you have little chance to get a feel for it. You have no chance to look around and figure out what's good, what's bad, what works, what doesn't. So you end up taking a packaged excursion, or shopping in the chinchy portside shop and drinking in the tacky portside bars.
Having now been on a cruise I see other limitations. Obviously you won't be residing in any sort of luxury dwellings. The staterooms are nicely done but cramped (it's a boat after all) -- this ain't a suite at the Mandarin Oriental. The pools are small, and crowded. The spa facilities are small and limited. The all-inclusive eating is decent and the specialty restaurants (extra cost, of course) can be very good, but availability is a question. The bars are plentiful, but rather pedestrian in quality; I ordered an Old Fashioned and got bourbon awash in maraschino cherry juice. The larger point is that while they certainly have everything and some of it is good -- none of it is truly great. You will not get pampered like you would at Canyon Ranch. You will not eat like the Vegas Strip. You will not have Manhattan-level night-life. And you will not get any sort of genuine appreciation of a destination, unless you count the boat as a foreign country.
But then, that's kind of the point. You don't get anything great, but you do get everything. You don't have to worry losing your wallet, dealing with potentially surly natives, arranging safe transportation, Montezuma's revenge. The risk is basically eliminated. That's nice. Very nice. It's especially nice if you get two weeks vacation a year and, though you may miss out on the chance of truly great experience, it's more important to be assured not wasting your limited time off on a bad trip. It means it works well for frenetic families who aren't going to have a chance to fall into the local rhythms anyway and would prefer not to worry about constantly keeping the kids on a leash. It also works for older travelers who are less mobile and, not to put a fine point on it, more easily flustered. (On this cruise, folks in their 40s qualified as youthful.)
So, I am now OK with cruising as a concept. I would do it again. I would not, I think, do it alone. It's geared for groups of two or more, there is no denying that. And since I am not immobile or easily flustered, I think I could do better on my own. But in the company of others, as I was for this cruise, I would do it in a heartbeat.
Kicking off from Ft. Lauderdale (I will get to Ft. L shortly), this was, in cruise lingo, a four-day Western Caribbean cruise: Set sail from Ft. L Thursday night, Friday at sea, Saturday in port at Cozumel, Sunday at sea, disembark Monday AM back in Ft. L.
The days at sea were about what you'd expect. Roll out of bed. Snag some breakfast of the buffet, then down to the pool to read or swim or work on one's tan. A light lunch. An afternoon nap or, in my case, an extended session at the bar, the group I was with being essentially a pack of high functioning alcoholics. Dinner. Night caps. Back to bed with the balcony door open to sleep to the real life wave machine. One night was a formal night, and I was looking all James Bond in my formalwear. Good times. No pressure.
You are provided with a menu of what must be 50 options for planned shore excursions on port days. Based on internet research and my desire for photography opportunities I chose to take a trip to the Mayan Ruins at Tulum, which also included some swimming time at a nearby private beach club. Much of this excursion was taken up with ancillary transportation. From the dock in Cozumel, take the ferry to Playa Del Carmen on the mainland (30 mins), then a bus ride to the ruins (40 mins). Along the way goods are hawked, naturally. Not hard sell in your face; polite, but pretty much constant. Folks will be pushing hats, sunglasses and trinkets pretty much everywhere. (In my case that was good because I needed a hat and sunglasses.) On the bus we were offered an opportunity to buy an official Mayan birth certificate for $20. At the entrance to the ruins the bathrooms are strategically located inside a jewelry shop where your group will be given a warm welcome and a pitch for a genuine Mayan pendant of some sort before being directed to the facilities. None of this is a bad experience because from what I could see, the folks doing the hawking were uniformly polite and friendly.
The ruins themselves, despite being accessed through the tourista infrastructure, still give one the impression of an ancient oasis in the feral tropics. Just before the entrance a group of folks were staring into the trees. I joined them to see that a good-sized snake had managed to snag and half swallow a bird although the bird was still flapping a wing in a vain attempt at escape. Don't be fooled by the happy cerveza huts, my friend, you are in the jungle; burning sun, dripping sweat.
