Chad Comello

Year: 2015

  • All You Can Do Is Type

    I’ve gone a little typewriter mad lately. In addition to my grandma’s IBM Selectric I, I’ve recently acquired a Smith-Corona Classic 12, Royal Futura 800, Rover 5000 Super deLuxe, Smith-Corona Skyriter, and a Smith-Corona Electra 12. All at thrift stores or antique shops and all for $30 or less. They are all fixer-uppers in one way or another, though mostly just need cleaning.

    Tonight I banged out a first draft of an upcoming review on the Futura. It was strange. My style of writing with word processors consists of starting from somewhere in the middle of my thoughts and editing as I write. But I can’t do that on a typewriter. All I can do is write and compile my thoughts as they come, and save the editing for the computer. An occasional change of habits is good, I think, for the soul and for the craft.

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  • The Typewriter Revolution

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    I discovered, located at my local library, checked out, and read Richard Polt’s The Typewriter’s Revolution within about two days. And wouldn’t you know it, now all I want to do is use my typewriter.

    Reading this beautiful book—nay, merely getting a few pages in—inspired me to uncover the IBM Selectric I that I inherited from my grandma when she moved into a different place and get the ink flowing again. Despite the incessant hum that accompanies electrics, I love the whole process of using it, and the basic thrill of having a piece of paper stamped with the words of my doing without the overlording influence of the Internet and that blasted distraction machine we call a laptop. I can’t wait to write more on it, and to retrieve the other typewriters from my parents’ storage and see if they can’t be brought back to life and service.

    Usually when we see a typewriter in action these days, it’s at the hands of a young Occupy Wherever libertine or an elderly, quite possibly curmudgeonly, traditionalist: people who don’t accede, intentionally or otherwise, to the Information Regime (as Polt’s Typewriter Insurgency Manifesto calls it). My chief connotation with them were my grandma’s missives on birthday and Christmas cards, discussing the weather and congratulating me on recent academic achievements. “Take care and keep in touch,” they would always end. Perhaps she was on to something. Taking care of ourselves and our instruments, keeping in touch with them and each other; these are the principles inherent in the Manifesto, which affirms “the real over representation, the physical over digital, the durable over the unsustainable, the self-sufficient over the efficient.”

    It’s easy and tempting to scoff at these “insurgents” for not giving in to the Regime, or for doing it so ostentatiously, until you actually consider why typewriters remain useful tools and toys. The possibility that I might find some practical application for these not-dead-yet mechanical wonders, and do so without ostentation, thrills me. Here’s to the ongoing Revolution.

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  • Love & Mercy

    As biopics go, Love & Mercy is more interesting than most. I liked how the two arcs and time periods of Brian Wilson’s life start off on their own but then slowly merge like converging highways. Having ’90s Brian in our heads as we watch ’60s Brian slowly devolve personally and psychologically, even as he peaks musically and famously, lends more dramatic irony to the film. Most Beach Boys fans probably already knew Wilson recovered and returned to music, but the film doesn’t let on until the credits (and fanboy postscript).

    As for the Pet Sounds sessions, at times the process of inspiration to execution took on the feel of the movie version of Jersey Boys, where someone would say offhand “Big girls don’t cry…” and then we’d see the proverbial lightbulb over Valli’s head, and then cut to the band singing the fully formed “Big Girls Don’t Cry.” I suppose it’s just an efficient way to signify the creative process, but it’s also a bit disingenuous. Lightbulb moments do happen, but shotgun songwriting in my experience tends to be the exception and not the rule.

    The movie luckily doesn’t overuse that trope; indeed, it dedicates good time to watching Wilson “compose” the album via the many studio musicians and strange new sounds. And the subsequent self-doubt and uneasiness about the album’s prospects for success will ring true to any musician or artist venturing into unorthodox grounds.

    I’m grateful, above all, that it didn’t go full-bio. We learn just enough about Wilson’s upbringing to provide context for the story; and we see just enough of Older Brian to get a sense of his nadir. Put those two halves together and you’ve got a story that says more than if they were to actually include more.

    More of that, please.

    Sidenote: Paul Giamatti is a national treasure. He can be likably flawed (John Adams, Win Win), a colorful character actor (Saving Private Ryan, Parkland), and total sleezeball or straight-up villain, as he is in Love & Mercy and 12 Years A Slave. (Also, his middle names are Edward and Valentine, apparently. If he were around in the 1930s and ’40s he could have gone by Eddie Valentine and been a badass Edward G. Robinson doppelgänger. Come to think of it, he is today’s Edward G. Robinson.)

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  • Guns Kill People

    It is right and good that the New York Times chose, for the first time since 1920, to publish an editorial on Page 1. “End the Gun Epidemic in America” captures the zeitgeist well, at least that of reasonable human beings without a vested, monied interest in seeing the NRA-sponsored carnage continue.

    “It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment,” the editorial reads. “No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.” Indeed, it seems the only right in the Constitution that has found itself immune from debate is that of the Second Amendment. The beneficiary of a modern-day gag rule, wherein even researching the causes and effects of gun violence is outlawed, our supposed right as American citizens to own unlimited military-grade weaponry is considered as self-evident and God-blessed as our country itself.

