Harry Potter and the Unbearable Weight of Expectation

It’s a scary time for Harry Potter lovers. Like die hard fans in the days before the big game, we wait in nervous anticipation. We long for the day to arrive, but find ourselves in fear of the unknown outcome. Conversations, arguments and even betting fill the blogosphere, attempting to predict what may be, though it is completely out of our control. These discussions offer the illusion that we are somehow participating in the end, rather than just waiting for it, but they also help mask the biggest fear of all. Not that the book ends in tragedy, but the fear that we may be utterly disappointed, Phantom Menace style. For six books Rowling has managed to keep the magic going. In our hearts of heart we pray, “Please Lord may she not crap out on the seventh.”

I find myself in a difficult place with Harry Potter. As a librarian, particularly as one responsible for buying the stuff one finds on the shelves, I have an ingrained skepticism of The Phenomenon; books that rocket into the stratosphere of popularity, boosted less by quality than by marketing juggernauts. And Harry Potter is a marketing juggernaut. It’s become a carefully crafted cash cow with every kind of officially licensed swag to go with. When it finally goes on sale it will be available at every grocery store, gas station, and Costco™. If you are inclined to be suspicious of anything with a billion dollar marketing budget, than Harry Potter is custom made to make you cranky.

But, as a reader, I love Harry Potter. I have loved the books ever since I opened one up ten years ago and first read about The Dursleys of number four Privet Drive in a town called Little Whinging, and their nephew, one Harry Potter, who was required to sleep in the closet under the stairs, along with the spiders. I’ve followed his tumultuous path to adulthood and, as with any kid who grows up before ones eyes, I’ve become invested in the outcome. I’d like to see him grow to adulthood and find a satisfying career, possibly as an auror, or even the future headmaster of Hogwarts. I’d like to see his friends Ron and Hermione get sorted, have a few frizzy red headed children over whom they argue constantly.

There are those that fume at the popularity of Harry Potter among adults, insisting that it is a sign of the infantilization of culture or the decline in educational standards or merely a harbinger of the end times. I prefer to think that the story’s popularity among people of all ages harkens back to a time where tales were told to amaze an audience, regardless of age or station. Dickens was not imagining an audience of nine year olds when he wrote Oliver Twist, originally published as a serial in the daily newspaper. Mark Twain was not thinking of generations of fifth graders searching for test answers when he wrote Huck Fin. Neither Kipling nor Stevenson sat down to write “kids books”, and literature is a better place for their results.

Of course, there are perils that remain, for readers and for Harry. There’s a chance that our boy may not make it. Perhaps he will lose so much in the attempt that any victory over the forces of darkness are hollow. Though there are many heartbreaking possibilities, it’s hard to imagine what Rowling could do with the story which would be a genuine disappointment. She’s proven that she pulls no punches, and accepts that life often has more bitter than sweet. A total victory over the power of darkness without any collateral damage would be lame, but unlikely. Suddenly transforming the last half of the book into a dry lecture on the obsolescence of God would suck (Phillip Pullman, I’m talking to you sir!). If Harry Potter fans are lucky, then the biggest disappointment we will experience this month will be the latest film installment, Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix, which is, truly, the first real let down in a film series that has thus far ranged from fine to extraordinary.

It’s true that the makers of this film had a lot to overcome. Phoenix is the darkest and most emotionally complex of the novels adapted so far. It also follows on the heels of the two best films of the series so far. The films peaked with Harry Potter and The Prisoner of Azkeban, a fast paced thriller which still gives us much of Rowling’s emotional complexity. The heart of the story, an elaborate maze involving time travel, shape shifters and the horrifying Dementors remains fully intact. Room is made for lovely details expanding our appreciation of the magical world, including the Knight Bus and more details of Diagon Alley and Hogwarts. Time is given to expand our appreciation of two of Rowling’s best adult characters, Remus Lupin and Sirius Black.

Goblet of Fire jettisons most of the emotional complexity of the book but in exchange gives us a rip roaring, non-stop adventure film, which still manages to convey the heartbreak of the first profound tragedy of the series, the death of Cedric Diggory, as well as the true, creepy, thrilling horror of the rise of Voldemort. I tend to be an apologist for film adaptations of novels, defending against charges that “they changed the books”. Books and film are completely different media, and they do different things well. Inevitably in a film adaptation some complexity of plot will be lost, some characters dropped or telescoped together. Goblet of Fire is an example of doing this well but somehow Order of the Phoenix has managed to eliminate not only the emotional complexity, but most of the action as well.

When I think about some of the material they had to work with (The headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, infested with dark magic; The Ministry of Magic; Mr Weasley’s near death and recovery at St. Mungo’s Hospital; The horrible, wretched, evil Dolores Umbridge; Harry’s teenage arrogance and rage; The Hall of Mysteries; Harry learning that even when the world’s most evil wizard is after you, it is still the people who love you the most who can cause you the most pain; Harry ignoring his friends warnings and, as a result, getting them seriously injured and his uncle killed.) the dark, bland, simplistic story they’ve presented on screen is, well, it’s a shame.

My mother asked me yesterday what my prediction is for the final Harry Potter and I told her honestly that I did not have one. I’m not the sort of person who reads the last page of the book before I start. Even if I could guess the end exactly, I’d like to experience it from first page to last unburdened by my own expectations. This is impossible of course, but I like to try.

If I have a hope it is that, when I arrive Friday evening to pick up my copy (yes, I am one of those people who will be there at the stroke of midnight), what awaits all of us is piles of books each as thick as the New York yellow pages. I hope the last book is longer than War and Peace (1400 pages), or at least as long as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (750 pages). I do want to know the end, but it’d be nice if it took a good long while to get there. I know I will read the first half to three quarters like a woman possessed, at which point I will start turning the pages with mixture of anticipation and sadness, knowing that the closer I get to the answer, the closer I am to The End.

Meandering Through History

I decided late yesterday afternoon that I was in the mood to celebrate my July 4^th with a hamburger and some fries from the diner next door. Alas, the diner next door was closed for the holiday as was the gyro stand up the street and all of the other diner joints in the neighborhood. The only place that ended up being open was a British pub where I enjoyed a Ruben sandwich and a Caesar salad, neither burgers nor fries being on the menu. I was in the company of a small motley group of lost 4^th of July souls many of whom were participating in the pub’s contest to win a trip to Ireland by finishing a bottle of Jamesons, or trying the bartender’s experimental cocktails. I’m not sure how many other countries would offer you the opportunity to celebrate Independence Day in the former enemy’s bar, but God Bless America for the right and the privilege.

If I sound blasé about celebrating the greatest of holidays in the greatest of nations it’s because I am, alas. I always have lame excuses for not making 4^th plans. This year the combination of its midweek placement and my being out of town last week led me to argue that it ‘snuck up on me’, but the truth is it’s always something. Traffic…mumble mumble…Noise…mumble mumble…Too Hot…Too Loud…Too Wet…I have to stay home to keep my cats from freaking out. Really, it’s pathetic. “Wicked anti-patriotic girl!” you may cry, but in that I must protest you are wrong.

The truth is when it comes to July 4^th celebrations I peaked early. 1976. New York City. Watching the tall ships roll in on the Hudson from the roof of my aunt’s Riverside Drive apartment building. I had my own official Statue of Liberty silver glitter crown. Now you’re asking me to fight the traffic (or walk for heaven’s sake!) to Ruston Way for the Movin’ 96.5 FM Rockin’ Tacoma 4^th? Yeah, I don’t think so. There are pedicures to be given, and cats to calm. Call me in 2076.

Last week I was in Washington D.C. for a conference. One day my friend Elise and I headed off to Monticello to visit the homestead of Thomas Jefferson. I actually caught myself contemplating some items in the gift shop thinking “This would look great on my new bookshelves,” as if I somehow needed new things to fill them. As if I don’t already own so many books, tchotkes and decorative detritus to fill a home full of bookshelves. There is more than ample crap in my home to fill these new bookshelves already, but I did give in and buy a small globe, about the size of a baseball. It’s a globe of the world as it was understood in 1745. It’s a fantastic world where Florida is a tiny nubbin poking off the coast of Amerique Sel De Something I can’t read, Cuba is a huge island the size of itself and, interestingly enough, the missing part of Florida, and the Amazon river slashes across Amerique Meridion bisecting it almost in two with a beautiful thick perfectly straight wide blue line; an aqua superhighway running, to its surprise I imagine, direct from Brazil to Ecuador with nary a bend.