The ruins themselves are grand stone structures spread out over what I would guess to be about ten acres. They are the exactly the sorts of buildings you picture Mayan ruins to be. Pyramidal and ornately squared off in an almost art deco-ish manner. Inlay some colorful tiles and Frank Lloyd Wright would be proud. We only had about an hour in the ruins area proper and I was really not interested in the detailed history our guide was providing so I broke off or some independent photography. And man, did I get some great shots. Unlike other Mayan ruins in Mexico, Tulum is right on the seaside, perched on a cliff. This makes for some dramatic images of the ruins with the sea in back drop. An hour my not seem long, but that's all you really need; it's just not a large area to cover and in that span I think I took close to a hundred pictures.
Back on the bus for about 15 minutes south, passing all sorts of little beachside resorts, to a pretty decent private beach club where there is a thatched roof dining area, changing rooms, and lounge chairs in the sand. We all ate fresh but nondescript Mexican buffet food, chatted briefly, then hit the beach for a little over an hour.
The beach in Tulum is as beautiful as they come. The sand is the same soft powdery variety that you get on the Florida gulf coast. The water is exquisite Caribbean turquoise; not too warm, not too cool. I wasted no time in getting in the water and swam and bobbed about, completely losing track of time. Fortuitously I finally trudged back to shore about five minutes before we were scheduled to leave, or I might still be there to this day. I was in the water for well over an hour.
Now we reversed the journey through Playa Del Carmen, a place I wish I had had more time to explore as a potential future destination, back to Cozumel and onto the ship to set sail. Thus completing my first trip to Mexico. I could handle some time in Tulum, it seems fully chilled out. Still, as I mentioned above, I have no sense for anything beyond the beach.
The reversal continued aboard, setting sail in the early evening, then another day at sea, where I availed myself of the ship's spa. It was...meh. Then back in port at Ft. L for an early morning disembarkation.
We all bee-lined for the airport, but my flight wasn't until 7 PM, so I snagged a rental car with a plan to explore Ft. L. It seemed there is a decent sized art museum currently running a Norman Rockwell exhibition so I shot over to it and dropped some cash to park only to find the museum was closed on Mondays. Great. I hoofed it along the riverwalk for a while but, while parts of the city seem quite lovely, and they have a loud and ritzy beach area, I just didn't see anything the made me feel comfortable with the place. Maybe it was the busy city streets, or the awkward shadows cast by the tall downtown buildings, or the fact that you have to cross a busy four lane thoroughfare (A1A at its ugliest) to get to the beach. It's a disharmonius juxapositon of city development and beach resort town. After about an hour I decided Ft L wasn't for me.
So I headed north on A1A; a fascinating drive through the social strata. Beyond the big hotels, Ft. L is characterized by what I would guess are '70s era apartment/condos, and they are getting long in the tooth. But pretty much the instant you cross into Deerfield Beach and Boynton, things start to steadily and obviously move upscale. By the time you hit Boca Raton, you know you have arrived. Keep going far enough and you'll go over the top in Palm Beach.
North of Boca and south of Lake Worth and Palm Beach is the town of Delray Beach. It is about perfect. It's an upscale beach town that doesn't take itself too seriously. There is clearly an emphasis on the active life. Apart from a handful of open air cafes along A1A, the action centers along Atlantic Avenue for four or five blocks perpendicular to the shore. The usual shops and cafes and some interesting restaurants. Nice and laid back. And the Florida oceanside beach is the same as the one I still idealize from age 11. Delray Beach was the discovery of the trip and it goes on the list for my habitual Florida travels.
I could have spent a couple of days here, but I had to hightail it back to FLL and wing it home because I had for a quick turnaround before my next journey...
[Travel] Home for Thanksgiving
Home for Thanksgiving: [[update: Valley of Fire State Park photos, Zion National Park photos, and Bryce Canyon National Park photos now available]]
I am sitting on a chaise lounge in a "GO room" at the Flamingo looking out at the dancing fountains of Bellagio. It's not a particularly nice room; better than the Motel 6 level standard rooms, but far short of anything luxurious. A burnt out bulb, a slow as molasses LCD TV -- it's as if they decided to upgrade these room but didn't budget enough to make them wonderful. That's fine -- they're cheap (about $70/night). But there's that wonderful view: the Bally's sign is most prominent, with gyrating scantily clad women appearing at regular intervals. Beyond that the Bellagio fountain. Beyond that the Strip southward. Plus there is a little mini-fridge in which I have socked away some Diet Coke that I bought at Walgreens rather than pay $3 from the gift shop. I have never seen a mini-fridge before in Vegas. I'm starting to like these "GO rooms".
