The Dan Brown Shadow

Matthew Pearl, whose debut novel The Dante Club, seen in many an airport travel station book section, surprised me as an enjoyable and creative read. When writing a book of historical fiction like this one, it is hard to stay clear of comparison to Dan Brown’s The Davinci Code which is, let’s say, umm, misleading and not taken seriously at all as a source of history or as a work of literature. Pearl’s first novel found it’s self lumped in with the genre that Brown is famous for, he even has a Brown sound byte on the cover, seemingly to get people to draw this association. This has to do with audience and marketing assuming, correctly for the most part, that people who read The Davinci Code would also like this other book with the same initials (TDC) while academics would write it off as crap if they took notice of it at all.

Its plot was sort of ludicrous; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and a team of Harvard poets/scholars go about solving a case of a serial killer who uses the Inferno as his inspiration in doing the deeds. It wasn’t a serious work of art, no, but it was clever enough to keep me reading and as far as it went into perhaps the greatest work of literature of all time, The Divine Comedy (another TDC title), it wasn’t at least wrong. There are even some analyses I found insightful with regards to Dante’s work.

Pearl’s follow up, The Poe Shadow, which attempted a similar endeavor involving a fictional amateur sleuth trying to solve the mysterious death of Edgar Allen Poe, however, is pre-Poe-sterous. The reader is supposed to care about Poe and his demise as Quinton Clark, the hapless narrator who cares way too much about his literary hero, but in the end we aren’t Poe obsessed and take on the role of Peter, his adopted brother—don’t ask—recommending that he get his life together and give up on this fruitless endeavor.

With DFW’s tragic end earlier this month, I have to admit it is tempting to fixate on the writer whose words bring you joy like no other and you live in anticipation of getting to read new ones. But when the author dies, you are left with the body of work that they left and that is all you are ever going to get. Thus you end up obsessing on what is there and, as Pearl’s novel illustrates, what is not.

The book claims to provide definitive answers to the questions about what happened to Poe in his final days with recently uncovered evidence “never before published,” but the evidence Pearl provides through his mouthpiece Clark is rather dubious and therefore not definitive. If you are looking for a nice, easy, fun read in this mystery, you are surely to come away with less than this book claims to answer. Go with something by Paul Auster if existential mysteries are your bag and Don DeLillo, Mark Costello, or Phillip Roth if you are more interested in alternate versions/accounts of history.

Grieving teams learn hard lessons after tragedy

The piece below was published last Sunday as my follow article to the game I covered on Friday at Glenn. I didn't want to go the “Debbie Downer” rout being mindful that it had been a month and being sure the kids were probably tired of talking about it considering the tragedy of it and all. But I did ask everyone I interviewed how they were holding up and such and what teams were doing and things like that as sort of a warm up to get them going. So at the last minute I decided that it more or less had be my follow because I have been, let’s say, upset since David Foster Wallace’s death considering that I have been looking to his commencement address delivered to my graduating class as practically a religious text.

Here is the piece:

Last Friday’s match up that pitted the now 1-4 Glenn Bobcats against the 2-3 R.J. Reynolds Demons would to most observers appear like a game hardly worth notice in its mediocrity. However, in this unexpected setting, there was a supreme truth to be learned with life-or-death significance void of self-interest or cynicism. It was a parable of hope.

One month ago, Reynolds linebacker Matt Gfeller died in a horrible anomaly and in his honor they have worn no.57 decals and patches. They’re also a reminder that adolescent myths of invincibility and immortality to committed pursuits get shattered when reality proves fragile and temporal and directed by forces beyond control. Yet they must play on, as their teammate cannot.

Talking about how his team has held up, Reynolds coach Mike Propst vented “anything we do, win or lose, on or off the field, you know… whatever,” considering how unimportant a loss becomes when compelled to think about bigger issues.

However, in the midst of an excruciating situation, players have learned a deep truth novelist David Foster Wallace, who woefully died last week, said in his commencement address at Kenyon College, “involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

“Sports have a way of healing things,” Propst said. He added that their opponents have done some “wonderful things” to make the burden easier to bare, but Glenn “did some extra things they didn’t have to do and that’s just been special.”

One such thing came soon after the horror when Glenn coach Dickie Cline, who not so long ago had a player pass, interrupted practice to talk about issues more serious than sports—assuming one thinks that possible—when he declared the obvious but overlooked truth that life is cruelly and unbelievably short.

“We do not know when it is going to be taken,” he said. “That is why you need to live your life to the fullest and to make sure your right with the-Man-Upstairs. Because you never know when its your turn.” This televised message for players to take responsibility and own up to their true interior selves was also an act of mercy since it took just a little attention off of the traumatized Reynolds community.

Though Cline would never say it, his team faces similar yet far less consequential dismay with their recent slump. But confident in his team’s “men of character,” there is hope that “something positive will ignite this team.”

When tragedy strikes the self-contained world of football, it paradoxically makes everyone more cognizant of the world off field since it refuses to indulge the fantasy of a seamless break between realities. There, things like personal character and communal disposition become extremely important to success. To deal with a player removed from not only his role on the team but from all aspects of life is a transcendentally profound and sad experience—teams have come apart when a player changes clubs or gets sidelined for a few weeks. Yet, as Cline’s words also pointed toward, through the tragedy there comes the more important awareness that life actually means something beyond self-interest.

Reynolds won the game 34-0.

