stevengharms.com

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Evolution of a President

Democrats grab the senate.

Start quacking, Bushie.

Is today effing great or what?

It appears that the American electorate has decided that enough is enough from the looney bin of George W. Bush and is interested in seeing if he can learn to quack like a duck as quickly as he undermined habeas corpus, let his Pentagon tank the war in Iraq, and let ideology override pragmatism.

I read some of his commentary from before last night from the Washington Post:

President Bush said terrorists will win if Democrats win and impose their policies on Iraq, as he and Vice President Cheney escalated their rhetoric Monday in an effort to turn out Republican voters in next week’s midterm elections.

You’ve gotta be joking, right?

That’s what’s at stake in this election. The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq.

Really? As far as I can tell your method for implementing your “goal” sucks and you’ve done nothing to change the direction ( Rumsfeld ) or the playbook ( “stay the course” ). As my dad taught me, you’ve got one hell of a case of “Ready, Fire, “How’d the bullet get over there”, aim” on your hands.

The Senate is still undetermined, but I think that this should be a much better direction for this country than the rubber-stamping partisan crap we’ve put up with for the last two years.

1997 seems to be haunting me today.

It crept up behind me on the Radio, where the 9 at nine was about 1997.

It reminded me of The Castilian, my sophomore year, symbolic logic and calculus.

I remembered my hallway: the firings, the sexual tension, the beer, the antics, Mandy, Matt, Ryan, Justin, Christine, Renée, Sarah.

I remembered Fall in Pease park, cool and dusky and orange sweaters.

I remember the night when a neighbor showed me Hal Hartley’s great movie trust. I remember thinking that I had never seen an actress like Adrienne Shelley.

The hauntings continued when I found out that Adrienne Shelley had died. It was thought that she had committed suicide, but now it has come to be thought that she was murdered and it was made to look as such.

My neighbour is now in an indie rock band in new york. I read the imdb news about Adrienne and remembered being 20 again to her band’s myspace music sampler.

While The League lacked lacked the intestinal fortitude and stamina to go see Running With Scissors, Lauren and I were brave enough to catch a showing at Barton Creek Mall.

This is not to imply The League is not brave and sturdy, for he is certainly not lacking in the areas of stability or bravery, to the contrary, the arc of the life of the young Augusten Burroughs is very, very depressing. It’s so bad that the phrase “You can’t make something like this up” applies many, many times over.

A Junior high boy dating a 30+ year-old man? A 13 year old being prescribed god-knows-what pills out of a medicine cabinet like they were trick or treats? A boy of this age being encouraged to overdose so as to establish a psychiatric case to drop out of junior high. It’s rough stuff. I suppose that at this abysmal level of tragedy, it’s only fitting that the other cliché kick in: “You have to laugh.”

Nevertheless the actors did a great job bringing Augusten’s very, very warped life to the screen. The characters perfectly embodied the space that I imagined them. I always imagined Hope as a sort of Emily Dickinson + Sylvia Plath combination and she was perfectly played by Gwyneth Paltrow. I always imagined Natalie as vulnerable and a bit too sexy for her own good, again perfectly executed by Evan Rachel Wood ( who will continue to become a great actress, I think ).

The real performance that everyone wants to see is Annette Bening’s return to “psychotic, middle-aged wife” territory that she does ever-so-well. In American Beauty she showed The American Working Woman collapsing under all her own expectations of success. Who can forget her cleaning that dingy house in her slip and, after failing to make the sale, slapping her sobbing face while giving herself such negative reinforcement as: “Shut up you big baby”? I was wondering if she would simply re-play that role, but with a more heavily narcissistic slant. She did, but added a breathy New England artist angle to it that really captured the essence of the Dierdre Burroughs portrayed in the book.

In addition, she also adds in, for good measure, some cuckoo’s nest completely looney trips to her own private mental place beyond the moonbeams and rainbows. One tends to think that people go “off the deep end” in a violent explosion. Bening’s portrayal shows that the rational world can go ‘pop’ like a soap bubble and there’s no coming back from that place.

I don’t think I’d rush to the theatres to catch it, but it’s probably worth a rental.

Upon posting my “Finished” response, Dedman asked the question that I ( consciously ) skirted the entire time: “Yeah, but did you like it?”.

Well, i think the plot was derivative, the setup failed to deliver, and there were a host of other problems but, yeah, I liked it.

I think that when the plot and structure sag, you can find a real sense of bliss is passages like this where the writing is ephemeral and beautiful:

That was what insomnia was, after all - an excess of consciousness, an excess of life…she couldn’t will herself to fall asleep. The only way to fall asleep was not to care whether you fell asleep or not: you had to relinquish your will. Most people seemed to think that you fall asleep and then started dreaming, but as far as Minny could tell, the process was exactly the reverse - you started dreaming and that enabled you to fall asleep.