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, as of the time I am writing this. Actually in the Eastern Time Zone it's already Thanksgiving, technically. I arrived this afternoon (upgraded to first class), pillaged the various sports books for the best lines, and then hit Palazzo where I dined at one of my favorites, Mario Batali's Carnevino. Despite the name, which means "beef and wine" more or less, they create the very best pasta dishes in the known universe. I had a half order of a special turkey pasta they had prepared (merely excellent) followed by a half order of the Ravioli Di Stracocco which, to my mind, is probably the most remarkable taste sensation I have ever experienced.
I then did a brief Strip-walk, explored Encore, the new-ish addition to Wynn which is equally as lovely it's mother property, and equally overpriced. Returning to Wynn to place my NFL bets and grab a nightcap at Parasol Down. Fully lubricated I walked back to the Flamingo, pausing to listen to an exceptionally talented band at Carnival Court outside Harrah's then a quick pass through Imperial Palace, the site of some epic blackjack throw-downs in my past, but I forwent repeating the experience -- now older and wiser and with no desire to recklessly tempt fate.
Chances are, dear reader, you spend Thanksgiving rehashing familiar and eternal neuroses in the bosom of family then fall asleep turkey-satiated in front of the football games. I go to Vegas. You probably have mixed feelings about the whole holiday charade, but despite the emotional turmoil, you find comfort in the tradition and all the known quantities. I do to. Whatever the course of the world from year to year, Vegas is still Vegas. The Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace are still packed with window shoppers. Cheesy shows are still advertised from gigantic, garish displays. The restaurants are still serving amazing food that is dreadfully overpriced. People are still drinking and carousing and cranking away at the slots. Couples with strange foreign accents are still asking for you to take their picture. Sex is still for sale everywhere you look. The cabbies are still queued up. The fountains are still dancing. And though the odds are dire, I may still win every bet I place. Just like you, I am home the holiday.
Actually the odds are less dire now. It is now Thanksgiving evening and I have won every bet on today's games including my three team parlay. Sweet payoffs. Even if I lose all of Sunday's action, I'll break about even.
Vegas still being Vegas, things are always changing. This morning I took a walk down towards an enormous new development project called City Center. It is masterminded by MGM and is, in theory, an attempt to recreate an entire city writ small between Monte Carlo and Bellagio. Of course, this "city" consists of a new monster hotel/casino called Aria and a new high end hotel, the Mandarin Oriental. There will be courtyards and pathway and parks and its own little monorail. And a mall; gotta have another mall. It's tagline is "A new Capitol of the World", I'm sure it will be priced as such. Parts of the complex are slated to open sometime next week, but I can't see it being fully functional before the New Year, judging from the state of construction. Then, it might be something worth visiting.
Another new discovery (although it's actually be around over a year) is the sportsbook at the Palazzo. Most sportsbooks are sullen affairs -- rows of chairs in a darkened space, gigantic odds boards, dozens of big screens, half showing games while the other half plays the horse races. Guys sitting around angling for comped Bud Lights. It's like being inside a movie theatre with a very unsettling film on display that, if it ends badly, costs you money. It's a very cold and uninviting effect. At Palazzo, the sportsbooks is like a big freindly man cave. There are beds and big comfy chairs and couches. Part of it is open air. Reservable cabanas. There's even a pool table. Emeril Lagasse's Del Toro restaurant is on site. I would love to go back for the Super Bowl. Far and away the best sportsbook in town. It goes on the list for next year.
But for the most part I know what I want from Vegas. And now, on Friday morning, I have it. I still have to stop by on Monday to cash out and of my Sunday winners, but the next three days are dedicated to Zion National Park just across the border in lovely Utah.