My Limited and Biased Top 50

I will say that list is more like the 50 books that had the most profound and lasting effect on my rather than a favorites list per se. The common denominator here with these books is that I read each and everyone of them at a time that I felt they were needed. Some of these books have become less and less significant as a piece of my world but nevertheless are still in some ways near and dear if only for nostalgia. Some of these books listed had an embarrassing amount of sway when I was younger and now I sort of wonder how. But my memory for things is ridiculous so even if I would wish to forget the fact that some of the books that really got me passionate about reading I can barely get through a few pages of now—every Stephen King book on this list would be an example of that—which comes with more mature tastes in literature as well as life experience. Another few oddities that I am sure have to do more with who I was when I read them as opposed to who I am now are books that I have read multiple times and either surprised me at how I hadn’t liked it so much the first go around but rocked my worldview with another inspection but the reverse has also been true a couple of times. An example of the latter that is still very fresh in my mind since I finally got around to rereading it after tracing it back to more or less the instant I decided I wanted to major in English and write for a living instead of doing something I would have hated. This book is that of Fahrenheit 451 which just about caused my head to explode as a sophomore in high school but when I read it again after living ten years and a couple of months, in which time I changed schools from the crappy public school that made us read it, to the dream-come-true-those-kids-are-so-lucky-to-go-there private school across town (praise the Lord I had an outstanding jump shot and an ability to de-cleat kids with extreme prejudice); went to a good college I never would have thought about going to had I not an absurd affinity for books; taught at a high school where I pushed postmodern literature on my kids to get them to care about books as I do, some of whom at least tell me that my strategies worked; went to grad school at another good school and read and read and now I write professionally (among other things). But last week when I read Bradbury again, I found his work to be pretty juvenile. So it goes I guess, but I think that was the start of my interest in “serious fiction” so it has a higher spot than I would at first want to place it because I try to take a book’s impact on my person as a whole from childhood until another one come along to drastically alter the way I see the world. Some of my selections aren’t even real books either, some are poems and plays and oral histories record much later. Others, like the Bible for instance, I have left off because I am not sure as to the extent it has over my being because it is interwoven into the American fabric—for good or bad I am not going to judge—and to include it is sort of a cop out eliciting basically a “no duh” when someone responds to my questions directed at knowing them better. That said, here it goes.

1. The Divine Comedy
2. Infinite Jest
3. Paradise Lost
4. The Canterbury Tales
5. Fahrenheit 451
6. King Lear
7. The Stranger
8. Macbeth
9. Hamlet
10. The Everlasting Gospel
11. Consider the Lobster
12. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
13. Lord of the Flies
14. The Life and Times of Michael K
15. The Aeneid
16. The Brothers Karamazov
17. Beowulf
18. Death Be Not Proud
19. The Corrections
20. A Clockwork Orange
21. As I Lay Dying
22. Brave New World
23. A Confederacy of Dunces
24. Bhagavad-Gita
25. To the Lighthouse
26. Waiting for the Barbarians
27. How To Be Alone
28. Timbuktu
29. The Catcher in the Rye
30. White Noise
31. The Magician’s Nephew
32. The Book of Illusions
33. The Medium is the Massage
34. Mr. Vertigo
35. Crying of Lot 49
36. The Iliad
37. The Hobbit
38. Ulysses
39. A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again
40. You Shall Know Our Velocity!
41. Catch-22
42. Slaughterhouse-Five
43. Doctor Faustus
44. Things Fall Apart
45. A Farewell to Arms
46. Billy Budd
47. An Enemy of the People
48. The Grapes of Wrath
49. Darkness at Noon
50. The Green Mile

Dead At 46: David Foster Wallace Hanged Himself and It Will Never Make Sense

DFW, who is my favorite writer of all time and the inspiration for the name of this blog (from his novel Infinite Jest) and the first contemporary writer who has a substantial amount of work out there that I have read in its entirety, who I witnessed give the commencement address to end all commencement addresses—Kenyon College Class of 2005—which I turn to whenever I think about how working in the service industry makes me want to stick my head in a microwave or think about how much I hated grad school or anything really that I just can’t deal with in a rational way, who I talk about everyday to my girl friend’s annoyance, has just taken himself off the map.  It sucks and I am as sad as anyone can be over the death of someone I don’t actually know.

I don’t watch TV.  I don’t care about celebrity culture.  And I don’t shed tears for anyone outside of my most nearest and dearest.  But Don Gately got my eyes flowing at a time when the end of my then current relationship to a girl I had loved since high school never did.  I saw a lot of Gately in myself as a once “near great” football player who is “massive” who found work with a bookie and is an alcoholic with an affinity for Demerol.  Plus I read the book while teaching at a boarding school outside of Boston, a job that I hated, yet found comfort in this work of splendid fiction. 

It is no wander that IJ has been called “the grunge American novel.”  Kurt Cobain and to a lesser extent Layne Staley (though the music of Alice in Chains had a more profound effect on me, I had mourned for Staley long before they found him dead) were the only other quote unquote celebrities that moved me in anyway, one was also a suicide, and I find that my heart ache this time around is even more awful.  Cobain and Staley pointed out how shitty the world is and while listening to their music, I felt momentary release and continue to.  With DFW though, I find ways to connect with other people and to see the world as a less hostile place, which Nirvana/Alice in Chains/Mad Season definitively did not do.  

