Once More Into the Breach

New Year's Eve is the best holiday.

You can, of course, polish off an entire bottle of champagne by yourself (it makes a good chaser for six glasses of boxed wine) and pass out on your bed fully clothed with a cat on your head any old night of the year. But on New Year's, you can still respect yourself in the morning.

Not that you should.

Okay, "Portlandia" is now getting a little out of control. Not only does Carrie Brownstein look uncannily like my sister Jessica, but in Season 3, Episode 3, they go to Seattle (which happens to be where my other sister Margie lives) to recruit new residents. One of the Seattleites they meet looks and acts just like Margie. I mean, has her haircut and everything.

Later in the episode she turns up and nonchalantly says she's decided to come live in Portland. They ask her, what will you do? Where will you live?

"I guess I'll just live with you guys," she says, nonchalantly.

If there's one word that describes Margie, "chalant" is not that word.

So now I'm waiting for the episode where the trying-desperately-not-to-be-middle-aged friend comes up from Austin in order to experience the bike culture. She'll have a flat-bar road bike she tries to pass off as hip by color-coordinating it as if it were a custom fixie. But it has 27 speeds and she still can't make it up hills without walking.

She's pretty damn chalant, I'm sorry to say. However, because the champagne hasn't quite worn off yet, she'll be played by the beautiful, brilliant, and still-living Madeline Kahn.

Happy New Year! Now for chrissakes get that damn cat off your head.

Football, Football, Football!

Doesn't anybody ever argue about the philosophical conflict posed by the concepts of predeterminism vs. free will anymore?

On Facebook, I mean.

The Dallas Cowboys are currently, or have until quite recently been, playing a football game. Their fate is uncertain as I type this, so for the moment, like Schroedinger's cat, they exist in a simultaneous state of victory and defeat. Until I open up Facebook and see what actually went down.

But that might not happen until morning.

Since there are some people, somewhere in the world, who care about the game enough actually to watch it, I realize it's a little self-centered to take this approach. Still, it's only fair. If they're going to clutter my newsfeed with stupid sports-related ephemera that no rational person could possibly be remotely interested in, I get to reduce them to hypothetical constructs. Fair's fair.

Meanwhile, here on Earth, I've been streaming "Portlandia" on Netflix.* This is becoming one of my favorite shows, though I've never been to Portland. I have a handful of important reasons for enjoying the show:

1. Carrie Brownstein bears a striking resemblance to my sister Jessie.
2. Bikes! Bikes bikes bikes bikes bikes.
3. We watched Dune the other night with the "No Olympics" episode of Portlandia as a chaser, which leaves you with an interesting mental image of Paul-Muad'Dib leading his people to enlightenment and world domination astride an exercise ball.
- 3a. And you could use that little plastic spike stopper in the exercise ball to make a crysknife. They don't seem to have mentioned crysknives in the movie.
4. Even though I've never been to Portland, I've been to both Seattle and Brooklyn. Seattle seems a bit more bike-friendly, but Brooklyn isn't set at a 45-degree angle.

There are some difficulties inherent in conducting a relationship with a member of the football cult. My boyfriend likes football quite a lot. He isn't fond of cats. God only knows what he sees in me.

Probably my philosophical leanings.

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*Did I mention that I'm an unusually deep thinker?

Life Imitates Kentucky Fried Movie

Do you watch local news?

I'm sitting in a Comfort Suites in Houston; and while not completely defenseless - I am armed with a laptop, a copy of Jack Kerouac's "On the Road," and - in the event of a particularly dire emergency - a choice between the Yellow Pages or the Gideon Bible - I still managed to pick up a two-minute local TV news brief, with an attractive female news anchor who missed her calling on the silver screen. In the 30's. Acting just ain't what it used to be.

"A neighborhood already wracked by crime was shocked when a man was shot in broad daylight in his car outside his home," she informs us in dire tones; the camera cuts to a statement by a tearful neighbor. "And in other news, in a tragic shooting, two children are dead." She goes on without pausing or altering her tone. "Add drywall to the list of hidden dangers that lurk in your home."