First though, a quick stop at Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada as a warm up. It's odd to consider how much good hiking is within close range of Vegas. Red Rock Canyon is literally about seven minutes outside of town (in the other direction). A little over a half-hour north on I-15 is Valley of Fire. It's basically a drive through park with some striking red rock formations, kind of like the parks in Utah, only significantly scaled down. There is really only one hiking trail of any significance, the rest are parking areas by the rock formations, one of these, called the Beehives is apparently open for climbing since folks were swarming all around them like, well, bees.
A bit more than two hours north from there you get to Springdale, Utah. Springdale is situated right at the entrance to Zion and is quite a sweet little place in itself. Outdoorsy and upscale, basically one main street filled with inns, boutiques and homey restaurants with tasty food. My flop house is the Desert Pearl Inn which is absolutely beautiful. The room is as nice as anything I've seen -- in Vegas you would call this a luxury suite, in New York City you wouldn't bother calling it anything because you couldn't afford it. Here in Utah, it's reasonably priced. It would work well for long-termers because it has a kitchenette. The balcony looks out over the pool and the nicely maintained grounds. The aforementioned shops and restaurants are a few steps away. There is also a bidet, which I don't think I am coordinated enough to use. Before turning in I strolled down the street for a bite to eat and a pale ale, taking in lungfuls of the bracingly crisp clear air.
This morning, Saturday, I tried for Angel's Landing, knowing full well I may not make it. The hike to Angel's Landing in Zion National Park is not trivial. It's only about five-miles round trip, but the elevation gain is nearly 1500 feet. The National Park Service labels it as "strenuous". It is I suppose; it took me about 40 minutes to get up. It's a magnificent trail, steep switchbacks cut into massive red rock overhangs including a section called Walter's Wiggles which I can only describe as a hiker's version of Lombard Street in San Francisco.
I made it through all that, which put me at a place called Scotty's Landing, but the final half-mile from there to Angel's Landing is basically a scramble up the rock and across a narrow pathway, with sheer drops on either side of thousands of feet. Chains have been pounded in place to assist hikers through this section, but the Park Service warns: Do Not Attempt This if you are Remotely Afraid of Heights.
That, apparently, describes me. It's clear that I struggle with heights in some circumstances. The trail up featured many sheer drop-offs but they were no problem. I still am not sure exactly the situational requirements that trigger my acrophobia. I have in the past jumped out of an airplane, but I will struggle looking over the ledge of a skyscraper.
I made two abortive efforts to start the rock scramble upwards and in both cases I felt vertigo coming on. I knew there were points further on in the climb that would be even more scary and I could just see myself freezing up at the worst possible moment. I had to step off. Meanwhile, all sorts of people, from kids to soccer moms to beer belly dads to retirees, were slowly but surely making their way along to the summit. I took some photos and turned back, knowing this failure was going to bother me deeply.
Back at the trailhead I sat at a picnic table and forlornly munched on a granola bar. I felt shamefully pathetic. I looked with bitterness at the folks wandering to and fro who probably hadn't given a second thought to the climb. There are times when I loathe myself and my fears and my limitations, and curse all the failures and self-doubt they have brought on me in my life. This was one of those times. I am what I am, though, even if I hate facing it. I will never climb a mountain.
Despite my foul mood, I made another brief hike to a section called the Emerald Pools. Pleasant enough, although at this time of year, the "pools" were little more than puddles and the color was more Mudpie than Emerald. I'm sure they are quite lovely in the spring and summer. Now late afternoon, I turned back to Springdale for a shower and dinner and the hope that tomorrow would bring something more uplifting.
Don't want to leave the impression that Zion is some kind of depressing place. It is certainly one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Just standing in the Court of the Patriarchs, under the ancient gaze but towering mountains on every side is utterly gobsmacking. In fact most of the beauty is on such a grand scale that I am not a skilled enough photographer to create adequate perspective. It is, simply not to be missed.
The next day, I found myself in a better frame of mind. In the morning I did a short but stunning hike accurately called Canyon Overlook. It had a lot of "heighty" stuff -- sheer cliff drop-offs, narrow ledges, even a wooden platform to cross the angled around a cliff face. Many of the hikers were fretting some of this, but in a complete reversal of the day before I had no problem being a ruddy mountain goat. Again, I have no clue as to what the specific visuals are that trigger my vertigo. I guess Nature giveth and Nature taketh away. The view at the end of this hike is magnificent, taking in the entirety of Zion Canyon.