There are, unfortunately, no menacing spots on the map claiming “Here be dragons”, but the northwest corner of what we know as North America does just kind of drift off into an amorphous whiteness like, we know something is up there, but it’s too damn cold to go figure out what. I like to think there’s hopefulness in that vaguery that says “We still haven’t given up on that whole Northwest Passage thing.” If we don’t draw any land in, we can still believe there’s a bitchin navigable river up there, just like the fantasy Amazon, a clear blue line custom made for floating shiny rafts of goods and services. Reality’s a bitch of a task mistress, but that’s what I like about early mapmaking, reality interpreted by a bunch of dreamy guys with sketch pads and the accountants who bankrolled them.

Monticello is an interesting place to visit. We’re awful fond of our founding fathers, we Amerique Sel De Whatevers, and not without reason. They achieved something amazing, often despite themselves. We learn in school the shiny version of them and their foibles, denying them the complexity that humanity gives us all. We can’t deny the fact that Jefferson was an aristocratic southern gentleman farmer who owned slaves, but we are taught that he struggled with this. He treated his slaves well, we’re taught, practically not even like slaves at all. He allowed them to be educated, to learn marketable skills and, of course we are told, he freed them when he died.

This was brought home to me even today as I watched, for the many-eth time, the musical 1776 on Turner Classic Movies. I like 1776, it’s great entertainment. If you haven’t seen it, then it helps to know that it is, yes, a musical about those blistering summer days in Philadelphia as the Continental Congress struggled to create what came to be our Declaration of Independence. In all musicals there must be some underlying quandary, in this case the moral struggle over slavery. Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration pretty clearly lays the groundwork for freeing slaves. The southern delegates are having none of it. There are some rousing arguments and sobering musical interludes and TJ states profoundly that he has decided to free his slaves. Ultimately the passage about slavery is stricken, the sad, but in the language of the musical somehow necessary, compromise upon which our country began its gangly first steps. The slaves had to take one for the team, with the promise we’d make it up to them later.

I don't know how much of this is or isn't accurate. Truth is I don’t know enough detailed knowledge of the history of the time to know the ins and outs of what was put in and removed from the Declaration. What I do know from my recent visit to Monticello is that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. He inherited…inhereted …a hundred or so on his 21^st birthday, and then inherited a bunch more when he got married. These were the starting gifts to a young American aristocrat, a matching set of people. They slaved for his farm as field hands, craftsmen, laborers and livestock managers. They worked in the kitchens and in the house. He took some of his slaves with him to France specifically to learn French cooking, and when they returned turned his southern kitchen into a French culinary institute. (Random Librarian Factette: Jefferson introduced the Waffle to we Ameriques Sel De Whatevers, God bless his foody soul)

Jefferson allowed his son to teach slaves who were interested in learning how to read and do maths, but he didn’t run around inflicting education on them all. I suppose Jefferson did treat his slaves well comparatively speaking, but taking a gander at the tiny shack which housed families of 13 or more or listening to the tour guide comment on the two set of clothes per year and one blanket every three years…three years…doesn’t really allow any illusion that these men were somehow treated like union employees.

When TJ died, he set a small number, something like 6 or 9, free. The rest of his hundred or so slaves were sold…sold…to pay off the large debts of his estate. I’m not offering this information up as a condemnation of Thomas Jefferson as much as a reality check. We love our founding fathers we do. We carry big old crushes on these supermen of yore who had a wacky notion and brought it to fruition and then in perhaps their wackiest decision, left it for us to steer. But the truth is they were men, geniuses of their time, but also men blinded by those same times to many of the truths we now hold self evident. This is the truth about American history, and what I love about it. When we teach our children whitewashed versions of history, we deny them the ability to be truly impressed and proud at what fallible beings, not gods, have created. When people talk as if the Founding Fathers created some perfect thing which we’ve only been fucking up ever since, it’s an offense to what they, and we, truly managed to accomplish.

According to Robert Osborne in his introduction to 1776, the director showed the completed film to Nixon before it was released. Nixon suggested, in that way Presidents have of suggesting things that magically get done, that the director remove a musical number called “Cool Cool Considerate Men”. It’s a great song and though the director did apparently cave at the time, it’s now been magically restored. “To the Right…Ever to the Right…Never to the Left…Always to the Right.” It’s pretty catchy and in its own unnerving way communicating a sentiment which appears to be as American as those crazy liberals agitating for capital “I” Independence. I get a little freaked out to think what the current administration might have done, given the same opportunity for advance edits. Probably stamp the whole thing “Treated As Secret”, or at the very least make the director pixilate Philadelphia.

One interesting thing that came up on both our tour of Monticello and after was that of the Hemmings family. Our tour guides were pretty straight forward about the fact that the Hemmings slave family held important roles running Jefferson’s various enterprises and that one of the daughters, Sally Hemmings, bore Jefferson at least one child, probably more. When I brought this up later my sister-in-law said that she had gone to Monticello several years ago, before the TJ foundation had been forced by DNA evidence to own up to the truth that had been staring everyone in the face for two hundred years: Jefferson was a busy founding father and was, in this case at least, colorblind in fulfilling his fathering obligations. It makes me giggle trying to imagine the stiff proper southern ladies who lead the tours desperately trying to shut down any of these distressing rumors being flung at them by their tours. In this I can only hope science did them a service, DNA allowing them to fling off their pinchy toed shoes of respectability and finally slip on the comfy Birkenstocks of wacky family truth.

Speaking of wacky family truth, one of the fun parts of having new books shelves is that I can finally put out assorted family photos I’ve gathered over the years. I’ve put out my high school graduation photo in a delusional attempt to convince someone, anyone, to gasp at how little I’ve changed in 20 years. I’m still waiting. There’s a nice set of pictures of me and my mother taken at approximately the same age. We look like the same person, only the black and white of my Mom’s photo giving a hint of weird time travel going on. Otherwise, seriously, it does look like the same little girl in two different pictures. There are some pictures of my parents as children, and a really neat picture of my Granny. She’s standing outside holding a baby, my mother, flanked a group of small children one of whom is one of my aunts. My Granny looks young, so very young. She’s wearing saddle shoes for heaven’s sake, and there’s a breeze blowing back her skirt and hair. It’s very Steinbeckian, but in a good way.

I finally put out a picture today I’ve gone back and forth on. It’s a snapshot of my parent’s wedding in a pretty round frame. It’s very much a document of its time. It looks like it belongs hanging on a wall in the background of That 70s Show, or some more square version of That 70s Show, where the kids actually did go down to the basement to do their homework. Well, duh, obviously it belongs hanging in the Brady House. This is the wedding picture Mike and Carol Brady should have had, clearly.

I like the picture because it does have a, I hesitate to use the overused word “retro” quality to it, and of course I like it because it’s my parents, or rather it was my parents 38 years ago. My hesitation comes from the fact that the marriage it is depicting is over in a way that exceeds the word “over”. Both the people prominently figured in the picture went their separate ways less than ten years after this picture was taken. They’ve both been married to their respective spouses at least 3 times longer than they were to each other. Those second marriages, and the additional parents they added to my life equation, were each in their own ways as or more significant to me personally. I mean, I actually attended both of those weddings.

My mother is wearing a dress she made herself which eventually ended up in my dress up box. I just finished reading this article about the Trash The Dress movement in which women get post-wedding pictures done of the bride wearing “the dress” while swimming or horseback riding or gardening or rolling around in dirt or attacking the dress with scissors. There’s a lot of sociological blah blah about what this symbolizes and how this is no more wasteful than paying to put the dress in hyperthermetically sealed storage for future posterity, and all I can think is, yeah, but both of those are a HELL of a lot more wasteful than just putting it in your kid’s dress up box. I had a lot of fun playing in, with and around that dress, which did get trashed in the process, but I can tell you looking at it in its prime that I’m grateful my mother did not somehow “save” the dress so that I might wear it someday. What happens in the 60s needs to stay in the 60s, and that’s all I have to say about that.

This snapshot is a document, an uneasy document, of that day and all the days to follow for that young hopeful but can I say kindly clueless couple. There is only one smile in this picture, although there are at least ten people in view; the smile on the face of my mother. It’s not a smile I recognize from the woman whose smile is more familiar to me than my own, not the least because it has become my own. It’s not a fake smile. It’s not a jolly smile that takes up her whole face. It’s kind of a small, quiet smile behind which I can read nothing. Hope? Relief? Confidence? Terror? Anything I could guess I’d be projecting what I know about the end of the story, and would therefore be totally wrong.

