Other Stuff

Oscars and The Troops

When my wife goes shopping for clothes, it's at a real store with real people who are real nice. Think Nordstrom. Think Sibling Revelry. Think Second Glance. When I go shopping for a new shirt I go online to perhaps one of the most offensive clothing sites on the whole WWW. It is one of my undying adolescent traits, loving humorous T-shirts. The adolescent part of that is, if it's funny to me, I wear it--though it may not be taken in the spirit intended. So, with one of these shirts on I went to work and then attended an Oscar party. This is the same party I've been going to for over a decade so they know me. It took a few minutes before I was reminded that I was wearing a "Support Our Troops" T-shirt. It was the laughter, thankfully, that reminded me, because the one person in that bastion of liberal thinking who noticed the shirt took a closer look to read the fine print underneath its Patriotic call.

So, the Oscars...Well...

With Jon Lewis, the "Go-To Man" for all things cinema at OSU (he's a professor, not an A/V geek), I did a radio interview on KBVR. We were there to talk about the Oscars and enlighten the great unwashed with our powerful ability to shed light on the winning and losing movies.

However, the radio host failed to show up.

Funny thing: the absent host was scheduled to be in one of Jon's classes that afternoon.

Anyway, Jon and I fired up the equipment ourselves and recorded what we thought they wanted. Getting Jon and me to talk about movies is about as hard as getting Sean Penn to take a swing at a photographer. So, we stood in front of the mics and agreed and disagreed about the movies that received or didn't receive the golden statue. That scenario pretty much describes every lunch Jon and I have had together since his kids, now in high school, were small enough to share the projectionist seat at my old single screen.

One of the many things that makes conversations with Jon interesting for me is that he has an academic filter that I do not. He can point out when a movie was the first one to produce or reflect this or that sociological event. Whereas, I can tell you what it was like to have to listen to the same sound track for 4 months because the movie was so popular. (Want to see me run from a room? Play the opening music of THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. I learned to run projectors when the movie had just come out and, frankly, hope to never hear that sound track again. At the Avalon we played CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON so long the workers could do the dialog from memory. The Chinese dialog.)

I arrived at OSU about half an hour before I was supposed to be at the KBVR studio. This is not an unfamiliar campus. I spent the early and mid-nineties wandering these walkways and paths. Occasionally these past treks would terminate in a classroom, so it was a nice distraction to retrace some old footsteps.
(The coffee is better now. Back in the day, the people who served the coffee had that drool affect and vocal lilt that screamed "I'd rather be getting an intimate piercing with a railroad spike than be here." Today, "What can I get you?" sounds more like "I'd rather be playing with my iPhone." Hey, the coffee was hot, fast, and they said thank you. What else could one want? Well, how 'bout something other than Splenda? There are a whole bunch of us who have never bought into the marketing and would rather risk cancer from artificial sweeteners the old fashioned way: with Sweet and Low.)

When I was lurking about the OSU campus over a decade ago, I earned a living running a single screen, small-town, first-run cinema. That theater had nothing to do with independent film, and it wasn't in this small town. It had everything to do with a place to dump the kids for a couple of hours for the price of a matinee ticket. Movies like TOY STORY ran for weeks and weeks. For months JURASSIC PARK had 327 people tossing their popcorn into the air when the raptor broke through the wall where the tasty, tasty humans were hiding.The Avalon was just a gleam in my eye back then, so the majority of the films on my radar were the kind of entertainment that our typical Darkside customer might make fun of. This type of cinema had an eroding effect on one's taste in films. It took three weeks of constant exposure, but I honestly started to believe that DUMB AND DUMBER was perhaps the funniest movie ever made.

Being on the OSU campus again, and among the ephemera of my university career, made the contrast between the two cinematic worlds even more pronounced. The 1990s was a time when a small theater had to play everything it was offered in order to curry favor with the studios that held our future in their cold-hearted hands. I have gotten in trouble more than once at the Avalon and the Darkside for refusing to play movies I found unacceptable--yet have lived to tell the tale. That's not something I could get away with at the old movie theater.

