What are you thinking? What’s wrong with you people? Are you the few –or the many; how would I know? –that actually respond to viagra spam? Are you the folks that pay to watch a scrawny hotel heiress have desultory congress on a cameraphone? I’d better explain, I guess.
I am the parent of two small children. An “adult” movie has at least one adult in it. That’s it. No sponges. No rabbits. No Sneetches. Adult persons talk to one another and do things that adults would do with a camera pointed at them and David Mamet telling them what to say. That’s an adult movie.
That’s a rare thing at my house. I do not understand persons that watch adult things in front of their children. Self-abnegation for the sake of others is the hallmark of adults. You really must look into it. My ten year old can recite every thing he’s ever heard or seen verbatim, with accents, so I know they’re paying attention. He’s going to hear enough dopey things at school. I’m not going to make it worse by watching Reservoir Dogs while he does his spelling homework.
My relatives are visiting from California, and we’ve done everything relatives do, but after all the frosting and bug juice and basketball and playgrounds and croquet and Playstation and Spongbob and bubbles and ice cream and hot dogs and Monopoly, I decided that all the adults could sit in my living room and watch a movie with a few expletives in it. And a big honkin’ bear.
The Edge is David Mamet making an action picture. For those of you who don’t know, David Mamet is a playwright, and a screenwriter, and a regular old writer too. Off the top of my head Mamet is:
The Verdict Glengarry Glenross The Edge The Winslow Boy The Spanish Prisoner Happy Texas State and Main
Anyway, he’s got that knack of putting words in people’s mouths that sound like people would say them, but seem to encapsulate world views and themes and conflict and, and, and… compare and contrast Mamet’s prose style with the style of Cheryl Printup’s short story…
I’m sorry, I lapsed into a college writing class. I didn’t like those. For me, college writing class, for as long as it lasted, consisted of me and twenty-nine girls, sitting there reading Emily Bronte or some other girl that could use a stiff drink and a boyfriend with a tattoo, and them nattering among themselves about that tripe until they got to the part where the heroine is walking through the dewy garden barefoot with Heathcliff or whatever the closet fruit’s name was and there was a lot of scattershot adjectives about burgeoning stamens and dripping pistils and men in a boat and ripe fruit, and the female teacher would invariably turn to me in the back row and ask: “What do you feel this imagery is driving at, Mr. Sullivan?” while the twenty nine ingenues turned and glared at me.
Lady, she should have shoes on and run off with a gardener and be done with it. The Chatterley broad did. Leave me alone.
I am luckier than you. It is not in my nature to gloat, of course; I wish to share the wealth a bit.
I am in possession of a captivating miniature human being. He actually says: “Tee Hee.”
I’m not joking. He actually says it. He is amused, and says, quite distinctly: “Tee Hee.”
It’s not an approximation of the sound of Tee Hee. We regular mortals snort and guffaw, and burst out laughing, and shriek with delight, and make a sort of sound that authors try to convey by writing Tee Hee into their text.
But he actually says: “Tee Hee.”
You need to make yourself a home and find a mate and produce a human that utters, unironically, in a moment of mild amusement: “Tee Hee.”
They are indispensable for making you say: “Pfffftttpppfffharharhoho.”
(Editor’s Note: Oh dear. Amba over at the erudite and occasionally eristic Ambivablog likes allegories with baseball in them. Who knew? She’s accused me of bringing something new to that hoary old table. If she knew me better, she’d know I bring nothing to the table. And I steal salt shakers when I leave. But I live to amuse her now, so my life has a certain meaning. Here’s some baseball writing from a year ago or so. Let me know if awl de werds are spelt wright, so I can fix them before Amba sees them. I think she’s un eddoortore, and I here tell there fussie)
(Author’s note: There is no editor.)
Now when I was a kid, baseball was different. I’m not ancient, so you’ll be relieved to know there’ll be no talk of stickball in a Brooklyn street or Ty Cobb’s sharpened spikes. The players we admired on our playing cards are coaches now, not dead. And the playing cards we had were worthless, and the gum was precious, thank God, so we enjoyed them, and flipped them for Face up/Facedown on the bus seats on the way to school, or lined them up against the old brick wall in the playground and played Knockdown. And we gave shopping bags and shoe boxes filled with them to our cousins and younger brothers when we came of age, and laugh when we think of the fortune just one of those cards commands from memorabilia freaks now.