From there I again took to the road for my last outdoors destination, Bryce Canyon, about two hours northeast. I know I have spoken ecstatically about Bryce before and this, my second visit, didn't alter my opinion. It is simply otherworldly. Not of this Earth. Physics defying rock spires everywhere you look. Wandering the canyon I suspect it was something created by the art department for a sci-fi epic. The tagline would be Bryce Canyon: Total Landscape Outrage.
Sunset comes early in the canyons so I only had time for the three mile Queen's Garden/Navaho Loop trail, described in the brochure as the most amazing three mile hike in the world. This is an absolute fact. And unlike Zion, the hoodoos (the freaky rock formations) are not so overwhelming in scale that they can't be easily captured in photos. I took more pictures here than everywhere else put together.
Back for my last night at the Desert Pearl Inn I checked on my Sunday NFL bets. Of five wagers I lost four and tied one. Unbelievable. Still up about 50 bucks overall because I swept my Thursday bets, but geez. Like Nature, Vegas giveth and Vegas taketh away.
One final run back to Vegas. With a 6 PM flight I have time for a massage and a bit of R&R at the (relatively) new Encore Spa. It is quite a place. It may replace Qua at Caesars as my preferred spa for future visits. They have all the requisites: whirlpools, cold plunge, sauna, steam, they even have these things called "experience showers" which have about eight nozzles at various positions and can be programmed via LCD display with different temperatures and settings, but I found them way too complicated to deal with. I was happy just doing the hot/cold/hot/cold thing. Got a deep, deep, deep tissue massage and otherwise availed myself of all the amenities. The place is truly quite beautiful with a kind of oriental motif. You don't have to get a service to get in; should you find yourself gambled into oblivion and/or hungover and/or overly laden with rich food I strongly recommend you pay for day pass and just hang out for a two or three hours either at Encore or Qua. It's a perfect way to resist the temptation to go beyond overindulgence. It's especially good if you have a late flight and have had to check out and need to kill a few hours.
From there off to the airport to wing it back to the newly frigid Michigan winter. Already I have thoughts of next year. City Center will be open and I should certainly investigate. There is also the Country Club, a restaurant at Wynn that I thought was a very exclusive reservations only place, but looks like I could walk in and snag a bite at the bar if I got there early. The post-Thanksgiving weekend is an open issue. I'm tempted to hit San Diego/Del Mar again, since I enjoyed that one so much. I could do L.A. I doubt I'll hit the trails again, but maybe. I'm lucky. When I'm home for Thanksgiving there is always some new reason to give thanks.
I am sitting on a chaise lounge in a "GO room" at the Flamingo looking out at the dancing fountains of Bellagio. It's not a particularly nice room; better than the Motel 6 level standard rooms, but far short of anything luxurious. A burnt out bulb, a slow as molasses LCD TV -- it's as if they decided to upgrade these room but didn't budget enough to make them wonderful. That's fine -- they're cheap (about $70/night). But there's that wonderful view: the Bally's sign is most prominent, with gyrating scantily clad women appearing at regular intervals. Beyond that the Bellagio fountain. Beyond that the Strip southward. Plus there is a little mini-fridge in which I have socked away some Diet Coke that I bought at Walgreens rather than pay $3 from the gift shop. I have never seen a mini-fridge before in Vegas. I'm starting to like these "GO rooms".
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, as of the time I am writing this. Actually in the Eastern Time Zone it's already Thanksgiving, technically. I arrived this afternoon (upgraded to first class), pillaged the various sports books for the best lines, and then hit Palazzo where I dined at one of my favorites, Mario Batali's Carnevino. Despite the name, which means "beef and wine" more or less, they create the very best pasta dishes in the known universe. I had a half order of a special turkey pasta they had prepared (merely excellent) followed by a half order of the Ravioli Di Stracocco which, to my mind, is probably the most remarkable taste sensation I have ever experienced.
I then did a brief Strip-walk, explored Encore, the new-ish addition to Wynn which is equally as lovely it's mother property, and equally overpriced. Returning to Wynn to place my NFL bets and grab a nightcap at Parasol Down. Fully lubricated I walked back to the Flamingo, pausing to listen to an exceptionally talented band at Carnival Court outside Harrah's then a quick pass through Imperial Palace, the site of some epic blackjack throw-downs in my past, but I forwent repeating the experience -- now older and wiser and with no desire to recklessly tempt fate.