    We need a John Quincy Adams. An incorrigible ramrod of righteousness with nothing to lose. Smart enough to use the system to the cause’s favor and intractably annoying to its enemies. We also need the truth to be spoken through the research—research!—that we’ve consistently denied because denial is bliss. When enough people finally open their eyes to this culture of death we’ve protected, the delusional, cowardly mania for guns will compare in the future’s unfavorable eyes to the same delusional, cowardly mania for slavery that gripped this country for far too long.

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  • Refer Madness: PB & A

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    Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.

    Here’s an interesting one that came to the desk: the PseudoBulbar Affect. (Pseudo “false” + Bulbar, referring to the brainstem.)

    A patron said she had it and was looking for some scholarly information about it. According to PBAinfo.org, PBA occurs when “certain neurologic diseases or brain injuries damage the areas in the brain that control normal expression of emotion. This damage can disrupt brain signaling, causing a ‘short circuit’ and triggering involuntary episodes of crying or laughing.”

    These outbursts can be inappropriate (spontaneous crying or laughing when neither are warranted) and exaggerated (more intense or larger than the situation merits). Common causes include traumatic brain injury, Alzheimer’s or dementia, stroke, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

    The first reference to PBA is credited to the Charles Darwin, in his 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and it’s in the kind of language that sounds crass now to our more medically enlightened ears: “We must not, however, lay too much stress on the copious shedding of tears by the insane, as being due to the lack of all restraint; for certain brain-diseases, as hemiplegia, brain-wasting, and senile decay, have a special tendency to induce weeping.”

    The more you know.

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  • The Hunt for Vulcan

    I’ve never forgotten the scene in Men in Black, when Jay (Will Smith) and Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) are sitting on a bench facing the New York City skyline. Jay has gotten a brief but shocking glimpse of the secret alien world Kay is trying to recruit him into, one that few people know about.

    “Why the big secret?” Jay asks. “People are smart. They can handle it.”

    “A person is smart,” Kay responds, but “people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

    This scene came to mind right after I finished reading Thomas Levenson’s new book The Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe. Levenson writes about the now-forgotten period between 1859 and 1915 when scientists believed our solar system had a planet called Vulcan within Mercury’s orbit. An anomaly in Mercury’s orbit affected its gravitational trajectory just enough to suggest another mass was tugging on it. Professional and amateur astronomers alike made several attempts to observe this mystery mass, and some reported doing so. But it wasn’t until decades later, when Einstein applied the principles of his new theory of relativity to the orbital calculations, when those sightings were finally reclassified as misidentified stars and the coulda-woulda-shoulda planet Vulcan was expunged from the solar system.

    This same process had happened in the mid-nineteenth century, when the French astronomer Urban Jean Joseph Le Verrier used Isaac Newton’s theory of gravity to discover Neptune, which, like Vulcan decades later, was hiding within a mysterious gravitational blip of a nearby planet. A decade after Neptune’s discovery Le Verrier detected Mercury’s anomaly, so he followed the same reasoning as before, expecting it to reveal the source of the anomaly just as Uranus had done with Neptune. But it didn’t happen. What mathematically should have existed stubbornly refused to reveal itself.

    As much as we could interpret this case study as a warning against relying on dogmatic belief over science, fallibility can extend both ways. When Einstein sought to tackle the problem of gravity and relativity, which did not fall in line with Isaac Newton’s time-tested theories, his colleague Max Planck cautioned him against it. It was too hard a problem, he said, and not even other scientists would believe him. Why? Essentially, because they are human: “Science may celebrate the triumph of the better idea,” Levenson writes. “Scientists don’t, not always, not immediately, not when the strangeness involved takes extraordinary effort to embrace.”

    If we extrapolate this Case of the Missing Planet to even bigger questions about creation and the universe, it may trigger some challenging questions. Is God just another word for something we haven’t solved yet (or, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has framed it, does God mean more to you than just where science has yet to tread)? Or does the entire system of scientific inquiry shortchange the presence of the divine?

    “We know now that Vulcan could never have existed; Einstein has shown us so,” Levenson writes. “But no route to such certainty existed for Le Verrier, nor for any of his successors over the next half century. They lacked not facts, but a framework, some alternate way of seeing through which Vulcan’s absence could be understood.”

    What is your framework? How near or far are the boundaries of your view out into the world? What are you failing to see? Or trying too hard to see? “Such insights do not come on command,” Levenson writes. “And until they do, the only way any of us can interpret what we find is through what we already know to be true.”

    This book came as close as any other I’ve read to helping my curious but overmatched brain understand how the heck relativity works. I think it’s because Levenson here seems less a scientist-author than a really smart dude at a bar who after a drink can unleash a killer stranger-than-fiction story between swigs. He paints a narrative picture that’s at once sweeping—running from Newton to Einstein and every key figure in between—and intimate, concisely explaining the nub of every junction point in Vulcan’s winding road to nowhere.

    Good popular science, at least in my experience with it, really has to hit the why better than the how. It has to relentlessly thresh the wheat from the chaff, making sure every paragraph and every key moment can answer the question “Why does this matter?” within the span of an elevator pitch. People like me who read science-themed books written for a general audience do so because picking up a textbook on the same topic would be as useful as reading something in Aramaic. It just wouldn’t compute. Not in the time it would take to read, anyway.

