fatty fatty two by four

I feel extra fat these days.

If you removed my gut, I would not look necessarily bad - gaping hole aside. I am quite tall, and therefore do not look particularly grotesque at my worst.

But these days my eating habits and my laziness have taken their toll-houses on me, and I feel more bloaty and awful than usual. (Did you get that? Toll-house, as in cookie, as in fatty fatty two by four, can't get enough of them cookie-licious goods.)

My favorite extravagances these days are caramel frappucinos, which, once you remove the whip cream, aren't as bad as they could be. I also like Chinese food, pizza, and have recently discovered Chipotle's burrito bowls. Their chicken is to expand for.

I'm not saying these are the only foods I eat. But these are the best/worst ones. I do my best to eat salads and Lean Cuisines and drink loads of water (despite what Penn & Teller say). But ultimately, my weak will and strong desires get the better of me. And exercise? Oh, that's two four-letter words, my friend. "Exer", which is Latin for "repetitive motion", and "cise" roughly translates as "to slice fat from the bone". No pain, no gain, no chocolate flan.

I am fortunate in that my wife is not only loving and supportive, but thinks I'm still Superman. Which is nice in those low, self-hating moments of doubt that crop up every few hours. If only my tights still fit.

vicious!

My son (15) had been after me for what felt like months about some game called God Of War, which looked initially like just another fighter game, only set in the rich mythology of Greece. I repeatedly blew him off in a gentle, fatherly way, because my son tends to want any game that looks remotely interesting. He does not discern the subtle differences between quality gameplay and dull, repetitive, noisy mechanisms that in my childhood required quarters.

My gaming website of choice, GameSpot, had a review of God Of War last week when it released, and it made a 9.3 out of 10, a superb rating, and one of the highest scores in some time. In fact, it has received more than its fair share of impressive reviews, so much so that I was inclined to buy the game for myself. And even before buying it I had the clear impression that the game was far too violent for my son. But that was when I hadn't planned on playing it.

Last Thursday I purchased the game, and I can safely say that it is one of the most amazing displays of virtual fun I have ever played in the course of, oh, the last twenty years.

It is also one of the most violent and ferocious creations I have played. And that sword has two sides, and they are equally sharp.

On the one hand, after the first thrilling level, you are treated to a cinematic display of an intense, gory kill-spree, including some nastiness I don't want to try to explain here. I found this to be a highly exhilarating sequence, setting me (as a gamer) up for an unparalleled ride. As a father, however, my mind was reeling at the thought of my son EVER seeing this. There is no way on Earth I would let a person under the age of, say, 27 anywhere near this game. But I only have to worry about the 15-year-old who's going to be salivating when he sees the game box on my shelf. He's my responsibility.

On the other hand, the game is incredible fun, very challenging and beautiful to look at. It is a real feat of genius on the part of it's designers, especially since this is no Xbox exclusive...this is a PS2-only game. And the PS2, by comparison, is not known for it's mechanical prowess.

And there you have it...the conundrum that is a creative, powerful, engaging and intensely enjoyable game that you cannot, by any means, share with your junior gamer-spawn. That "M" rating has never been more acutely accurate.

That said...God Of War is sweet. Sugar cane. Vicious!

between wives

Having just celebrated my 41st birthday, I am at that period of age where men seem to sometimes lose their minds trying to compensate for life's little inequities. Middle age crazy, I believe, was the term some years back. They even made a film by that name in 1980 with Bruce Dern as a goes-nutty 40-year-old married to Ann-Margret who wasn't completely satisfied with life. This was, quite clearly, a fantasy on the scale of Lord Of The Rings, as any man married to Ann-Margret in her prime - or hell, before or after her prime for that matter - would have been crazy NOT to be satisfied. Ann-Margret, for the uninitiated, was the Anna Nicole Smith of her day, the only differences being she was sufficiently talented as an actress and singer, and did not seem to be in a drug-induced stupor most of the time. Oh, and she didn't just start out hot, she remained hot for many a decade.

So while I am not wondering how to get back some precious, lost element of my youth, it's primarily because I never had a sufficient transitional period of single life to know what kinds of things I could be missing now anyway. After college, a period where I maintained a few steady girlfriends and interests such that I did not feel like I was wasting my time, I jumped with relative speed into husbandry twice, once by necessity and once by choice. If there is some internal mechanism that thrives on a perceived comfort or structure created by marriage, I don't know, but it doesn't always work out. That my first marriage was an error in judgement is understating things a bit; in an emotionally naive moment I allowed myself to become involved with someone who, in any other time of my life, I would have been repelled by on every level - emotionally, intellectually, culturally and most damning of all, behaviorally - and so I have only myself to blame for the loss of the six years that it consumed.

