Tom Blog

Stayin' Alive--Technically, Anyway

Tom Block — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 11:50:00 GMT

It's been a while, I know--this cure for St. Vitus' Dance is taking a little longer than I thought it would--but I still haven't given up, not entirely, on this venture. It has moved to a new location, though, and any new content (when it comes) will be appearing here. I'd say it's worth your while to bookmark it...

Finally...

Tom Block — Sun, 20 May 2007 11:36:00 GMT

...the last of Robert Altman’s four greatest films have made it to DVD. When they came out it was inconceivable the day would come that you wouldn’t have to wait on the vagaries of rep house schedules or some film professor’s whims aligning with your own before you could see them. Now they’re there for all to see, at any time of day or night: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, and California Split. And the world’s a better place for it.

When accountability still meant something

Tom Block — Thu, 10 May 2007 19:18:00 GMT

I spent this afternoon watching the last half of something I forgot I even had, the 250-minute documentary about Nixon's second term simply called Watergate that BBC and The Discovery Channel put together about 15 years ago. I have about five documentaries and specials about the mess but this one is the mother of them all. That's partly because it isn't fixated on The Washington Post's role the way the others are—Woodward and Bernstein make an appearance alright, but they're onscreen just a tad longer than Tony Ulasewicz, and they get a helluva lot less face-time than Dean or McCord or that bow-tied dandy known as Archibald Cox. Another thing that makes it great is that the filmmakers somehow put all the subjects at their ease, with Haldeman and Ehrlichman in particular showing hitherto hidden human faces. Nixon himself is present only in the form of generous excerpts from the David Frost interview in '77, and when describing the meeting in which he fired Haldeman, Nixon describes his old chief of staff, spitting the words out as they come to him, “not as some Germanic...Nazi...stormtrooper,” which does pretty much nail the public's perception of the guy, but as a “decent public servant.” That last phrase might be stretching a point but Haldeman comes off well. With his hair grown out a tad and wearing a plaid shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of half-glasses, he comes across like an uncle at his favorite fishing lodge. And he's not alone. Ehrlichman, Liddy, Dean, Magruder, Colson, Mardian, Porter—damn near all of them—speak out with a surprising openness and lack of rancor, and the way their interviews are woven together makes us feel for once that everyone's telling the truth.

There are exceptions. John Mitchell, who died years ago, isn't on-hand, of course, but you get the feeling that even if he was he wouldn't have been interested in opening up to a film-crew for a documentary narrated by Dan Schorr. He's the one who bluntly told the Ervin Committee that he considered Nixon's re-election so important because of “what the other side was putting up” that he would've done anything to accomplish it, and he's also the only one who failed to see the humor in his exchange with Sam Dash. When Dash asked Mitchell why he hadn't thrown Liddy out of his office while Liddy was describing one of his hare-brained (and highly illegal) schemes, Mitchell, pipe in hand, evenly replied, “In retrospect, I wish I hadn't just thrown him out of my office, but that I'd thrown him out of the window.” With a professional's timing Dash let the answer hang in the air before prefacing his next question with, "Seeing as how you did neither...” As the caucus room rang out with spontaneous guffaws, the camera zoomed in on Mitchell who, judging by his expression, looked as if he were trying to decide whether it would be more fun to kill Dash by roasting him on a spit or throttling him with his bare hands.

Still, the man who comes off the ugliest isn't named Mitchell or Haig or even Richard Milhouse Nixon. It's E. Howard Hunt, the reputed "spymaster” who did us all a favor by dying and going to Hell just a few short weeks ago. Hunt, it will be recalled, led the planning for the break-in along with his co-mastermind Gordon Liddy, and it was he who began squeezing his former bosses for hush money after his arrest. Hunt, too, appears in contemporary interviews, but where even the likes of Colson, Magruder, and Ehrlichman mellowed with age, and managed to recognize the tawdriness in their own souls somewhere along the way, Hunt gazes into the camera as one might regard a bottle of cyanide as he talks about the "considerations" he felt were due him. It's a disgusting, even disquieting, performance.

Green Eggs and Zim

Tom Block — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 23:33:00 GMT

One of the more knowing—and ticklish—appreciations I’ve seen in a while: Dylan Hears a Who. “Miss Gertrude McFuzz” especially recommended.

You Can Get Anything You Want...

Tom Block — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 10:55:00 GMT

In the couple years surrounding our last year of high-school all we did was drive around town every night, getting stoned and talking and finding (usually) innocuous ways of getting into trouble. Since the "getting stoned" part was de rigeur, we wound up frequenting, on a more or less rotating basis, a handful of households that usually had some stash lying around. John and Suzy Littlejohn*, along with their three young kids, made up not just one of the most welcoming of these households, but easily the most comfortable one. They owned a house in Houston's Montrose District, a rambling two-story affair that reeked of comfort and roots, and we wound up there at least once a week. It was my sister, Polly, who introduced me to the Littlejohns (God knows where she met them), but since she was a couple years older than I was chronologically (and a lifetime older than me in terms of maturity) she ran with her own crowd of friends. (There was a period of time where Polly and I ran into each other more at the Littlejohns' than we did in our own home.) But usually it was me and Glenn and Dennis, or some subset thereof, who'd show up unannounced on their doorstep. John and Suzy were in their mid to late 30s, almost a generation away from us, but their open-door policy dictated taking in everyone, both the river of friends that flowed through the place as well as these scrounging little long-haired rats who came to scarf down the remnants of that night's pot of chili and then get high on their pot or hash and zombie out on the livingroom floor while the stereo blared away. Suzy had a frizzed-out mop of hair that tentacled out in every direction, and tended to wear tent-like dresses stamped with African prints that pooled out around her legs when she put her feet up on the couch, while John (who supported the family by working as an architect) looked like George Carlin in his glory days, only with a slow, considered, ruminative way of talking—a trait I initially took as a sign of maturity and wisdom.

The kids were young enough that they were always in bed by 9 or 10, leaving us free to stay up all hours of the night, listening to music and talking, talking, talking. In the early years a lot of it was about the war and Nixon, but in time the conversation revolved more and more around books and movies. John and Suzy could talk about that shit, too, though Suzy was the more knowing and curious one of the two: when Glenn and I came in raving one night about some movie we'd just seen called McCabe & Mrs. Miller, she got up without a word and put on The Songs of Leonard Cohen while we sat there with our mouths open. In high school my bond with Glenn was galvanized by "Howl," Desolation Angels, and some of the other Beat tracts, but eventually we fell under the baleful influence of the Modernists—a development that doubtless elevated the level of our conversation, but which also hardened us, and made us haughty and impatient with lesser work. Sometimes we were making a legitimate point, but more often we were just being a pain in the ass. The only thing is that the air was full of "lesser work" at the time. It was the age of The Eagles and of the disaster-movie cycle and of Jonathan Livingston Seagull; the cultural landscape was so overloaded with crap it was possible to overlook the fact that American cinema was enjoying its last renaissance.

All of this only served to irritate us that much more. I don't even remember what movie it was now, but one night John Littlejohn offered up the earth-shaking opinion that such-and-such a film may not have constituted a crime against humanity, and Glenn and I went to work on him. What-about-this, and What-about-that, we kept asking him, growing a little more unsparing with the adjectives we were throwing out with every swing of our whipsaw. We thought we were just having another conversation, so we were surprised when Suzy suddenly got up, crying, and ran out of the room. Somehow that night ended with Glenn and me sitting up with her in the kitchen while she explained to us, decidedly not in so many words, that John, lovely man that he was, just wasn't very bright. "He tries so hard," Suzy said, and I think now she was asking us not to lean on him like that again. What it all meant was that John's deliberate way of talking wasn't wisdom at all—it was just simple insecurity about saying the wrong damn thing. Listening to Suzy I had the same feeling you get the first time you see your parents fail at something and you realize they're just doofuses, too, a comparison all the more fitting because it was the first chink of any kind I'd ever seen in the armor of their marriage.

A little time passed, both Glenn and Dennis moved away, I got a girlfriend and a life of my own, and I didn't see the Littlejohns anymore. Then came the news from Polly that Suzy and John had separated and were getting divorced—an idea that would've upended the world had it come a couple years earlier—and that John was drinking too much. Suzy kept the Montrose house for a couple more years before moving her brood to Colorado, where Polly, in her peripatetic journeys around the Southwest, would often see her.