My Dad, god bless him, looks as pleased and smug as any man in a powder blue tuxedo has a right to. He also does, I must confess, look exactly like my brother David, which means I must now officially excuse myself from any and all versions of the argument between David and my Mom that tend to go like this: “Yes you do.” “No I don’t!” “You SO do!” “I SO do not!” This is the curse of the child. There are moments in your life when you do, in fact, appear exactly like one of your parents during a particular moment in their lives. Like everything, these moments are transitional and do not last, but parents have that elephantine memory that will not allow us to forget that one day in the kitchen when I was three a photograph of me was taken that proves my doppelganger lived in a nursery school photo from the 1940s. All I’m saying, Dave, is that I suggest you avoid powder blue tuxedos.

But where are the other smiles in this picture? Those of the happy families and acquaintances itching to hit the cake and lemonade in the narthex? The only two people in the picture who look like they’ve been at a wedding are my parents. The rest of the scene feels vaguely funereal, like the witnesses know they’ve been party to the end of something, rather than the beginning. Their unease was off by eight years and two children, of whom I am both rather quite fond, so I’m glad that no one did that made-for-tv moment of interrupting the ceremony to ask if the couple is, in fact, quite completely off their rockers to believe this is a good idea.

But perhaps I'm just projecting what I know to be true now on history more ancient than I. I place emotions and intentions on faces I know, but without knowing anything about them then. Maybe everyone not looking at my parents walk by was distracted by the best man’s shiny shiny shoes. Perhaps my grandpa had offered one of his patented Deep Thought homilies which still had them all pondering what really did happen at that wacky water into wine party. It’s a mystery, lost to the ages.

I’m keeping the picture out because, as odd as I’ve made it sound, it makes me happy. My parents are walking out of a church hand and hand into a future which, it turns out, was my future, and my brother’s future, even if it wasn’t so much their future. Pretending it didn’t happen doesn’t improve history. It just makes for empty shelves.

Mission Eradicated: A Musing on the Epidemic of Mission Statements

Shopping at a mini-mart near my office the other day, I could not help but notice the menagerie of freshly painted signs announcing that this particular Gas n' Sip was: "Redefining the Culture of Customer Care". I feel we've achieved some kind of cultural nadir when even the local mini-mart feels it's necessary to not only have but proudly trumpet that they have a mission, and they're not afraid to state it!

When it comes to mini-marts, about the only mission I feel is really necessary is "Every Tuesday is Two For One Twinkies Day" or, perhaps, "Our staff: not on any Top Ten Most Wanted fugitives list in the contiguous United States." "Tenth cup of coffee always free," is also acceptable, but "Redefining the Culture of Customer Care" is frankly unsettling. I do not go to mini-marts for customer care or culture. Gas. Soda. Gum. In an emergency, cat food. This is all I need, or want, from my local gas station. Anything more feels like undue burden.

What is this Mission Statement Mania that has gripped our nation? Upon walking into a business covered with posters declaring "Revitalizing Customer Satisfaction Through Unparalleled Dedication to the Ten Commandments of Service Commitment," does anyone think "Oh boy, this is going to be the best bank deposit experience ever!"? Has it ever been?

I wanted to write a piece about funny mission statements, but what I quickly realized is that while almost all mission statements are laughable in some way, they're rarely funny. A perfect example is the Mission Statement Generator found on Dilbert.com. The idea of the Generator is hysterical. They've programmed in every business buzz word you can imagine like "proactively", "seven-habits conforming", "empowerment", and "paradigm shift", and then the little generator spits out complete mission statements, ready for cutting and pasting into your annual report.

The problem is that the mission statements it generates are so spot on, they're not so much funny as depressing. "It is our business to quickly maintain competitive sources while continuing to globally simplify virtual services." "We strive to globally provide access to multimedia based intellectual capital and efficiently simplify effective sources to stay competitive in tomorrow's world." "Our mission is to collaboratively leverage existing high standards in content while promoting personal employee growth." Try to read them, and your mind just kind of slips off of them. They are so replete with meaningful meaningless, the mind cannot get purchase and instead decides to take early vacation.

Since I'm a person who has been employed in the Aughts, I've obviously been obliged to participate in Mission Statement creation for the organization which employs me. Our system has recently begun a new process which not only involves the Library developing a mission and vision statement, but each department developing one as well. The process my department went through coming up with its mission statement was, frankly, painful, and it's still a sore topic amongst some of my colleagues.

One (although by no means the only) problem had to do with the word "enthusiasm". A suggestion was put forward that our department's mission was to do some particular things involving customer service "with enthusiasm", or "enthusiastically". I'd missed the first planning meaning, or else I never would have opened my mouth, but I made the mistake of suggesting that we NOT use the word enthusiasm. My philosophy is that my library (which I like, by the way — I've worked for significantly worse) can ask me to do many things, can require me to do many things but they really can't mandate my feelings about the process. I can make customers my focus. I can produce things in a timely manner. I can constantly strive to deliver goods of the highest quality, but my feelings about those actions are my own, dammit, and if one day I don't feel like being enthusiastic about it, must that be a crime against our mission?

Well, my friends, a shitstorm was unleashed upon my lack of enthusiasm for enthusiasm. I was raining on a parade of blind veterans. I was pissing in orphan's cornflakes. I obviously hated babies and puppies and soldiers and America. I ruined everyone's day, hurt everyone's feelings and totally spoiled everything. In the end, enthusiasm stayed in and I shut my big heartless cruel mouth and now on days when I'm feeling less than fresh I can take heart in the fact that not only am I ruining my own day, I'm failing my department's mission.

Actually, that's BS. I hardly ever think about the mission when I'm doing my job. (D'OH!) If I do consider it, it's usually with an image of RobertDiNiro in The Untouchables in my head. "Enthusiasms ... enTHUsiasms ... enthusiasms." That's really the problem with Mission Statements. How often can the average person really "live" their company's mission statement in their daily work? Must a person stop in the midst of processing the payroll and think "Am I collaboratively leveraging existing high standards?", like an isometric exercise your doctor insists you do 50 times a day while you're standing at the copier?

Particularly annoying to me are the mission statements which are totally generic, like the one for that poor mini-mart. Nothing identifies "Redefining the Culture of Customer Care" as belonging a mini mart or supermarket. It could just as easily be an ointment factory or a nuclear power plant, although something about it strongly suggests to me a nursing home. Words mean something. If you're going to pick a group of them and label them a mission statement, then either you really like that group of words and want your staff to make them important too, or it's just a bunch of words which might as well have been spit out by Dilbert's machine. If a company really expects their employees to "live" their mission then they need to make a mission statement their employees can actually DO. How is the acne-scarred teenage boy selling me my gum supposed to Redefine the Culture of Customer Care during that process? Do I want him to? Personally, I just want the gum.

Summer Flicks Worth Seeing

I find myself oddly uninspired by the current crop of summer flicks dukeing it out in a theater near you. It’s not that this batch is somehow worse than those of previous years. I’m just overcome with been there/done that-itis. I don’t really care what happens to Peter Parker and Mary-Jane. I can catch Pirates 3 on DVD. I’m indifferent to the Silver Surfer and his Rise. Nothing has convinced me the world needed another Shrek. I find myself standing on the diving board over the pool of Summer Blockbuster extravaganza and all I’m inspired to do is get down and go read a book in the shade.

Two films have tempted me into the theater recently, neither of them Hollywood products, and both have given me great joy. Black Book is an intense, charming, almost retro film brought to us by the notorious Paul Verhoeven. Verhoeven has left Hollywood, Starship Troopers and Sharon Stone far behind to present a good old fashioned World War II movie in his native language, Dutch.

Rachel is a Jew who bleaches her hair and joins the Dutch resistance movement. She is asked to seduce an SS officer, so as better to spy upon him, which she does with great enthusiasm. Imagine Hitchcock’s film Notorious if Ingrid Bergman’s character had not been made to feel like a whore in order to guilt her into spying and you have an approximation of Rachel. The SS officer in question, Ludwig Muntz, is a lonely widower who is perhaps not taken in by Rachel’s charade as much as he is entertained by her company. Muntz is also facing the future with a clear eyed reckoning: the war is ending, his side is losing, and the piper will soon arrive with the bill.