I can't help noticing that this hotel room has a fairly high concentration of drywall. Maybe I better start reading that Gideon Bible after all.

Double Feature

It's always good to have new cultural experiences. Right?

I had a cultured friend once. We were housemates in the vegetarian coop I lived in off campus. We used to go see movies at the Varsity, and later at the Village, or rent videos at Vulcan (no, I can't explain the alliteration). A couple of times we drove down to San Antonio late at night, on the spur of the moment, to stroll down the Riverwalk with no one else around. He sold me a Volkswagen. Once he tried to get me to run off to New Mexico with him. Eventually he married a woman who was allergic to everything, especially cats, and the friendship had to end.

Anyway, this is the friend, I now remember, who recommended the film Babette's Feast to me. Tony and I watched it last night. It's about a couple of ascetic evangelical Danish sisters who employ a French cook for humanitarian reasons (on the condition that they don't have to pay her) until she wins the lottery and blows the proceedings on a sinfully lavish, gorgeous French dinner for her tea-sipping, ale-bread slurping benefactresses, thus bringing closure, redemption and peace to the whole village.

There. Now you don't have to watch it. Aren't you happy?

Actually I quite enjoyed it, though. It was a little contrived, but worth it for the imagery and the language, because you've gotta love people speaking Scandinavian tongues (also a big part of why I'm so fond of The Kingdom). And it's funny. Culturally uplifting experiences should always be funny, if they possibly can; it makes the viewer feel so superior to be laughing at things none of his Budweiser-swilling, unibrowed friends would understand.

The Norwegians, I'm told, bake themselves in a hot sauna, then run naked into the snow. Similarly, after the movie was over we watched part of an episode of Sex and the City. I'd never seen it before; it's one of those things I was pretty content to know only through SNL parodies, and after watching last night I stand by that assessment. Really. I have no moral objection to sexual promiscuity, though I don't quite understand the appeal. Whyever would you have sex with someone you don't care about and aren't interested in ever seeing again? If it's just quick thrills you're after, I have to say, batteries are a hell of a lot cheaper than contraceptives. But to each her own. What really bothered me about the show is how rude these women are - rude to men who approach them in bars, when after all they went there solely in order to be approached; rude to men they're involved with, rude to one another; taking it as a matter of course that a "good" boyfriend will jump through hoops for them when they're much too busy exploring their own wants and needs to do anything in return. I've always heard the show is supposed to be about female empowerment and sexual liberation. Why would you have to demean others to achieve this? I resent the implication that I'm supposed to identify with and admire these nasty, shallow, self-absorbed people.

Beth's rating:

Babette's Feast: Three and a half stars
The Kingdom: Four stars
Sex and the City: Half a star, and go get tested for the clap

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P.S. Why didn't anybody point out how stupid the lyrics to "Leave It" are? Aren't you people paying attention?!?

Ork Ork Ork

We've been watching old "Mork and Mindys" lately.

I don't know why I say old ones, as if there were a new one; though there probably eventually will be, what with the ongoing trend of remaking favorites from decades past into new TV series or movies. Which reminds me! I never did see the new Get Smart. But I think Zooey Deschanel might have made a better 99.

Anyway, they're fun to watch, and not just because whenever they show the outdoor shot of the house I am reminded of my friend Billy. The overall premise is an interesting snapshot of its time: Mindy's dad is totally freaked out that she has a guy move in with her, and keeps on being freaked out even when she reveals that Mork comes from another planet and sleeps hanging upside down in the closet.

That might actually constitute reasonable cause for freaking out, even in Boulder, I guess. But Mindy's dad doesn't really care about that. He's still freaking out because they are living together, unmarried. Various early plot devices (I haven't got very far into the series yet) center around old high school friends of Mindy's trying to steal her "boyfriend," and the difficulty she has getting dates when guys find out there's a man on the premises. Does it ever even occur to her to tell anybody they're just roommates? That's legitimate enough. Why doesn't she just tell her suitors Mork is gay? He wears rainbow suspenders, for God's sake. She shouldn't even have to say anything.