    So I greatly appreciated Levenson’s authoritative voice as much as his humane style. This book was fun. Which, given that the subtitle pretty much spoils the main events, lends even more credence to Levenson’s storytelling savvy. He guides us through some pretty heady stuff with equal parts aplomb and passion, exemplifying an Einstein quote he references when speaking of the driving force behind great work: “The daily effort does not originate from a deliberate intention or program, but straight from the heart.”

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  • The Guns of August

    I like books with spunk, and Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August has it. Published in 1962, it’s too old to be considered the definitive historical work on the First World War, as I’m sure more modern books have benefitted from a more widely available historical record and emotional distance from the events now a century past. But damn, The Guns of August comes out firing and just doesn’t let up.

    I must admit that I haven’t finish it. To me the play-by-play of battles and movements of armies is a lot less interesting than how and why they got to the battlefield. Perhaps I’ll pick it up again and get a better sense of the Great War’s nitty gritty, but for now I’m satisfied and impressed by the sniper-like precision Tuchman wields in her dramatic reenactment of the political, diplomatic, and military machinations that triggered a catastrophic war between and within the great European powers.

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  • Citizenfour

    The hotel’s fire alarm testing in Citizenfour = the nighttime controlled explosions in Force Majeure.

    I wonder how well this documentary would work with someone who knew nothing of Edward Snowden, who wasn’t aware of the NSA leak when it happened and its subsequent firestorm. Without knowing that context ahead of time and carrying it through the viewing, I doubt the scenes of Snowden in the hotel room breaking down his documents and sharing his (quite poised) reasons for whistleblowing would carry the same weight.

    The flipside of that is, remembering that time very clearly and still harboring animosity for the skullduggery Snowden revealed, I thought it was gripping. Poitras’s footage allows us to be present at the epicenter of the hurricane, before and after the public learned of “Ed” Snowden and his very deliberate actions. It’s like a zoomed-in photo negative. Recommended.

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  • A Reader’s Guide to ‘Back to the Future’

    I noticed a motif of paper, reading, and the written word throughout the Back to the Future trilogy. Perhaps that’s much more common in movies set in pre-Internet times, but I thought it was especially prevalent in the Holy Trilogy.

    (Tap/click photos to enlarge)

    Part I:

    Part 2:

    Part 3:

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  • Closing the Almanac: On the Fandom-Industrial Complex and Moving Forward from ‘Back to the Future’

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    The day Back to the Future fans have waited for is finally here. The thirty-year countdown to October 21, 2015, one of the most well-known dates in movie history (despite how often it has been incorrectly reported on the interwebs), is over1. There’s been an ongoing celebration of the trilogy on the internet and in real life: this Wired dispatch by Jason Tanz, “Fandom Eats Itself at New York Comic Con,” spotlights the kind of reception a widely loved favorite like BTTF gets in the more insular (yet quickly expanding) world of nerd culture:

    The rowdiest panel I attended was about the film Back In Time, a documentary about Back to the Future fans. The documentarians presented themselves as Back to the Future fans, but also as fans of other Back to the Future fans, like the guy who spent more than $500,000 to buy the original DeLorean time machine. The audience greeted the documentarians as celebrities too, making them fans of fans of fans of Back to the Future.

    Fandom is eating itself, but from the tone of the article and the culture at large you wouldn’t think this is a bad thing. Tanz describes the end of the panel, when the documentary filmmakers give away replicas of the specially produced Pepsi Perfect bottles featured in Part II to everyone in the audience. “Before the event,” he writes, “I had rolled my eyes at the promotion, a two-decade long-con of corporate sponsorship. But here, surrounded by red-vested Marties, whooping and stampeding toward the back of the hall, I couldn’t help but feel a begrudging thrill as I grabbed my goddamn bottle of Pepsi Perfect. What can I say? I guess I’m a fan.”

    It’s not an exaggeration to say Back to the Future has been a foundational element of my life. I don’t remember when exactly I watched the trilogy, but middle school was when it caught on with a fury. Since then it’s embedded itself into my identity so thoroughly that I’ve heard from several friends and acquaintances that I’m the first person they think of to send BTTF-related articles, parodies, fake product announcements, and news bites of every stripe. It’s a distinction I’ve willingly cultivated over the years, what with my effusive writings on the subject, my collection of homemade and gifted memorabilia, my eager attendance at meet-and-greets with cast members, and my delight at two separate encounters (both arranged by my very accommodating father) with cosplaying Doc Browns.

    So when I read articles like this, at the tail end of decades of brand-sponsored fandom, I’m conflicted. The incipient parade of new Star Wars films and its adjacent subculture has helped me see this phenomenon of superfandom from the outside. I’ve never been much of a Star Wars fan. This might be due to not watching them at an impressionable young age as I think was the case with many of its proponents. But, separating my impression of it from its iconic place in film history, I also don’t like them all that much. So when every scrap of news from the now Disney-owned Lucasfilm universe is alternately drooled over and dissected, I get that “uncanny valley” feeling of seeing another version of my BTTF-loving self that doesn’t quite feel right, that I’m prone to criticize or roll my eyes at without realizing how much it looks like me.