In truth, every character in Black Book is wrestling with the same struggle. When you’ve been living your life like there’s no tomorrow, what do you do when presented with a future? One of the more interesting characters in Black Book is Ronnie, a Dutch woman working as a secretary for the Nazis who befriends Rachel. It seems easy to label Ronnie in the beginning as a brainless floozy who has cheerfully done whatever or whomever she needed to in order to save her own skin. But as the movie progresses you come to realize that everyone in the film has done exactly the same thing, though many not as honestly as Ronnie. Whether they end up working for the Nazis or the Resistance or just muddling through with their head down is as much a factor of chance as it is some inherent quality of their character.

While Verhoeven has given us a very entertaining melodrama he has also, in a strange way, given us a much more realistic portrayal of World War II than we are used to. So often the stories of WWII have been given to us in black and white, featuring archetypes rather than people who are flawed and human, regardless of what side they are on. Ultimately we see a story which is not about a rag tag band of resistance fighters besting the Nazis, but a story about all kinds of people trying to avoid being crushed by the wheels of history. Plus, it's Verhoeven, and it's summer, so we get plenty of action and full frontal birthday suit-age which make Sharon Stone's infamous "is she or isn't she flashing us?" shot in Basic Instinct look prudish. Mazel Tov!

And now for something completely different, I must extol for you the virtues of one of the best action/adventure cop buddy films I have seen since possibly the early days of Lethal Weapon. Hot Fuzz gets four stars, two thumbs and two toes up, and a Totally Awesome! for good measure. Things looked promising even from the trailer which announced: "From the guys who watched every action movie ever made", and stars the team of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, fellas we came to love in Shaun of the Dead, a delightful homage to zombie flicks and the people who love them.

Hot Fuzz is the tale of a supercop, Sergeant Nicholas Angel, whose perfectionist and overachieving ways manage to get him transferred to a small town outside of London. ("You're making the rest of us look bad," announces the supercilious Chief Inspector, played delightfully straight by Bill Nighy). The town has no crime to speak of, an affable, lazy police department and a cast of villagers straight out of Miss Marple. Angel reluctantly befriends an eager puppy of a policeman, PC Butterman, who Shaun fans will recognize as Shaun's impossible doof of a friend Ed. Sergeant Angel is, of course, played by Simon Pegg, aka Shaun, who also wrote both Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. Pegg's Angel is so perfect as the straight laced, by-the-book cop that I realized, with some embarrassment, that Pegg is a really fine actor. I so much enjoyed his character of Shaun, the slackish try-to-do-well that I'd assumed he was playing himself.

As in all great cop movies, there is of course something nefarious and sinister going on, and Sergeant Angel must fight to get his laissez fair colleagues to listen to him. ("Have you ever wondered why the crime rate is so low but the accident rate is so high?") And as in all of the best buddy cop movies, Angel and Butterman forge a friendship which improves both of them. Angel teaches Butterman the basics of policework, and Butterman teaches Angel the profound meaning to be found in Point Break and Bad Boys II. One of the great conceits of the film is that many of the scenes between Butterman and Angel are shot in soft focus close up, with poignant music playing in the background. There are no superfluous female love interests in Hot Fuzz, just the only meaningful relationship that matters in a buddy cop movie, that of the buddies.

After watching Hot Fuzz my brother and I had a long chat dissecting the difference between Hot Fuzz and other cop satire films like Police Academy, Naked Gun or Reno 911!:Miami. It's hard not sound airy faerie philosophical but I think the difference comes down to the soul of intent in the creators. Naked Gun is Satire with a capital 'S'. They're satirizing cop shows, cops, actors, Hollywood, cars, the audience, wind, rain and the seasons. It's the world according to Nelson Muntz. Let us point at things and go "HA HA" and see who laughs. Reno 911! is a spoof on the concept of the live action cop show, only it's the cops instead of the criminals who are the real freaks of nature.

Hot Fuzz is an homage to action films created by people who have watched them all, loved them all and would love to have starred in them all, but were burdened by the lack of not being born Keanu Reeves. Yes, Hot Fuzz contains every trademarked cop movie element, each one polished up and delivered with a soft focus shine. It's funny, but it's also an entertaining cop movie. There's some outrageously hysterical gore, like when a church steeple falls on a victim's head, but some worrying moments when some characters we have come to love may or may not be dead. In the process of satirizing the buddy cop genre, the makers of Hot Fuzz have created a damn fine buddy cop movie.

Sense and Proportion: A Parent's Guide to Film

My sister-in-law related to me an interesting incident that happened to her recently. She teaches singing to kidlets at an elementary school and recently decided to show them West Side Story. While the children were engrossed in the film, another teacher peeked in the room and saw Szilvia’s class raptly watching West Side Story, at which point she apparently flounced down to the head of the after-school program and complained. The children (third graders) could NOT watch this movie! The hero dies at the end! The head of the program came up to tell Szilvia she had to stop showing the movie. Szilvia was dumbfounded, but the piano teacher in the class recovered enough to give the program head what for. “Do you REALIZE this movie is a CLASSIC??” Do you REALIZE it was written by LEONARD BERNSTEIN and STEPHEN SONDHEIM? Do you REALIZE it is based on the most CLASSIC play in the ENGLISH LANGUAGE, written by SHAKESPEARE?”

I think it might have been great to also ask if he realized that the kids were completely enraptured and none of them were shrieking at the door or rocking themselves in a corner. (Make the singing ladies stop… oh please… make them STOP!)

One of my own earliest memories is listening to the West Side Story cast recording of the Broadway show with my Mom. I will always remember the album cover: red, with a dramatic black and white picture of Tony and Maria running down a New York sidewalk. My mother told me the story, and she did not edit the fact that Tony dies at the end, and yet I was unscarred. To my child self West Side Story represented all that was glamorous and sophisticated in life: New York City. Dancing. Twirly Dresses.

Truth is, when it comes to scarring memories of movies from my childhood, others rank significantly higher. Bambi (they shot his mother and burned his m**** f*** HOME!). The Wizard of Oz (freaking flying monkeys! Don’t try to tell me - or at least my five-year-old self - freaking flying monkeys aren’t a sign of the Apocalypse). One excruciatingly early Saturday morning my parents awoke to the sound of me screaming at the top of my lungs. They rushed downstairs to find me watching Lassie, who was in a burning barn, trying to save that idiot accident prone Timmy. I also was not fond of The Three Stooges, or I Love Lucy; Stooges for their unconventional dispute resolution techniques, Lucy just for getting herself into those freaky, humiliating jams. The anxiety of wondering how she was going to extricate herself was just too damn much.

My parents were quick to take dramatic action when something in life upset me. When I flipped out at The Wizard of Oz, they took me out of the theater. When they found me watching Lassie in tears, they turned the TV off. Interestingly enough, they did not sue the movie theater for emotional damages or report the TV station to the FCC. Also interesting, I never needed therapy to recover from seeing The Three Stooges, despite their disturbing, violent, co-dependent relationship.

This nostalgia trip reminded me of another school-related movie memory from my childhood. We were shown a film (a real honest to goodness moving picture show, rather than a filmstrip… BING) about bus safety. This was back in the days when no one thought much about scaring the beejesus out of kids to make a point. They’d only recently stopped teaching us to dive under our desks in the event of a nuclear war. The plot of the film is thus: Kids are acting up on the bus. The bus driver keeps hollering at them to settle down. One kid takes a mouse out of a box and dangles it in the bus driver’s face, the driver screams, faints, and the bus crashes, runs off the side of a bridge, and impacts in an exploding fireball.

Actually, the exploding fireball is probably my imagination, but the rest is '70s educational film gospel. The movie totally and completely freaked me out. (Yes, I was a total wuss when I was a kid, and I was no fun at birthday parties either.) The next year at a new school we were gathered together in the auditorium for movie time, and I recognized the same movie starting. I found a teacher and asked her if I could please sit this one out, since I’d seen it before. I don’t think I admitted that I was terrified, but maybe she could see it in my eyes, so she said sure and excused me to the library. That was it. Kids find their own limits, and they tell you what they are. Reasonable adults respond in a sensible, proportionate manner.

Let us contrast this with another more newsworthy, or certainly more reported, story involving a class, a teacher, and a movie. A substitute teacher in Chicago showed a class full of eighth graders Brokeback Mountain. Now the school board is being sued by the family of one of the students, a twelve-year-old girl, for $500,000 for the ever popular “emotional damages”. The girl has been so traumatized by the experience she has had to undergo psychological counseling.