That said, it's actually a reasonably funny show, and I can remember how completely off-the-wall it was for its time. Remember, this was an era when we were all supposed to believe that ring-around-the-collar was the worst social calamity that could ever befall you, and that Sara Tucker put big globs of Cool Whip on her pies at what was supposed to be a good restaurant.*

It's kind of weird how badly Robin Williams cheesed out as he got older, though. Did he have to? Do we all have to? Sometimes it looks that way, but then I remember that I know lots of older people who didn't: my maternal grandmother, for one, I always thought was very cool, except for a brief period in the early nineties when she really liked Dan Quayle. But nobody's perfect.

As I recall - and we haven't gotten there yet - Mork and Mindy did eventually hook up, and have a baby in the form of Jonathan Winters. And if that doesn't teach you about the perils of living together before marriage, I'd like to know what does?

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*100% stolen from Dave Barry, who was also well ahead of his time.

People Who Watch Buck Rogers Are Stupid

Well, I'm watching it right now, actually. "Buck Rogers in the 21st Century." Gil Gerard! Erin Gray! Either Lorne Michaels, or a close enough facsimile thereof to make no difference! A penis-headed robot who says "Bee-dee-bee-dee-bee-dee" all the time despite the fact that he is clearly capable of normal speech! What's not to believe?

Well, to start with, it's the commercials. The first one was not too bad: just a bunch of people sipping champagne and telling you how they started out making $5,000 a month and are now making $18,000 a month or more!

They don't really get into what they do.

The second ad is worse just because it does get into what you do. You sell crap, including, apparently, highly tasteless green-glass mass-produced leaping dolphin sculptures which people even stupider than the people who watch Buck Rogers (because that's you, remember? You forgot, didn't you??) will put on their mantelpiece, in flagrant defiance of every law of good taste ever known to man.

That's not what's bad about the second ad. No. What's bad about the second ad is that it tells you how all this works. And the way all this works is that you get to use a giant sales, marketing and warehousing network supporting all the crap you're selling, so you can make all these sales and build your personal fortune, right? And they show you the warehouses, and the customers, and the crap; but where it all falls apart is that they also show you the workers: a big panned shot of a vast cubicle farm full of purchasers and marketers and telephone operators who are showing up at 8am every day just to bring everything together so you, dear Buck Rogers viewer, can work from home and make a small fortune. Maybe even a large one.

I bet they don't even get dental.

This is where, unless your brain was completely liquidated by the aerosol fumes of the mid-to-late 80s (and I wouldn't be at all surprised if the advertisers had taken this possibility into consideration), the record goes scrrrriiiiiiitch!!! And you say, hey. Wait a minute.

If I can make $15,000 a month or more, selling tasteless crap, presumably the people working for me in the cubicle farm are aware of this fact. Right? So - why, again, are they content to work full-time jobs in a soulless cubicle environment to get you rich? Are they ruined Ginsu investors? Survivors of Richard-Simmons-induced cardiac arrest?? It just doesn't make sense.

Again, when you look at some of the stuff that science fiction has thrown at us, faster-than-light travel doesn't seem all that improbable.

Ready for the Weekend

Anna was taken aback by the bright green bandages on my arms when I got home. "Why do you have those?" she asked.

"Because I gave blood at work today," I said.

She was perplexed. "Somebody at work ran out of blood?"

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me.

Today feels like a Friday: the last day of school, and there's jubilation in the air. I just dropped Eric off at his grandma's house for the long weekend.

She gardens, my ex-mother-in-law, which is odd. Inside the house it's always dark and gloomy. It's furnished and decorated with heavy, almost Gothic antiques. The TV, the only light source in the living room, is never off. There are big windows, but they never seem to admit any light. My ex-father-in-law floats around the place, vaguely, like an alcohol-fueled ghost. It's an incredibly depressing place; but outside is a profusion of bloom and life that contrasts starkly with the airless indoors.

Whereas I tend to be the other way around: my home tends to be, if not in the strictest sense clean, at least cozy and cheerful inside; but my outdoor design and maintenance abilities make the baby Jesus cry.

It should be a fun weekend. I'm going to Corpus with friends, liquor, and the flying spaghetti car. There will be dancing!

With luck, there won't be any further bloodshed.