With excessive exposure to formulaic first-run fare, one eventually builds a layer of protection. This numbs one to the possibility that there is a whole world of cinema out there that would never suggest Jim Carrey can act. After a work night of interminable schlock, I would come home and toss in the tape (remember VHS?) and watch CINEMA PARADISO--using it as an astringent to cleanse the workday psychic torments. Now I bathe daily in the good stuff, which means my longing turns toward the more mundane. I must never admit this publicly, but there are days I would rather watch something with at least a dozen car chases than a French political satire. One of the local multiplexes and I have a mutually agreeable employee admittance policy. This allows all our film tastes to be indulged on the big screen.

Meanwhile, back on the campus, it was one of those days where the rain was falling between and during the sun breaks. I liked it, so it made it easier to take the long way back to KBVR. It was now show time and I had no idea what I was going to say, since, to my embarrassment, I had not seen all of the films we were supposed to be talking about. I have to remember that Jon is a lot smarter than I am; I have to stick to opinions and leave the facts to him--avoiding having this become a humiliating debate instead of a discussion. Though I did challenge his huge dislike for GRAN TORINO, which was a movie I loved.

So, up the stairs I went into a building where I'd spent more than a little time working as one of several editors at the Barometer. My raincoat had dripped off pretty well before I shed it in the heated waiting area. I did take a second to pause and check which T-shirt I was wearing before the coat came all the way off. It was blank. Good. Visiting a university campus, I could have probably gotten away with wearing one of my other, more offensive shirts. Shirts much worse than my Oscar Night T-shirt, which read "Support Our Troops! Except Ron, that guy's a dick."

Note to Ron in Afghanistan: I support you, too.

Dodging the Butterfly Nets

Reading material has a huge influence on bathroom habits, which is the perfect segue to talking about my new book. I just got the final proof copy of Dodging the Butterfly Nets, and it looks good. So now, it's off to the printer!

Putting this book together, I took heed of the comments from both people who read my last book (Prancing Lavender Bunnies--available in local independent bookstores or on lulu.com or amazon.com). One of the most common comments I received was that the essays were the perfect length for bathroom reading. I was hoping for something along the lines of, "Wow, you need to get an agent and get this out there! You could be at the top of the New York Times Best Seller List!" Instead, the rave seems to be that the book is a good bathroom companion. Be still, my beating heart.

The length of my essays happens to be the result of total chance. When I first started writing these damned things, I found that if I went beyond around 1200 words, I started repeating myself. Being redundant. Saying the same thing. So, it became a discipline to stop at 1200 words. I have no trouble getting up to 1200 words. The fact that my essays can help you pass the time between entering the smallest room in the house and washing your hands before leaving (you better wash your hands!), is ... well, oddly cool.

Perhaps one of the best laxatives in my world is the arrival of a new Sun Magazine. (Or Easy Rider. But this is mostly a Corvallis audience, so we'll not mention the bad biker magazines that I swear I read only for the articles.) Before opening each new issue of the Sun, I pause for a short prayer that I will not have to endure endless photos of statues before getting to "Readers Write." This is a section of essays on pre-selected topics, written ... well, by readers. The essays run from a couple sentences to a couple columns in length. It is rare for me to be able to get through the whole section without hearing a polite knock on the bathroom door. Someone is wondering if I'm still alive.

Now, Dodging the Butterfly Nets can be used as a barometer of your digestive health. If it takes more than a couple of essays before someone is interrupting your "me" time, then you should think about more water in your diet, and consider the virtues of eating fruit a couple of times a day. In the event you can only get through the introduction before it's time to knock the air freshener onto the floor (thanking God it didn't go into the bowl), then you might consider a different grade of Mexican food.

When I first moved out of my childhood home (or as I like to call it, the basement cage I freed myself from), I moved into an apartment under the screen tower of the drive-in movie theater where I worked. I shared the apartment with my best friend and fellow worker, Ron. Summers were not too bad, with the 60-foot screen tower hovering over our heads like a cool cloud. But during winter, that place was damn cold. Cold and scary, and perhaps a little dangerous. (You have not lived until you've survived a windstorm while huddled under a 60-foot drive-in screen made of wood and corrugated sheet metal. It makes nude bungee jumping look like picking daises along a swan-strewn pond.)