We did not have uniforms. We played with baseballs that looked much older than us, and cracked wooden bats with electrical tape holding them together, and had to mow the field before we could play on it. There were never enough of us, so we pitched to our own team members, and right field was an out. Period. And more often than not, right field went unmowed, too. We played in jeans and canvas sneakers, and a hole in the knee of your pants wasn’t yet stylish – it was a calamity when you had to face your mother, who knew what they cost. And we played until we heard our mothers yell our names for the second time like a town crier, and hurried home to a scolding for tarrying, and dinner.
All of that is gone now, like so many things, changed by time, and prosperity, and other things. Our mothers thought nothing of turning us out of doors at daylight in the summer, though we were but small, because forty years ago, someone who would hurt a child would have more problems in this world than registering at the police station and paying their lawyers. And we mowed the grass ourselves, with a mower that shot gravel out the unbaffled chute at our confederates, and we could barely reach up to the handle to push it, but we didn’t maim ourselves, or sue anybody, that I recall. And we settled the rules first and our disputes later among ourselves without the guiding hand of our parents, except what little sense they had managed to get into our heads, and rarely resorted to knuckles. Funny that. We had it sorted out in 1965, when we were but children, but forty years later we assault the umpires at our children’s games. Something was there, and has slipped away, I think.
I remember lots of things about that little diamond, carved out of the trees as an afterthought by the developer of our little neighborhood, long before the word “developer” became an epithet hurled at conservation committee meetings by people who live in houses made by a “builder.” The builder and the developer look identical to the unaided eye, but people who already have a house have a different perspective, and thesaurus, than those that need one.
And I remember Cookie. Now, our children should be collecting Cookie’s rookie trading cards, to put them through college when they sell them on ebay – and not community college either. But it was not to be. Because Cookie, although the greatest baseball player I ever saw, didn’t want to be a professional ballplayer. He wanted to be a barber.
Now that last sentence clanged to the floor at your house, and you thought: He’s kidding, or he’s nuts. Well, I’m not kidding, anyhow. Cookie wouldn’t have it if it was offered.
Now, Cookie was a little older than us, and that brought out the Paul Bunyan side of it a little I’m sure. Remember when you thought your father could lift a car, or paint the house by having you hold the brush while he moved the house up and down? Later you found out he was just another middle aged guy that emitted an audible gasp every time he sat down. Well, I’m sure that entered into it a little, that perspective from down where the little kids are, looking at big Cookie, but that wasn’t all of it. He really was a wonder, I think.
Cookie would show up when we had been playing all day, and to this day I don’t know his last name, or where he came from, or where he went to after he was done. But every time he came, we stopped whatever we were doing, and Cookie put on a Ruthian barnstorming exhibition. The biggest kid among us would pitch to Cookie, and the rest of us would scatter into the woods beyond the field, and wait for the balls to rain down on us. Because Cookie was a machine for hitting home runs. If the pitcher would wince during his delivery, human nature being what it is, knowing the ball might be coming back those 60′ 6″ in a big hurry- he’d maybe sail the ball wide and three feet off the plate. It didn’t matter. Cookie would step on the plate, and lean over, and flick his wrists, and it would rain down into the woods, every time.
And with Cookie, right field was in play for once, after a fashion. We’d grow tired of fishing our precious baseballs out of the oaks and poison ivy in center field, and beseech Cookie for a real show, and he’d get up lefty, his switch hitting a revelation to us, and hit it out over the unmowed grass. Right field had no natural end, so the balls would roll when they hit, like cannonballs that had missed their fortress, but occasionally Cookie would clear the whole distance, and hit the pavement at the foot of the road that entered the field. And we’d ululate like madmen, and didn’t care our precious baseball was no longer round. We adored him.
Cookie even sort of looked the part, if I recall correctly. The major leagues were filled with midwestern farmboy looking lummoxes like Mantle and Killebrew back then, and Cookie had the rangy frame, reddish blond stubble head, loping strides and laconic demeanor of our icons. But with glasses. But not coke bottle glasses. Those wouldn’t have brought a billboard into focus for Cookie. Cookie had the sort of glasses that seemed like the windows on a deep sea submarine. It was disorienting just to look at him, and if the barbering trade didn’t fly, I imagine mesmerism would have been a cakewalk for him.