Chances are, dear reader, you spend Thanksgiving rehashing familiar and eternal neuroses in the bosom of family then fall asleep turkey-satiated in front of the football games. I go to Vegas. You probably have mixed feelings about the whole holiday charade, but despite the emotional turmoil, you find comfort in the tradition and all the known quantities. I do to. Whatever the course of the world from year to year, Vegas is still Vegas. The Forum Shops at Caesar's Palace are still packed with window shoppers. Cheesy shows are still advertised from gigantic, garish displays. The restaurants are still serving amazing food that is dreadfully overpriced. People are still drinking and carousing and cranking away at the slots. Couples with strange foreign accents are still asking for you to take their picture. Sex is still for sale everywhere you look. The cabbies are still queued up. The fountains are still dancing. And though the odds are dire, I may still win every bet I place. Just like you, I am home the holiday.
Actually the odds are less dire now. It is now Thanksgiving evening and I have won every bet on today's games including my three team parlay. Sweet payoffs. Even if I lose all of Sunday's action, I'll break about even.
Vegas still being Vegas, things are always changing. This morning I took a walk down towards an enormous new development project called City Center. It is masterminded by MGM and is, in theory, an attempt to recreate an entire city writ small between Monte Carlo and Bellagio. Of course, this "city" consists of a new monster hotel/casino called Aria and a new high end hotel, the Mandarin Oriental. There will be courtyards and pathway and parks and its own little monorail. And a mall; gotta have another mall. It's tagline is "A new Capitol of the World", I'm sure it will be priced as such. Parts of the complex are slated to open sometime next week, but I can't see it being fully functional before the New Year, judging from the state of construction. Then, it might be something worth visiting.
Another new discovery (although it's actually be around over a year) is the sportsbook at the Palazzo. Most sportsbooks are sullen affairs -- rows of chairs in a darkened space, gigantic odds boards, dozens of big screens, half showing games while the other half plays the horse races. Guys sitting around angling for comped Bud Lights. It's like being inside a movie theatre with a very unsettling film on display that, if it ends badly, costs you money. It's a very cold and uninviting effect. At Palazzo, the sportsbooks is like a big freindly man cave. There are beds and big comfy chairs and couches. Part of it is open air. Reservable cabanas. There's even a pool table. Emeril Lagasse's Del Toro restaurant is on site. I would love to go back for the Super Bowl. Far and away the best sportsbook in town. It goes on the list for next year.
But for the most part I know what I want from Vegas. And now, on Friday morning, I have it. I still have to stop by on Monday to cash out and of my Sunday winners, but the next three days are dedicated to Zion National Park just across the border in lovely Utah.
First though, a quick stop at Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada as a warm up. It's odd to consider how much good hiking is within close range of Vegas. Red Rock Canyon is literally about seven minutes outside of town (in the other direction). A little over a half-hour north on I-15 is Valley of Fire. It's basically a drive through park with some striking red rock formations, kind of like the parks in Utah, only significantly scaled down. There is really only one hiking trail of any significance, the rest are parking areas by the rock formations, one of these, called the Beehives is apparently open for climbing since folks were swarming all around them like, well, bees.
A bit more than two hours north from there you get to Springdale, Utah. Springdale is situated right at the entrance to Zion and is quite a sweet little place in itself. Outdoorsy and upscale, basically one main street filled with inns, boutiques and homey restaurants with tasty food. My flop house is the Desert Pearl Inn which is absolutely beautiful. The room is as nice as anything I've seen -- in Vegas you would call this a luxury suite, in New York City you wouldn't bother calling it anything because you couldn't afford it. Here in Utah, it's reasonably priced. It would work well for long-termers because it has a kitchenette. The balcony looks out over the pool and the nicely maintained grounds. The aforementioned shops and restaurants are a few steps away. There is also a bidet, which I don't think I am coordinated enough to use. Before turning in I strolled down the street for a bite to eat and a pale ale, taking in lungfuls of the bracingly crisp clear air.