Finally one night around '78 or so, I ran into John in Cactus Records. He looked like he was 65 and he was completely shit-faced, stumbling around the aisles and hanging onto the bins to stay upright. I wasn't in a good place either then—a horrible breakup had left me a dilapidated, weak-willed mess—so I took John up on his offer to have a drink at his house. His "house," I call it—actually it was a dingy one-bedroom apartment, nearly bereft of furniture and a long ways down from the warm paisleys and throw-pillows of his old home. We sat at a bare kitchen table, and he kept pouring so I kept drinking, especially since he was eager to have someone else who'd recently been dumped beside him. He launched into a couple anti-Suzy tirades that he almost immediately took back, but then out of the blue he remembered that night and he turned his guns on me. Whatever sketchy camaraderie we'd developed in the previous hour evaporated as he started telling me what superior sniveling snots Glenn and I had been, and on he went until he was blaming the breakup of his marriage on a couple of pretentious twenty-somethings. I sat and listened to it for a while before I finally bailed, and when he called stone-cold sober a week later to see if I wanted to get together for a drink, I begged off. I never saw him again.

Or Suzy either, for that matter, though Polly's relayed the news about her over the years. Those kids we used to shoo upstairs are pushing 40 now, and Suzy somehow landed on a ranch of her own, and nobody knew for sure where John was. Then, on this last Wednesday, Polly emailed me to say that Suzy had gotten intestinal cancer that jumped down her hip bone and into her leg, before killing her a couple of weeks ago. The news hit with only a distant thud, but I didn't have to think very hard before I remembered all those good nights we had, along with those couple of bad ones. Any lessons I might've learned from knowing the Littlejohns I either learned or didn't learn 30 years ago, and there's nothing else to say about it now except thanks for the weed and the chili, Suzy. For the most part I had a really good time.

* - an alias

A Few Words from Our Sponsor

Tom Block — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 10:28:00 GMT

Thanks to my friend Chris Lanier, I wound up appearing on Steve Lambert's show on UC Davis' radio station a couple weeks back. (Chris can also be heard on the program, recounting with Homeric splendor the mighty Battle of the Pine Needles.) Steve's ostensible theme was "Fist Fights and Violence" but that didn't stop me from saddling up some of my pet hobbyhorses—Peckinpah, The Sopranos, the corruption of feminism—and riding them into the ground, thus boring an audience much wider than my close circle of friends for a change. You can hear the show on Steve’s website by scrolling down to Episode 10 and clicking on the sound bar. There aren't any earth-shaking insights, but I did I get to tell a couple of my circus stories (though I unconscionably neglected to give shout-outs to the two horses I handled, Pancho and Frosty), and Steve did a really nice job with the editing. That post about Dority's fistfight also got cannibalized for a contribution to The High Hat a couple of issues ago. That issue was intended (in part) as a tribute to Robert Altman (who died unexpectedly about 24 hours after it came online, making me think that a special issue about Dick Cheney might be in order), and also includes my take on California Split—still a piece of relevant (and hilarious) filmmaking 30+ years after the fact.

On "A Two-Headed Beast"

Tom Block — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 01:47:00 GMT

Anyone who’s ever been in a fight remembers it forever. Those of us who don’t like to fight, who never really learned how to, see the world of violence as a foreign place whose customs we hope we never have to get the hang of. I’d rather—much rather—live in a war-zone than ever get into a serious fight, one where the guy isn’t trying to merely beat me but take me apart with his hands. I spent my seventeenth summer traveling with the Ringling Bros. Circus, and practically all of the guys I worked with (we looked to the livestock) had run out on something—a bail-bond or a family, alimony payments or parole. They were stupid and listless creatures, uneducated, often drunk, and getting old fast. They fought over anything or over nothing at all, in horrific little set-tos that never lasted long before someone was hurt. There were no schoolyard shoves or who-sez-you-sez preliminaries leading up to the violence—it just naturally flowed from the realization that some disagreement hung in the air—and it always ended with someone being overwhelmed both physically and psychologically, which is a crushing thing to see. One fight, fought over a horse's location on the picket line, concluded with the big, naïve farmboy we called “G.I. Joe” splayed across the horseshit and hay, his nose spurting blood, his hands raised in surrender, and screeching for mercy as his opponent towered over him, spitting demeaning obscenities into his face while threatening to wallop him again.

I suppose that’s why movies never get fistfights right—they’re just too ugly, too painful—so we turn them into entertaining little agons where punches sound like a wet washcloth hitting the bathroom floor instead of human bone breaking against itself. And yet violence is all the rage in our movies—without it most films wouldn’t know how to end. It’s so pervasive that even an otherwise likeable movie such as Something Wild has to end with Ray Liotta taking a knife in the guts. And of course Liotta must die from his wound—without that assurance the audience would exit the theater with misfiring synapses, half-consciously alarmed he may somehow escape, recover, and return to finish his bloody mission. All of this formula comes in a Jonathan Demme film about a man losing his conformist ways, a theme that served a dozen Cary Grant comedies without once boiling over into bloodshed. One of the reasons I’ve always admired the Robert De Niro-Charles Grodin buddy-picture Midnight Run is that it foils our expectations of violence after preparing us for the worst: once the heroes, cops, and villains have gathered for a showdown in the Las Vegas airport, the movie ends, not in a hailstorm of exploding squibs, but in a confrontation both comical and, for one moment, intensely suspenseful, providing the kind of perfect catharsis that Hollywood ought to be able to churn out in its sleep.

It’s remarkable to me that after so many years and so many movies that employ violence, I can think of so few American films that do justice to the subject. It only gets worse as time goes by, what with the villains still going up in a fireball that inspires a dryly intoned wisecrack, and the heroes still falling for tricks that were musty before vaudeville died. It makes one almost giddy with gratitude when movie people actually act like people. I felt like throwing a party the first time I saw Key Largo, where Edward G. Robinson, having spent the movie establishing himself as an arch-criminal of nearly Hitlerian malice and cunning, attempts to deke Humphrey Bogart in their endgame. “Okay, Soldier, I’m coming out. I ain't got no gun,” he yells as he slithers out of the fishing boat’s cabin, a pistol hidden by his body. When I saw Bogart peering down through the hatch, I was ready to throw my beer at the TV—I knew he’d ultimately win the showdown but I was positive he’d fall for the old ruse in the meantime—but no. As “Johnny Rocco” hove into view, Bogart simply lifted his gun and fired a shot into him without a moment’s hesitation. And when Robinson, staggered but not downed by the shot, continued to move, Bogart let him have it again, and then again.

Even rarer than the moments that violence is represented realistically are those when it’s rendered with an aesthetic point in mind. After Seven Samurai, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch (still the Rosetta Stone of cinematic violence), and a handful of miscellaneous killings in lesser pictures, it’s hard to think of films or TV shows whose violence was done well enough to make it stick to our ribs—to really affect us. Terrence Malick’s Badlands is rife with brutal killings but nothing in the film touches the moment when Kit, the bored, half-bright sociopath played by Martin Sheen, locks a hapless young couple in a storm shelter, sticks his revolver between two of its boards and blindly lets go a couple of rounds, then asks his girlfriend, “Think I hit ‘em?” Francis Coppola’s instincts as a storyteller were never sharper than in The Godfather Part II when he thought to have the thickheaded thug Don Fanucci touch his chin in bewilderment at an apparent marvel—a darkened lightbulb in his hallway—just before Vito Corleone guns him down.

The Fanucci killing is a keeper because it comes at the end of a sustained sequence that follows Vito as he stalks Fanucci’s leisurely stroll down Mulberry Street through the Feast of San Gennaro. An incredibly suspenseful sequence, suspense isn’t its only point; it’s drawn out so long we feel a welter of emotions as it progresses, culminating in the moment when Vito applies the coup de grâce by shooting Fanucci in the mouth, a moment made horrific by being shown in close-up, but which is split by a feeling of relief because Vito has so much of our sympathy. Hitchcock, of course, was the master of sustained mayhem: in (at the very least) Sabotage, Strangers on a Train, Psycho, Torn Curtain, and Frenzy, he crafted long, incredibly detailed sequences that end in violent deaths whose aftershocks play on our nerves after the movies have ended.

And yet considering the absolutely incredible amount of violence in our movies, so little of it is memorable in the way that, say, William Holden shooting down the German officer to kick off the final bloodbath in The Wild Bunch is. Our filmmakers tend to care only about body counts, without ever following through on their punches or actually affecting us emotionally with their maimings and gorings, which is surely the only legitimate excuse for such bedlam to begin with. In Chinatown we never quite recover from seeing Jack Nicholson’s nostril bisected by Polanski’s switchblade before the movie is barely a quarter old, while in Die Hard and the Bruckheimer movies bodies are stacked up like cordwood, yet no one in the audience thinks of choking on their popcorn. It’s unreal.

So it was with something like gratitude that I took in Dan Dority’s fight with Captain Turner in the fifth episode of this season’s Deadwood. I’ve been meaning to write something about the show here for months, but it seemed there was little to say that hadn’t already been said. (And besides, as you’ve noticed, I haven’t been posting about anything here.) But the Dority scene is the real deal—the realest deal I’ve seen in years. As a piece of cinematic storytelling, for intertwining character with action, for capturing physical exertion and the terror of combat, and then the exhaustion of death, it has few peers. Even for a show so accomplished as Deadwood it’s a tour de force.