When I first heard about the death of my literary hero, it was from the person who probably knows me better than anyone else, my girl friend whom I live with and love and who understands that this is the one person in the world outside of my close and very small circle whose death would have a devastating effect on me.  I was in the can at my shitty, shitty job, risking dismissal for having my phone out and in use, hitting send on my missed call from “The PGOAT”, which I typed in on the night we met, and on this night, when she began to talk, I was afraid that Darth Maul, the black cat we are cabbaging from our neighbors, had been run over by a car.  No, thank God, but in the long run it was something much worse.  Sara, the girl friend, has made me promise, before and again on this evening, that I would not do that to her—hang or in anyway de-map myself—and I won’t.  I wouldn’t do that to her or to my parents because of what I have learned from the man who himself could not swallow his own medicine.  I believe love involves empathy and connection and now I have allowed myself to be vulnerable enough to do that—to love and experience empathy—which I interpret all of the thousands of DFW pages to really, at their core, convey.

But what to do when the one person whose words you turn to when you just don’t feel like going on, in your darkest hours when you barely feel human, when you are nothing more than some abstract conception of grief or doubt or negativity, whose words always bring you back from whatever despair you find yourself consumed by, has killed himself.  Was he consumed by this idea that he was a fraud like his character in “Good Old Neon”?  Did he feel “weak and afraid” or maybe “stupid, afraid, always on the verge of being found out”? Did he buy into the line of thinking that he explicitly warned us was so soul sucking and deadly on that lovely May morning in 2005?  Perhaps he had that “constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing,” Some probably question whether he felt washed up and/or like a sell out considering that Brief Interviews is being made into a feature film and rumors circulate that Infinite Jest may be as well and lets not forget the photo of him in GQ last year.  None of these questions really matter though and we are never going to get answers unless a 200 page suicide note begins to circulate (which it very well might), his fiction and essays will continue to make me a much better and happier person and will never be more than a couple of feet away lest I forget “what it is to be a fucking human being.”  His death is an extraordinarily sad thing.

Below are some of the better pieces I have read that talk about his death.  I am still in shock.

Washington City Paper

La Times

Gawker

Kottke.org

New York Times

LA Times: Farewell, David Foster Wallace

A Pit Bull in Lipstick is the Same as a Wolf in Sheep's Clothing; Isn't it?

Gov. Palin, as it turns out, is a pit-bull.  Not only did she herself allude to this, but often times I will employ this term for a person who at first seems passive and reserved to only surprise you with ferociousness when push comes to shove.  My mother for example, standing at all of 5’2, has been called a pit bull before.  Even though I agree with her—Palin that is—politics only about 1% of the time, I have to give her credit for her apparent outrage.

And she sunk her teeth deep into the media and the Democratic campaign last night both of whom supposedly crossed the line in speaking about her home life, despite the fact that it seems the Republicans involved went on the offensive to break the story, and her qualifications as a running mate.  As far as her qualifications go, I don’t think that is an area where Obama really wants to tread considering much of the questioning of his own qualifications is just now starting to die down.  Plus there is the fact that she is a Governor which neither McCain nor Obama can boast as true of themselves and that is usually regarded as one of the stipulations to becoming a viable Presidential Candidate. 

As for the other charge, I contend that going on the offensive with the breaking news on Monday was a clever way of provoking controversy and thereby taking everything that gets said about and saying it is biased and sexist.  This is sort of what conservatives charge liberals with doing, kind of like crying wolf or intimidation in their offended states—i.e. you are just looking for something to make the issue about race or gender or class or what-have-you when it really has little to do with those things in the first place.

That said, the focus of The New York Times today was not on the creepy right wing stuff that Palin said but rather the “melodrama” that always seems to garner so much attention and focus.  As Obama pointed out, I “did not hear a single word about the economy… Not once did they mention the hardships that people are going through.”  The poor, as usual, go uncared for and in their economic plan, which consists of it would seem tax cuts!,  the divide between rich and poor would only be greater. 

Then, of course, there is God’s creation to look at that we are given dominion over.  Too often that call for care is interpreted as making Mother Nature bow to the nature of man, which is complete futile, and ends with destruction.  The energy crisis we are in, Palin says, has a quasi-solution just off Alaska’s shores in untapped natural oil reserves.  What a plan. 

The Doomsday Clock is down to five minutes till midnight and the crowd in Minnesota chanted “Drill Now, Drill Now, Drill Now!”!  She says they are also going to “lay more pipelines, build more nuclear plants, create jobs with clean coal and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal and other alternative sources,” one can only assume in that order, leaving little time for “moving forward” as we still focus on nonrenewable resources (with the except of nuclear energy of course).

But no one hears about any of this stuff except for just in passing.  It doesn’t sell papers to talk about stuff like this.  It isn’t sexy and no one cares.  So all we get is talk about what order McCain hugged Palin’s family in.  

Family Politics

After yesterday’s announcement that Vice Presidential Candidate, Gov. Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old unwed daughter, Bristol, is pregnant, much attention has been placed back on the ever-present campaign issues of family values and abortion. 

This is, of course, something that happens to people all the time and is rarely even news worthy; however, with the GOP’s supposed core of support coming from conservative Protestants, which Gov. Palin herself claims to be a part of, some questions with religious implications have begun to surface (as they almost always do at this time in an election year).  Some Republican constituents are asking whether McCain made the right decision when choosing his running mate, favoring Senator Joseph Lieberman or former Gov. Tom Ridge, both of whom favor abortion rights, but this runs anathema to those Christian groups who are pro-life.  There is also the question of whether she will be able to handle the demands of being a VP considering that Gov. Palin herself has recently had a child who will require special attention and now has a daughter, still a child herself, who will soon bring another life into their home.

