Two Things

Just a few moments ago, from the time that I write this, I was struggling to think what it would be about.  Once again the made-up deadline for the blog no one reads was fast approaching.  I racked my brain to think of a topic.  In honor of Saturday Night Live's season premiere tomorrow I considered doing "Three Things That Happen at Night," or "Three Things That are Made of Paper" for National Comic Book Day yesterday.  For a while the front runner was "Three Things That I Have Done in My Life That Contribute Absolutely Nothing to Humanity," but none of these seemed right.  I realized that all of them had something in common; they were all lists of three things.  I have written many lists of three things between my time at my college newspaper and this blog, but even my biggest fans (yes, even you Miranda, and no one else) may not realize that early in my career I wrote a list of four things.  It was a list of the greatest bromances of all time.  It may have been a regrettable topic, but I long for that experimental spirit that I had in my youth; the kind of creativity that leads to four things instead of three.  Of course, I couldn't just replicate my innovative "four things" structure.  Then it hit me: two things.  I wrote down many of the things around me on scraps of paper and selected two; not three, or even four, but two, of them at random out of a hat, and have compiled a list of those two things here.

Fortunately, one of the things was not Taiwan

• Poker Kit

I got this as a gift from my parents when I was in high school, probably for Christmas.  They gave it to me because I went through a phase when I was really into poker; they didn't randomly encourage me to gamble, which I never did anyway.  I just don't have the confidence for gambling.  Even now, after years of practice, and with the ability to do this:

It's even more impressive if you know that thin, pale fingers and Shakira are only a hindrance.

I still wouldn't put up any amount of real money.  I've played a lot of games with the chips in the kit and given them imaginary values, but I would never play if at the end of the game I would be expected to cash them in.  The kit came with two decks of cards but I don't remember what happened to the other one.  It also came with dice but I don't know what those are for.  Did I mention that I don't gamble?

• Things That Hang From Graduation Cap

I have graduated from high school and college.  Now I am writing a blog post about two things that is going to turn the entire Internet on its freaking head!  The system works!  My research shows that the things that hang from graduation caps are called tassels.  I definitely would have known that if someone said it or something but it slipped my mind and I didn't feel like looking it up before I wrote it down.  It was a very informal process, I didn't know you were going to get so judgey.  Yeesh.  Its not like I majored in remembering things that won't matter after graduation.  I got tired of that during high school.  After both graduations I didn't know what to do with the tassels so I hung them from my ceiling fan.  I had a whole thing planned about how I forgot to bring my tassel to my college graduation and my brother had to go get it but I'm not even going to bother now.  Anyway, the tassels count as one thing so that's two things.  Also, I forgive you.

The Art of the Unbalanced Story

I've read my fair share of movie reviews and I've written a few as well.  One word that I've come across often in these reviews is "unbalanced"; it is usually negative and accompanied by a suggestion that it feels like two different movies instead of one.  Most of the time this lack of balance is caused by bad writing, but sometimes it's done intentionally, or at least occurs out of a happy accident.  It can still be off putting if you're not in on it, but if you can see why the story tellers would want to tell two different stories it can give a new appreciation for the movie or TV show.  For instance:

• Funny People

Funny People is about Adam Sandler playing a comedy legend turned hack and total jerk, so basically he's playing himself.  Judd Apatow directed the movie because he's best equipped to keep Sandler from realizing it and getting his feelings hurt.  There are certain scenes where you can almost hear Apatow saying "What? No!  You're nothing like this George Simmons character.  Hey, you should make out with my wife some more.  You wanna do that?"  The main difference between Adam and George is that George has cancer.  The first scene of the movie is George receiving his diagnosis.  Soon after that the focus shifts to the struggling young comic Ira, played by Seth Rogen.  George takes Ira under his wing and hires him to write some jokes and help him with other miscellanea.  We still see plenty of George as he struggles with his disease, but mostly this movie is about Ira's complicated relationship with his idol and his personal problems with his roommates and his crush on the girl down the hall.  George even takes an interest in Ira's life and helps him out.  Then George's cancer goes into remission.  Now that his life isn't in immediate danger George reverts to his selfish ways.  The movie is now about George reconnecting with his old flame Laura, played by Leslie Mann, who is married with two children.  George and Ira leave L.A. altogether to visit with Laura and her family in the suburbs.  George's shameless attempts to rekindle his relationship with Laura at the risk of breaking up her family ultimately drives George and Ira apart.  When the two return to L.A. Ira goes back to work at a sub shop and George continues his lonely and spiteful life.  Finally George visits Ira at the sub shop to give him some jokes George wrote for him.  It is George's first true act of selflessness in the film, and the final shot is George and Ira sitting together on equal footing.