When the divorce was final, I actually had a few years between wives, but again, I did not create a commendable bachelor lifestyle. There were a few girlfriends and interests, but I became so introverted that I rarely wanted to go out, let alone be part of a crowd, and that has stayed with me ever since. Fact is, the "between wives" period should have seen me become far more adventurous socially. I should have played it up, wanting to make up for the loss of a fifth of my life, but the anger and sheer fright at having managed to allow myself to be in that position once, I believe, made me the sarcastic, displeased hermit that I was fast-tracking toward becoming. It petrified me.

Now, happy with second marriage and wife despite the setbacks of being laid off a few years back and having to essentially start a career over at a mid-point in life, I definitely feel smarter now than before. Less naive. Less likely to make snap decisions with years of my life. Yet I do regret the mistakes of my first 40 years for their impact on my next 40 years. Savings, debt, parenting, health, art...all could have been better handled sooner in my life. I claim ignorance, because I never figured that all that time could seem so precious years later.

This wasn't meant to be depressing or dull. But it also wasn't intended as an entertainment. I think I've just gotten to the point where I had to say it somewhere, so that it could be said. Let's just file it under self-therapy.

I'll find something funny for the next one to balance this out. But I don't think I'll apologize. Somehow that just wouldn't ring true.

one from the archives

the effort

sometimes
the effort seems so silly
and misplaced
that you want to
simply slip away
down a mountain road
to some isolated
foreign dancehall
where you can
sweat happily
into the night
with a doe-eyed
revolution widow
whose hair is tied behind her
and whose mouth curls
up in a devil's wink
and whose body is as
hard as a whip-stock,
wet from the close,
poorly-ventilated space
and urged on by the
music and the joyous cries
of men and women
in a time of resurgence
in a time of allowance
in a time of unwound muscle
and muted nerve

unbound, you only need dance,
no native tongue required
when eyes translate
so well

no need of plans and
understanding
so long as music plays
and moonlight
defends us

this effort
defines us.

© scn 5-15-01

signs of the apocalypse, volume 37

Steven Spielberg, director of The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List, has just bought the rights to make a 2006 big-screen version of the defunct television series Baywatch.

...and the seas will boil as blood, and the skies will char as air turns fire, and teeth will gnash and something something rending asunder. Oy.

sargasso blog

There comes a time when you simply have to flush out all the scraps of paper and seemingly clever asides and topical rants and just put them down, stop waiting, get rid of them from your already cluttered desk. This would be that thing.

-OSCAR POST PARTUM
Paul Giamatti. Uma Thurman. Javier Bardem. Yeah, I'm still pretty shocked. I always think "maybe next year". But I know better. Hollywood is a strange, strange planet.

-THE OVERT PIZZA OF WRATH (with a +2 Dexterity)
I saw this just a few days ago: while playing Everquest 2 online, you apparently can type in "/pizza" and your browser will open an order form for your local Pizza Hut. This clever example of cross-marketing falls somewhere between brilliant and despicable, and I don't know what to make of it. Rated "T" for Toppings.

-ANOTHER SALUTE TO THE DOCTOR
Whether you like Doonesbury or not, you had to take your hat off to Garry Trudeau's spot-on tribute to Hunter S. Thompson, inspiration for the strip's character Duke. I liked it. So there.

-WORST...E-MAIL...EVER
I received a choice little piece of horrific spam earlier this week. From "Kurdish O. Corrector", either a phenomenally clever cover-name or a ridiculously unfortunate real moniker, came the message "Hello Mr. Steven Norwood". From this plainly direct opener alone, I could only guess how many awful sorts of things lie in wait, but I managed to be shocked anyway. In order to preserve the sanctity of Controlled Burning, I have decided to transcribe it here in true Madlibs fashion. I have not changed any of the incorrect spellings or grammatical errors found within (at least, on the words I haven't deleted):

"Hello dear Steven Norwood

We ask you to remember this five simple rules to treat the gir1s right:

1. Remember - You are The Boss and You are The Master. All the girlls in the world are yours.

2. Forget "sweetheart", "honey", "darling" and other stupid words. You need one word - _____.

3. Never ask _____s if and how they like it. Just ____ them the way U want.

4. Make _____s _____ and ______, they gonna love it. Then, _____ your ____ right into their ____s.

5. Get to this site to see _____ _____ action and _____ _____ ___. We do not promise, we simply deliver."

(pause for a quick shower to clean the slime off)

I did not click on the URL provided. That would have been tempting the nastiest web gods.