What The Times is seeing this as, in a way, in the article “In Political Realm, ‘Family Problem’ Emerges as Test and Distraction,” which was one of about four on the family centered issue, seems to be an opportunity for the VP nominee to walk the conservative pro-life walk which I am sure the GOP is all very aware.  This puts the young Bristol in quite the predicament considering that one of her options was never really an option politically.  But that is neither here nor there since she is well past the time for aborting the fetus.  What she has now become is a symbol for the conservative party, she is someone who is commended for doing the “right thing” by “deciding to marry and have the baby.”

While the candidates are saying that the private lives of these people are “off-limits”, there will likely be much political spin on both sides trying to pull the old religious ethical conundrums down around Gov. Palin and her “family problem.”  This is not “the traditional image of a first family,” as the article is quick to point out.  James Dobson of Focus on the Family, who always has to make his two cents count, claims in the article that “the media is already trying to spin this as evidence that Govenor Palin is a hypocrite.”  Going on that “all it really means is that she and her family are human.” 

Be that as it may, this too is political spin that is using the religious convictions many have for a right to live for political ends.  One has to wander if McCain’s choice for a running mate may have been based on the knowledge of Palin’s daughter, which does give her even more political significance than she already had.

What does it say about the media, this supposed liberal media outlet specifically, that Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy gets painted in a light of courageous action instead of a possible political move by the GOP to have a family that walks the walk, so to speak?  Can you imagine what people like Dobson would be saying if it were Obama’s daughter who were pregnant with the Dem. Nominee not only on the left of the Evangelical Right but also a candidate who is black?  Wouldn’t that be devastating for the party?  Why is her family even a part of the debate?  She was willing to put all of this in the national media come to think of it.  Gone are the days when Truman threatened reports for featuring the first daughter’s singing abilities.  Even Clinton would have flipped a shit if Chelsea was under the public eye like this.  Of course, this could just be my cynicism talking.

No Nation, No Beast

Having read much in the genre of African Literature, I knew what to expect from Uzodinma Iweala's book Beasts of No Nation—things we Americans know absolutely nothing about in our, even those of us in the toughest of neighborhoods, in terms of capital S suffering. So the whole thing wasn’t really all that shocking, especially to anyone who has read a JM Coetzee novel (which are, in this reviewers opinion, along with Farah and, of course, Achebe, [who are all significantly more disturbing btw] the best of the bunch) despite the fact that that was one of the two things most people site in positive reviews.

The other thing, which in my opinion is way over the top, is Iweala’s voice. It is basically that of Okunkwo (the spelling here is, I am sure, butchered) from Things Fall Apart taken to the stereotypic extreme. These two things combined for what seemed to be a parody of the typical African novel that was written by a guy who, as one sees in the “P.S.” section of the book, is an American, born and raised.

To make the book more dubious still is the fact that the author is a child of extreme privilege unknown to almost everyone outside of the top 1% in the US, which I believe is telling in a profound way. (I mean what authority does he really have?). He ends up romanticizing Africa in a bizarre way; instead of writing about a small part of African culture that is unknown to us, he takes something he read and knows nothing of as a first hand experience and confirms what white elites think they know about what is going on in the “Dark Continent.” This sort of thing directly contrasts the work of Achebe, the one who not only began the literary movement, but also the one who brought it into the mainstream, thus obliterating (Achebe did) the lense through which English writers such as Denison and Conrad made us see the this strange place.

In that Iweala perpetuated the belief that Africa is incredibly violent and scary and inhumane and just completely FUBARed, I would have to call the book a “disappointment” in almost every way.

A Semi Blow

Semi-Pro, the Will Farrell box office flop, proves a total waste of film and not even worth your time as one of the worst sports movies ever made with no redeeming qualities.  There were maybe two points in the film that I smirked but never once did I laugh during its duration.  The film seems to have been made with the sheer intention of marketing Budweiser.  You will no doubt recall the Superbowl spots which ran one of a number of ads featuring Farrell, in character, bumbling through the beer commercials’ dialogue with a off screen voice that were just as awful and irritating as the actual feature.  Good God, everything about it sucked.  I think my old man’s reaction to the film pretty says it all saying “It caused me to lose all faith in movies” and swearing them off for at least a while. 

The only memorable thing about this movie besides making my father damn near physically ill was the film’s one-song soundtrack, “Love Me Sexy”, a song that (unfortunately) stays in your head for an incredibly long time it being hummed by your reviewer a month after watching it.  On occasion I even find myself singing its atrocious lyrics “Baby wake up, we’re naked.” to everyone’s terror and my better judgment. 

The ludicrous plot line runs thus: Jackie Moon (Will Farrell), player/coach/owner/marketing genius, attempts to resurrect his Flint Michigan Tropics (Let’s Get Tropical!) failing franchise by getting fans in the stands.  Only thing is, he has clearly never touched a basketball, among other problems.  With talk of merger, the owner will do anything to make a buck—e.g. dress his team in tropical themed costumes, shave points to avoid having to give away free corndogs on “Free Corndog Night”, volunteer his wife (who seems to be a real slut sleeping with every Mark Spitz stache in the film yet apparently never letting Moon stick his penis in his whore of a wife) for XXX halftime shows, wrestle a bear, etc.—except learn the basketball basics.  This changes after Jackie trades the teams washer for former NBA champ Ed Monix (Woody Harrelson) and led by star player Coffee Black (Andre 3000) aka Clarence Withers/Downtown “Funky Stuff” Malone/Sugar Dunkerton/ Jumping Johnny Johnson the team defects in a mutiny that leaves Monix head coach. 