Let’s start with the teacher. What the hell was she thinking? I am more liberal than the next person, particularly when it comes to movies, but the point of film ratings is to help parents decide what they want their kids to see. No teacher with an ounce of sense could assume that most parents would be totally fine with letting their 12- or 13-year-old kids see an rated R-movie. (Let us put aside the fact that most of them have known how to override the parental control setting on the cable since they helped their parents set it up. We are talking about the sanctity of parental illusion.) Lest one wonder if she was confused about what she was showing this class of 12-year-olds, that perhaps she thought this film was a documentary about sheep farming, she screwed herself out of that excuse when she told the class, “What happens in Ms. Buford’s class stays in Ms. Buford’s class.”

I’ve pondered what might inspire a teacher to do something like this. Maybe she was tired of subbing at that school and was looking for a way never to be invited back. Certainly back in my reference desk working days we had dreams of things we would do on our last day, like answering every inquiry with, “What are you? Stupid?” It’s hard not to imagine an Edna Crabapple announcing that it’s time her class learned what the dating world is really like, starting Brokeback Mountain, and then escaping out the back door to Boca Raton. Truth is, the whole story sounds a lot like an episode of The Simpsons, up to and including the family now suing the school.

I think the teacher was an idiot. I don’t have issues with her being reprimanded or fired. She wasn’t striking a blow for gay rights or freedom of expression, and she has single-handedly justified all the oversensitive schools that have banned the use of film as a teaching tool. But she’s not the only idiot in the story, or even possibly the biggest. That prize goes to the grandfather and guardian of one of the 12-year-old girls in the class who is now suing the school for half a million dollars.

His argument is that he’s tried to protect his granddaughter from being exposed to this sort of lifestyle. Before the movie incident he had complained about books she was being asked to read, and his justification for suing the school is to teach them a lesson. The girl has been so scarred by seeing this film that kids in her class have discovered, no doubt to their delight, that they can get her to freak out just by humming the theme music of the movie. I try to avoid mocking children for their behavior, even if a particular child does appear to be behaving like a ninny, on the assumption that children are products of their environment. If this poor child was so scarred by seeing Brokeback Mountain that she needs therapy, that the mere theme song sends her into paroxysms of hysteria, then the blame can be placed firmly on the doorstep of her grandparents.

I also blame them for her inability to speak up while Ms. Crabapple played the movie. She could have told the teacher she’s sure her parents don’t want her to see this. She could have told the teacher she didn’t want to see this. She could have asked to be excused to the bathroom and declined to come back. I was eight when I approached the teacher and asked if I could be excused from Bus Carnage ’76. My parents raised me to be obedient and respectful to my teachers, but they didn’t teach me to be a passive ninny.

All in all, any common sense or sense of proportion is completely lacking from any of the adults in this story. Sadly I think this story could easily be a parable of life in the Aughts, where Shock and Awe have annihilated Sense or Proportion as desirable traits. Somewhere society got the impression that it is easier to raise children in a sensory deprivation tank than to explain things about society that might be uncomfortable.

When the world inevitably intrudes into this illusory sensory deprivation tank, it is easier to write angry letters or sue someone else then it is to explain to children that shit happens. Bad things happen to good people. People have different opinions but that doesn’t make them evil. You can’t always get what you want. Some cowboys are gay, and Tony dies at the end.

Speaking of signs of the unravling fabric of civilization, I have to say something about the recent "debate" about evolution shown on ABC's Nightline. Actually, I'm not going to discuss the debate, which was so far from newsworthy I imagine Ted Koppel dying just to roll over in his grave. I just have to discuss one moment in the "debate" (I'm sorry, I just can't use the word without adding quotes.) when actor Kirk Cameron help "prove" the fallacy of Darwinism by showing a picture of a duck with an alligator head.

Set aside for a moment what it says about a movement that would send a long-past-his-expiration-date former child sitcom star to make an intellectual argument upon their behalf. I simply must point out, for the sake of my own sanity, that a picture of a duck with an alligator head actually PROVES NATURAL SELECTION more than it proves God is behind the whole thing. You see, there are no ducks with alligator heads. Ducks with alligator heads... crazy... funny... nutty. Wouldn't work in real life. Wouldn't last very long. Their mouths are bigger than their stomachs for one thing, which is never a good survival mechanism. In the process of natural selection, weird creatures that make no sense never make it past the mutant embryo stage.

In fact, the only way a duck with an alligator head could come about would be if some almighty powerful being with sense of the ridiculous created it. That's why I firmly believe that God created the platypus, while leaving natural selection to do the rest. Therefore, to use the same masterful, razor sharp "debating" techniques spouted by Cameron and his sidekick: the only thing that could explain the existance of a duck with an alligator head is some all powerful being making up things just to fuck with our heads. Ducks with alligator heads do not exist. Therefore, an all powerful being that makes up things to fuck with our heads, hides dinosaur bones inside mountains for kicks, and provided us with reason and common sense so that hucksters calling themselves spiritual leaders could label them as sinful, does not exist.

Cogito ergo sum.

Books & Stuff

At the end of April I spent a week away at a training class (Please feel free to call on me for any and all of your interest based negotiation needs. After a week of training I feel like Gandhi.) After returning to the real world, I got very excited about writing a piece on graphic novels. I spent a week putting it together in my spare minutes. It was a beautiful work of art. Seriously Pulitzer Prize winning stuff. Then my computer at work ate it.

I'm not an eejit when it comes to computers. I looked all the obvious and non obvious places, but alas. It seems to have evaporated. I'm not quite ready to give up on it and re-write it (because it will be written my friends, one way or another), and I plan to pester the IT guys good and well tomorrow.

I went to not one but two movies last week, but unfortunately neither of them jazzed me enough to write much about them. They were Miss Potter and The Year of the Dog. Not great. Not bad. Not a complete waste of time, but neither rocked my world either. So, until the fabulous graphic novel article is found or re-written, and/or I see or hear something sock blowing, I thought I'd share with you some of the books I've been reading and enjoying lately.

Boomsday by Christopher Buckley -

Thanks to my high level, perks replete job in public libraries, I often find myself in possession of advance reader copies of books. After doing this job for ten (aack!) or so years, one even finds oneself getting quite blase about them. Oh, wow, another Sophie Kinsella clone about a sassy professional woman approaching 30 or 40 or (god forbid) 50 whose incisive intellect and wit frighten all the men around her to flee from her stupendous size six self to sub-zero sized model/actresses. How unique. Hey, if you want to be really original, why don't you put a picture of expensive Italian 3 inch heels on the cover? No one's ever done that before.

Every once in a while, though, a title comes through that does, in fact, still has what it takes to blow my skirt up. Boomsday by Christopher Buckley falls into that category. I eagerly read anything written by Buckley, and would have read it regardless of topic. But, as it happens, Boomsday is about something I can actually relate to: the culture clash between the Baby Boom generation and all that followed.

Buckley writes satirical novels with outrageous enough plots to be superbly entertaining but with enough true to life details, particularly of the swirling cesspool of Beltway politics, that you almost feel smarter for having read it, despite enjoying yourself fully.

The star of Boomsday is PR executive Cassandra Devine who, in her spare time, runs a blog devoted to agitating young generations against the massive Baby Boomer Social Security debt. Say what? Funny Social Security reform? In a not so subtle homage to Jonathan Swift, whose Modest Proposal suggested that the Irish could simultaneously solve the unemployment and famine problems by selling their children as food, Cassandra proposes that the government offer the ominous hordes of retiring Baby Boomers incentives for killing themselves. Her crazy idea gets the attention of an attention seeking congressman who wants to ride the ensuing publicity storm into the White House.

It's typical Buckley stuff. Funny, irreverent, bi-partisan heckling. It's not quite as good as Thank You For Smoking, or even Florence of Arabia, but it's a great weekend read.

Holidays in Hell by P.J. O'Rourke

I found Holidays in Hell at the local used bookstore and, after purchasing, discovered that it was inscribed:

To Bart, Good luck with the article (just make it up!) P.J. O'Rourke, Dec 1, 1989

Dunno who this Bart is, but I'm flattered to think that P.J. won't mind me taking the inscription as my own.

Reading Holidays in Hell is a nostalgia trip, or perhaps an acid flashback, depending on your point of view. The book, first published in 1989, is a collection of essays O'Rourke wrote during the '80s about various parts of the globe, near and far, and the various messes these parts managed to get themselves into, with and without U.S. help. During the time O'Rourke wrote the pieces in Holiday in Hell, the Axis of Evil was Russia-Iran-Russia, with Libya, China and possibly Korea waiting in the wings. George the Pere was the only Bush worth worrying about, and he wasn't even running things yet. Ah, the good old days.