And perhaps Cookie knew what we, in our innocence, did not; that his eyesight would forever make him an also-ran, and it was best not to dream overmuch and better to make use of your gifts to amuse your neighbors and spice your life than to try to squeeze every drop of mammon from them. Maybe. But I really think that Cookie didn’t care if he became what was to us an exalted thing: A big league ballplayer. He wasn’t interested. He wanted to be a barber, and that was that.
I recall reading a story about Eisenhower when he was young and a cadet at West Point, and not yet the general who beat the Axis armies or the President who presided over my birth, though perhaps he did not notice it. He was no longer a “plebe” then, and was allowed to order the newcomers around, and haze them, as he had been hazed the year before. And for amusement, he picked out a goofy looking recruit, and made him stand at attention in front of his peers, and lambasted him, for no good reason, simply because it was expected of him. And he wrote in his memoirs, that he always remembered, to his shame, that as a capstone to his string of abuse, he asked the plebe what he did in his civilian life before he entered West Point, because he seemed such a numbskull that he couldn’t be more than a barber. And the man, showing no emotion, but feeling some, no doubt, answered that he was indeed a barber in his short pre-military working life.
Eisenhower wrote that he had never known real shame before that, and he remembered that moment for the rest of his life, when he had disparaged the honest toil and effort of his fellow man. And he said he owed that man a great debt, though he couldn’t remember his name, and he never again wanted to look down his nose on any man.
Cookie, if you’re listening. I’m sure you’re a terrific barber.
In the spirit of yesterday’s post, and to form a more perfect union…
Wait a minute, there’s no union here. Let me think if I can name ten things that I never paid any attention to, that disappeared from prominence before I knew they were important. This list is likely to be defective, as many things come and go of course, and I can’t talk about what I don’t know. Others may still be wildly successful although I figure they’re about as popular as “Maude,” because I’m not paying attention
Maude’s still not on TV, is she?
Anyway, no wagering.
10. Britney Spears I’m using her for a sort of shorthand for a certain kind of entertainer. They’re all washed up before I ever know what the hell is up with them. By the time I got a look at Britney, she was a doughy matron who dropped her kids occasionally. She was famous for kissing a stringy, even older matron on TV a few years back, but I missed out on that too. Apparently a Back Street Boy also announced he was gay, and was no longer a boy, last week. Insert obvious jokes here. 9. That all meat diet. It is a testament to the veracity of my professed profound ignorance of things average that I can’t for the life of me remember the name of this diet, although for a while it was more important and far reaching than peanut butter and jelly or potable water ever was. Pass the butter. 8. Survivor. Trust me when I tell you, the very first person voted off all of those islands was me, by the unanimous vote of me. Not one of those “survivors” could last until noon the first day working for my uncle the mason contractor. The rest is conversation. And not a very interesting one. 7. Star Trek without Kirk This is also a kind of shorthand. Star Trek had forty five iterations on little and big screen alike. And you can throw Star Wars in here too. It’s all the same. If it didn’t have James T. Kirk humping green chicks while Spock played chess on an etagere and a drunk Scotsman stripping nuts with the wrong wrench on the warp drive, I’m not interested. 6. Titanic I’m told that this is the most popular movie ever. I never saw it, because from what I know of the persons depicted and the persons that portray them, I’m as likely as not to root for them to be drowned long before any iceberg shows up. 5. Tattoos When I was young, every third ex-marine had a blurry splotch on their arm that said: “Born To Raise Hell.” They were “Born To Raise Children,” and do precisely what their wives instructed them to do, in my experience. But in their defense, they participated in ritual scarification while part of a gladiatorial organization. What’s the clerk in the Abercrombie and Fitch’s excuse? 4. Metrosexuality Soap. Head and Shoulders. Baby Powder. Crest. We’re done here. 3. Ringtones There is a formula that is as important and far reaching as The Theory of Relativity: The importance of any phone call is inversely proportional to the complexity of the ring that announces it. 2. Viagra I do not understand this substance. I do not understand why everyone who is not from Nigeria, and some who are, wish to sell it to me every day, all day, on the internet. If girls don’t give you erections, try boys; it seems as likely as chemistry to solve your problems. 1. The i-pod Let me get this straight. I’m supposed to have an enjoyable time with two earwax smeared things jammed in my head, held together with a sort of gossamer dog collar, which allow me to ensure that in all the spare moments the world is not inflicting bad, old rock music on me ambiently, I can inject it directly into my cranium.