When morning broke, thus began the test of wills. My roomie's bedroom was closer to the bathroom, so I would just turn up my electric blanket and wait for him to use the bathroom first. Whoever got the bathroom first was the one who got to warm up the toilet seat. There was no heat in the bathroom at all, so subjecting one's bareness to the wooden seat made starting your day with a 42 ounce quad-shot espresso seem like sleeping in. The walls of the apartment were not designed to stop sound (or bullets, but that's another story). From our respective rooms, we would tell each other stories about waterfalls and sprinklers and cool streams and rapids. We sounded like a Glengarry Glen Ross of adult diaper sales. Eventually, one of us would have to brave the Ring of Ice and get on with things. When there was ice, using the hair dryer before settling in with the Reader's Digest seemed prudent. This worked great--unless it was still well below freezing in the apartment. Sometimes body heat doesn't keep a toilet seat from refreezing. When my grandkids ask about the most embarrassing moment of my life, the story will involve a toilet. Of course, they are not going to want to hear about that. They are going to want to know how we figured out the walls weren't bulletproof.

Dodging the Butterfly Nets is a book of funny essays. Nothing brings knocking on the bathroom door like unrestrained laughter coming from inside that room. Now, I actually did a little research and it seems to indicate that the kitchen is the place where most home accidents occur. On the other hand, the bathroom is where most people go to go insane. I think it is the unavoidable mirror. You can't help but look yourself squarely in the eye and realize that you are older, fatter, and/or have grown/lost more hair than you imagined you ever would. At which point obscenities erupt, or you have to start laughing at how deluded you were.

There is that point between the ol' wet-fish-slap-in-the-face reality and blissful denial. This is where you laugh--just for a second. Most people know that laugh when they hear it. Passing by the bathroom door, they hear that laugh and nod knowingly. "Been there, done that, got the T-shirt," they say while rubbing the graying hair on their potbellies. The men do that too. But if the laughter continues, like if you are reading my book Dodging the Butterfly Nets, then that creates concern. Someone could assume you've fallen into that place between denial and pretend-acceptance where the laughing continues-like a mad scientist before he throws the big switch, but the switch is stuck, so he keeps laughing. If they knock on the door and ask if you are okay, respond with, "I'm not coming out until the giant bats are out of the living room!" This will give you a chance to read a couple more chapters of my book before the men in the white suits arrive and you have to start Dodging the Butterfly Nets.

Trouble the Water: Review

It is not uncommon for the workers at the Darkside Cinema to be gathered around the computer in the snack bar looking at options for upcoming films to play. Below is part of the decision process:

“Is it about urban black people?”

If the answer is yes, we move on.

Anything that even hints at being about urban black folks is the kiss of attendance death at the Darkside. It doesn’t make me feel good to say that. It’s a fact.

Sure, the historical, old-timey feel-good dramas do okay, as long as the stars are familiar from mainstream movies. But one does get tired of having to explain to the movie companies why an Oscar-winning movie like HUSTLE AND FLOW with Terrance Howard had roughly two people see it in its two-week run at the Darkside.

TROUBLE THE WATER is different. This Oscar-nominated documentary gives us a first-person, stuck-in-the-attic-with-the-water-rising point of view of the 2005 hurricane Katrina. Twenty-four year-old Kimberly Rivers took her camcorder for a walk around her New Orleans neighborhood, talking to her friends and neighbors. In the beginning, it looks more like footage from a kid’s birthday party than the preamble to a story about 160 mile-an-hour levy-decimating winds and water moving in from the gulf just below the city. Kimberly is not a filmmaker. She is a resident who had the luck to be rolling tape when things started getting ugly. She was also smart enough to keep rolling tape when the water rose to the bottom of the stop signs. Images of these neighborhoods ensconced in green-grey waters play to the tune of 911 calls from people just minutes from dying, trapped between their attic ceilings and the rising waters.

Nothing screams a good time at the movies like a good drowning or two.

Good thing that’s not the main focus of TROUBLE THE WATER. NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN didn’t win Best Feature Film last year because it was about a sociopath in a nowhere border town. If TROUBLE THE WATER wins the Best Documentary Oscar, it will be because it is about a lot more than people dying in New Orleans.

The falling ash erased the race and status of New Yorkers after 911. When survivors of the fallen twin towers gathered to look back at the hole in the skyline, everyone was grey. Who and what they were was concealed under a layer of dust. For the first time, many of them no longer had the advantage or disadvantage of their place in the pecking order. There was no way to tell. Some say it was the lack of visual clues that granted all the same status, if just for a moment. Others think it might have been the disaster that subdued the evolutionary instinct to cull off the weak. What happened after Katrina seems to support the idea that it was the lack of visual clues.