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

It seems that with all the anticipation for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. last year many people forgot a very important of rule of television: If there's a Whedon involved the show will probably need a season, give or take, before it finds its footing.  (The obvious exception being Firefly, which foresaw its untimely demise and went out in a blaze of glory.)  In the case of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. the first fifteen or sixteen episodes were slow and at times boring because it wasn't the show it was always meant to be yet.  What seemed like a typical "monster of the week" paranormal investigation series was actually just showrunners Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon biding time until the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier and AoS episode "Turn Turn Turn" could reveal that S.H.I.E.L.D. had been infiltrated by evil Hydra agents for years, including a trusted member of the team.  In the span of one episode and a movie AoS stopped being an X-Files clone and became a 60's spy vs. spy throwback action comedy and then some.  Everything before that was just world and character building to raise the stakes for the surprise unmasking. Perhaps those early episodes could have been handled better, but they can be forgiven considering the excellence of the last six episodes.

• Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick is largely agreed to be one of the greatest directors of all time.  There are plenty of people far more qualified than I to wax on about the brilliance of films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, etc.  Instead this will be about one of his more mildly received movies.  The first half of Full Metal Jacket is iconic, particularly thanks to the performance of R. Lee Ermey's as drill instructor Sergeant Hartman.  It's also visually stunning, which is par for Kubrick, who is famous for his use of symmetry and other patterns.  By making a movie about Marine Corps boot camp Kubrick finally got to live his dream of making patterns out of people.  Eventually, Hartman's archaic brand of discipline drives Private Lawrence (Vincent D'Onofrio) too far.  He kills the Sergeant then himself as Matthew Modine's Private Davis watches.  Immediately after that scene there's a jump in time and this movie follows Davis, who is a sergeant and combat correspondent in  Vietnam.  The rest of the movie is almost unrecognizable from the first half.  The order and discipline of boot camp and Kubrick's signature patterns have vanished, to be replaced entirely by the chaos of war.

This

becomes this.

The stark contrast of the two halves of the movie has been widely criticized even though dichotomy is a major theme, especially in the second half.  There is quite a bit of discussion in the film about the disparity between the words "Born to Kill" on Davis' helmet and the peace medallion pinned on his uniform.  Davis even explicitly explains that it is a shout out to Jung's philosophy of the duality of man.  Regardless, the first half of Full Metal Jacket is far more famous than the second, perhaps because most people check out before they get to the nitty gritty Jungian philosophy part of the war movie.

Hambone: A Somewhat Imagined Account of Link Wray's Influence

Our story begins in the swamp woods of North Carolina, a town called Dunn, in 1937.  In true small town fashion our hero, a boy by the name of Frederick Lincoln Wray, is sitting on his front porch.  He is toying with a guitar that his brother received for his last birthday when he is approached by a mysterious figure named Hambone.  Hambone works for the traveling circus that has just come to Dunn and taken root temporarily across the street from the Wray home.  The elderly black man sees young Frederick with his guitar and approaches him.  He asks to borrow the instrument for a moment or two and Frederick obliges.  Hambone tunes the guitar before taking a bottle neck from his pocket, putting it on the neck of the guitar and playing a blues song.  As Hambone slides the glass along the strings, channeling the unimaginable pain and turmoil of his long life, Frederick Lincoln ceases to exist, and in his place is Link Wray, The Rumble Man.  Hambone planted the seed of music in Link, and Link paid if forward with his song “Rumble”.  Brian Eno said that all of the few people who bought The Velvet Underground’s debut album started bands.  One could similarly say of Link Wray that out of everyone who heard Rumble, a few of them started the greatest bands of all time.

• Pete Townshend

When Pete Townshend first hears “Rumble” in the late 50’s he feels “uneasy… yet very excited.”  He is confused by the emotions the song stirs in him.  He has never before experienced such wildly opposing ideas, he has never heard something so ugly yet beautiful, gentle but violent.  He doesn’t understand what Link has done, but he knows he has to try it for himself.  He has a guitar that his grandmother gave to him for Christmas in 1956, but he never had much interest in the Spanish instrument that looks nothing like the slick electric guitar that Chuck Berry uses.  Once Pete hears “Rumble” he gives it another shot.  It isn’t perfect but it works, and with some help from his saxophonist father he learns to play a couple of tunes.  A few years later he forms The Who with Roger Daltrey, John Entwistle, and fellow Link Wray fanatic Keith Moon, who writes a song called “Wasp Man” as a tribute to Link.