Monix proves to be a real hard-ass despite the fact that he more or less gets everything he wants with complete creative control—respect from fans and players, wins back the girl (Lynn played by the ever lovely Maura Tierney) he cheated on back when he had game , etc.  So they start winning games, believing that the NBA will merge with the ABA’s top four teams.  This, however, like in real life, never was the case and going into their final game having made a miraculous turnaround from last place are now a half game back from their fourth place goal with a game against the team in that spot, conveniently, the San Antonio Spurs.   But as they set to play, they are told that their team is as dead as a doornail no matter the final outcome.  Apparently there are no playoffs or trade deadlines/restrictions with Jackie trading his star Coffee Black for God only knows, I suspect either money or a hotdog cart as he’s about to be unemployed.  Whatever it was, it wasn’t worth remembering.

So nobody gives a shit and they sure as hell play like it in the first half.  With the Spurs up by some quit-at-halftime type sum, some asshole who mysteriously is on every team they play (actually, the opposing teams seem entirely comprised of the same players, sort of like the Washington Generals if they put on different colored uniforms every night and sucked worse than usual) cheap shots Moon (with no flagrant foul shots apparently) and nearly kills him just before heading to the locker-room. 

This is when things go from incredibly stupid, witless, and foolish to unbearable and pointless and irresponsible and just plain sad.  After his near-death experience, Moon retells his team of his time in Heaven where he just visited with his deceased mother who by the way is an explained black woman who he stole his hit “Love Me Sexy” from after her unfortunate death from which the precedes allowed him to purchase the Flint team.  The sage wisdom bestowed from mother to son in the standard heavenly clouds was to use this great new play that would bring the team back from their incredible deficit—the alley-oop.  But they don’t have anyone with more than a ten inch vertical; luckily, their athletic former teammate Coffee Black has just traded himself back to the Tropics to finish the year with his former comrades in a reckless career decision that burns all his NBA bridges.  For the rest of the game, the Tropics mount a comeback based on Black’s dunks (clearly on a goal that is significantly under the regulation ten feet) from perimeter passes.

Forget the fact that the oop was already in use for at least a decade at that point, even if the play had been revolutionary, don’t you think they would have wised up before the final play of the game?  Well, they don’t and down by two the game comes down to the final ticks of the clock whereupon Moon gets fouled and is sent to the line with one second left in play.  Moon, who has yet to go to the line all season it seems despite never leaving the floor, shoots granny style to Monix’s utter disgust.  The thing about this is that the best free-throw shooter of the era was one Rick Barry who shot underhand which made it at least somewhat acceptable for players at any level.  So, of course, he sinks the first one but the second rattles around and out and with no time left Monix flies in and tips it in for the win.  They win fourth place, woo-hoo!  Who cares?  Right?

But the movie goes on for 20 more minutes in which it is revealed that Moon’s wife’s vagina is “for sad people”, Coffee Black or whatever he calls himself at that point resigns with the Spurs, some pot-smoking $10,000 shot winner gets part of his drug purchasing money from the NBA (not too different from what goes on with players in the league today), Monix and Lynn decide to keep getting it on, Moon is offered a high exec job in the NBA but it is dubious whether he actually gets the job since the bear on the loose who he wrestled in a failed publicity stunt attacks the commissioner of the NBA.  After the bear attack, Jackie screams “Everybody panic!  It’s just like Titanic, but it’s full of bears!”  What an appropriate way of ending this piece of shit movie.  Mercifully the credits begin to fall.

This is the second of three crappy movies (You Don’t Mess with the Zohan being the first with Fools Gold [sic] as the third) viewed in my week home last month that were so bad they made me wonder what, if anything, some actors won’t put their names to just to make a buck.  With that though, one thing is clear, Will Farrell’s popularity has reached a plateau.  Soon people will no longer go to see variations of Ron Burgundy and he will end up going the way of Paulie Shore.  Do yourself a favor and get a new act, otherwise, people are going to wake up and say “fuck Will Farrell” just like we collectively did with Shore after BioDome.  And this is going to happen sooner rather than later.

Men and Their Toys

The documentary Guys and Dolls, which deals with the recent phenomenon of men purchasing Real Dolls that are the equivalent to a very realistic and very expensive blowup doll—something like a plastic woman—takes you into the lives of five men who own these inanimate people. The film itself, fine as far as it goes[1] in depicting this particular subculture, ends up showing you basically what you would expect from the lives of men who have sex with dolls. But it does ask the expected questions and seems to answer them in a somewhat straight forward manner from the mouths’ of the owners of said sex dolls.

The first of the five men that we meet, a guy unfortunately named Davecat, seems to be one of the more screwed up of the bunch. Davecat lives at home[2] and his Real Girl is the cause of much family feuding. This guy, more than anybody else, seriously gives me the creeps. His dad, who is understandably freaked out about his son’s affinity for plastic people, proves unsupportive of his son’s extracurricular activities wishing that he would go out with an actual human being. All of this gets told to us second hand by Davecat, presumably because his father is embarrassed about the whole thing and wants nothing to do with it. Anyway, he explains that he has always had a fascination with manikins and has stories of when he was younger wondering off at the mall to talk to “synthetic women” in miniskirts or something.