That isn’t to say that watching the scene is a pleasure; it’s far from that. It had come to me only earlier in the week how much I’d cottoned to Dority and W. Earl Brown’s work in the role, a realization born of the fact that David Milch and his writers had set Dority on an unavoidable collision course with Turner, an Old West version of Oddjob whose indomitable mien made him seem the inevitable victor in any encounter he might face. Dority, with his paunch and shoulder-length hair, is like your older hippie brother who’s gone bad, but his relative innocence (at least when compared to Al Swearengen or Cy Tolliver) and his sunny drawl take much of the moral stink off of him. Also, as Swearengen has had to evolve, so have his men, even if they didn’t know why or that they’re doing it at all.

But George Hearst’s appearance, and his insane plans, seemingly ripped from the Book of Revelations, to destroy the camp if it won’t succumb to his will, forces Swearengen and his confederates—including that yang to his yin, Seth Bullock—to backslide a little, and maybe a lot. For a villain in a western Hearst’s motives run deep, so deep as to be unfathomable even to Swearengen, who’s carved out his place in the world by correctly divining his opponents’ next move. Hearst understands that what will hurt Swearengen far more than merely killing his right-hand man is to make the killing a protracted and very public one, indelibly stamped by his own hand, and in that sense Dority and Turner each are shadowed by a tragic cloud—both men, defined by their loyalty to their bosses, must go through with the fight just to sustain their identities.

Brown has stated that Milch said he wanted the fight to have three qualities: 1) an absence of fistfight clichés (no roundhouse punches or people thrown through store windows); 2) a rolling rhythm, gaining in intensity just when it seemed to be slowing down; and 3) something he’d never seen before. It’s that second quality which really defines the fight, which in memory seems to occur in a mere handful of set-ups even though it’s nearly five minutes long. The sequence in fact does have several cuts, but none of them are for the sake of flashiness—they simply propel us to a better vantage point of the convulsive action, whether we want to go or not. The fight itself plays just as a fight between practiced, burly, and motivated fighters would, with the deadlier, larger Turner having the advantage from the first second of contact. The men fight in such close quarters that it’s hard for either to land a solid blow, and the first big turning point comes when Turner headbutts Dority, then grabs Dan’s cheek between his teeth. The bite hurts but the headbutt is a true howler; you see how it instantly dazes, and frightens, Dority, and throws all the advantage to Turner’s side. Dority spends most of the rest of the fight just trying to escape with his life, two or three times crawling away, pathetically, like a wounded animal, and each time Turner comes after him, making his life a little worse with each return. At one point Turner hauls Dan to his feet and strangles him from behind, and through the snot and blood Dan spits into the wheeling sky we see Swearengen staring impassively down from his balcony.

The sequence wouldn’t be what it is if not for what comes next. Turner drags Dority to a mud puddle and forces his face down into the water, and holding it there, glances up to where Hearst stands on his “veranda,” and in that moment Swearengen quietly lowers his head, in anguish and in concession, now that it looks that his man has lost, and that his best friend will be killed. When the creative team of The Sopranos killed off Adrianna La Cerva two years ago, out of a delicacy of feeling for us (and perhaps for her), they let her crawl entirely offscreen before Silvio Dante pumped a shot into her head. But Swearengen’s redirection of his gaze seems to confirm that both the worst and the unthinkable are about to happen: the worst being that his power is about to be stripped away in a single stroke, the unthinkable being that a man we care about is about to be dispatched, in conditions so squalid and humiliating as to be grotesque, before our eyes.

It’s that motion of Swearengen’s, that downward tilt of his head without any change in his expression, that got to me. I don’t know fully why, though I’m sure it has to do with how the show’s relationships are made so concrete and believable that we can sense with unusual particularity how all of these people feel about each other. Swearengen’s history with Dority has been doled out to us in dribs and drabs—we know, for instance, that they cut the lumber for The Gem together. When Dority’s face is in that water, Swearengen is at risk of passing with him. From his point of view he’d have no leg to stand on if Dan were killed; Dority’s drowning would only finish what Hearst had begun by cutting off Swearengen’s finger. And Ian McShane has never been finer in the role than in his scenes leading up to the fight, when Swearengen desperately tries, without success, to suss out Hearst’s intentions—“What's in his head, I cannot fucking find in mine”—while pretending to his allies that he’s only working by his own timetable. Al Swearengen may be nothing but a sacred monster, and but for sheer naked circumstance he and Dority would be child-killers, but in this one moment none of that matters. Two men’s lives, and all of their labor, can be seen vanishing into that oily mudhole.

Leaving the kicker—presumably, the thing Milch has never seen before. Eye-gouging was a fairly frequent turn in frontier fights so it couldn’t have taken much labor to realize that popping out the Captain’s left eye was the right way to decide the fight’s direction once and for all. But before it comes there’s one last crisis: Turner smacking Dority’s skull against a rock, once with a thud, once with a sickening cracking sound, facing us again with witnessing what at that moment is the last thing we’d witness. But if Dan’s body is beaten, the look in his eye as his fingers spider across, and then dig into, Turner’s face is focused and deliberate, and when the Captain rolls off of him, one eye now dancing at the end of its nerves and his arms convulsing so rapidly that it seems for a second they’ve increased the film speed, Dan, like Bogart looking down on Edward G. Robinson, knows it’s neither the time nor the place for self-destructive pity.

Technically the scene’s a bloody marvel. For one thing, whatever Brown’s makeup artist makes on the show, it can’t be nearly enough: by the end of the fight, his mouth dripping ropes of saliva, his face split and bruised, his hair and clothing slathered in blood and grease and mud, Dan looks like a caveman who’s been blindsided by lightning. The sound design, too, is a thing of beauty. Except for a wagon rolling past at the beginning and the heavy thuds of the men’s blows, there’s barely a sound in the entire five minutes—only a grunt here, a murmur there from the townspeople watching or strolling past. The glaring absence of mood music gives the fight a fluid but fully shaped form—we can clearly retrace the action in all its vigor the second it ends. And in the end we're left with the sound of Allan Graf’s indescribably ghastly howls after the gouging, at least until Dority takes his cudgel-like fire log to the back of Turner’s skull. We don’t see that last bit of violence, and barely even hear it, coming to us as it does from Al’s distanced perspective on the balcony, just before he flips his toothpick over the railing and goes back inside. After everything that's come before, it’s a blessing to have things end with a whimper.

True Story

Tom Block — Fri, 24 Feb 2006 01:35:00 GMT

Dave G., a friend from the bar, went camping with five friends north of Reno last weekend despite some (seriously) inclement weather. On Sunday four of the friends were off somewhere, and Dave and Matt were alone shooting target practice when all of a sudden a large white dog stumbled over the ridge. It was a male springer spaniel, and he was skinny as a rail and his muzzle was all scabbed and bloodied like something big had been biting down into it, and he had a wild look in his eye as he came tramping into the campsite as if he couldn’t believe he’d actually found some people after all this time. He slobbered down the water that Dave and Matt gave him, but when they tried to feed him the only food they had, which was a bag of salted pretzels, he couldn’t even get them down—Dave said they just slid back out the sides of his mouth. He spent the next 24 hours curled up like a donut, with his nose tucked entirely up between his hind legs, but on the second day he sat up and started looking around. By then he’d gotten something to eat and the guys had scrubbed the blood off his nose and checked out the cuts on his face, and by two days later when the trip was over, he was acting like a normal dog.

He had tags on him that included a phone number, but Dave and his buddies hadn’t been able to call because they couldn’t get a signal for their cell phones from the campsite. When they got out of the mountains, though, they called the number and sure enough got the mutt’s owner. The guy and his girlfriend had lost the dog two weeks earlier in the mountains, and had had to turn around and give him up for lost after he’d run away. Two full weeks, that’s how long this dog had been wandering around the foothills of the eastern Sierras in early February, and in that time he’d wandered either two hundred yards or twenty miles—who knows?—before he came over a rise and saw a couple of sympathetic human beings staring up at him. The owner had to work or something so his girlfriend came to retrieve him, and when she showed up the dog immediately recognized her and started barking his ass off in her direction. (I can only imagine what he had to say to his actual master.) Anyway, it was beautiful the way Dave told this story to me. He did it just step by step, drawing me off-guard by talking about the target practice and so on before describing the sight of this horrible looking mutt materializing on the hilltop, and only very gradually did he make it clear that the dog not only would survive his ordeal but would be reunited with his grieving owners who couldn’t believe they were getting a second chance with him, and would finally get to go home to the place which the whole time must've been just simmering like a mirage on the back-burner of his brain.