Some things are better left alone. Some things are better burned in a horrible house fire. The server this message came from deserves to be incinerated and its ashes used to line the foundation of a maximum-security prison.

-IDOL OPINIONS
Bo Bice and Nadia what'shername are awesome. The rest are cluttering up the stage. Paula Abdul needs to realize that constructive criticism doesn't mean saying "you're awesome, you're such a star". Simon Cowell needs to stop prefacing his comments with "I'll be honest" and just say what he thinks, instead of dressing it up with obscure references to Tasmanian Nightclubs and such falderal.

-HOSTAGE
It's a much better movie than anyone's giving it credit. Very tense and heavy for a popcorn thriller. But fun to sit through. Give Bruce Willis a few more dollars and feel the love.

Okay...the rest gets shredded...that's it.

insert rimshot here

From the I Kid You Not Department:

The funniest thing I read last week was an e-mail announcement from one of our local art-house theaters, which promoted two of the films starting that Friday. It was titled:

"This Week: Inside Deep Throat and The Pacifier!"

the passing of progressive men

I forgot last week to mention: I learned from reading the newspaper on Sunday, February 27th, that Peter Benenson and Robert Kearns had died.

Benenson, 83, was the man who founded Amnesty International back in 1961 after reading an article about the arrest and imprisonment of two students in Portugal. Their crime was toasting liberty in a public cafe.

Kearns, 77, was the man who invented intermittent windshield wipers. He got the patents for his invention in 1967. Auto manufacturers started using the wipers without a licensing agreement, and in settling cases against Ford and Chrysler he won judgments of more than twenty million dollars, with interest.

That these two pioneers in their disparate fields died on the same day, I think, implies some grand design. Perhaps, in time, we will come to understand its importance.

the screening of be cool: addendum

All of this reminds me of a conversation I had a few weeks earlier at a screening of the film Bride and Prejudice, a Bollywood flick that was co-sponsored by the Asian Film Festival of Dallas (AFFD), a group that I support. That evening, I was manning the table of promotional materials as folks came in to see the film. There was one gentleman who approached us and asked about the manner in which we handled the screenings, saying they should be more "dignified". I think he meant something else, but he relished the word "dignified" like it was a very effective good luck charm.

His complaint, re-stated about seven different (but same) ways, was that because he didn't always get a good seat, we were to blame. I tried to point out my favorite clause, the old standard "First Come, First Served Basis", but he had none of that. It was like talking to adults who don't want to actually hear your response, because they have already organized what they think your response should be in their heads, and frankly, you can say nothing to sway them. And don't try logic or anything so well-thought out as reason. They don't barter in reason. If they did, they wouldn't be complaining about getting a better seat while fifty other people walk past them and get, surprisingly, better seats.

Crys is not nearly as patient as I am, though her happy-people skills are quite strong. But I could see and hear her seams coming apart, and I knew she really wanted to pop this guy in the face, or at least tell him to get the fuck out of that theater "before she did something they'd both regret". Yeah, it's a Sedaris line, but it fits.

I've never considered myself good at dealing with conflict. I prefer to joke my way out of situations, charm myself past them. But I think we handled the guy in the right way. We reasoned and reasoned until he finally just left. Still, it all circles back to the concept of, what the hell is wrong with people when it comes to something free? Don't they realize it isn't? Nothing is. There's no lunch, no grocery aisle sample platter, no stack of cutouts that doesn't cost you in some form or fashion. But you can't tell total strangers to stop their whining and act like 40-year-olds. Sometimes they just leave. Sometimes they shoot you in the face. And sometimes they say they'll come back, and you're left never knowing if they're going to keep their word or not.

And really, what does their word cost them?

the screening of be cool, part 2

Book-to-movie and movie-to-book comparisons aside, let me tell you about the world of advance film screenings. This much I know:

There are agencies that promote films being released. They have a relationship with the movie studios and they screen films for both critics and general audiences alike. Often, in the bowels of your local weekly newspaper, between advertisements for tattoo parlors "legitimate" masseuses and sperm donation centers, you'll find an ad telling you that if you go and stand in line for hours one Saturday morning at the cigar shop on the corner of racial epithet and stab wound, they'll (maybe) give you a pass for two to see an advance screening of a film. These screenings are often cross-promoted by one or two or even three local radio stations, often of differing formats, but all with one thing in common: they were all given the same number of passes to distribute, and that number always exceeds the number of seats in a given theater. Thus the use of the phrase "Seating Limited" on the passes. Oh, and my own personal favorite: "First Come, First Serve Basis".

