Burrito Naps

For what it's worth, and that's not much, not much to me even, less to you, Carne Adobado burrito naps are one of life's simplest pleasures, superior in every way to all other nap producing activities:  the headache inducing six-pack nap, the sticky leg, just had sex nap, the still at work sleeping in the lunch room nap, etc.  In fact, the only nap better than the Adobado nap is the screen door open, California "rainstorm" nap.  You know the one, when it gets really cold, like down to 50, brrrr.

I came home today from our minimum day at school and stopped with the boy at a local dive food Mexican restaurant.  The place isn't much for decor, sitting with a commanding view of Inglewood and Artesia Bolevards, not that anyone would ever really want to command such a view.  We sat away from the windows. The lad, knowing very little about the magical properties of Adobado, and lacking the proper adult supervision he has sorely missed for his whole life, ordered the "rolled tacos", which he was surprised to find look a lot like taquitos--dumbass (that's a direct quote from yours truly, though if you know me, you know that).  My burrito was for more wonderful, no beans, no rice, just marinated pork, a tiny bit of guacamole and a generous amount of pico de gallo.  I ate quickly, avoiding the view, imagining I was in a sleepy village of Quernavaca, protecting the locals from Eli Wallach.  The sad consequence of eating quickly is that you finish quickly, but the boy was done with the Mexican equivalent of Van DeKamps frozen fish sticks anyway and the gas fumes were starting to get to me, besides, I knew what would follow.

I drove home, hung my keys in the place my wife has forced me to do such things and headed up stairs.  The old cat, who my wife is convinced is dying, though he has been this way for years, was sleeping on my pillow.  I gently lifted him, so as not to wake him from his 30 hours of sleep, and threw him across the room.  I don't know if cats always land on their feet, but they do always wake up when you throw them, which isn't a bad skill.  Don't worry, he's back on my pillow now, as I write this, continuing to die.  Anywho, I put my back down next to the bed and fell into my pillow, face first.  Exactly one and a half hours later, I awakened.  I am thankful for that nap, for Adobado, for the boy, his brother, the wife who makes me hang my keys in a place I can find them, and even for the cat who will probably make it another year or two before he does die on my pillow.  I will bury him in one of my pillow cases so he will stay warm forever.

They Say This President is a Bad Mother--Shut Your Mouth

This time tomorrow all the pundits will be talking about how Barrack "Shaft" Obama mopped the floor with his magic underwear touting, dressage lovin', car elevator using piece of Republican shit opponent.  President Shaft was fucking with Mittens in the first debate, but the "rope-a-dope" stops tomorrow.  If not, I'm moving to Canada.

In which there's no accounting for taste

It's true.  I have a good friend with whom I agree on the most important parts of life:  women, whiskey and war, though we disagree on many of the small things.  He likes baseball, singularly the worst sport ever imagined or played and I like football.  He likes Scotch, the oakier the better--yuck, why not chew on a log soaked in grain alcohol (same thing).  These petty differences have provided endless semi-,  or wholly drunken conversational material and I'm thankful for that, but there's a line.

When somebody openly disses Anton Karras' brilliant zither soundtrack from Carol Reed's amazing 1949 film The Third Man, it reveals a basic lack of understanding or art and beauty, if not the universe itself, that requires a response.  My friend and I agree that the film is a classic.  The scene when Joseph Cotton's Holly Martin meets Orson Welles' Harry Lime for the first time in the eastern section of Vienna, when the two ride an enormous Ferris wheel in a nearly empty amusement park, when Lime explains that people are basically insects and killing a few here or there, even if they are children, isn't likely to disturb the universe, is one of the most balanced and beautiful moments in all of film--it's a textbook.  The scene, like all the entire movie, is framed by the amazing Karas' soundtrack that I eluded to earlier. 

The zither does have a distinct sound, an Austrian sound.  The instrument has 20 some odd strings depending on what kind it is, and has a history dating back to King David.  Karras played his like a gypsy angel.  The soundtrack for the film is a musical version of its most disturbing image, a midnight balloon man, wandering the shadowy post war streets of Vienna, eerily happy, cheerful and dreadfully out of place.  The presence of said balloon man has never ceased to blow my mind in The Third Man, nor has the music.  Yes, it repetitious, but not unnecessarily so.  The music creates a wild opposition to one of the bleakest noir films ever made.  It lends the film a creepy  quality not unlike the one created in Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter, which gives us Robert Mitchum as a serial killing preacher who is fond of singing "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms" while he hunts children down.  In both cases, the music makes the movies.  The Third Man would not have been the same movie without the zither.  I have never shown the film without a student commenting on it and I doubt I ever will be able to.  The original theatrical trailer for the film was correct in stating, "you'll be in a dither over the zither."  Watch the film and tell me if I'm wrong.