Dem Bones, Dem Bones

Tom Block — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 18:17:00 GMT

A couple days ago a local big-time criminal defense attorney found his wife’s body in their home – she had the ol’ multiple blunt trauma to the head thing going – and the TV media here, smelling another O.J./Laci epic in the offing, have gone absolutely nuts. They lead off every newscast with the story (what Iraqi referendum? what fascistic special election?), refer to the victim exclusively as “Pam,” keep reminding us of the money factor by endlessly re-running chopper footage of the Xanaduesque hilltop mansion that the couple was building, bring on FBI profilers whom they then machine-gun with leading, lurid questions (“Does the fact that Pam was in her T-shirt and panties indicate that she knew her attacker well?”), and otherwise openly flirt with the line between showing proper sympathy for a grieving husband and accusing the bastard of outright murder. I’ll probably never mention this case again, but just know that for the next year or so I’ll be banging my head against the wall whenever I stumble across the 10:00 news.

Batty

Tom Block — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 11:38:00 GMT

I actually wrote the following at about this time last year, but anyone who follows these things knows this morning how relevant it still is, even in its sorry unfinished state:

Ten years from now I doubt I’ll remember exactly how it was that I managed to miss practically all of the Red Sox’s clinching victory and a full lunar eclipse on the same night—I just hope I remember that it was for a very good reason. As it was, the Red Sox’s four-game sweep of the Series came as an anticlimax after all the years of haplessness, so much so that the fourth game was barely over before the announcers were asking, “Which is the next cursed team?”

I wish I could claim something so redolent with mystery as a curse for my Astros. Everyone seemed happy that by dispatching the Braves in five games they finally managed to win a postseason series for the first time in the franchise’s 43-year history. The Astros’ problem, though, isn’t just winning any series, but the LCS in particular. They’ve been there twice, in ’80 against the Phillies and in ’86 against the Mets, and both times they were mercilessly mangled and ridiculed before being rejected by the mirthless gods of baseball. It doesn’t matter that in both cases their opponents went on to win the World Series; nor does it matter that both series (still in the old five-game format) were memorable for their high-anxiety theatrics. Game Four of the ’80 NLCS was a baseball anti-gravity house, rife with slapstick adventures on the basepaths, a momentum-turning play which, although it could only have been a single out or a triple-play, was instead deemed a double-play by the umps after they huddled for a 15-minute strange interlude, and a play in which the Astros leftfielder, rearing back to throw the ball, had it roll through his fingers behind his head before completing his full-armed throw to the infield, like a Little Leaguer faking out his teammates. (It was at this point that my buddy threw up his hands and yelled, “Do these jokers even want to win this game?”) Despite their own miscues and the calls against them, the Astros held a two-run, eighth inning lead with Nolan Ryan on the mound in Game Five, and still found a way to lose.

Against all odds, 1986 was even more painful. The Mets, a team just bursting with talent, had squashed their opponents all year long as they rolled toward what seemed like a predestined coronation. I was living in San Francisco by then and had become entranced by the young Giants, now under the tutelage of Roger Craig. The Giants had lost exactly 100 games in ’85 (I was there for Loss #100 on the last day of the season, when they’d gone down flailing at Dwight Goodin’s fastballs); Craig, sensing nothing to lose, loaded his lineup with rookies from the minor leagues, including Will Clark, who in his first major league at-bat lived up to his nickname “The Natural” by redirecting a Ryan fastball over the Astrodome’s centerfield fence. As it turned out the Astros and Giants, neither of whom anyone had picked in the preseason, battled it out for NL West title until a late September meeting between the teams at the Dome. Ryan threw a one-hitter to put the Astros within a game of clinching, leaving it to Mike Scott to finish things for the hometeam. Scott had been a journeyman pitcher until joining the Astros, where none other than Roger Craig, then the Houston pitching coach, had taught him the split-fingered fastball, and practically overnight the splitter turned Scott into a 20-game winner and the league’s most imposing pitcher. There was only one way Scott could top Ryan’s one-hitter, but by God he did it, throwing a completely dominating no-hitter that clinched the division. Suddenly it looked like the Mets had met their match... [Insert sound of gunshot here.]

grumble

Tom Block — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 08:49:00 GMT

The baseball playoffs are running a Bud Light ad that makes it look like Babe Ruth was actually pointing at a beer vendor in the stands when he supposedly called his homerun in the 1932 World Series. Even when Budweiser has a clever (or, in this case, possibly clever) idea, and they don’t overload it with smarm and jiggle, they still manage to offend just by being so damn lazy. You can tell that Woody Allen and Orson Welles had a blast capturing the look of old documentary footage in Zelig and Citizen Kane, but this Bud Light thing just looks like shit. The ad-men were content to just shoot it in B&W, cut out a frame here and there to make it jumpy, and draw some scratches on it that don’t even remotely look like the product of time. Maybe they’ll put more heart into it when they do an ad showing Morgana running out to give Ty Cobb a buss on the field...

I don't mean to jinx the man...

Tom Block — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 00:55:00 GMT

...but tonight I felt a real rush of sadness that Robert Altman just can't be with us that much longer.

Scales of Justice

Tom Block — Sun, 25 Sep 2005 00:05:00 GMT

There’s a little advertisement for a bail bond company that shows up on late night broadcasts of Jerry Springer and Cheaters which is so cheesy, both morally and aesthetically, that I feel rather happy whenever it comes on. It follows a doltish looking white guy who lip-synchs a cheap rap ditty as he’s being busted, booked, and then bailed out of jail, and ends with him arriving back at home where his mother is waiting for him, only “Mom” is a mustachioed black man done up in drag. (Whether this is meant as some jokey allusion to the actual penitentiary experience, I don’t know.) I’ve never managed to notice the company’s name because the whole thing throws my mental gyroscope too far off its axis, but the ads for another company, Aladdin Bail Bonds, emphasize just how serene the whole Gettin’ Busted experience can be. Their most memorable effort begins with an attractive, wholesome looking blonde—why, it could be you, missy—being rousted from her slumber by a ringing telephone and then crying out, “Ar-REST-ed!?” (Ma’am, may I ask just who it was you thought you were married to this whole time?) Cut to the Aladdin offices, where some bail-bondsman cum New Age guru brings the distraught woman a glass of water (aww...) and touches her comfortingly about the shoulder before shooing her off to bail Clyde Barrow out of the pokey. All of these ads treat the criminal act with the same non-accusatory indifference with which insurance companies view cyclones and hurricanes; in fact, they’re so impartial and highminded that their creative director probably deserves Rehnquist’s chair. Aladdin’s slogan—“We get you out. We get you through it.”—is the perfect enabler’s motto, glossing over as it does the traumas that grease its wheels. In their view it’s a given that your husband or son will be arrested someday, whether it’s for jaywalking or attempted murder who’s to say, and there’s no point in wondering how things came to such a pass. Bailing the hubby out of jail in the dead of night is just one of life’s grubby little chores, like cleaning up after the dog, that’s handled quite easily if you just bend your mind the right way.

Like a Hurricane

Tom Block — Tue, 13 Sep 2005 10:40:00 GMT

So in the space of two weeks Mother Nature has accomplished what the war in Iraq couldn’t do in two and a half years: first, forced George W. Bush to admit that he’s less than perfect, and then forced one of his staffers to pay the price for his mistakes. FEMA chief and personification of cronyism Mike Brown walked the plank yesterday, and whether or not he was forced to do it at sword-point, he delivered one last maudlin gust of the misdirected reasoning that’s made his name an international byword for incompetence. Insisting one last time that he’s been scapegoated by the media (but not by the president), he said, “The press was too focused on what did we do, what didn’t we do, the whole blame game. I wanted to take that factor out of the equation, so that the people at FEMA, who are some of the most hard-working, dedicated civil servants I have ever met, could just go do their job.” (See, he’s not just some historical footnote—he’s a martyr.) But it doesn’t take a Plato to suss this one out—the press was only doing its job when it “focused” on Brown’s appalling shortcomings, and it was clearly Bush who cut Brown’s legs off and then left him swinging in the winds of history. (Brown was unharnessed from his hurricane duties four days ago to decrease his visibility, after which that jerk Scott McClellan refused to give him a vote of confidence even when the reporters howled for one).