We revisit some almost forgotten classic global shitstorms of yore. Anyone remember the U.S. bombing Libya? Anyone? Muammar al-Gaddafi? If you find yourself thinking, huh, whatever DID happen to that dude, well, I'll tell you. He's still running Libya, although apparently in a way that is now acceptable to the U.S., unlike the 80s when he ran around privatizing U.S. air force bases and nationalizing Libyan oil, pretty much the opposite of what the U.S. had in mind.

We visit cheerful global outposts like post-Marcos Phillipines, Contra-ville Nicaragua, North Korea when Pappy Il-Jung was still in charge and Epcot Center. Along the way O'Rourke drops his trademark acidicisms like "Is Nicaragua a Bulgaria with marimba bands, or just a misunderstood Massachusetts with Cuban military advisors?" He visits some places, like still Communist Poland and still Apartheid South Africa, which one can confidently think, wow, things sure have improved. Other places he visits, like Lebanon, Korea and Palestine, make one feel the wheels of progress grinding ever backwards.

O'Rourke is unapologetically crotchety and conservative, though it's the old school conservatism one hardly sees anymore, at least in avowed conservatives. Reporting on the momentous occasion of Gorbechov's visit to the United States in 1987, P.J. comments on the irony of the American left's love fest for Gorby:

"This is a bit of a mystery since Communists and Republicans both hate liberals. Regan believes that liberals should be deported to Russia, and Gorbachev believes they should be sent to Siberia. The two sides are in perfect agreement on this point."

My favorite essay in Holidays in Hell is "Among the Euro Weenies", detailing a month in 1986 when O'Rourke was stranded in Europe while trying, unsuccessfully, to fly to Libya just as the U.S. began it's bombing campaign. Instead of getting to hang out with his reporter buddies in a war zone, O'Rourke must spend a month in various European countries arguing with airline representatives and catching endless flack from Europeans for the bombing campaign. Although this took place mere months after the Russians almost successfully poisoned all of Europe with Chernobyl, the streets of most European cities were filled with protesters against the United States, and most conversations O'Rourke had were with people accusing him of unhealthy affection for John Wayne and American Imperialism; wanting to build McDonald's everywhere and itching to start World War III. (Never mind the fact that World War III would be antithetical to McDonald's plan to take over the world's food supply.)

I enjoyed this article because, in fact, it absolutely mirrored my own experience while traveling in Europe in 1992. At that time, all were in uproar over Gulf War, the first. McDonald's seem to be a particular bone of contention with many Europeans, which actually led to one of my most satisfying experiences. My friend and I were visiting a friend of hers and his brother, for the sake of jingoistic stereotyping, let's call them Hans and Franz. Hans was a lovely man and a gracious host, but Franz had United States issues. Many of these issues could be traced to his year as an exchange student at the University of Louisiana which happened to coincide with the shooting of Yoshihiro Hattori, a Japanese exchange student, by an overzealous homeowner. So, you know, a kinder person might cut him some slack, but by that point I'd been in Europe seven months and had spent seven months politely smiling while perfect strangers screamed at me about American foreign policy.

I should mention here that I've always been liberal. For the first presidential election in which I was eligible to vote, I walked two miles along a grassy highway median to vote for Dukakis. I'd decided that if George I had been re-elected in the '92 elections, I wasn't going to return to the United States. I wasn't a fan, but months of abuse from perfect strangers about forty years of U.S. foreign policy would be enough to make Barbra Streisand re-consider her party affiliation.

Anywho, Franz made all the usual whines about the evil US. During dinner out one evening a small child at a table next to us made a comment which made Hans laugh. Loosely translated what he said was "But grandma, television without a VCR is like television without cable". We all laughed, except Franz who grumbled "You see? THIS is what America has done to us." Without much thought I shot back "Well you didn't have to BUY it. Besides, I think if you look on the back of your TV, it was probably made in Japan." At that point, it was game on between me and Franz.

One day Hans & Franz took us sightseeing in a beautiful town called Trier. It was just around Christmas, Christmas Eve, or the day after, which meant that many things were closed. At a certain point, my friend and I decided that we were cold and hungry and would like to stop for a nosh, which we suggested to our escorts. Perhaps enraged at our desire to deviate from the day's scheduled activities, Franz snapped "I suppose you wish to go to McDonald's" with as much disdain as an angry German can muster. Uh, no. We just want to stop somewhere heated for a coffee, for chrissake.

We walked block after block past shops and cafes closed for the holiday, at which point we rounded a corner and, behold, the only place open on this day of days, this manger for lost souls, packed to the gills with people lining up out the door, was a McDonald's. In the words of Nelson Munz: "HA HA!" I've never been so happy to see a McDonald's in my life, before or since.

My point, and I do have one, is that reading P.J.'s essay made me realize that apparently, regardless of what may be happening in the world, Europeans are never so happy as when they are miserable about U.S. foreign policy. As someone who likes Europe and Europeans, it seems clear that our best course of action as a country is to continue pissing them off every way possible. In fact, it seems very likely that we will continue to piss them off, regardless of what we do.

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie Wars by Max Brooks

In 1984 historian Studs Terkel published The Good War: An Oral History of World War II. A collection of firsthand accounts of World War II from a broad cross section of American society, The Good War offers real insight into the war and its impact at home and abroad. It reveals some of the ugly truths about the war which history has tended to polish over, such as the massive racism facing many soldiers within the armed forces, and, in general effectively shows that while nations may wage wars, they are ultimately fought by individuals.

I will be the first person to admit how utterly bizarre it is that a book about the world under siege by zombies reminds me of nothing so much as The Good War, but there it is. The similarity is, I'm sure, not a mistake. Max Brooks has created a story told entirely through "interviews" with people from all over the world recounting their experiences with the horrible time when the earth was overrun by a nasty virus which transformed victims into the living evil dead. The conceit of the book is complete and seamless, from the introduction explaining the genesis of the book during the author's research for the United Nations' Postwar Commission Report to the grave review bites on the back discussing the importance of the work for future generations understanding of this horrible time.

Lest I make this book sound like some kind of tedious homework assignment, let me assure you that it is a (sorry, pun intended) scrumptious treat. The "realism" only adds to the creepy, compelling story tracing the plague's odd genesis (accidental or engineered?) in rural China to its terrifying spread to almost every continent, decimating populations, destroying civil order and unity and basically grossing everybody out. The zombies are perfect zombies: they're slow moving, lumbering, moaning, rotting corpses whose success lie in their overwhelming numbers, rather than any sort of tactical skills. They can't climb and have the ill luck of freezing in the winter, but they remain animated underwater, so don't try escaping by diving into the pool.

When it comes to understanding history, governments and military, Brooks has the details right. The world does not unite in face of this threat, but fractures. State of the art military weaponry fail spectacularly. The only way to kill these bastards is bashing their brains out, one at a time. To complete the verisimilitude there is even a website which allows visitors to measure their likelihood of survival during a zombie invasion. Mine is an uninspiring 36%, although reading the book I'm surprised it's not lower. Clearly I need to take up some kind of sword training, and perhaps move to a tree house.

The Namesake

Once in a rare while, I see a movie that simply takes my breath away; something achingly beautiful, so familiar it seems I know these people, or come to know them in the brief time in the theater. They keep on living after the credits roll, not in a tidy happily ever after way, but in a true, messy, lovely and painful way. Mira Nair has directed two films that fall into this category for me, Monsoon Wedding and now The Namesake.

The Namesake, based on the book by Jhumpa Lahiri, is a story about a family. Like every story about a family, it is actually many stories, the stories of each member of that family, together and apart. The beginning for one is the next chapter for another and sometimes, agonizingly, the last for yet another. It is the story of Ashok Ganguli, a man inspired by a grandfather’s gift and a horrible tragedy to move far from home. It is the story of Ashima, the lovely bride he takes with him, who struggles with desperate homesickness, but comes to love her new country. It is the story of Gogol, their son, raised with all the advantages of a life in American suburbia, who must come to terms with who he wants to be; an American boy with Indian parents or an Indian American? A dutiful son or his own man?

I’ve recently become enthralled with Showtime’s new series This American Life. The day after I saw The Namesake, I watched an episode of This American Life which included a story about a woman who was struggling to leave the Mormon faith without turning her back on her family. There was the most exceptional quote which seemed strangely relevant to the movie I’d seen the day before:

Choosing not to become the person your family expected is painful. You have to leave their world completely so you can make sense of your own life. But fate lures you back in whenever it can, to give you the chance to measure the distance between their world and yours, and see if its just as far as you remembered.