    In a now-deleted post called “Withdraw Into Yourself Forever,” Fredrik deBoer criticizes what I’ll call the fandom-industrial complex, the natural outgrowth of a cultural landscape littered with infinitely rebooted Superhero Brand franchises and their surrounding ecosystems that encourage you to keep on loving and buying it in perpetuity, and blur the lines between those two things. “It’s the creation,” deBoer writes, “of an economic, social, cultural, and even political infrastructure to convince you that your urge to dive deeper into the stuff you already like is always the correct feeling. It’s an ideology of taste that is totally unfettered by anachronistic compulsions to be more widely read, or to try new things, or to acquire a cultural literacy other than the stuff that you have always loved.” And it’s a phenomenon perfectly encapsulated in Wired’s dispatch from Comic Con.

    I’m not advocating for consuming only new things or for abandoning the things you love simply because other people like them (nor do I think deBoer is). Rewatching favorite movies, or going back to an album that perfectly scores a moment or mood is a unique thrill—and that in our time is unbelievably easy to do. But I still try to subscribe to the tenets Alan Jacobs lays down in his great book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, which I’ve adapted for moviegoing here:

    • Whim: Watch what you want, when you want to, without shame.
    • Aspiration: …but don’t get stuck watching the same stuff—branch out and seek to be a better watcher.
    • Upstream: Seek out the older works that inspired your favorites and be challenged to “swim upstream.” It might be challenging sometimes but the rewards will be greater than just coasting downstream.
    • Responsiveness: Don’t be afraid to take notes and respond to what you’re watching—make moviegoing matter.
    • Slow: You’ll miss the little things if you view moviegoing as simply uploading information. Slow down and you’ll absorb more.

    Jacobs meant for these to be an approach to reading books, but taken together they work just as well for a more balanced and thoughtful approach to consumption of whatever culture you’re into. They’re also a challenge for myself, and a reminder of what other good I could be missing every time I return to Hill Valley, however weirdly charming it is.

    I’m not breaking up with BTTF. I married a Jennifer, for Doc’s sake. In 2015 no less.2 Our first dance was to the movie version of “Earth Angel,” which was immediately followed by a group dance with our bridal party to “Power of Love.” I think I’ve fulfilled my density. The trilogy will always be there for me to enjoy. But the hegemony it has enjoyed over my identity has begun to wane. I don’t want to withdraw into Back to the Future forever. I’m so grateful for its place in my cultural biography and for its fraternity of enthusiastic fans, but I’ve got the same blank page Marty and Jennifer got at the end of the trilogy when Doc says their future hasn’t been written yet, that it would be whatever they made it.

    It’s time to explore a new future, and today is as good a time as any to begin doing so.

    1. I think November 5, 1955, is the more important date, but who’s asking? ↩︎
    2. Believe it or not, this didn’t dawn on me until a few months before the wedding, which unfortunately didn’t happen in the Chapel O’ Love. ↩︎
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  • The Martian

    I conducted an experiment with The Martian. Too many times I’ve read a book before seeing its movie version and have come out of the theater disappointed they didn’t show this or showed too much of that, and above all that I knew what was going to happen. Seems the conventional wisdom is that you should read the book beforehand to get the truest experience first and prepare for seeing the movie, but this doesn’t make any sense. Prepare for what? Knowing what’s going to happen so you’re not surprised? I like not knowing what’s going to happen in a movie. So I postponed reading Andy Weir’s book until after I saw the movie.

    Ridley Scott’s rendition captures the book quite well. It condenses Watney’s extensive, often mind-numbing passages on the technical aspects of his survival process while maintaining the spirit of the book. (At some point a character tells another “Walk me through it,” and I thought that could easily be the title.) Watney’s play-by-play is (mostly) fascinating, absolutely, but changing it for the movie to Matt Damon directly addressing the camera/mission log allows us to see Watney’s personality come to life in real time.

    The movie also, for me, elevated interest in the deliberations at NASA and on the Hermes. Screenwriter Drew Goddard cleaned up a lot of Weir’s cringeworthy dialogue in the book, or at least made it more palatable for the very talented supporting cast of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Jeff Daniels, Kristin Wiig (!), and Sean Bean on earth, and Jessica Chastain et al on the Hermes.

    The book lived up to its reputation as an exciting, extremely detailed, chatty thriller slash user manual. I assumed, having seen the film, that I knew how it was going to end—that they wouldn’t have made any drastic changes to the conclusion—but it’s a testament to Weir that I stayed with it the whole time. Indeed, my palms were sweating during the climax. No doubt there’s a scientific solution for that.

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  • Refer Madness: The Library Lives of Others

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    Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.

    Earlier this year I started keeping a list of things people have asked me at the library information desk. It’s not totally comprehensive: some questions either aren’t noteworthy (“Where’s the bathroom?”) or slipped my mind during a busy rush. But even as a scattershot sample, it’s an interesting snapshot of what people care about. 

    Here are the ten most recent items on the list people have asked me for or wondered about:

    • Introduction to Academic Writing by Alice Oshima et al
    • Casper DVD
    • Halloween DVD
    • Monster by Walter Dean Myers
    • Cars For U.S. Troops phone number
    • History of Monroney stickers on new cars
    • The Court and the World by Stephen Breyer
    • Stonewall Uprising documentary
    • My Life on the Road by Gloria Steinem
    • The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

    So we have five books of diverse genres, three very different movies, one phone number request, and one reference question I was able to find info on pretty quickly (and learn about myself). A more accurate representation would have more requests for phone numbers and addresses, but it still gives you an idea of the kinds of things people ask a total stranger for.