The next gentleman featured in the film is Everard, a 50-year-old man who is incredibly lonely and sad and a guy you can’t help really feeling for. Everard, who also lived with his mother for a suspiciously long time, has been alone since her death eleven years ago and has (creepily) kept his mother’s room exactly the way she left it then. What makes this even weirder is the fact that she died in a nursing home and like recreated her room there Norman Bates style.

Next up is Gordon and he is just as unsettling as Davecat just in a slightly different way. Whereas Davecat has my vote for most likely to be a serial killer, no small feat among these men, Gordon is most likely to be a mass murderer. Don’t be surprised if you see this guy on a killing spree a la postal sometime in the future. Gordon, who admits to having an attachment to “inanimate objects,” also owns three guns two of which are assault weapons and not to be fucked with. “Three guns and two girls,” he boasts. Like the other two men thus far mentioned, Gordon has an interesting family background, his father left when he was less than a year-old and his mother buys him things like four-and-a-half feet tall medieval-looking swords. No correlation is ever proposed between this fact and the men preferring the company of dolls.

Two of the few men anywhere, one would guess, that have Real Girls and girl friends are the last two featured in the documentary. The first, Mike from Texas, is in the early stages of a relationship with a woman named Jody; he has be upfront about having at least one Real Doll and hasn’t scared her off yet, and now that he has a girl friend, claims to no longer use the dolls to get his rocks off. Jody remains unconvinced. So do we for that matter. Nonetheless, he contests that he will “give up the dolls for the right women” which he believes could very well be this woman Jody whom he met over the internet. He has began attending Sexoholics Anonymous meetings at the local Catholic church and even sees wedding bells in their future. At one particularly stomach wrenching point in the film, Mike cleans out his favorite (Lexi) of the eight dolls that he owns. He sticks a cleaning utensil that looks like a feather duster into the doll’s vagina saying that it is beginning to “smell like fish” and, pulling the vag-duster out of the artificial womanly orifice, there is a grime that is truly indescribable and almost made my female companion throw up. Despite his persistence that he is not having intercourse with any of his “girls,” he does admit that sometimes he “wakes up with a raging hard on” and wants to have sex with something while his living sexual partner is either asleep or away. So Mike gets this seemingly brilliant idea, rocket scientist he is not, that springing a proposal of a foursome between him, Jody, and two of his favorite dolls for his birthday would further their relationship. All of this, however, proves to be far too confusing for Jody who splits a week after filming.

The other guy who is currently in a relationship, Slade, may or may not own a Real Doll himself,[3] is known as a quote unquote “doll doctor” who fixes them when they get old and flabby. Seeing his workshops sends chills down the spine. In Slade’s garage are five or six dolls[4] hanging, in a row, from chains that fit noose-like around their necks and makes you recall images from the dungeons of serial killers you see on Real TV. The effect is kind of surreal. Anyway, when having sex with a Real Doll, he says “it comes alive.” It is so lifelike, he contends, that “when you push it feels like it is pushing back.” Somewhat grounded in reality though, he recognizes “it’s just a doll—a high form of masturbation.” It is his girl friend, Rebecca, though who expresses an obvious fact that none of the men seem to have realized—that the Real Girls have set an unrealistic standard for the female form. This typical feminist rhetoric is very true as can be seen with many men and their affinity for porn, this, however, is an actual manifestation of the fantasy into the 3-D world we as human beings live in making it all the more likely that these men will set standards that no woman apart from some .01% could measure up to, literally.

The result of all this ends up being a special kind of sadness in that you just know all of these men will ultimately end up being hopelessly alone. Gordon, for instance, speaking of an ex-girl friend, says that the nicest thing she ever did for him was leave him right before Christmas, that allowed him to spend the money he had been saving up on himself rather than buying gifts for her. He admits “if you are 39-years-old and haven’t found anyone by now, you’re probably not going to.” Well, you certainly won’t now with a couple of freaky life-like dolls hanging in your closet. It seems that these men have sort of just given up. “It looks like it is just me and my dolls from here on out” Everard says, adding “But there are worse things in life.” And one would have to agree that there are worse ways to live. I would strongly suggest not judging these men, I mean more power to them, but it is all pretty weird. All of the men, with the possible exception of Slade, have serious self-esteem issues, clearly. With that said, if they aren’t hurting anybody, why not let them live this bizarre fantasy out to the fullest. However, one of those things that are worse than living with the dolls, Everard says, is “living alone.” But sadly, he is living alone. This points to the two major psychological problems in living out a fantasy, namely that (1) these men have chosen an inanimate Real Girl over a real girl which makes actual person-to-person connection impossible which leads (2) to their constructing such a detailed fantasy that they have blurred the lines between that fantasy and reality in such a way that they are having trouble distinguishing the two.

Living in your own fantasy 24/7/365 makes actual human connection impossible and unless they stop, they are going to have their dolls and nothing else. “I know what to expect, with real girls[5] you don’t get that,” Davecat says pointing to a fact that while it is true, people with thoughts do tend to be pretty unpredictable, is really the problem itself. From time to time, he makes half-hearted attempts at dating “organics” but will always go back to “living in a Barbie world” because “It’s Fantastic!”[6] What he ultimately wants is a constant, and “you can’t get more constant that a doll.”