Endeavor, Please

Everyone looks up.  We have since the first slimy creature looked out of its crowded, muddy pool of stagnant water and said, "I wish there was a way I could walk onto that beach."  Looking up is what we descendants of that evolutionary link do best.  In the words of the immortal Coen Brothers, "It's [Our] whole goddamn raison d'itre."  As I young child, I would look into the blue, suburban sky of Newbury Park and wonder at it.  Wonder at its depth, its form, its blue.  I would spin in circle, arms extended grabbing a street sign and look up until I fell over.  Up is limitless--limitless.  We don't know its beginning or ending, nor even our own position in it.  It is what we see every day when we are tired of looking down, when we have felt enough of the gravity of our planet, our lives.

I would walk the two miles home each day from Sequoia Elementary school, alone most days during the whole of my 7th grade year.  I was too afraid to ride my bike as I had been a late bloomer bikewise and didn't think much of my skills (the next year, I went over the handle bars while looking at Kelly Clancy walk, but I digress).  I would walk home, alone with my head facing up, not from happiness, or haughtiness, but because my life was shit, because I needed to look up and see any possibility of a life beyond that moment, and I did.  I saw planes, birds, trees, clouds; you've seen it, you know.  And in 1978, we saw rockets, and we saw Space Shuttles.  We had been fed a steady diet of Jetsons, Battlestar Gallactica and even Alf, so we knew that a life in the sky was surely in our future.  The moon landing changed the world, but TV gave us pictures.  The Space Shuttles made for the best of these.

I saw a launch of a shuttle in 1983.  I was in Merrit Island, Florida at the national "Teen Missions" training facility.  I was heading to Norway, the land of Munch and Ibsen, to build a church and spread the Good News.  The Jim and Tammy Baker types who ran the "camp" (we slept in tents and bathed in an alligator filled lake (really)), decided that we had enough time between doing the biblical verses obstacle course and our afternoon meal next to the palm trees with the coral snakes on them to drive the 3 miles down and watch a shuttle launch.  I was tired that day, having cleared a fallen tree with a hatchet and wheelbarrow, and filthy in a way that only a Nordic type, who sweats when he wakes up, could be in the middle of a Florida swamp in summer.  So we got on a school bus and went to the launch. 

I wasn't ready for the smoke, for the size of the exhaust trails that covered most of the sky I had so long observed.  I was struck by the scope of things, and scope always impresses.  If you can make something bigger than a bus fly into space, your bound to impress and that's the thing.  The Space Shuttle, if it didn't outright scare the Russians and Chinese, couldn't have failed to impress them with our ability to see beyond the limitations that were our birthrights.  Almost two years later, I drove out to the desert with Mary Duggan to Andrews Air Base to watch the shuttle land.  Mary is a nun now, but she wasn't then.  We parked her car and watched that thing drop from fucking heaven onto the middle of the California dessert and I cried.

We are a nation of people who look up.  Perhaps we are rowing backwards, Mr. Fitzgerald, but we wouldn't know--we're looking up.  It may have been the Challenger that I take off or land, but I honestly can't remember that as much as I can watching with 7 other boy/men as we sat in Germany in the Army , watching Armed Forces TV cover the death of the crew and explosion of the Shuttle.  While the Challenger disaster was a horrible event, even then, perhaps especially then, I couldn't feel bad for the astronauts.  They were flying into space, going places we may never have meant to go because we do not accept limitations easily.  And if God has made us, then he better like competition, because we will not be stopped, not by Global Warming, not by overcrowding, not by anything because we still have the ability to look up.

I took my students out to the football field yesterday to try and catch a glimpse of the Space Shuttle Endeavour's final flight to its new home.  We got fleeting glimpses of the Shuttle Carrier 747 and its extra-Terrestrial cargo through the smog as it flew over L.A. landmarks in the distance and that was it.  I drove home with my oldest son, who was trying his best to not be interested in the Shuttle, or anything, and there it was.  In front of my window, 400 feet off the ground above Aviation Blvd., the Shuttle Endeavour flew by and I said something vulgar.  The child told me to calm down, but I couldn't.  I have seen three of these things in the air and that makes the sky watching worth it.  I was 12 again, unsure of myself and not very happy, but hopeful.  That anyone should ever have looked up and thought, "I will go there", is all you need to know of the future.  Yes the shuttle is gone, but I'm glad to be part of a species who made one.  There will be another shuttle, or likely something better.  Our story is not done, and the sky is limitless.