    And that’s what I’ve found so intriguing and invigorating about my public library jobs thus far into my short career. Aside from the regulars whose desires you can pretty well anticipate as they approach, when a person walks up to the desk I have no idea what they’re gonna ask. So when people ask how my job is going, I can legitimately say that every day is different, and I like that. I appreciate the trust people put in me as the guy behind the desk to get them what they need. And I don’t want to jeopardize that trust by blowing them off, judging their requests (openly anyway), or getting them bad information.

    Because it’s their lives we’re dealing with. I’ve written before about how I’ve come to view libraries as sanctuaries and the librarian as a kind of secular pastor. Indeed, the info desk can sometimes feel like a confession booth, which patrons approach with every conceivable attitude: frustrated by their inability to find something, ashamed in the asking of it, happy to be getting help at all, and so on. Whatever they throw at me, I have to be ready to respond accurately, with patience and grace when applicable. Librarians have to do a lot of different things, but good public service is and should be number one.

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  • Step Aside, Pops

    Kate Beaton’s first collection of Hark! A Vagrant comics gave us bizarro world takes on Tesla, Susan B. Anthony, Lord Byron, Batman, and my favorite, Open Mic Night at the French Revolution. Her new collection, gleefully titled Step Aside, Pops, gives us the Founding Fathers at the mall, Tennyson, Greek mythology, Ida B. Wells, Jane Austen remixes, the Beatniks, Cinderella, a burned-out Wonder Woman, and so much more.

    The laugh-out-loud quotient is high in Step Aside. I especially love when Beaton finds old broadsides or book covers and turns them into the basis for little oddball scenes. Like this one from the “Broadside Ballads” collection (the ghost’s doofus face gets me every time):

    ballads

    Or this one from the Nancy Drew covers:

    nancy-drew

    It occurs to me now that comics are essentially storyboarded Vines—or rather, that Vines are like comics in motion, bite-sized stories that in a flash express an idea or illustrate a scene that in prose would probably fall flat. And in the above examples, the punchline in the final frames are purely visual, and the better for it.

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  • We Don’t Need Roads

    Caseen Gaines, author of Inside Pee-wee’s Playhouse: The Untold, Unauthorized, and Unpredictable Story of a Pop Phenomenon, leads this year’s deluge of commentary honoring the Back to the Future trilogy’s 30th anniversary with a wide-ranging and lovingly crafted retrospective on the development, production, and long afterlife of the 1985 time-travel classic. Built upon extensive interviews with cast, crew, studio executives, and even Huey Lewis (who wrote the movie’s famous theme “Power of Love”), We Don’t Need Roads: The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy explores the treasure trove of trivia usually reserved for hardcore BTTF buffs.

    Like the futuristic DeLorean itself, Gaines flies over lots of fascinating territory, dispelling myths (no, hoverboards still aren’t real), revealing production snafus (how a stunt almost turned deadly), and explaining the curious case of casting Marty McFly. We Don’t Need Roads benefits from the detailed recollections of the trilogy’s co-writer Bob Gale and director/co-writer Robert Zemeckis, but not from the onslaught of clichés and Entertainment Tonight-style copy Gaines unfortunately succumbs to. (It pains me to say this as a longtime BTTFhead.) Nevertheless, equal parts celebration and exposition, it’s a well-informed ode to a beloved series that casual moviegoers will enjoy as much as dedicated cinephiles.

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  • Pay attention during ‘Children of Men’

    I noticed the bustling in the background during my first viewing of Children of Men, but it was overshadowed by the main plot and everything else going on. It wasn’t until the second or third viewing when I started paying attention.

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  • Slow West

    The refrain from Thomas Hood’s nineteenth century poem “The Haunted House” stands out not only because it appears about halfway through Slow West, John Mclean’s darkly funny reverie of a western, but because its final line—“The place is Haunted!”—breaks the iambic pentameter the poem employs throughout the rest of its eighty-five stanzas. Such a break jars the listener out of the steady rhythm they’ve been lulled into and calls abrupt attention to whatever the line proclaims.

    It’s a fitting reference in Slow West, a film whose moments of flashbang severity disrupt the steady gait of a young man’s westward quest for redemption and grace within a world reluctant to give them.

    It’s haunted, the place we wind our way through. The barren plains and pined mountains of 1870 Colorado are unforgiving to Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a teenaged Scottish patrician who, anguished in unrequited love and unresolved guilt, ventures through the wild American West for another chance to win over Rose (Caren Pistorius), a commoner’s daughter who back in Scotland had playfully rebuffed Jay’s declaration of love. “These violent delights have violent ends,” she’d told him (quoting Romeo & Juliet) with a smile and a sisterly nudge. But to Jay it’s a gut-punch, and it clearly haunts him when we meet him: lying on a blanket beside an extinguished campfire, stargazing, calling out constellations by name and pinpointing their stars with his revolver. He seems to be harnessing the heavens to his quest. The scene calls to mind the first stanza of Hood’s “The Haunted House”:

    Some dreams we have are nothing else but dreams,
    Unnatural, and full of contradictions;
    Yet others of our most romantic schemes
    Are something more than fictions.