Gogol spends much of the film fighting that lure of fate, trying to broaden the distance between his world and his parents. Like many a young person, he discovers the hard way that a determination to be “not like” his parents is not sufficient to count as an identity.

Mira Nair is an amazing director. She find beauty everywhere; in the mad, vibrant, filthy streets of India or a non-descript cul de sac somewhere in American suburbia. Through the eyes of a newlywed wife, the landscape of a New York winter appears black and white compared to the world from which she has come. As she waves to her husband through a window as he trudges off to work in the snow, you feel the oppressiveness of that white open space upon her. It is as if he has left her to fend for herself on the moon. Fans of Mira Nair's work will recognize her touches, including an impromtu song and dance number which seems both out of place and perfect.

There is something so incredibly American about this story. Frightened young wives from every corner of the globe have stood in dingy American tenements, overwhelmed by mysterious questions like how to do laundry in this strange land. Unless you are full blooded Native American, somewhere in your history, you have an ancestor who did the same thing. Somewhere in your history, you have an ancestor who despaired of the Old World ways of their parents, struggling to understand why they would come all this way just to insist on eating their cereal with curry powder and peanuts. The further away we get from our original ancestors' trek to this country, the more we’re inclined to believe that we are somehow separate from the immigrant experience, when in fact America is a tapestry created by the immigrant experience.

This movie got me thinking about my own scrap of the tapestry, so I thought I'd end this review with my own immigrant roots, and a nod to everyone along the way who had dreams bigger than their original country could contain. My granny on my mom’s side was born in England. She came here with her family to Illinois, by way of Canada. She was an illegal immigrant until she reached adulthood and, though her parents were successful business owners, they lived in constant fear of being found out and deported. My granddad’s mother was from Holland, and I’ve still got a handful of distant cousins who live there. On my Dad’s side, I know less, except that we’re Heinz 57: Scotch, Irish, German… whatever they could pick up along the way. My grandma was born in Oklahoma, but headed West with her family during the Dust Bowl, just like the Joads.

What does your scrap of tapestry look like?

Gee Cardinal Krupke: An Ode To My Favorite Tyrant

It’s hard to know where, exactly, my bizarre affection began. Perhaps it was upon reading The Autobiography of Henry VIII, the novel, despite its title, by Margaret George. Perhaps it was during my college years when I majored in British History. Perhaps it has some connection to my life as a cradle Episcopalian. Regardless of its origins there is no escaping the truth. I love Henry VIII. He’s absolutely my favorite tyrant in all of history.


This affection has caused me no little embarrassment. I’ve found myself making the oddest arguments in defense of his wacky antics. I get cranky when people say he broke with the Church just to get a divorce. You know, it wasn’t just to get an annulment (not a divorce) from his first wife that he caused all that ruckus with Rome. He was standing up to Rome’s political manipulations and attempts to weaken England in favor of Spain. Truthfully, Henry was relatively pious and not a big fan of divorce, which is why he beheaded which is why he beheaded two of his wives instead of just divorcing them.

Like I said, the oddest arguments, the sorts that cause sprains. When a friend of mine heard they were beginning a series on Showtime about Henry, he rather crankily referred to Henry as, I believe, a psychotic sociopath. Well now really. That’s a bit much. He wasn't all that bad, just misunderstood. Deep down inside him there was good! (There was good! There was good! There was untapped good. Likeinside, the worst of him was good.)

Certainly Henry has had an ongoing image problem, particularly in Hollywood. You usually see the fat, boorish Charles Laughten version. Or the fat, boorish and whiny Richard Burton version. Or the executing his best friend Robert Shaw version. Most of his portrayals seem to involve gratuitous eating of turkey legs and copious amounts of “off with his head!!”-ings. Which isn’t to say that Henry wasn’t rather corpulent by the end, or that he didn’t tend to have people who irritated him killed (but seriously now, what sixteenth century monarch didn’t?). It’s just a bit one sided, like judging The King (the other one) solely on his Fat Elvis, television shooting days.


Even if you do think that Henry VIII was a psychotic sociopath (but seriously now, what sixteenth century monarch wasn’t?) you cannot claim that Henry led a boring life. Six wives. Many more female conquests. Untold number of dead and living offspring. Telling Rome to go ‘f’ itself. Dragging England from small dog to big dog status in Europe.  It's a shame that Shakespeare's play had to be the sanitized version, since a more factual representation would have given Macbeth a real run for its money.  It probably also would have gotten Shakespeare executed.  

Which brings us to Showtime’s new series The Tudors. I admit I was a wee bit excited when I heard about this series, excited enough that I actually changed my cable subscription from HBO to Showtime. Weeds. The L Word. Dexter. None of these shows, as interesting as they seemed, were enough to entice me away from my HBO. But a drama about young Henry? Be still my heart! Henry VIII could kick Tony Soprano’s ass eight ways til Tuesday. “Him and what army?” you ask condescendingly. Well his freaking army is what army!

After watching the first episode of The Tudors, I like what I’m seeing so far. Henry was a walking bundle of contradictions, which is honestly where much of his fame comes from.  He has come to represent both the best and the worst a monarchy has to offer.  He was an educated, learned patron of the arts, as well as a bruiser and an athlete. He appreciated humanist philosophy which suggested that the primary duty of a king was to improve the lives of his people, but he longed to build an army and kick whomever’s butt he could, primarily the French.

He fantasized about military victory, but backed more than one clever treaty with his enemies which avoided battle. He loved his first wife, but was an inveterate womanizer. He had deeply held religious beliefs and a strong sense of duty to God, but he wrested the Church of England away from Rome and pillaged the holdings of the Church in England. He loved his daughters, but almost destroyed his empire trying to get a son. He loved his friends dearly, until they failed him, at which point he would destroy them. He was all these things, fine and lousy, brilliant and terrifying, and The Tudors gets that.


The Tudors gives us Young Henry, as opposed to Old Henry, showing us rather clearly that Harry was at one point in his life hot. He didn’t get all that tail just because he was the King. Well, he probably would have gotten just as much if he’d been King Quasimodo, but he wouldn’t have gotten as much willing and enthusiastic tail. Like many a football player, age and injury eventually transformed muscle to fat, but when he was young, he was the bomb.

I’m not convinced that Jonathan Rhys Meyers is the best choice to play Henry, at least based on the fantasy version of Henry I have in my head. Don’t get me wrong. Rhys Meyers is hot. H-H-O-T-T.  Hot.  But Jon is a bit effete for Henry, despite his obviously sculpted biceps. He’s under tall, for one thing. Henry was known for being one of the tallest guys in the room, and despite scenes referencing the King’s very fine calf muscles (apparently calves were like the six pack of its day), I have seen no evidence of them so far. Plus, Henry was fair (his daughter’s Tudor red hair came from somewhere) rather than dark and smoldery. I suppose I always envisaged him a bit more like this, or perhaps this, or even this.  But Meyers does capture his charm and impetuousness, as well as his fierce temper.  And did I mention that he's HOT? 

Like all filmed adaptations of history, the show has got telescoping problems, bouncing liberally across time and space to cherry pick the interesting. But if we wanted reality, we’d be watching the History Channel, so shame on me, really, for noticing or comparing any of these things to my history books. So far, the show is darned entertaining, and Showtime has not let me or my favorite tyrant down.

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300 Spartans VS The Modern Media-cracy

300, based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, which was inspired by Gates of Fire by Stephen Pressfield, tells the tale of Leonidas, King of Sparta, who led 300 Spartan soldiers against the theretofore undefeated Persian army. At great cost the Persians won the battle, but ultimately lost the war, creating a turning point in world history. The movie has received mixed reviews both from people who wish to dismiss it as a video game brought to life and those who would like to wrest from it a modern political allegory.

Blah, blah, history, politics, blah! This movie kicks ass! It is entertainment of the highest order. By the time the first battle scene started, I was grinning ear to ear. I have not been as genuinely and joyfully entertained by an action flick since they shot up the marble lobby in The Matrix. When the movie ended, it is only because I am a grown mature adult that I did not bounce up and down in my chair and cry Again! Again!

“So how do you explain all the crappy reviews?” my brother asked me, based on my breathless adulation of the film. “I really have no idea,” was the best I could come up with.

The number of sources who are trying hard to drag modern politics into the film of a 2500 years past battle is growing. When it was screened at the Berlin Film Festival, Germans booed the film and walked out. The New York Times and Newsweek have both come out decrying the racist and politically insensitive subject matter. Now the President of Iran has joined in, declaring the film an American act of war on Iranian Culture.