So you get all kinds at these screenings, but what you get most is a legion of folks who seem not so fanatical about seeing movies but seeing them for free. And therein lies the tragedy of the average screening.

When 600 people are gathered for a film in a theater that seats 300, and from that 300 you must subtract the 50 seats reserved for press and special guests, you ultimately have a large number of people who don't get to see the show. Some take it well. Some do not.

I have witnessed normal-looking, middle-class suburban individuals spout venomous tirades with wild eyes and bared fangs when someone slips into line ahead of them. I have heard ugly derision and contempt blurted out at people seated in the press section. I have had conversations with individuals who feel that since they received a pass, they should get in without issue, even if they arrive five minutes before a feature is scheduled to begin, every nook of the theater long-since jammed with people who waited for hours. Ultimately, it is the agency rep who must handle these complaints, though they really can't help the complainants' bad timing. The rep can only smile, shrug, and say they're sorry. But that is frequently not enough for the angry and forlorn.

I see some of the same people at screenings now that I saw almost ten years ago. They have aged, and not always well, and they were older to begin with. They appear to be holding onto their free films as a sort of life-support system. And some of them don't look like they're going to make the summer releases.

At the Be Cool screening I attended last night, the first indication that things would not go well was the burgeoning line of hundreds of folks who I wagered would not make it through the theater door. About fifteen minutes before the show was to begin, we marched ourselves in and saw that the theater, maybe a 300 seater, was already filled with close to 75 people in little clusters, and several rows were still reserved for press, and when you did the math, it equaled ugly.

We did not sit in the press section because we wanted to be on the aisle and no aisle seats were available in the roped-off rows. We sat one row below the press section on the far end, where we knew that a) we could make a quick exit when the end credits started to roll, and b) our respective flu-weakened stomachs might call upon us for a speedy departure during, say, a key action sequence or good joke. We wanted to be as unhindered as possible for that gastronomic possibility.

Once the auditorium was filled, I found myself immediately surrounded by a large number of individuals who, by my most careful calculations, would be termed filthy and mentally unstable. These were ragged people that I joked might have been given passes as they exited a downtown asylum, then realized they had to come uptown to see the free show, and walked all the way, never missing a gutter to stomp through as they sang flat renditions of "Don't Worry, Be Happy" or some Christina Aguilera tune that was popular three years ago. Some of them walked and ate simultaneously. Some of them ate more than others. Some of them, I wagered, ate the others. There were an alarming number of golem-like pears waddling about, looking for better seats, hoping to get free memorabilia from the radio deejays standing down front, teasing t-shirts and coozies. Some just waited for the last-minute release of press seats, and others just wandered aimlessly, looking dirty and confused. This would have been a cruel joke, but I was only being observant.

One of the more alarming was a rail-thin woman in an ill-fitting windbreaker and Swifty Lazar glasses. During an ill-conceived freebie distribution game where the deejays asked for anyone with a stain on their clothing to wave their arms so they could be given one of the aforementioned tchotchkes, this lady was so distressed at the prospect of being overlooked that her speech seemed to break down to guttural yelps, pathetic wookie dipthongs that were actually the word "stain" being repeated, again and again. "Stain...stain...STAIN!" This display was just painful to watch, as she clutched at the spot on her sweatshirt where, indeed, there was a small smear.

This is an extreme example, but the veneer of wanting, the ugly, proprietary greed you find in some screening audience members really does seem to convert normal people into grabbing, selfish dogs, and when they have the barest scraps of meat in their teeth, they will shake their jaws until their eyes water before they let go.

You can't control any of these things. You can only go, take your seat, and hope the film doesn't completely fail your sensibilities. You can't control who sits beside you, or people's attitudes, or the madness that is someone who has paid nothing for something they grasp to their chest as though it cost them a king's ransom in gold.

the screening of be cool, part 1

Elmore Leonard writes fun books. The ones I've read have been about tough-guy characters in tense and humorous situations, often punctuated by bullets. I'm sure that's not all he's written about, but hey, I wouldn't even pretend I've read a fraction of the forty-plus books he has written, many of which have been turned into great, good and sometimes awful films.