    This serves as a kind of establishing shot for what follows, both in the poem and the film, where the characters’ dreams of every kind often presage reality like violent premonitions.

    Jay trudges on alone through rough terrain and the smoldering remains of torched Indian camps, haunted by memories of Rose and his role in her forced exile. Soon, finding himself in a harrowing spot, a cloaked mystery man—later revealed as the bounty hunter Silas Selleck, himself an immigrant from the British Isles played by Michael Fassbender—relieves Jay of this precarious situation and elects himself (for a fee) chaperone of this vulnerable boy.

    So westward they go together on a plodding course, Jay suspicious of Silas’ motives and Silas, a taciturn mercenary, irritated by Jay’s starry-eyed chatter. Quickly the dynamic between them reveals itself when Silas asks about Rose:

    “She’s a beauty,” Jay says. “And she does not waste words. They tumble out, wit following wisdom.”
    “You haven’t bedded her, have you?” Silas responds with a chuckle.
    “You’re a brute,” Jay retorts.

    A brute, it turns out, who learns something Jay doesn’t while stopping at a trading post: that Rose and her father have a $2,000 bounty on their heads, dead or alive, for what they fled their homeland for. Perfect fodder for a bounty hunter being led right to his prey.

    But along the way the facade of Silas’ gruff exterior, forged by the toil of surviving the West’s hardscrabble life, begins to crack. He grows fond of Jay. Of his innocence, of his willingness to brave a new unknown world for the sake of unlikely love. And soon, after fixating on the pencil sketch of Rose on her “Wanted” poster, he grows fond of her too, or at least the idea of her and the idyllic life she could represent.

    The movie’s odd-couple dynamic shines brightest in the darkest moments. More than once Silas stares down a gun pointed at his head while maintaining the tempered serenity of a man very familiar with death. Jay, though highly determined, lacks the weathered wisdom of a gun-for-hire like Silas, and is often victimized by the desperate circumstances around him.

    We see this in a scene of the pair curving through an eerily quiet forest considered by the locals to be haunted. The sun creeping through the canopy, Jay, perhaps in a bout of superstition, recites from Psalm 91:

    Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night;
    nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
    Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness;
    nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

    Silas, considerably less pious, cuts in with a timely invocation of the refrain from “The Haunted House”:

    O’er all there hung a shadow and a fear;
    A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
    And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
    The place is Haunted!

    They couldn’t have been more right. What happens after that sets the stage for a climactic set piece that’s at once a wryly fatalistic conclusion and a searing, clear-eyed accounting of all the loss and destruction Jay’s mission—and by proxy the wild west itself—had wrought.

    The occasional showy shot aside, Slow West is exceptionally well-crafted, deliberate in the best way, and concerned about portraying its humans as such, and not as plastic figurines in a cowboy-themed Playmobil set. They are flesh and grit, have dirty fingers and often die ingloriously. They’re brazenly self-serving, out to make a buck or get ahead at any cost, or just survive. Even our young protagonist Jay, with his nobleman’s comportment, is impertinent and brash, prone to bouts of high-minded hauteur at poorly chosen times.

    The music in Slow West, composed by Jed Kurzel, accompanies the action only when necessary and is as spartan as the film’s running time. Maclean savvily weaves in the throbbing strings beneath key moments, but also allows other moments to unfold in the harsh, spare silence of reality. Despite what we’ve seen in countless westerns, real shootouts aren’t underscored by an orchestra or a triumphant brass theme. The whip-crack of the revolver’s hammer, the whistle of an airborne arrow, the thud of a bullet into flesh, the crackling of a destructive fire in a soft wind: these are the sounds of death in the West, and Maclean wisely lets them tell a lot of this story.

    Other reviews of Slow West have called attention to its stylistic similarities to more well-known filmmakers like Wes Anderson and the Coen Brothers. At times it did remind me of the best parts of the Coen Brothers’ rendition of True Grit. But I’ll happily take Slow West on its own terms, unbeholden to its predecessors. It’s good enough to stand on its own, and it deserves to.

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  • Fourteen Memories

    Fourteen scattered memories, in no particular order, written at whim on the occasion of my birthday on the fourteenth of September.

    1. Every summer, on their way down to or up from Texas, Grandma Helen and Grandpa Cliff stayed with us in Madison for a few days. Knowing they’d be there when I got home from school added an extra buzz to the day they arrived. I’d run the four blocks from school, which suddenly in my anticipation seemed so much longer than usual. Grandma would have Bugle chips and bags of cookies and homemade mounds bars. Mornings were different when they stayed with us because of the coffee; it was usually rare because only Dad drank it, but when Cliff and Helen were visiting it was brewed every morning and accompanied Cliff’s newspaper and crossword.

    2. We vacationed in Florida one winter after Grandma LaVonne died. It was, as far as I can recall, my first Christmas without snow, without cold, and without everything that constituted the Christmas season. Except for It’s a Wonderful Life. Mom and dad insisted we still watch it on Christmas Eve as usual, because we had to. Dad even called the hotel to make sure they had a VCR.