If not for the damage he’s caused Brown would be remembered as a two-bit resumé padder, and even with it I suspect it’ll take some googling a year from now to recall who the hell he was. But Hurricane Katrina has accomplished things even more remarkable than making Bush flinch. For one thing, a poll last week showed that 44% of the country was “ashamed” of the government’s response to the disaster. That’s right—ashamed. This, in a country where the biggest insult one person can lay on another is, “You don’t have any self-esteem,” where France and Germany are regularly hooted at for their effete and timid morality, and where the mantle of self-entitlement weighs so heavy on us that we continue gobbling up fossil fuels and our grandchildren’s capital without a second thought. Bush’s ratings have taken a further beating, with only 39% of the voters giving him a thumb’s up, as the man himself has looked hard-pressed to explain his own response to the storm. The largest issues of our day—the federal government’s responsibility for its citizens, the roles that race and class play in American society—are getting a more serious hearing in the media than they’ve had in years, and twice now on major network news shows I’ve heard the word “property” pronounced with a nearly Marxist disdain. We suddenly have our heads cocked quizzically to the side and one ear raised like dogs watching their masters do something funny. We’re almost cute in that position, for sure a lot cuter than the supine position we usually adopt in the face of the White House’s antics, and all it took was the trashing of one of America’s great romantic jewels. It’s happened here, in our backyard, and the people we see struggling in the muck look unmistakably like ourselves. The Department of Homeland Security has been exposed as a hive of grifters and incompetents, Bush’s take-charge reputation is in shreds, and for once Karl Rove can’t control the camera angles or redirect the anger. Whatever Katrina did to New Orleans, it’s done even more to America, something that Richard Clarke, Cindy Sheehan, and 1,800 ghosts working full-time couldn’t do. Even if the furor dies down before the World Series begins, it’s a breath of fresh air in the meantime.

The eye of Katrina, before landfall:

Tom Block — Fri, 09 Sep 2005 01:20:00 GMT

This Poor Cracker’s Land

Tom Block — Wed, 07 Sep 2005 15:29:00 GMT

…and…nothing, I guess. I stopped writing on that last post, feeling too dispirited to go on, and it turns out it was just as well. Virtually everyone I know who’s blogged about Katrina, and a lot of people who don’t blog at all, saw New Orleans the same way I did, as a giant brackish Petri dish where Social Darwinism, supply-side economics, and Compassionate Conservatism are finally free to breed with each other. Talk about your toxic soups. At least we know now why Republicans think that Big Government just messes things up—it’s because it does when it isn’t accompanied by a little thoughtfulness and compassion, which are not these people’s long suits. No one’s captured the nightmare of Bush’s America better than my friend Dana Knowles when she said, “Living under BushCo is like being trapped inside a Ponzi scheme run by the Manson Family.”

Now, if you’ve never seen this cocksucker Scott McClellan, today he bullshitted his way through another White House press briefing, parroting the operative Talking Point over and over again: “Now’s the time to help people, not play the Blame Game.” The Blame Game! See, it’s all just tiresome partisan politics, people trying to nitpick this president so he can't get it on with his compassion! In different conditions I might agree, but not here, not with this crowd, because George W. Bush and his friends live in a Never-Neverland of eternally deferred accountability. They know if they stonewall long enough people will either stop caring, lose track of the details and chronology, or both. (The White House has already floated the idea that the feds couldn’t move without a state of emergency being declared. The amazingly few non-amnesiac members of the press quickly noted that Blanco—and Bush himself—had done exactly that the night before Katrina made landfall.) I'd love to hear what the reporters say to McClellan when they get a couple drinks in them, even if I suspect McClellan knows better than to drink too much around them. McClellan is a Frankenstein stitched together from pathetic qualities, but the most pathetic of them all might be his “affable” way of occasionally acknowledging his adversarial relationship with the press with statements like, “I like and respect you all, and I don't take it personally.” Well, not even Scott McClellan is so goddam stupid that he can’t see that the tone and implications of the press corps’ questions, at least on the days it does its job, are a spit in the face to whatever shred of personal integrity he thinks is still clinging to him. You can practically see Karl Rove winding up the crank in McClellan’s side just before each briefing, and his status as a tool is so apparent that his greatest qualification for the job is that he doesn't seem to mind that fact. If he had an ounce of self-respect he’d be challenging Bush and Rove to a duel with pistols at dawn.

As usual the administration is talking out of both sides of its mouth at the same time. Just as McClellan is busy decrying the Blame Game, nearly everyone else is busy pointing fingers: at the locals who didn’t evacuate, at the (Democratic) governor and the (Democratic) mayor, at the (probably Democratic) looters, at all that gosh-darned water that came in with the hurricane (who'd a thunk it?), and at those reliable old stand-bys “red-tape” and “bureaucracy.” An interesting sidebar to the whole mess is the Name Game: what to call the victims. Last week most news reports were calling them “refugees,” and around Saturday, having scoured every other website, I happened to look at Limbaugh’s to see what Fathead had to say about the mess. It was surprisingly little, but his home page did contain a headline reading “These People Aren’t Refugees” and a link that took you to a Merriam-Webster page defining “refugee” as “a person who flees to a foreign country or power to escape danger or persecution.” Okay, fine, I thought, if for whatever arcane reason Rush doesn't want to call these people who've suddenly been made homeless and transported to aid shelters in other states “refugees,” then I’ll just avoid that word in his tender presence. It turns out, though, that many of the victims themselves are balking at the word, preferring instead “American citizen,” “survivor,” or even the white-paperish term “evacuee.” Any of these do lack a couple subtle insidious connotations that give them the edge, I guess, as they carry neither the depth of powerlessness nor the seeming permanence of “refugee.” On the one hand it’s just another indication of how much importance people place on language, even in times when you’d think such fine distinctions would be the farthest thing from their minds; on the other hand, we should probably be elated if this is Limbaugh’s greatest insight into the whole fiasco.

The mainstream media is getting back to normal after the stress and trauma of doing its job last week. When some reporters asked George Senior a couple days ago about the criticism of Numbnuts, he said, “Well, if you repeat it to Barb you better wear a flak-jacket,” and the press corps hooted with laughter right on cue, as if she really is just Irene Ryan in pearls instead of some backwater Lady Macbeth. (Senior then went on to compare the criticism to the Monday morning fallout after a losing football game. The apple didn’t fall six inches off this tree.) From here it looks like the media loves Hurricane Katrina. With Bush’s negative poll numbers and the “great visuals” of human suffering in hand, they’re feeling a little reckless and can be seen striking skeptical, angry postures they never dreamed of taking post-9/11—you know, when it might’ve done some real good. They take time out from that yummy footage of ballooning corpses bobbing in the floodwater to recount the latest zingers flying back and forth between the state and feds, but it feels less like an exercise in democratic illumination than someone swinging a stick in a big circle and whacking two hornets’ nests at the same time. At least BBC is relishing the administration’s discomfort for truly political, not Nielsen-driven, reasons. Their raw footage and blunt narration is strikingly devoid of American news’ “balanced” dithering, or what Al Swearengen would call “this several hands fucking shit.” As the camera zooms in on a pile of debris, topped by one of the pathetic HELP signs, still littering the Convention Center, the British reporter flatly declares: “It’s a monument of shame.”

Katrina, Katrina

Tom Block — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 13:42:00 GMT

· Survivors living among corpses

· FEMA head: Working in “conditions of urban warfare”

· Armed gangs attempting rapes, police warn

· Bodies dragged into corners at convention center

· Sniper fire halts hospital evacuation

That’s the slate of subheadlines that could be found at CNN.com two nights ago. I include them here not because it still seems unreal that the location in question is New Orleans, Louisiana, but because seeing them grouped together like that—from before the first convoy of relief trucks rolled in, causing the resulting gasps of relief to be mistaken for “cheers”—does a good job of showing just how ugly this thing got. That’s important because in an about-face the Bush administration had chosen to answer the accusations of incompetence and insensitivity with a limited modified hangout, rather than the straight-ahead stonewalling it normally prefers. Bush has offered a couple of mea culpas in the last 24 hours, but they’ve been watered-down generalities (e.g., the relief effort was “not acceptable”) that identified neither specific shortcomings nor (most importantly) who was responsible for them. But that’s Bush’s way. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert had to issue a clarification for floating the idea of bulldozing instead of rebuilding the city. Not so FEMA head Michael Brown, though, who suggested that those haggard people clinging to life on chunks of shattered Interstate highway wouldn’t have anything to complain about if they’d just gotten their asses out of town when they were told to. Despite being fired from his previous job as the head of the International Arabian Horse Association (what’s the emoticon for throwing one’s hands up in the air?), and despite his supremely fucked-up job on Katrina, Bush gave “Brownie” a very public atta-boy yesterday.

America is a country famously uninterested in history. Oh, we like to watch grainy footage of German artillery corps blasting their way across the Russian steppes, and we like to make grand, meaningless comparisons when they serve our purpose (indeed, one of the duties distracting Bush from Katrina the day after she made landfall was a speech likening the Iraq war to World War II), but when it comes it to actually observing the results of some past occurrence, deriving a lesson from it, and then retaining that thought long enough to base some future decision upon it—well, forget it. More and more we live in a nebulous haze where things just happen. The President makes some bold statements. We invade a foreign country. The President’s statements turn out to be lies. We reelect him. Now a hurricane blows in. People suffer. The President mumbles some shit. Life goes on. The subtly anesthetizing quality of American life can make it hard to remember what it was that pissed us off a year ago (while writing something about the war a couple of days ago, I had to Google “nicholas + beheading” because I couldn’t remember Nicholas Berg’s name), and even within a week’s worth of 24-hour news-cycles, developments that were amazing on Tuesday can seem ho-hum by Friday.