Which brings us to the second problem, all the men, on some level, tend to think of their dolls as being living things. Gordon again sometimes thinks “I hope I don’t get her pregnant” or “she doesn’t give me any diseases.” Likewise, we see Davecat experience real grief in having to part from his doll for any amount of time.

Unfortunately for Davecat, he has to take his “sweetie” in for some repairs which will take three weeks, the longest they have been apart for the past six years. What this really involves, however, is his putting her in a cargo box and shipping her across the country as you would say a book or a television. An obvious sadness is going on he admits. He sure has that right. He doesn’t mean it the way you would hope though, he says “they’ll be missing each other” and that he “has never had anyone to say good bye to.” But absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say, and “when she returns it will be like a second honeymoon,” which implies a first honeymoon which is heartbreaking.

Despite the film’s tagline, that “For some, money really can buy love,” ultimately it doesn’t. It never does. These inanimate lifelike recreations of a human being do not offer any of the psychic consequences, neither positive nor negative, of being with an actual living and breathing human being. All they are and all they ever will be is an elaborate fantasy that perpetuates the loneliness and alienation that we already experience way too much of.

[1] In that generic documentary way.
[2] Go figure.
[3] Though he does admit to having sex with them on a few occasions, which if he has never actually owned one is even grosser and creepier considering that he repairs them for a living so would have to like barrow another guy’s sex toy. What does that say for cheating btw? I assume most of the men in this film anyway would be pretty upset indeed if they thought their artificial partners had some other man’s dick in their nether regions.
[4] One of the dolls doesn’t have a face, having been removed for detailed painting, which exposes the plastic underneath the area you wish the face was. With teeth and eye sockets, the plastic does resemble a crude skull which makes the scene horrifying if for only a brief moment until you realize the girls aren’t real. This does, however, make you wonder how many serial killers own these things. Jeffrey Dahmer, for instance, didn’t want to kill his victims so much as have the living equivalent of a Real Doll which he attempted to create by drilling holes in the heads of young men and pour acid down into their skulls so as to make them “zombie-like”—i.e. turn them into sexual partners that do not themselves have the ability to think or act much like these men seem to themselves want.
[5] As in women with an actual pulse.
[6] In case you don’t recognize them, these are the lyrics to Aqua’s song “Barbie Girl”. I am so funny I just threw up.

Of Course the Candidate Caught Doing Prostitutes Thinks America’s a Theocracy

Gary Hart, former U.S. Senator and Democratic Presidential Candidate, offers some of the most insightful critiques of American democracy and the current state of affairs. As one who has studied Law and had a life long history in politics as well as a degree in divinity from Yale, Hart is one of the most qualified individuals on the planet to deliver such an outstanding blow for American politics. In masterfully asking that his critics offer him as much forgiveness for his past discretions with prostitutes as they have with W and his former use of cocaine, Hart effectively regains much of the authority that would most certainly have been quested had he ignored it all together. This thoughtful and beautifully written essay on religion and politics is the most insightful and thought provoking account published since Thomas Paine.

Right now, according to Hart, there is a religious revival undergoing in the United States that has proved damaging to our country’s democratic principles, especially when it comes to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Evangelical and Nondenominational churches are currently increasing in their numbers of attendees while all other denominations are either at a plateau or declining. The former often times have eschatological beliefs and contend that America is a quote unquote Christian nation with the right to fight Crusades against “evil” and govern by the principles of the Bible rather than those laid out by our Founding Fathers. In fact, most people see evangelical ideals as actually being one and the same. And what Hart is quick to point out is that our current President and his administration are among this group of people. People who when we see them holding signs on the street we think they are insane and when we walk by them when they are holding court—usually on city corners they consider secular, a term synonymous with evil in this day and age—they tell us we are going to Hell to burn for all eternity because we eat shrimp or smoke pot or kill hookers or whatever. These are the kinds of people running our country according to Hart. And he’s right.

Hart is tired of this Bush shit that all of us have had to deal with for the past eight years. He is sick and tired of rewarding the wealthy for being wealthy with tax cuts, Health-and-Wealth gospels, and our present Crusade which has brought us back into the period of Christian v. Muslim in hand-to-hand warfare reminiscent of medieval Europe when the Pope controlled national policy and declared war on Islam. He believes our leaders should be helping the poor instead of republicans and should actually listen to the United Nations before going off and fighting in the name of Christ.

What’s going on now is that the line between politics and religion have been blurred and its been done without many taking notice, or at least hadn’t noticed it was happening. Much of this is the result of the “code words” our leaders use all the time that can mean anything the audience wants them to mean instead of the freaky stuff that the evangelical right really knows them to mean.

This minority, a minority not only within this country and their religion but also within their own party and their denomination, has taken control of country and established what Hart calls “the tyranny of the faithful” comparing them to another minority political group with freaky religious beliefs that hijacked their nation’s government: the Nazis. He explains that the greatest danger in the politicization of the early twenty-first-century religious revival, aka the religious occupation of politics, is that both religion and politics are corrupted. He says:

Organized religion that seeks to occupy political power loses its purity and its purpose. Jesus sought to change people’s hearts, not their political parties… When any faith becomes an instrument of politics, it no longer is a religious faith. It is simply a political instrument like all others. And that is the way it is being used today. (34)

So now the U.S. has been reconstituted on religious lines and this group was the one responsible for Gulf War Redux which makes our government look more like a theocratic empire rather than a political democracy. In other words, everything is fucked.