These episodes of linguistic painting are one of the best reasons to read the book.

Dedman has been on my case for many moons now to read this book and I finished it today.

Setup

The dead move to a city (the city) after undergoing a crossing which has no objective standard (wandering a desert, a forest, going underwater, etc.). The dead or, more precisely, the living dead, rest in the city until those who remember them die at which point they go into a different beyond.

Good setup.

The population starts swelling as a pandemic wipes out the population: sending people into the city by the barrel-load and, given the setup, the people who remember them, into death quite quickly. Thus the city swells and then empties, with only a few hundred survivors wondering why they’re still there.

The reason is that they’re still remembered by the last person on earth who is trekking across Antarctica trying to find some contrary evidence to the inescapable conclusion: “I am the last person on Earth”.

…et La Peste

As I was reading this story I was more and more reminded of Camus’ The Plague, which contemplates how humans relate to one another as a city vanishes ( in this case, the much more pedestrian aspect of the population dying ). In Camus’ Oran we watch as the people we love vanish bubo-covered body by body. In this we have a much more mysterious Nothing that erases parts of the city ( appropriate for the generation that grew up to The Neverending Story ). In both of these scenarios the intractable end can’t be avoided, and against Camus l’Absurde, the characters find the Existentialists resolve to be good, to live a jubilant life ( or afterlife ), even when there’s no reason to it.

Some of the Amazon reviews seem to forget there is a beauty in Brockmeier’s style of delivery, a calm sort of collected sobriety with a Romantic nostalgia that was what I liked best of the sci-fi / horror / Gothic romance The Time Traveler’s Wife.

The Last Man

I’d also say that there’s a certain similitude between this book and Vonnegut’s amazing Cat’s Cradle. You can read more about that after the jump, I don’t want to spoil your read of Cat’s Cradle.

In all, a fine book, but I’d suggest you wait for paperback or a library rental. At 250 pages without much re-read value you might be best saving a few dollars.

(more…)

We’ll be going…maybe see you there?

Yesterday afternoon Lauren came to meet me for lunch and remarked that she wanted to do Halloween “big”. Well the biggest, that I know, is the Halloween parade / mill-about on 6th street, so we launched a bid to make the scene in the early afternoon.

We headed to the seasonal Halloween headquarters on South 35 and Stassney ( in the derelict husk of a forgotten Albertson’s ) and looked through the mostly picked-over costumes. Lauren found a very cool pixie outfit with wings and upon seeing a cape and a wand I knew that I would be evil professory Severus Snape from the Harry Potter universe.

A few hobby shop trips later we had gold ribbon for her hair, a Slytherin emblem for my cape we had our outfits together. We headed down to the festivities around 9. As usual there were a lot of people, not much room, and a lot of fun costumes. Lauren and I were photographed a few times ( I’m sure it’s more her than me ) and we made a couple circuits between the blocked off sections of the street, me flashing my Harry Potter light up tip and sound effects wand every few steps.

We saw some amazing costumes: someone on stilts looking like the grim reaper ( 10 feet tall it’s an imposing force out of spiritus mundi ), rococo Sun King style costumes made out of paper ( think of the towering wig styles of 18th century France! ), a toilet or two, many zombies, and even a few Republicans! ::Shiver::

Towards the evening’s end the style of dress moved out of the scary and into the ribald. The ass cheek ratio moved steadily up as the pre-soaked crowd joined the fun: naughty cops, naughty fire fighterettes, naughty waitresses, naughty nurses, naughty construction workers, naughty nuns, naughty genetic researchers, naughty mayors, naughty … well, yeah, you get the idea, naughty occupations.

About the stroke of the witching hour Lauren’s feet starting complaining about the heels she was in and we headed westward up the street, back home.

I will add that in the middle of the street there were some evangelical preachers yelling on and on about how people who worship death ( Hallow’een revelers I take it ) will find their souls forefeit until they find the bridge to life, Jesus Christ, etc.

Exqueese me?

Christians disparaging people who focus on celebrating death and the non living flesh. I could be wrong, but key tenets of a Christian existence are turning the other cheek, denying the present needs / urges of the flesh, not minding your conditions because you’ll get your heavenly reward. And doesn’t the doctrine of transubstantiation mean you’re eating the flesh of Jesus?

I just thought it showed a certain lack of depth of understanding and appreciation of the real messages of his mystery cult.

(*I fully grant that different sects take the death cult focus with more or less seriousness. I’ve discussed this before with respect to “The Passion” *)

So this yahoo was yelling right in my left ear about brimstone and fire this and death cult that the only pithy thing I could come up with was:

“Science not bull….!” which got a good bit of laughter.

Had I not been caught in the flow of the masses I might have said something more clever, but it’s hard to make a detailed philosophical argument when your pixie girl is hobbling on her heels muttering ow, ow, ow.