But what’s going on in New Orleans is a genuinely big deal—or should be. That qualification is necessary, of course, since all the wrong things become big deals in America. The Rodney King riots, which should’ve touched off a moratorium on all human activity in the United States until we figured out some way for the people who just happened to be born black and white to coexist without freaking the fuck out over everything, were instead dropped like a hot potato; after all, it was an election year, and after Bush and Clinton each did a quickie goggle-eyed tour of South Central, they got the hell out of there and didn’t mention race again for the rest of the campaign. The Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings, instead of fostering much sincere or thoughtful analysis about gender issues, turned into political football, with both sides’ cheerleaders overlooking the weaknesses of their own arguments and witnesses in their eagerness to pummel the others’. (Far more objectionable than the pubic-hair joke—I mean, come on already—was Thomas’ ludicrously transparent lie that he’d never discussed Roe v. Wade in law school.)

New Orleans is also being talked about in terms of race and property, as well it fucking should be, but it offered something more: It offered a vision of the way of life we’ll have if we don’t stop thinking of Big Government as an obscenity. Ever since Reagan first claimed the Republican nomination in ’80, we’ve been backsliding in a way that’s eventually going to kill us, city by city, if we don't put the brakes on. I must’ve heard a hundred commentators compare the scenes in New Orleans to a Third World country—the city’s French colonial architecture summons up mental pictures of Haiti, in particular—and

Biosphere

Tom Block — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 00:20:00 GMT

Talking over old times tonight my hands chanced to touch some cards and paper I haven't seen in 40 years:

June 23, 1964
Dear Mom, We just got back from town. I got another book about the trilogy of the “BOUNTY”. It’s the 2nd story. It’s called “Men Against the Sea. It’s written by Nordhoff and Hall. It’s about Bligh’s trip back to England in the boat with his loyal men. Aunt Ginger left today. We are all fine. How are you? Love, Tom

June 26, 1964 Friday
Dear Mom, How are you? We are all fine. Grandma got a letter from Aunt Ginger. I saved the Kennedy stamp for you and it is enclosed in this letter. We went fishing last night at the 101 Ferry Dock. We caught a bunch of little ones. Gramps is fishing now. We’re going to get a couple of fireworks for the 4th of July. Love, Tom

June 29, 1964
Dear Mom, How are you? We are all fine. I wish you were here. We’re having lots of fun. I made a house out of old bords. Grandpa has a plastic flower and it has tube filled with liquid hummingbirds like. The hummingbirds come more than once a day. Love, Tom

July 1, 1964 Wednesday
Dear Mom, How are you? I’m fine. Polly and I wrote to Nanny and Pa. Gramps and I are going fishing today. Last night we went fishing on the ferry dock. We caught eight good-sized fish. Two of mine, not counting the eight, slipped off the hook and back into the water but second one was flopping around on the. When I tried to get it, I slipped and was sprawled all over the dock, arms and legs out, head down, and a big oof. Will you please send me Jerry’s address and the flippers. “The Bounty” book is good. My favorite bird is the hummingbird. Has a long beak and wings that go very fast. I miss you, Tom
P.S. There is a picture of hummingbird on the back.

July 5, 1964
Dear Mom, Grandpa and I went fishing this morning. I caught two Rainbow Trout with the spinning (the one I practiced with last summer). I caught one when Grandpa was getting another fishing pole. I caught both of the fish by myself. They’re about as long as this piece of paper. We were fishing by the dam. That model only kept me out of the pool hall for one day. Last night when told you we had The Fugitive on T.V. over the phone it was about Chicago. Kimble found the one-armed man, but the guy got away on the bus. Kimble was almost but he escaped. I like the model. Say hi to Jean Montgomery for me if you see him again. If you can’t bring my monster models, give them to him. But try and bring them. Say hi to Steve upstairs for me. I’m missing you awful. I miss you, Tom
P.S. Don’t give away my blue truck or Jeep truck or the yellow truck with the silver cap. Try and get a box from the grocery store for my monster models Please!!! I really want to keep them.

July 18, 1964
Dear Mom, While I’ve been here I’ve caught 5 trout. A couple of days ago I caught 2 and Gramps caught 1. The Grant’s dog has come down once in a while. When he comes down I play with him. I met this boy named John. He lives in Kansas. His birthday is on the same day as mine. So is his brother’s Joseph.
Love, Tom
c/o C.F. Coleman
Mallard Point Rd.
Mountain Home, Arkansas

"Nothing to see here. Just move along..."

Tom Block — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 11:01:00 GMT

Nothing yet anyway, though I do have high hopes and abundant intentions of picking this up again, and sooner rather than later. The problem is that I never meant to abandon it for eight months or whatever it's been. It's true that I've been up to my ass in writing projects of one kind or another throughout that time, and it's equally true that certain subjects which inspired me before the outage (namely, the American political scene) now only serve to depress me, even as they've only grown more intense. In any case, for any wayfaring sailors who drift across this page, let me just say don't give up hope yet.

Above It All

Tom Block — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 14:53:00 GMT

Monday afternoon a California Superior Court judge ruled that banning gay marriage is unconstitutional, and that evening there was a stroll from the Castro up Market Street to mark the occasion. One couldn’t really call it a parade, consisting as it did of fewer than a hundred people, but it was a celebratory little gathering, with several of the marchers sporting the wedding gowns and tuxedos they wore to City Hall the weekend that Gavin Newsom opened the gates. A few drivers leaned on their horns in support, and my pool teammates and I joined the other folks who happened to be on the sidewalk in a round of applause, but I came within a whisker of missing a reflection from the one truly charming image that came out of the event. The second floor of the building directly across the street from The Expansion is occupied by a ballet academy, and as the parade passed by I happened to look up and see the dancers there taking a break from their class to shower the crowd with good wishes. They had filled the row of windows that look down on Market, and the line of happy, unruly ballerinas, all of them smiling and clapping and shouting in their leotards, looked like an ebullient Degas come to life. Like I say, it was charming, but it was only when I spotted one of those beautifully toned and tanned creatures regarding us—looking down at me and my buddies, these older men, as she clapped, with our pot-bellies and worries, our reek of smokes and scotch and bourbon—that I felt the glimmer of some larger picture. The idea of a scene bringing gays, some ballerinas, and a troupe of boozehounds to their feet…Well, it was touching, in a modern kind of way.

And not a car in sight

Tom Block — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 23:41:00 GMT

Just now saw a TV ad from The Twilight Zone, which (among other things) shows how confused America's notion of individuality has become:

A cute young woman is trying on a dress in a store, checking herself out in the fitting room mirror. She looks good in it.

She looks up, reacts. Across the way a second woman is headed her way, carrying the same dress. They stare at each other.

Suddenly something off to the side catches the first woman's notice. It's a third woman, caught in the act of pulling another one of the same dresses off the rack.

The third woman sees the first woman, sees the second woman – sees their dresses. She throws the dress back on the rack as if covering up a crime.

Cut to black. A logo and title appear:

SAAB

Maintain Your Identity

My Kind-of Brush with Kind-of Greatness

Tom Block — Tue, 14 Dec 2004 21:50:00 GMT

My boss from last summer’s project called me about three weeks ago and told me, in tones quite mysterious for her, that she had “a big surprise” for me on December 14 and that I ought to keep this afternoon free to receive it. I knew I’d have to go to San Rafael, over in Marin, to get it, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out whether it was going to be a bonus or if I was going to be shanghaied and wake up far out at sea. Judy picked me up in the city and we drove over to Marin, and along the way she lightly asked me which famous people I’d like to meet someday. I never know how to answer these fucking questions but I probably came somewhere near the truth when I mentioned Altman and Dylan. “What about politicians?” she said. I knew for a fact that Joe Lieberman isn’t on that fucking list, but beyond that I couldn’t think of anyone still living except the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a man who showed some personal heroism during the Civil Rights Movement (what dat?), and for all I know even Shuttlesworth is dead. “What about Bill Clinton?” asked Judy. “Yeah,” I said, bobbing my head from side to side, “Clinton’d be fun to kill a couple beers with, I guess.” “What about Jimmy Carter?” “Well, Carter, I…” At this point I was beginning to think Judy was on heroin or something. “Carter,” I finally finished, “yeah, sure, why the hell not meet Jimmy Carter?”