The face of bureaucracy in New Orleans is white. The masses were black.

Kimberley and her husband are not white. They are iconic of urban black culture, from the bling to the wholesale massacre of the King’s English. Digging into viewer comments on this film reveals some pretty searingly unkind revelations and opinions. My guess is, the people expressing these opinions would have been inclined to respond to desperate measures with, “I say, my good man, would you be so kind as to turn over your truck and food stuffs?” If there are no atheists in foxholes, it is also true that when the water comes, trying to wash you and your life away, it ain’t the fast-track to canonization.

An Australian can get laid with the lilt of his accent and an intonation about the tragic death of the Crocodile Hunter. But in the geographic majority of this country, a stereotypical urban black voice will repel. The use of the “F” word as adverb/adjective/modifier for one’s relationship with one’s mother can be a little off-putting. But these are just the words. What TROUBLE THE WATER does is to expose the heart that beats behind the subwoofer rhythm emanating from the 1963 Chevrolet. Though Kimberly’s sentences are crude and unsophisticated by our bleached standards, she has something to say. Ironically, it was Hurricane Katrina that gave her voice. She and her family and friends are not so different from us; they feel pain like we do. They love and care about their communities, just like we do. We may say this with a poem or an essay. Kimberly says it with a rap piece that articulates her passion for her life and communicates as well as anything you’ll find in a literature class.

And this is what this film is about for me: Language. We all feel the same about the important things, though we may differ on how we express those feelings. When you watch someone trapped between the 2x4s of their attic, with death coming in the way of dirty, rising water—suddenly we all speak the same language.

TROUBLE THE WATER is produced by the same people who produced FAHRENHEIT 9/11 and BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE. Normally anything with Michael Moore’s fingerprints on it sends me screaming in the other direction, but this time there is little of his fact-twisting residue. The producers took Kimberly’s crude, live footage of the hours before, during, and months after Katrina, and made it into a coherent piece of history. We watch some very everyday people make their way from the flood waters of a broken levy into the rough seas of government agencies, supposedly there to help. Throughout the movie we see southern manners employed where many of us would be using the “F” word. The fact that losing everything is a way to start again is not lost on Kimberly and her husband Scott. As their lives move toward more satisfying work, we see them slim down and the hope grow.

Last night Lainie and I went to see CORALINE and it is a delightful film I would recommend as a light cinematic snack. This is often a good thing and not to be sneered at. But TROUBLE THE WATER is the type of film that makes independent cinema important. As much as the stop-action animation of CORALINE lures one into the theater, the death and destruction in TROUBLE THE WATER might send people away. After all, life is complicated enough. But, seeing someone whose life had been taken away and then returned can uncomplicate things real fast.

Though I make fun of our Corvallis smugness, the luxury to take things a little easier is something we have all worked for and much of the rest of the world is killing each other to have. We treat each other with respect and inflict as little damage to the planet as we can. We have many options for lunch and can expect little violence in our communities. These are all good things. What TROUBLE THE WATER has to offer is another way to see these things as precious—to all of us.

LUNA Lunacy

I was piloting an old minivan when I started turning into a parking lot (Poof! I'm a parking lot!),and then suddenly swerved back onto the highway. There was a big sign in the middle of the entry and I couldn’t read it fast enough so I reflexively chose not to enter. It was suggested, quite aggressively, that if I could’ve read the sign, I would have understood it to read, FREE PARKING rather than KEEP OUT YOU IDIOT. Such is the bane of those of us who lack the ability to read quickly. Some say it’s dyslexia. Some say it’s bad reading skills. Others say it is an anxiety response. Not that it matters. The fact is, one of the triggers for me is my mom.

Those of you who have been tossed upon the rough waters of losing a parent know that there is always a nagging sense of loss that seems to live in the back of your neck, waiting quietly for an opportunity to spirit you back in time to the good times and bad—the bad usually being much more recent, thus closer to the surface.

I was standing on the stage looking at a packed house in Austin auditorium at LaSells Stewart Center. There were a lot of people out there looking back, expecting me to say something significant about women’s health issues and about the LunaFest films that were the main event. I was the keynote speaker. In that crowd were more than just a smattering of cancer survivors and other women who have had a brush with a dreaded disease. And they were all looking at me. The light was bad on the podium and I was trying to see my notes.