For this, as well as all the others, I say: I remain unconvinced.
(UPDATE: Commenter tcd’s internet goes to eleven! She picks out one that absofreakinglutely passed me by:)
11. Watching people play poker on TV.
I can see watching darts on TV, as they’re likely drunk and might accidentally fire one into their opponent, lending a kind of drama to the proceedings. Until they find some way of adding “defense” to poker, it shouldn’t be televised.
Over at the Ambivablog, I’ve been described as the place “where nostalgia makes love to the future.” I don’t really know the proprietor of Ambivablog, although I’ve been reading her page for a while. I’m grateful for the attention of course, but that’s not the part we’re going to talk about. I get “attention” from people that e-mail me and tell me to “die in a fire” over some perceived, if not to say totally imaginary, slight. The purpose of writing is to make your thoughts available to strangers – and to ensure you have milk, if your list is handy when you’re in the market. But the corollary to making your thoughts available to strangers is having strangers understand what you’re driving at. That’s rarer, and piquant when it rears its head.
Well, assessments like Amba’s are double edged swords. Nostalgia is fun, but it risks being a navel-gazing affair. If I were nineteen years old, and a guy that was nineteen with twenty-nine years experience at being nineteen told me that Weezer sucked but Bachman Turner Overdrive was like Mozart and Elvis and Free Beer, I’d tell him to shove it. And the old fellow would say the same to his elders about Perry Como. Nostalgia is a church where no one converts and the parishioners slowly die off. But Amba gave me more credit than that. I appreciate it, because she’s correct in her assessment. It doesn’t stop there for me.
I like things, often, that are anachronisms. Traditions are interesting, serve useful purposes, and have a tendency to breed such anachronisms. You can never improve on a wooden baseball bat. It’s not possible, because to tinker with it is to destroy it. The clink an aluminum bat makes when you hit the ball has no oompah. It’s got no anima. It’s got no whatsis. The meaning in the thing is lost. Why not use a mortar or a bazooka and be done with it? To suggest that children should eschew aluminum bats for the traditional wood meets with blank stares or acrimony now. “Do you know what a wooden bat costs, and how many we’d break?” is flung at you by persons who think such handwaving arithmetic is dispositive to those of us that can’t help but notice their children are wearing $200.00 sneakers.
Yes, I know. That wooden bat would seem…precious, wouldn’t it?
And yet if I bought a baseball bat tomorrow, I’d buy one of those magnificent dyed and lacquered maple affairs that have come into popularity recently. An old fashioned Hillerich and Bradsby Louisville Slugger is made from Ash. Ash is a stringy, dense, heavy, stiff wood that has a long and storied history of being made into axe handles.
An axe handle. A plow handle. An adze. A grub hoe. Think of the iconic status of the baulk of wood itself before it becomes that same utilitarian thing fashioned to bring the joy of the physical test to the user and the audience alike.
But someone said: Maple. Lighter, but harder. Smooth. Chastely grained, not the big roping sawtooth whorls of the Ash. They made a bat from Maple and said: I’ve made it better but I did not destroy the meaning of the thing.
A handful of people, who you and I will never meet — and trust me, we’re not them –will bring change to things so profoundly that something useful or amusing will be entirely superseded. You’re wasting your time-maybe, but our time-certainly, if you’re telling us you’re going invent the Next. Big. Thing. There’s never any talk in it.
Don’t interfere if you’ve got nothing but ideas on how things should be “different.” “Different” is not the operative and essential part of “good.” It’s as likely to be good’s enemy as not. Don’t make it worse, if you can make it as good. Generally, that just takes a certain amount of effort, and a little judgement.
Make it better, without destroying the meaning of the thing. If you can.
Month: August 2006
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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