This morning, Saturday, I tried for Angel's Landing, knowing full well I may not make it. The hike to Angel's Landing in Zion National Park is not trivial. It's only about five-miles round trip, but the elevation gain is nearly 1500 feet. The National Park Service labels it as "strenuous". It is I suppose; it took me about 40 minutes to get up. It's a magnificent trail, steep switchbacks cut into massive red rock overhangs including a section called Walter's Wiggles which I can only describe as a hiker's version of Lombard Street in San Francisco.
I made it through all that, which put me at a place called Scotty's Landing, but the final half-mile from there to Angel's Landing is basically a scramble up the rock and across a narrow pathway, with sheer drops on either side of thousands of feet. Chains have been pounded in place to assist hikers through this section, but the Park Service warns: Do Not Attempt This if you are Remotely Afraid of Heights.
That, apparently, describes me. It's clear that I struggle with heights in some circumstances. The trail up featured many sheer drop-offs but they were no problem. I still am not sure exactly the situational requirements that trigger my acrophobia. I have in the past jumped out of an airplane, but I will struggle looking over the ledge of a skyscraper.
I made two abortive efforts to start the rock scramble upwards and in both cases I felt vertigo coming on. I knew there were points further on in the climb that would be even more scary and I could just see myself freezing up at the worst possible moment. I had to step off. Meanwhile, all sorts of people, from kids to soccer moms to beer belly dads to retirees, were slowly but surely making their way along to the summit. I took some photos and turned back, knowing this failure was going to bother me deeply.
Back at the trailhead I sat at a picnic table and forlornly munched on a granola bar. I felt shamefully pathetic. I looked with bitterness at the folks wandering to and fro who probably hadn't given a second thought to the climb. There are times when I loathe myself and my fears and my limitations, and curse all the failures and self-doubt they have brought on me in my life. This was one of those times. I am what I am, though, even if I hate facing it. I will never climb a mountain.
Despite my foul mood, I made another brief hike to a section called the Emerald Pools. Pleasant enough, although at this time of year, the "pools" were little more than puddles and the color was more Mudpie than Emerald. I'm sure they are quite lovely in the spring and summer. Now late afternoon, I turned back to Springdale for a shower and dinner and the hope that tomorrow would bring something more uplifting.
Don't want to leave the impression that Zion is some kind of depressing place. It is certainly one of the most beautiful places on Earth. Just standing in the Court of the Patriarchs, under the ancient gaze but towering mountains on every side is utterly gobsmacking. In fact most of the beauty is on such a grand scale that I am not a skilled enough photographer to create adequate perspective. It is, simply not to be missed.
The next day, I found myself in a better frame of mind. In the morning I did a short but stunning hike accurately called Canyon Overlook. It had a lot of "heighty" stuff -- sheer cliff drop-offs, narrow ledges, even a wooden platform to cross the angled around a cliff face. Many of the hikers were fretting some of this, but in a complete reversal of the day before I had no problem being a ruddy mountain goat. Again, I have no clue as to what the specific visuals are that trigger my vertigo. I guess Nature giveth and Nature taketh away. The view at the end of this hike is magnificent, taking in the entirety of Zion Canyon.
From there I again took to the road for my last outdoors destination, Bryce Canyon, about two hours northeast. I know I have spoken ecstatically about Bryce before and this, my second visit, didn't alter my opinion. It is simply otherworldly. Not of this Earth. Physics defying rock spires everywhere you look. Wandering the canyon I suspect it was something created by the art department for a sci-fi epic. The tagline would be Bryce Canyon: Total Landscape Outrage.
Sunset comes early in the canyons so I only had time for the three mile Queen's Garden/Navaho Loop trail, described in the brochure as the most amazing three mile hike in the world. This is an absolute fact. And unlike Zion, the hoodoos (the freaky rock formations) are not so overwhelming in scale that they can't be easily captured in photos. I took more pictures here than everywhere else put together.
Back for my last night at the Desert Pearl Inn I checked on my Sunday NFL bets. Of five wagers I lost four and tied one. Unbelievable. Still up about 50 bucks overall because I swept my Thursday bets, but geez. Like Nature, Vegas giveth and Vegas taketh away.