As it turned out, Carter’s just written a new book, a volume slimmer even than he is, called Sharing Good Times, and he was doing a book-signing in a chain bookstore at a San Rafael mall this evening, and Judy had gone out of her way to get me a pass granting me brief access to the physical space surrounding Mr. Camp David Accord. This was indeed a “surprise” to me, in the purest sense of the word, for I promise you, I could’ve stayed up every night for a year trying guess what was coming, and I would’ve guessed that Judy had somehow arranged for me to witness a Martian cat delivering a litter of kittens before I would’ve guessed this. “Gosh, Judy, what made you think of me?” I asked her, trying as I spoke the words to avoid any inflection that’d make it sound like they really meant, “What are you, off your fucking meds?” But Judy then reminded me of a conversation we once had in which I allegedly called Carter “the most maligned politician of our time” and apparently went even farther, alluding to him in the awe-struck terms one usually reserves for the Great Men of History. “Wow, I don’t remember that at all,” I said. “When did we have this conversation?” “We were sitting at your kitchen table on Green Street,” Judy replied. “I remember it distinctly.” Two things must be noted here: 1) when I lived on Green Street the year was 1986, and 2) I was drinking so much and showing such little discrimination in those days I probably made similar adoring pronouncements about a great many public figures, leaving me in fear that someday some other well-meaning friend is going to “surprise” me with a visit to George Wendt or Mark Knopfler.

The mall parking-lot was jam-packed with holiday-shoppers and hundreds of other people who had mystifyingly left the comfort of their homes to come see Jimmy Carter. Because my little pass bore a bold C I was allowed to bypass practically all of them and go almost to the head of the line. And there sat The Great Man at a folding table, looking tan and happy and healthy, surrounded by a trio of very bored-looking Secret Service agents. A handful of the bookstore’s employees had formed a little assembly-line which efficiently flapped the book (kindly supplied by Judy, or else this evening really would’ve ended in ruins) to the page that Carter would sign and then passed it along at a rate to match my progress towards the table, presumably to foil the old anthrax-at-the-book-signing scheme that’s so popular nowadays. Carter had just gotten done signing about a dozen copies of the book all brought in by a single woman, who the fuck knows why, and I noticed that none of his fans seemed to be making small-talk with him. And indeed, he was barely looking up at them. Anyway, my moment was almost upon me, and I began trying to think of something to say to him if for no other reason you get to talk to a president, ex- or no, how many times in your life? It’s true that in ’76 I had desperately wanted him to win, and felt sure that his election would herald a permanent return to honesty and commonsense in American politics. (I was a kid, okay? Get off my case.) Carter’s reelection campaign was a cause for dismay, though, as he not only was outfronted, outflanked, and out-everything elsed by Ronald Reagan, but tried to win over voters with a series of incredibly hawkish ads and promises that posited him as the exact opposite of everything he’d stood for in his winning campaign. So when it came time to think of something to say to him, all I could think of was, “There you go again,” but I didn’t want Judy to see me being escorted out of the place with one arm twisted behind my back. Suddenly an employee was hissing at me, “Go! Go! Go!,” I saw my book being thrust into Carter’s veiny old mitts, and as I walked up to him I managed to think of one true thing I could say to him. He scribbled something frightfully fast onto the book’s title-page, and as he did I told him: “You did the right thing with Panama.” Now how many people tell him that nowadays? Hell, I thought he’d be happy to have someone in the room who’s almost as old as he is, and that he’d say something gracious in return, something showing the humble Georgian way he’s famous for. Instead Mr. Reagan Revolution pushed the book across to me, shot a flinty look at me that lasted perhaps 1/1000^th of a second, and barked, “I know it!” To top things off when I got back to the car and pulled out the book to inspect his signature, I saw that it’d been signed by someone named “J. Catc.”

Ah, fuck it. It really was nice of Judy – I’m sure she remembers that long-ago conversation correctly, and besides she took me out for a great dinner of Indian food afterwards. I took the ferry back into the city, and drifted off to near-sleep during the trip. I awoke just as we were passing the Alcatraz lighthouse, and when the boat was perhaps three hundred yards from docking I strolled out onto the aft deck to get the blood back into my legs. It suddenly occurred to me I couldn’t remember ever riding the ferry at night, and certainly not around Christmastime, and the lit up city looked like a huge tiered and candled cake, with the Embarcadero Buildings especially resplendent, four large presents wrapped in black velvet and staggered against each other. Hey, I’m glad I did it.

I saw the Scott Peterson verdict come in yesterday because I was waiting for a return phone call and to kill the time turned the tube on just a couple minutes before the announcement, and I am here to tell you that that was one truly fucked-up crowd. A million people with cell-phones doing that self-conscious wave at the camera when they’d see it light on them, one guy in a knit-cap (and on a cell-phone) who followed the cameras around and smiled delightedly as he pushed his face up into them, the grins and swaggering that went down when the verdict was announced, these insane fucking mothers who dragged their kids down to the courthouse, a woman who said that Peterson ought to die “because Laci was an angel,” and the especially repellent dolt who said she was there because she wanted to “witness history.” It was a convention of Rupert Pupkins, a demonstration of people who’ve had their consciousnesses knitted together from years of watching bad television. I’m never surprised by what these media circuses say about people, or about Americans, but I am always a little surprised that the participants’ bloodlust and celebrity-chasing can be so unabashed without their – or the media, or the American public overall – ever being finally revolted by the atmosphere of unadorned necrophilia. If Dennis Eckersley could realize it was time to sober up after seeing a videotape of himself acting the drunken buffoon at a family Fourth of July gathering, it’d be nice if these folks could just for once see themselves as the ugly mob they are. It also always takes me aback that almost no description of these scenes, no matter how cartoonish, ever seems to exaggerate them, and I suspect the same unwarranted sense of disbelief hovered over Mencken’s pieces about the Scopes trial and contemporary accounts of Bruno Hauptmann’s trial. At least O.J.’s trial brought out some real issues in American life and its proceedings were riddled with some stunningly pertinent archetypes (Kato Kaelin, Faye Resnick, Mark Fuhrman, Johnnie Cochran). Scott Peterson, on the other hand, is just an idiot who committed an idiot’s crime.

The Man Who's Stuck on Earth

Tom Block — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 05:45:00 GMT

I haven’t tripped in at least a few years now and booze tends to plane off my reactions instead of sharpening them, so it takes other wrinkles of consciousness to give me fresh twinges of surprised alienation. I fell asleep on the couch watching TV last night and woke up with a crick in my neck about a half hour ago, just as a spayed weatherman wrapped up his morning report with, “It’s going to be a beautiful day today so you have no excuse not to go shopping.” Naturally this was cause for much mirth for the two female coanchors, one of whom burbled, “Like we need an excuse!” and the other of whom rejoined, “He means shopping for other people!,” setting off fresh waves of giggles amongst the trio. It’s moments like that that make me wish my mother ship would beam me aboard and whisk me back to Alpha Centauri.

Saturday morning...

Tom Block — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 11:30:00 GMT

…and the carpet’s been pressed with a bright trapezoid of sunshine. Sunshine! What a concept. Had the history of the universe taken an even slightly different turn, I could be sitting here with the exact same advantages and flaws but this time I’d be just a pool of slobbering extraterrestrial slime and typing, “Gbortnik! What a concept…”

A note about the silence that’s been surrounding this space of late. It isn’t because nothing’s been going on in my life – far from it, in fact – but the election shut down, at least for now, one of the major lines of discourse. (Bush’s reelection had a weird effect on a lot of my circle. One night I ran into my friend B.D., looking more haggard than usual, and I asked him what was up. Without any preamble he launched into a profane and agonized tirade about that day’s news – the murder of the Iraqi-born C.A.R.E. worker – talking about in terms one would normally reserve for a Nagasaki. But that’s the way things are now: it seems like everyone’s either benumbed and doesn’t want to talk about The Bullshit at all or else they’re completely on edge, able to be set off by any unpredictable thing.) Also, I’ve been preoccupied by tedious workaday concerns barely fit for thinking about much less subjecting others to, and I’ve been procrastinating on other fronts. (Why can’t that Pennies from Heaven piece just finish itself and leave me the fuck alone?) I’ve had a major distraction or two of late, that’s true, stuff that’s constantly turning my mind toward the willowy and quasi-depressed, plus the onrushing holidays have me wanting to just call a timeout on Reality until they’re all over. I can think of several less worthy New Year’s resolutions than promising to get my ass in here at least three times a week, but anyone who knows me also knows all about me and my promises.

So long as I’m here, though, I do want to use the chance to plug Hick Flicks, a study of ’70s-era redneck cinema by the Austin-based film critic Scott Von Doviak. (Von Doviak, a man of sterling wit in the worst of times, was a special hoot as he bewailed his contractual obligation to watch – and then think about – Cannonball Run 2 and the oeuvre of Claudia Jennings.) Hick Flicks comes out on 12/28 but I think you can preorder it through Amazon. Do both yourself and Scott a favor and pick a copy up.