As part of my talk, I intoned the memory of my mother and her death from cancer. As soon as I did that, the memory that sits at the back of my neck came alive. Not in a good way.

My mom and I had a rather exclusive sense of humor. The nurse who came in to give her some meds would—perhaps assuming cancer meant deafness—speak loudly to my mom. My mom’s hearing was perfect, and she’d give me a sideways glance before asking the nurse to repeat her comments—usually more than once—feigning both deafness and dementia. I had to leave to room to control my laughter. Afterward, my mom would coyly ask me what was so damn funny. To this day, when someone appears to be feigning deafness, I think of my mom.

The words on the paper in front of me no longer made sense. Even though I’d printed them in 22-point type and numbered the pages with a big red marker, nothing was coming together. Well, this was fun. Having been down this road before—suddenly losing my ability to read—I relied on my set of rather elaborate reflexes and started talking, with the hope that something sensible would come out. In cases like this, my reflexes include excluding the “F” word and not doing any jokes that would have been damn funny between my mom and me, but not necessarily to the rest of the world. So, I started speaking. Meanwhile, in my mind…

There was extensive remodeling in progress throughout the hospital. Plastic sheets hung from the ceiling, a vague hope of lulling people into believing construction dust was being contained. Fire alarms blared intermittently, which was right unhandy to those trying to get some rest. The rest of the infrastructure seemed to be meeting its own set of challenges. I guessed they’d just upped the morphine to dull the reactions to the disturbances. Someone mentioned they do this for the patients, too. I picked up a newspaper and a cup of the used transmission fluid that passed as coffee to bring to my mom’s room as she slept. One of the nice things about Tucson is how the room lights can become irrelevant with the big windows and perpetual sunshine offering more light in ten seconds than we get here in the PNW the whole winter long. I hadn’t noticed the electric lights were off. Suddenly the lights came on and the one over my mom’s bed was particularly obnoxious. I heard her small voice come from under the covers, “The light. I'm going into the light…”

“Not quite yet, mom,” I said as I turned the page of the paper. Mom flopped her covers over and peeked up over the top of them to see me. And in her rather pronounced French-Canadian accent she asked, “Paul? Are you dead, too?”

We were laughing so hard the nurse came in to make sure mom wasn’t having a seizure.

But this night in front of the audience, the lights were also unkind; such is the nature of stage lights. As I spoke I would steal glances at my notes, with the faint hope that a legible language would pop out of the page and give me a hint as to what I wanted to say. Suddenly people were clapping in the auditorium and my first thought was, “Is this over already?” Umm, no. Now I just need to remember what the hell I said that got hundreds of people to applaud. Think, damn you. Think! I said something about iPods. Must be a room full of Mac people. Do I know any Windows jokes? A hundred probably, but I cannot start with the jokes, remember? Then I recalled the LunaFest movies and how, because they are short films by obscure filmmakers, it’s unlikely these movies may be seen again in Corvallis, much less in an auditorium full of people in a communal experience.

I was slinging popcorn over the counter one busy night. Suddenly a woman’s voice came over the counter. “Were you in the ICU in Eugene about ten years ago?” As much as I am given to rambling on about myself when given the sliver of a chance, there are pieces of my life that I do not typically share. After the crowd left, I discovered she’d been my ICU nurse. I asked her how she could remember me after 10 years—I had to be one of thousands of patients to pass through her ward. “You were funny,” she said.

I guess people doing comedy from a hospital bed is not something that usually happens. I wish I could remember the material I was using back then, since it was no doubt painkiller-induced, thus powerfully uncensored. Humor surely had contributed to my eventually walking out of that hospital. Mom would’ve been proud.

As I wrapped up my podium pontification, it struck me: I had no recollection of what I’d said. So I sat back and watched my two favorite films of this LunaFest, and then headed back to work.

Outside, the temp had dropped below freezing and I could see the ice crystals forming on the roofs and windows of the cars in the lot. I had to walk quite a ways to find my car. I felt that thing in the back of my neck start to loosen up the further away I got from LaSells. I was cold and hoped to find parking space 3512 very soon. I found my car in space number 1235. Or vice versa…a marked improvement in reading ability from the hour before.

Since the death of my mother, I often feel she is with me—especially when I laugh. If there is a gift to be had from Death, it is the awareness of a recognizable benevolent presence. The work comes in separating the loving presence from the haunting specter of sorrow.