Be Cool is a sequel of sorts to Get Shorty, which was filmed by Barry Sonnenfeld and starred John Travolta as Chili Palmer, a so-cool-he's-tough (or so-tough-he's-cool) collector for the mob who decides that the movie business in Hollywood is a much more enjoyable racket, while maintaining a certain level of the backstabbing, murder and intimidation he is used to. Chili glides through the story completely unrattled by the goings-on of various shady producers, conflicted bodyguards, skeevy mob stooges and the elite, mostly unaware hierarchy of Hollywood royalty who see him as a guy who knows how to command a room, usually with nothing more than a hard stare and the velvet inflections of his voice. At least, this is how Travolta manifests the character in Get Shorty, and it works like a dream. Sonnenfeld's film glides cooly along like Chili's stride, and every scene is pretty damn funny, no matter the gravity of the situation.

Overall, the film is a real joy in a low-key way that makes it almost forgettable.

That is, until you get the chance to compare it to it's sequel, Be Cool. Be Cool fails on two completely different levels: as a film, it is flat, frequently unfunny, and never maintains its characters' rhythms the way its predecessor did. But more on that later. Worse, it seems a complete negative of the book it is based on. I am halfway through Be Cool at this time, and have now seen the film (again, wait for it...). For pulpy, pop-culture noir, the book is richer, allowing some nice motivations that don't translate well into two hours of film. But more importantly, the film seems to invert all the major characters either physically, or with regard to their roles in the story. Halfway through, and I can tell you that:

-the character of Linda Moon, who seems to be falling for Chili, is a white chick, and sounds like Uma Thurman as written by QT. In the film, Uma Thurman plays a record executive's widow who falls for Chili, while Linda Moon is a black chick played by Christina Milian, more the object of the story than a fully-realized lead character.

-the character of Raji is a black man, and he may not be the wisest fellow, but he isn't a moron. In the film, Vince Vaughan plays Raji as a white guy who acts black, and is more buffoon than threat.

-the character of Eliot, Raji's (conflicted) bodyguard, is a large "wall" of a Samoan with shoulder-length black hair. In the film he is played by The Rock as a tall, muscular man with a neat blaxploitation fro.

-Linda Moon's former bandmates are brought back onto the scene to re-form her original band. In the film, Linda Moon is a solo performer who apparently never had a band.

-the police detective Darryl Holmes seems to be a thoughtful recurring character so far in the book. Cops are almost an afterthought in the film.

This is just some of what tweaks you when you see a film that is so opposite what you're reading, and let's suppose for a moment that I hadn't been reading Be Cool. I would still find the movie lacking because it has a rep to maintain, that coolness and persistent humor that made Get Shorty a really delightful fish out of water story, while neatly deflating all the sharks that fish dives in with. Forgive the sea analogies, but consider this: Be Cool is a film that can't do as it says. It strains too hard and ultimately finishes feeling under-cooked and over-seasoned. Or over-cooked and under-seasoned. Or maybe I should go back to sea anemonies...analogies. Sorry.

On the plus side, some of Leonard's crisper dialogue does get placed verbatim into the film, though it sounds both great and out-of-place. Uma Thurman is frequently gorgeous. And The Rock is the only performer who owns scenes in the film. He's not Olivier, but his comic timing and sheer zeal are very appealing. Eliot takes center stage in the most inspired scene of the film. Suffice it to say: you won't be able to keep a straight face the next time some too-cool film student decides to perform his favorite monologue for you.

But when there's so little else going on in a movie, what's there to stop a minor role from stealing the show?

Enough about material comparisons. Now, about that screening...

that magnificent mysterious morphing bookstore

Dreams are something I wouldn't dare attempt to research, for I'm certain I'd give myself too many ideas. I tend to strengthen anxieties when researching a topic rather than setting my mind at ease.

But I do have this one recurring element to some of my dreams: there is a bookstore that I frequently end up in, a massive, sprawling beast where things are not always well-maintained and often I can find books and films that are not to be found in the real world. But it is a magnificent place, and the detail in my dreams is fine-tuned down to the single pages of every tome in the joint.

Also, each time I return, the order of book genres are never in the same sequence as when I last visited.

Whether I have been in a Demille-esque adventure, a metaphysical chase or cruelly haunted by the worst tortures my mind can conjure...or simply in the midst of a serene sexual episode...this bookstore will occasionally crop up at the end, before waking, as if some kind of weigh-station where my brain gets to shake itself out to a degree, maybe even allowing a more gentle dream to close out the marathon.

Again, I wouldn't want to figure out what this means, if anything. I just find it oddly interesting enough to bring up in polite, one-way conversation.

File this under Go Figure.