Look. The trapezoid’s growing longer…

Playing for Time

Tom Block — Mon, 06 Dec 2004 14:15:00 GMT

Well, these days do keep flowing by, and at this point I can nearly get a post out of just ticking off all the topics I’ve been meaning to write about in the last few weeks: Colin Powell (thanks for nothin’, Big Guy), Hail the Conquering Hero, California Split, Bob Dylan, those weird occasions that an overheard conversation seems like the universe’s ironic reflection of your own situation, The Wire, how frustrating it is when people won’t drop their shit and just be reasonable during an argument, Sideways, a list of people whose faces came floating up to me and gave me the warm fuzzies during a postprandial snooze on Thanksgiving, plus some other crap, too. A couple of these I still hope to get around to, but this’ll have to do in the meantime.

Deck the Halls

Tom Block — Fri, 26 Nov 2004 13:58:00 GMT

Holiday Traditions I Could Really Do Without: Pointlessly self-fulfilling media stories about the day-after-Thanksgiving shopping rush; the president pardoning a turkey, especially when the president is one who mimicked a death-row inmate pleading for her life; the third- and fourth-rate football announcers pulled out of God knows what woodwork to cover all the bowl games, and whose forced chortling and inane jargon-riddled spiels (“And Calhoun rushes for plus yardage!”) are literally indistinguishable from The Simpsons’ send-ups of sports broadcasters; the inevitable story about a family gathering gone homicidally bad; all the goddam rushing around people do; worrying what Christmas will be like with neither family nor old friends close by.

Holiday Tradition Keepers: Dinner at Chris and Aurora’s and the chance to catch up with friends I haven’t seen in a year; Jon Carroll’s annual Thanksgiving Day column; the Christmas lights on the Embarcadero Buildings, especially as seen from the Bay Bridge; watching It’s a Gift on New Year’s Eve; the hush and expanse of deserted streets on Christmas morning, followed by the slow emergence of little kids trying out their new bikes in wobbly amateur fashion; pondering the hassles and mayhem of all the cross-country travelers from the serenity of my couch; the stray spontaneous get-together with old friends for a holiday toddy; seeing people give generously to the homeless, with both parties coming away feeling better about themselves; the warm blanket of camaraderie that hangs itself over The Expansion about this time of year; sleeping through the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade for the umpteenth year in a row; uninvited meditations about John Lennon thanks to “Happy Christmas (War is Over)” and because it’s that time of year; the first cigarette after Thanksgiving dinner, a/k/a The Best Cigarette of the Year; worrying what Christmas will be like with neither family nor old friends close by, and somehow getting by just fine each year.

& that's the he & the she of it

Tom Block — Tue, 16 Nov 2004 02:35:00 GMT

If I could be watching California Split while I was listening to “Fleurette Africane” at the same time that some Scandinavian amazon was reading Absalom, Absalom! out loud to me, why, I'd die a happy man.

Peachy Keen

Tom Block — Wed, 10 Nov 2004 23:25:00 GMT

Late in The Candidate there’s a scene where Robert Redford, playing an underdog senatorial candidate, is sitting in the back of a limousine and exhaustedly riffing in a gibbering way on his campaign’s tagline until he unmasks it as the pure pap it is, causing his campaign manager to pop his head up in alarm. If my life had a tagline – you know, one beyond “I’m not as stupid as I look” or “Not again!” – I swear that’s what I’d be doing with it right now. I’m so tired and un-with it tonight I may as well be in a Holiday Inn room waiting to get up and go to tomorrow’s session of an Amish quilting convention.

Hard Rain

Tom Block — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 23:52:00 GMT

[Prescript: Tonight I got drenched in a cloudburst during a cross-city walk that I didn’t plan on happening. ‘Twas basically okay, though, for at all the crucial nodes and junctures I had the jukebox remnants of Ms. Williams’ “Jackson” playing in my head. The stuff that matters is the stuff that gets you through.]

If this election really was as historic as everyone seems to think it was and if the speed with which TV resumes normal broadcasting after outsized events is any indication, Americans must be the most bovine creatures that ever existed; by 10 a.m. today I felt like I was finding nothing but Malcolm in the Middle reruns the morning after Lincoln visited Ford’s Theater. The lasting damage looks to have occurred inside my friends’ psyches, but then a lot of them really expected Kerry to win. I never could see it myself – I mean, I live in America, and paid glancing attention to what’s been going on here the last 30 years or so – plus his campaign was spattered with telltale signs as he failed to get a lasting national bump from even a single one of his supposed highlights (e.g., Iowa, naming Edwards, or the convention) or gain any traction despite the endless trail of bad news that littered Bush’s excellent Iraqi adventure like a line of smelly elephant turds. The most interesting part of the whole day yesterday – that is, the only part that had any emotional coloring beyond outright head-rolling depression – came around four o’clock. By then the major anchors were openly chirping about how happy and gloomy the Kerry and Bush camps were respectively thanks to the early exit polls from Florida and Ohio, and that was the capper to a train of details accruing over the previous 48 hours that made everyone feel the wind shifting behind John Kerry’s back. But then there came a long empty hour or two in which the pundits droned on and flashed their fancy graphics but no real hard news was breaking that was like the anticipatory moments before a gathering thunderstorm. You could see the clouds piling up overhead and darkening in hue...but then they just sat there and the rain never came. By the third or fourth time that George Stephanopoulos and the other handicappers mentioned that the red and blue states were falling into the exact same slots as 2000, it was obvious that something was wrong, and that all the ballyhooed new turns this election was supposed to hinge upon – the insurgent youth vote, the angry minority vote, and a Democratic party incensed by ’00 and flush with cash gathered through the Internet – weren’t going to cut the nut.

While it’s true that 55,000,000 Americans voted for a liberal Massachusetts senator who once referred to our wartime actions in Vietnam as “atrocities” and put him within a single state’s electoral votes of the White House, it’s also true that more than 59,000,000 reelected a man who, after plunging us into a harebrained war and gutting the economy, couldn’t think of a single mistake that he’d made in the course of it all. The fact that this same man acted as if he had a mandate when he didn’t even have a majority of the popular vote makes it easy to guess what he’ll do now that he’s been reelected after a noisome campaign, had his single largest Senate opponent removed, firmed up the House, and stands in line to make perhaps a couple or three Supreme Court appointments. How one should react to these circumstances seems entirely a matter of personal choice, but right now I can sympathize equally with the suicidal, the expatriate, and the armed revolutionary. “Don’t mourn – organize,” is what Joe Hill supposedly said before a Utah firing squad cut him down, and that seems like an outstanding posture for all true-blue activist types to adopt. On the other hand, the real problem is America itself, and that’s a question even the smartest political animals on the left rarely seem to get a handle on. [Here follows some stuff I really shouldn’t post yet. This program has a nifty feature that allows you to X out all troublesome Microsoft Word features, but to date it doesn’t do shit towards salting down my more lachrymose, heartrending prose. Let me re-read tomorrow and see what I think then. Expression aside, the sentiment remains the same: This country has one long row to hoe.]

ugh

Tom Block — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 22:13:00 GMT

From beginning to end, this was the Perfect Crappy Day.

Faster, Pussycat...Kill! Kill!

Tom Block — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 10:12:00 GMT

I just proudly cast my vote for the man whose most memorable campaign promise was, “I will hunt down and kill the terrorists, wherever they are.” Then while walking home I saw a young woman whose garb had a pronounced hippie tilt, twirling around on Market Street while waving a Kerry sign and flashing the peace-sign at motorists. Some peace candidate. I’m praying Kerry wins alright, but circumstances have made him the damn strangest candidate in a while: a sheep in wolf’s clothing, an obvious peacenik forced to accuse the president of not killing enough people, when everyone knows he’ll only try to reduce the violence should he win. All this in a yahoo political climate that makes it impossible for anyone to even raise the subject of why 9/11 happened…Goodnight, Irene. Well, good luck to you, John, and to the rest of us while I’m at it.

It seems we’re fated to know only two types of election in our lifetime: the nerve-shattering squeaker and the soul-destroying landslide. I spent the ’72 election getting drunk in a Houston titty-bar with Glenn Smith (I still tear up whenever I hear “Witchy Woman”) and the ’84 election in Cuernavaca with a bunch of American duffers who thought they were auditioning for a dinner theater production of The Year of Living Dangerously. But tonight, being an older and wiser man, I’m merely laying in the scotch and tranquilizers for tonight’s televisual festivities. I just wonder who’s going to make me kick out the TV screen first, George W. Bush or that blithering idiot Dan Rather...