With our “modern theocracy,” we have taken on the role of Avenging Angel with detrimental consequences all because of American hubris. When a government thinks it is ordained by God and therefore must be right and then implements those sentiments into state policy no matter how many oppose it or however unreasonable or opposed to reality and then insisting that those who oppose them are wrong or stupid or evil or insane, then things end up getting pretty scary. It’s pretty obvious that this is what is going on now, there is an Us, which means conservative-fundamentalist-Christian-free-market-capitalists, and a Them, which includes everyone else.

Jesus taught us that where your head is, your heart is as well. As everyone knows, there is no such thing as atheism, everybody worships something whether it is money or power or intellect or beauty or the Four Noble Truths or JC or Allah or whatever. Something else that everyone knows, Hart points out, is that there is no worshipping more than one God in a way that allows for you to worship them both in an equal and accurate way. Either you worship God in the way that Christ intended or you worship money or power or one of those other things that will eat you alive. There is no reconciliation between the Kingdom of God and the thrown of Caesar. It just cannot happen.

Fundamentalists who are running our country seem to care about one thing—money. Fundamentalism and wealth are proving insufficient and things are not going well for our country. Not well at all. This is because, as Hart makes clear, we are being forced to adopt these ideas that are by no means mainstream. Faith cannot be coerced and still have a salutary effect; it does not fulfill our longing in anyway to have a faith forced on us just as it didn’t a thousand years ago. They are judging us but not themselves. They judge and prescribe who is evil and what is good for us. They do this because they are among the Elect and are absolute in their convictions. This, however, is extremely dangerous national policy because it makes a decision without lateral dialogue and sticks with it no matter the outcome—ah la Iraq. This is reverting back to “pre-enlightenment ideals,” Hart explains, where absolutism reined supreme. Bush’s God policy has reverted us back to the centuries before the French Revolution in a belief that seems to say Reason is the Enemy of Religion. Faith is a very personal thing, yet now it is something people use to get votes and to go on crusades.

Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, wanted us to be our best by empowering others, he said nothing about apocalyptic end of days or partisan values or trampling on others for our own financial gain. In fact, Hart believes, these were the things that Jesus spoke out against. In our capitalist system, some people are in need of help, yet these supposed Christian don’t give two shits about the poor. It is easy for those with inherited wealth to talk about the American Dream and bitch about the poor and do nothing for those in need. We need to work on social issues and we need to do this now. The need is now and must take place through justice, mercy, and humility.

However, there is little to suggest that we live in a just, merciful, or humble society. The idea is to be righteous, not self-righteous by forcing others to accept their own policies. This would include, Hart declares, ceasing the demonization of liberals which was just getting out of hand for a while. But liberal doesn’t seem like a dirty word anymore; not in Indiana and not in the South even, at least North Carolina that is, which is saying a lot since when I told people I voted for Nader in 2000, I got looks from my high school classmates that you could just tell they thought I was either an idiot or crazy or both. This goes to prove Hart’s last assertion of the book—that the system won’t let this continue to the point of a all in all theocracy—as people start wanting to know what our politicians mean when they say “values” and how they are going to influence policy. There are checks and balances built in so this won’t happen.

Not only is a shift to more secular politics taking place as a result of our three branched system, it is happening because, as history has taught us, it is inevitable (or at least seems to be [especially in a democracy]). According to JC’s old adage, what’s Caesar’s is Caesar’s and what’s God’s is God’s; that is, the state controls the secular and the church rules the spiritual. With that he warns the Religious Right that it ultimately can’t win. People are getting tired of their medieval mindset, their covert advances toward making this a Christian Nation, their unwillingness to negotiate, the lack of lateral dialogue, Bush using the word crusade, etc., etc. The Religious Right’s strong-arm over the political landscape, Hart believes, isn’t going to last much longer, and neither do I. The Founding Fathers, feeling divinely inspired themselves, set up roadblocks against greed, power, and terror. They knew that the future leaders of this great nation would be only human and thus susceptible to error as well as the aforementioned evils. Nobody is perfect so they made it impossible for one man to change the nation to the way he see’s fit. Now, it seems that we have returned to our inevitable moderate center which, trust me, is really for the best. This is what makes the current attempt of combining religion and politics so incredibly pathetic and stupid and pointless because someone is going to come along and undo all the religious mess that we are now left with. But we are still going to truck along, as Americans that is what we do and will continue to do.

What makes Hart’s book so impressive is the way he shows us that Jesus was an awfully warm and caring guy and the way the Religious Right has shanghaied Him for political ends and pretty much done everything in their power to twist his words into things they were not in order make their own worldview fit into that of Our Lord and Savior’s. But after closer inspection, this isn’t what they are doing at all, what they are really doing is twisting His words and taking His words out of context so as to fit them into their belief structure. Isn’t that blasphemy? Isn’t our present situation the sort that Jesus sacrificed his life to speak out against? And hey, doesn’t our country suddenly, when you think about it, start looking an awful lot like Rome? Shit, if some guy knocked on Pat Robertson’s door and contested his faith as he understands it and claimed he was the son of God, don’t you think he would probably scream that the guy be thrown in jail? Don’t you think just maybe we would crucify Him again? After reading Hart, you start to ask yourself some of these very tough questions.