Since 18 of the top 25 grossing films in Germany last year were from the Beast known as Hollywood, it’s hard to take German disdain seriously. Maybe they were late for a Leni Riefenstahl retrospective. As for the President of Iran, taking him seriously presumes that he is actually speaking to us. He’s not talking to us. He’s talking to the same group of people they got to riot over drawings of Mohammed in a Norwegian newspaper six months after they were originally published. They never saw those drawings. They’re never going to see 300. I doubt Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has seen it.

To the U.S. media-cracy, I can only offer this one thought: How arrogant are you? Seriously, how arrogant and self centered do you have to be to see American history reflected in every story? There’s a whole lot of human history, most of which has taken place totally without influence of the United States. In fact, it’s only been about sixty or seventy years that the rest of the world felt it was necessary to even invite us to the table.

Cinematographically speaking, the film is an artful combination of live action and computer animation, using the same techniques as critically lauded Sin City. Color is layered upon black and white images, creating something vibrant and unearthly, like something transmitted from Hades itself.

Adding to this effect is the main character, King Leonidas, played by Gerard Butler. Leonidas looks like a relief of the ideal Greek man rendered on an ancient Grecian urn, but then his handsome face will transformed into a mask of glaring eyes and gnashing teeth. The effect is unsettling and great for reminding us that Spartan culture was hardly a utopian one. Boys were taken from home at the age of 7 and beaten into soldiers. As we all learned in the story of Oedipus, weak infants were left on a mountainside to die. Spartans may be the heroes of this film, but that does not make them excellent role models, and the film does not whitewash this fact.

Butler is definitely an actor to watch. By that I mean he is definitely an actor I like to watch. I’d like to watch him chew gum, or tie his shoes. I first became aware of him in a sweet movie called Dear Frankie, which could not be more different than 300. He is, unfortunately, best known for playing the Phantom in Phantom of the Opera, a movie I tried, unsuccessfully, to watch just because it had him in it. My opinion of Phantom was really expressed best by SNL: “Phantom of the Opera is the best musical ever about a burn victim who rapes an opera singer.”  

Leonidas leads an army of 300 soldiers who are, among other things, r-r-r-r-r-r-ripped like Jesus. That’s 600 pecs and at least 1800 ab muscles for those of you who are counting, of whom I am not one, of course. That would be objectification, and wrong. The soldiers wear leather BVDs, red capes and gladiator sandals; an outfit that is totally practical for fighting and not even remotely gay.

The film has taken flack for being homophobic, in part because the Persian God King Xerxes is portrayed as being aggressively androgynous. While hardly historically accurate, the decision to portray him that way is a legitimate artistic choice. Ancient gods often had androgynous or hermaphroditic qualities, and the character definitely amps up the fantastical quality of the story.

Along with some really amazing action scenes, there is a secondary plot dealing with the politics going on back in Sparta. Leonidas and his wife, the unfortunately (yet historically accurate) named Queen Gorgo have a surprisingly complex relationship for a battle movie. I actually found myself wondering if they were overdoing the Grrrrrl Power bit while watching the movie, but then I looked it up when I got home. Apparently women in Sparta were unusually powerful compared to their contemporaries elsewhere. When the men are away at war all the time, someone has to keep things running.

Oh dear, there I go again with the history. For a wild action movie, they did include a remarkable amount of historically accurate detail, but it would be silly to call this history. In fact, one element of the story is the idea of storytellers sitting around a campfire, spinning a yarn that is intended to inform, inspire, and entertain, with emphasis on the latter two.  The story of King Leonidas and his band of Spartan soldiers has been told and retold untold thousands of times since the battle occurred, because it’s a great story. It makes me sad to imagine we've become unable to just appreciate a good yarn.  300 certainly creates a fantastic vision which does the tale justice.  I encourage you to leave your politics in the car, buy an extra large bag of popcorn and enjoy it.      

The Higher Power of Scrotums-Book Drives Librarians Nuts!!

As a music and film librarian, kids books are not my area of expertise. Lately, however, controversy has gripped the Library World over a kids book, and like the wreck of a clown car, it’s been impossible to look away. This particular controversy is about the use of a word. A word which, in the opinion of some, utterly negates any value of the story. Although the book, The Higher Power of Lucky, impressed the Newbery Award Committee enough to honor it, this word is making it impossible for some librarians to read the book aloud, to recommend it to children, even to carry it in their collections.

The word is “scrotum”.

The first I heard of this was a column in Publisher’s Weekly discussing the fact that certain library listservs were aflame with this nightmare. I had to re-read the article several times to confirm that the controversy is, in fact, about the actual word “scrotum”, and not the use of some other euphemism for the word scrotum more often found on made-for-cable series about cowboys or gangsters. Alas, the controversy really is about the word “scrotum”.

“Because of that one word,” said a school librarian, “I would not be able to read that book aloud.” Some complained that the use of the word was totally unnecessary. Some implied that there were many other choices the author could have used instead.

I like contemplating this plethora of words the author could have used instead of scrotum, which is the anatomically accurate name for a specific body part. None come to mind that are not on that aforementioned list of premium cable euphemisms guaranteed to get your average ten year old mouth washed out with soap.

Armchair editing like this drives me bonkers. “The author ought to have used this word instead of that word.” “The author used a word that was “unnecessary””, as if the selection of words, specific words in a specific order, is not the very definition of what it means to be an author. It’s like saying it was unnecessary for Picasso to use so much blue paint. It’s ridiculous to argue that an author used a word, any word, “unnecessarily”. They used the words that they used.

Under normal circumstances, it might have been years, possibly never, before I got around to reading this year’s Newbery Award winner, but fortunately controversy made reading it a vital necessity. One does not have to go far into The Higher Power of Lucky to find the word. It’s right there, on page one. Our heroine overhears a dramatic story about a man whose dog was bit on the scrotum by a rattlesnake.

If I’d thought the controversy was silly before, reading the context elevated it to positively asinine. We’re not even talking about a human scrotum, but a canine one, similar to any one of the millions presently on display in living rooms, yards and parks across the country. I had assumed based on the level of hysteria that the scrotum was perhaps doing something vaguely offensive or scatological, instead of valiantly withstanding the attack of a rattler. Considering the average dog’s propensity for doing embarrassing things to their privates, usually in public, this particular scrotum is positively heroic.

If the “controversy” had stopped with the Publisher’s Weekly bit, it would have been easily shrugged off. Unfortunately, what with all the concern over troop surges and military hospital failures and where oh God where on Your Green Earth shall Anna Nicole be buried, it was apparently a slow news week, and the scrotum controversy went national. The New York Times and Newsweek both picked up the story, leading to an explosion in scrotal related newspaper stories.

Many of the articles, like the original PW one, failed to mention the fact that the scrotum in question belonged to a dog. The New York Times article did have one woman insisting that this was yet another example of the “Howard Stern” effect on our country, where people just use nasty words for no reason but to upset good decent people. Comments like this always reveal more about the commenter than the commentated (like maybe they haven't read the book) , but what bothered me more was the thought that the people who actually wrote the articles had not read the book. How else to explain the inclusion of quotes like “you won't find men's genitalia in quality literature” without any kind of fact based alternative perspective? Either the reporters hadn’t read the book (which isn’t that long people) or else the reporters were more interested in la scandale than the truth, and we know that never happens.

For most librarians I know, this sort of thing is just embarrassing, like having a family argument broadcast on America’s Funniest Home Videos. Most librarians are not horrified by the word scrotum. Most librarians have had to clean much worse graffiti off of walls, books and furniture. Most librarians have larger concerns, like the threat of local, state and federal legislators conspiring to keep us from offering any kind of useful computer services to our patrons, but that’s a rant for another day.

In the midst of this controversy, a children’s book catalog was accidentally delivered to my inbox. The back cover promoted several cheerful looking kids books, including one which instantly grabbed my attention. I hurried over to the librarian in charge of buying children’s materials and begged her to add it to the collection. It's called Let’s Look at Animal Bottoms, and features a full color display of several elephant behinds on the cover.

Times like these I realize it’s probably for the best that I never became a Children’s Librarian. I feel I’m lacking some inherent diplomacy necessary to navigate the rocky shoals of children’s lit. My impulse to a scandal like the one over The Higher Power of Lucky is to organize an All Animal Bottoms story time, featuring classic stories like The Truth About Poop and Walter the Farting Dog. No doubt the Library would have some cranky parents on their hands, but I tell you what, if it were up to the kids, it would be a smash hit.