One final run back to Vegas. With a 6 PM flight I have time for a massage and a bit of R&R at the (relatively) new Encore Spa. It is quite a place. It may replace Qua at Caesars as my preferred spa for future visits. They have all the requisites: whirlpools, cold plunge, sauna, steam, they even have these things called "experience showers" which have about eight nozzles at various positions and can be programmed via LCD display with different temperatures and settings, but I found them way too complicated to deal with. I was happy just doing the hot/cold/hot/cold thing. Got a deep, deep, deep tissue massage and otherwise availed myself of all the amenities. The place is truly quite beautiful with a kind of oriental motif. You don't have to get a service to get in; should you find yourself gambled into oblivion and/or hungover and/or overly laden with rich food I strongly recommend you pay for day pass and just hang out for a two or three hours either at Encore or Qua. It's a perfect way to resist the temptation to go beyond overindulgence. It's especially good if you have a late flight and have had to check out and need to kill a few hours.
From there off to the airport to wing it back to the newly frigid Michigan winter. Already I have thoughts of next year. City Center will be open and I should certainly investigate. There is also the Country Club, a restaurant at Wynn that I thought was a very exclusive reservations only place, but looks like I could walk in and snag a bite at the bar if I got there early. The post-Thanksgiving weekend is an open issue. I'm tempted to hit San Diego/Del Mar again, since I enjoyed that one so much. I could do L.A. I doubt I'll hit the trails again, but maybe. I'm lucky. When I'm home for Thanksgiving there is always some new reason to give thanks.
[Travel] See the U.S.A.
See the U.S.A.: Sophia Dembling at World Hum explains why you should visit flyover country by picking ten must-sees, and nails it. Best of all she doesn't short change the commercial sites (Vegas, Disney World). These places are popular for a reason, specifically: they are awesome. But for the folks who claim to be unable to stomach such commerce oriented places she explains re: Vegas:
There is little to quibble with in her list of all-American places. I could do a similar list but it wouldn't be better. I'll try anyway:
The more I think about it, I bet I could do another set of ten alternatives. Maybe next month.
(If you are looking for a single massive road trip, check out the Nation Park Service's site devoted to Route 66.)
[T]his is a basic philosophical question: Do we travel to see what we want, or to see what is? I subscribe to the latter philosophy. Vegas IS, like it or not, in a very big way. It's more quintessential America-it's big, loud, razzle-dazzle, and unapologetic and, by the way, it's full of Europeans, who wouldn't dream of skipping it.
There is little to quibble with in her list of all-American places. I could do a similar list but it wouldn't be better. I'll try anyway:
- Manhattan -- Center of the universe. Arts. Food. People. Energy.
- Utah -- Spend some time in the big four parks -- Zion, Bryce Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands -- you will have the same awe at the world that you had as a kid.
- Vegas -- What Sophia said.
- Disney -- What Sophia said.
- French Quarter -- After two hours on Bourbon Street and you will be drunk, deaf, and broke. If you're lucky.
- Carlsbad Caverns -- The only place I've seen that is as striking as the Utah parks. It's just unimaginable that such a place exists.
- South Dakota -- I'll extend Sophia's Mt. Rushmore recommendation to include the swath of western South Dakota that covers the Badlands, the Crazy Horse memorial, Custer State Park, and the rest of the Black Hills.
- Charleston/Savannah -- Two cities wholly devoted to the preservation of their past. Savannah's antebellum homes were made for touring. The heart of Charleston is more modern, but the surrounding plantations are verdant beauties.
- Hana, Maui -- This is a tough one. You need Hawaii in this list and I could easily have gone with Kauai. But the road to Hana, the town itself, Hamoa beach, and the Seven Pools hike are as sweet a set of experiences as you can have. Forego the bus tours and day trips and arrange to stay a couple of nights in Hana. Only then will you relax enough to glimpse the spirit.
- Northern Michigan -- I could have easily picked the upstate New York (Adirondacks or Finger Lakes), but this is a sentimental favorite. Follow the Lake Michigan shore from Saugatuck up around the glove to Leelanau Peninsula and on to Mackinac Island. You will then know Lake Culture.
The more I think about it, I bet I could do another set of ten alternatives. Maybe next month.
(If you are looking for a single massive road trip, check out the Nation Park Service's site devoted to Route 66.)
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