    3. Summer of 2012 I was in grad school and worked as a graduate assistant in residence life. One weekend an epic power outage left us campus-dwelling staff, including the student workers, without electricity or air conditioning. I and the other hall directors used our iPhone group chat to share updates, coordinate actions, and vent against ComEd and the school administration. Some of us flocked to the packed public library to charge our devices and await the impending darkness. For dinner that first night I heated a can of soup by rigging a stove grill above a candle. The next day, still unsure when the power would be restored, I showered in one of residence hall’s communal bathrooms that still had power, and prepared for another stuffy night. The power returned at 9pm.

    4. My roommate freshman year had a summer job that got him up very early, so most mornings when I woke up around 7 a.m., he’d already be fully dressed, lying on his fully made bed and watching TV. Sometimes it was the Strongman competition or Saved By the Bell, but usually it was Dawson’s Creek. Soon enough that theme song became my alarm clock.

    5. At summer camp we had 24 hours off between Saturday afternoon—after the kids left and we cleaned everything up—and Sunday afternoon when the new group arrived. One Saturday I drove all the way across Madison with a fellow camp counselor to see the movie Once at Westgate Cinema. We were so enamored with it that when we returned to camp I tickled out “Falling Slowly” on the piano and we sang the duet. [Update: more on this.]

    6. Along with Westgate Cinema, in high school I frequented the old Hilldale Theatre on Midvale to see the smaller, independent films Marcus Cinema didn’t show. Going to a showing of Brick with some friends, I didn’t realize when I walked up to the ticket counter that my box of Sour Patch Kids was still in my hand rather than stashed away in my pocket. “You can’t bring those in,” the guy said. I tried to convince him otherwise, but he wasn’t having it. So I grumpily returned to my car, put the box in the glove department, and texted my on-the-way friends to grab it from my car when they arrived and sneak it in for me. Mission accomplished, and Brick blew our minds.

    7. One night at camp the middle-schoolers decided they want to sleep outside. They started bringing their bunk mattresses out but then Rich, a camp supervisor, said no, if they were going to sleep outside they had to own it and not use mattresses, only their sleeping bags and a pillow. So they did, and another counselor and I stayed out with them. As they settled in I ruminated aloud on the beautiful starry sky above us, about how vast and inscrutable the universe seemed. They’d quieted and begun to doze when Rich, in a typical bout of wild whimsy, came screaming by our quiet flock of preteens in the camp’s golf cart, honking and flashing his lights, just cuz. It took a lot longer to get the boys to sleep again—which we pointed out to Rich repeatedly the next day—but sleep they eventually did. I awoke with the early summer dawn and, with the other counselor standing guard over the sleepers, walked to the camp’s tranquil lakeshore to watch the sun rise through the distant treeline.

    8. Senior year of high school my band played a gig at my high school. I was working that evening at my Copps cashier job and realized only once I got to work that I was scheduled to work past the time the gig was supposed to start. I panicked, but realized fate was on my side: the nice manager was working that night. I asked if I could cut out early, and she said we’d have to see how busy it was later. The time came and it wasn’t slow, but she said I could go. As I dashed out of the store I saw her bagging the groceries at her own station and realized she’d be short-staffed the rest of the night but still let me go. My feelings of gratitude quickly dissolved into a vat of anxiety as I hopped into my Toyota Corolla and gunned the drive to my high school, which was luckily short and not monitored by police. I bolted inside and saw my bandmates standing on stage waiting to play, their instruments in hand and my drum kit waiting for me. Out of breath I picked up my sticks, slid onto my throne, and clicked off our first song.

    9. After I returned from Colombia I was a month away from zeroing out my checking and savings accounts when I got a call from the Butera grocery store across the street offering me a cashier job. I said yes because I had to. It wasn’t bad except for it being a cashier job. But four and a half years after getting that lucky break from Copps I got another one from Butera: on February 6, 2011, I was scheduled from 12 to 5pm, instead of the usual 12 to 7pm. This was important because on February 6, 2011, the Packers were playing in Super Bowl XLV at 5:30pm. I was able to dash home, change into my yellow Donald Driver jersey, and get a ride from friends to the Super Bowl party where I’d get to witness for the second time the Packers bring the Lombardi home.

    10. I was angry about something—probably my parents, as is common for middle-schoolers. I was also in a yo-yo phase, so I was holding the end of an unwound yo-yo when in my anger I slammed the door to my room and impulsively decided to use the object in my hand as an outlet for my adolescent rage. My idea was to whip it over my head and down onto my bed like a sledgehammer, but at the vertex of its arc the yo-yo crashed into one of the opaque glass lightbulb shades on the overhead fan. The bulb remained intact, but to this day it’s missing its cover. Deciding that whatever animus existed between my parents and me would be exacerbated by this, I never told them what had happened.

    11. One night at Copps grocery store, I was working the register when a little before 9pm a classmate from high school bolted through the automatic sliding doors. In Wisconsin liquor sales end at 9—the register wouldn’t even allow you to scan liquor of any kind once the clock struck 9—so it was common to have a small rush around this time. My classmate hustled past me and with a smile said, “I’m gonna get liquor, OK?” Thinking I misheard him, I casually nodded as he disappeared behind the corner. He quickly reemerged at my register with a 24-pack of whatever cheap swill high schoolers drink and pulled out his fake ID. Suddenly realizing he was serious, I said, “Dude, I can’t sell this to you.” I could have. It was slow; my manager was at the other end of the registers in the only other open lane. But either out of principle or not wanting to be taken for a schmuck just because this kid was in the cool crowd and I was in band, I reiterated: “I know who you are. I can’t sell you this.” He was more shocked than angry I think, surprised a peer wasn’t playing along. “You’re sure…” he followed. “Yeah, sorry man,” I replied. And he walked out. I wondered who was waiting for him in the car, whose night I just ruined because they wouldn’t have time to get to another store before liquor sales ended. But now I think I did them a favor. A night without Keystone Light is a good night indeed.