• Jimmy Page

In 1956 a twelve year old Jimmy Page took his first guitar lesson.  He quickly abandoned them, preferring instead to teach himself.  He spent many days over the next two years listening to music at the record store before going home to attempt to duplicate the guitar part on his own.  In 1958 one of those records was “Rumble.”  Fifty years later, after joining The Yardbirds and forming Led Zeppelin, Page remembers the influence “Rumble” had on him.  Not just the technical aspect of its innovative use of the power chord and vibrato, but more importantly, its pure “profound attitude.”  Fifty years later Jimmy Page puts the needle down on “Rumble” and plays an air guitar just as countless Led Zeppelin fans have done to “Stairway to Heaven” in the past four decades.

• Iggy Pop

A young man named Iggy is enrolled in the University of Michigan in the mid 60’s.   Iggy is much like his fellow students, stressing over their grades, desperately struggling to get through the next test, then the next, reaching for the diploma in the distance.  One day in the student union someone puts on a record in hopes of calming her nerves.  The sound of “Rumble” reaches Iggy this day, and he becomes aware.  He realizes that he is not where he belongs, he is not living the life he is meant to live.  His mind and spirit leave the school in this moment, and soon after his body follows suit.  Iggy moves to Chicago, where he forms a band called the Psychedelic Stooges, quickly becoming Iggy and the Stooges.

American Folklore and Superheroes

Better people than I have made the connection between superheroes and mythology.  Superman is famously an analogy for Judeo-Christian figures Moses and Jesus.  There are also characters like Thor and Hercules, who are taken straight from Norse and Greek mythology respectively, retaining their basic characteristics and backstories mostly as is because Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were in a bit of a creative slump I guess.  No disrespect, everyone has bad days; it’s nothing to be ashamed of.  Strangely, superheroes are an almost uniquely American concept.  The most famous non-American superhero created by non-American people is John Constantine and he’s just a normal guy who does magic stuff sometimes.  Despite America’s relative youth as a nation it has managed to build up a handful of its own legends, so it’s fitting that they should have an impact on superhero stories.

•  Captain America is Rip Van Winkle
• It’s fitting again, that the most American superhero imaginable has ties to a classic American tale.  In Washington Irving’s 1819 short story the titular Rip Van Winkle goes out into the woods to hide from his nagging wife, where he gets drunk and falls asleep, you know, like heroes do.  He stays asleep long enough for the American Revolution to take place.  When he wakes up he is confused by the world around him.  He finds that his wife is dead, along with his friends who have fallen in combat, and his children have grown up without him.  Similarly, Cap plunged into the icy waters of the North Atlantic while saving hundreds of lives from Nazi bombs, you know, like lazy bums do.  He’s cryogenically frozen for years, missing out on the fifties and some other stuff, I guess; Marvel’s rolling timeline confuses me.  When Cap is unfrozen he is confused by the world around him.  He finds that his old Army buddies and loved ones are either dead or incredibly old.  Did I mention the part where Rip Van Winkle’s best friend is a brainwashed assassin with a robot arm?  I guess that doesn’t have anything to do with Captain America though.
• Hawkgirl is Evangeline
• I’ll confess, I’d never heard of Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie before I did research for this, but I saw it with other American folklore figures on Wikipedia and it felt familiar.  The poem, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poet and great name haver, is about Evangeline, who is separated from her paramour, Gabriel, in the Expulsion of the Acadians.  She spends the rest of her life searching America for Gabriel, sometimes coming near him without realizing it.  It’s like a Pink Panther cartoon if it were a sad love story, which it kind of is when you think about it.  Eventually, Evangeline settles in Philadelphia where she tends to the sick and poor.  There she finds Gabriel, who is diseased, and dies in her arms.  It reminded me of Hawkgirl and Hawkman.  In certain versions of their origin they are lovers who are cursed to be reborn then watch each other die over and over again.  Both stories are tragic romances about a couple who are destined to come together and then be separated again and again.
• Steel is John Henry
• The connection between Steel and John Henry is about as subtle as a steel nail driven through Slim Shady’s eyelid.  Steel’s real name is John Henry Irons.  John Henry used a hammer to drive steel into rock; Steel uses a hammer to fight bad guys.  John Henry died in a legendary battle of man versus machine when a steam powered hammer threatened his job; Steel’s job was to make machines that killed people before he faked his own death and became a Superman stand-in after the Man of Steel died-ish while fighting Doomsday.  John Henry is the basis of a pretty good Johnny Cash song and Steel is the basis of a really bad Shaquille O’Neil movie.  They’d be the same basic person if it weren’t ridiculous to base an engineer on a man who died fighting a machine.