    12. New Year’s Eve, 2011. I was living on campus for graduate school, but didn’t have a girlfriend so I didn’t have plans. Luckily my on-campus friends Tone and Brian didn’t have plans either, so we decided to drive around awhile and listen to the radio. When “I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing” came on, Tone asked if it made me think of anyone special, and I said I had someone in mind. (My future wife.) Deciding we should have a comfort night, we stopped to get Ben & Jerry’s Americone Dream and Late Night Snack and a Redbox before returning to campus. We got into our pajamas and watched the horrible Horrible Bosses while eating ice cream. I left at 11pm and went to sleep.

    13. On a bright and warm weekday September morning, I had Whiskeytown National Recreation Area to myself, or so it seemed. Newly unemployed, I’d flown to Redding to visit friends, see some mountains, and find whatever else I was looking for on what ended up being a much-needed salubrious stay. I didn’t see a soul as a drove my rental to the Brandy Creek Falls trailhead and parked. On the solo hike to the falls (which I wrote about here), I found silence. I found vistas that I photographed once but no more. At the falls I found a rock to sit on astride the stream. I read, dozed a bit, let the water’s whooshing chorus drown everything else out, and then I walked back.

    14. Meeting Henry Winkler.

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  • Little Big City

    Imagine my surprise when fellow high-school classmate and garage band musician Aaron Shekey was mentioned in John McPhee’s latest essay for The New Yorker. McPhee quoted Shekey’s own essay from a few years ago called “It’s What You Leave Out”, about the curious case of the Madison skyline. “One of the more interesting things about the layout of my hometown,” Shekey wrote, “is a simple rule the city planners made around 1915: No building can be taller than the base of the pillars surrounding the capital building’s dome—that’s only 190 feet.”

    This mandate, now 100 years old, is still in place, leaving us with a skyline a Madisonian who was around at the time of the edict’s passing would still recognize.

    It’s a view I’ve grown used to, even bored of, having lived there until I left for college. But when I compare it to other lakeside skylines I’ve come to know, like Chicago’s, where even with the Sears Tower there is no clear focal point or guiding architectural principle except how high the buildings can reach and how many condos they can cram into the air space, I see the value of the Madison experiment—the “century’s worth of restraint” as Shekey called it. You could almost call it a civic humility, thought that’s not quite right. Not when the capitol building, the literal civic center, is the legally mandated center of attention.

    madison-map

    A bird’s-eye view tells the same story: the Capitol sits in the middle of the downtown square, in the middle of the isthmus that splits the lakes Monona and Mendota. You could loop around the Capitol all day on the one-way streets that revolve around it. And that’s OK, because it’s a beauty. Shekey again: “If you let your eye wander along the horizon, you’d see it—The capital. A tiny white light shining above everything else. You can see it for miles. Even from there it was breathtaking—a skyline defined by what it isn’t.”

    I suppose it makes sense the center of government should be the nucleus of the city, the standard by which everything else is judged and modeled. But one person’s civic restraint is another’s stunted growth. Chicago is a storied architectural wonder (I’d highly recommend taking an architectural boat tour if you can), but that wouldn’t have been so if after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 the city planners had imposed a vertical quota on the Loop.

    When I tell people I’m from Madison, they often ask what it’s like and how I liked it. If they’re familiar with the area I tell them I’m actually, like Shekey, from the western suburb of Middleton, though I was born and raised in Madison through elementary school. But if they’re unfamiliar, I say it’s a typical college town: liberal (in Madison’s case very much so), lots of bars and bikes, and has lots to see around it if you know where to look.

    I also like to call it a “little big city.” Like any big city it has a bustling downtown with distinct neighborhoods and adjacent suburbs, but it’s no Chicago or even Milwaukee. Driving on University Avenue through the Isthmus you can get from the westside of town to the east in 15 minutes if the stoplights and traffic are friendly. Besides the capitol building itself, the biggest things about Madison are the lakes it’s squeezed between—and the world renowned farmer’s market during the summer.

    I’m sure Madison has “little big” friends in Pennsylvania’s Harrisburg, Missouri’s Jefferson City, Washington’s Olympia, and other cities: state capitals that aren’t their state’s biggest city. They don’t have the skyscrapers of Philadelphia, Kansas City, or Seattle, but they have beautiful capitol buildings visitors like me would love to see. This is even true in Washington D.C., where the U.S. Capitol, larger but almost identical to Madison’s pillared dome, sits atop a hill overlooking the National Mall and the much smaller yet more iconic White House.

    It takes high regard for the built beauty of one’s own place to preserve the arrangement Madison has over a century of constant change. Perhaps one day Madison’s glass (or ice) ceiling will shatter and the capitol dome will shrink into a much taller skyline than it’s accustomed to. But until then it will remain a little big city with a little big horizon that ain’t bad to come home to.

    (Photo by Steve Wetzel)

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