20 years

20 years, a quarter of a good long life.  That's how long, as of today, I have been teaching, in some capacity or another, English, such as I know it.  I have had breaks here and there, other jobs I can't remember or chose not to, but it's been 20 years since I started with adult ESL classes in Pacoima, CA.  I had no business taking that job, no training in dealing with limited English speakers, no working knowledge of Spanish and no real sense of what the fuck I was supposed to be doing, but it didn't matter.  The "school", whose name I have long since forgotten for good reason, was a diploma mill that thrived on scamming the migrant population into taking 6 hour a day immersion classes in English and paying for it with Pell Grants from the U.S. Government.  The guy who ran the school new it was bullshit.  He was hiring fresh college grads, paying us to read sentences in English to people who were illiterate in Spanish, a Harold Ramis scene from Stripes.  I worked a double shift, teaching 12 hours a day, 5 days a week for $12 an hour.  Fortunately, I knew how to drink.

My second gig was better, teaching freshman English at Wayne State University in Detroit.  I was 25, and many of my students were older than me.  My first classes were in Old Main hall, which had not been refurbished since it was built in the late 19th century.  Come November, it got cold in the shit hole of a room I was in, the broken windows letting in blasts of the coming cold that I would learn could, in fact, get much fucking worse.  Still, I had fun.  In the winter semester (that's what they call the spring semester in the cold hell that is Michigan) I taught two classes and picked up two sections of writing at the Center for Creative Studies, a nearby art college, meaning I was working full time while taking PhD classes.  The first day of the semester, the ambient temperature was 10 below zero with wind gusts blowing 30 to 40 below.  My eyelashes froze shut walking down the street and, in an attempt to thaw with my fingers, I inadvertently put my car keys in my mouth as I walked down the street--they froze to my tongue. So I walked down the street, unable to see, with my keys dangling from my mouth.  God hated me, but he had his reasons.

My first wife and I left Detroit after 3 years, and I can honestly say I missed it.  I had friends there, the kind you don't replace.  We moved to Mountain View, CA where I took a day job in a local post production facility dubbing tapes.  At night, I drove across the bay to Fremont's Ohlone College where I taught Freshman Comp to students who, I am wholly convinced, have yet to graduate from college.  We only lasted a year in Mountain View, with no support from friends or family, deciding to move back to L.A. where we had both.  We lived with my mother-in-law and I took a job in a post production house in West L.A., "working" on my dissertation at night.

Broadcast Standards was the worst place I ever worked.  My boss was a tyrant and his wife, who was the second half of the two headed monster, wasn't much better.  My first wife got pregnant again, by me she says, and I thought it was time to shift gears.  I heard that LAUSD would hire people with degrees and give them credentials while they worked in the district, so I leapt.  I took a job at Jefferson High School on Hooper and MLK in South Central L.A..  I had been in the Army and thought I could handle it.  I was right, but LAUSD had a way of wearing on you.  My first week of class, I had a student drop his pants to the floor and walk around showing his package to everyone in the room.  He left, but things didn't get much better.  I took one day off of work when my younger son was born and in my absence a student stood on my desk and tagged the blackboard behind it.  When I asked what happened the next day, the kids told me the sub couldn't handle it and walked out.  I left that job after 3 years during which time: two of my students were shot, one was stabbed through the eye and two were rapped (on campus).  I loved the students at Jefferson.  I took them to Cabrillo Beach in San Pedro for a field trip.  It was 10 miles away, but most had never been.  I took them to the Zoo, to the Autrey Museum, to the library downtown and each time there eyes got bigger, their world broader.  I would have stayed but for the death and the rape and the sadness.  I still feel guilty for leaving, but I did.

A decade ago, I came to Peninsula High School and settled in.  My first wife left me in November of my first year, so it wasn't all easy going.  Still, I survived, made some of the best friends I have ever had, or will have and grew to love the school.  Now, 10 years later, I find myself in front of a new group of American Literature students again and I have to get it up again.  The job is great, despite the budget cuts, the petty annoyances, the over zealous parents, all of it.  I stood today in front of 181 new and excited kids, who are depending on us to educate them, make their lives better and we will.  I have the best job in the world.  20 years of slogging through bureaucratic bullshit, pecuniary difficulties, self-doubt and brief, but shinning, successes have not yet made me too tired to want September to come--for which I am truly grateful.

Newsroom

I figured out the deal with Aaron Sorkin's new HBO Series last night whilst watching it On Demand, it's just liberal porn.  That is to say that in each episode there are 2 or 3 minutes of interesting shit (let's call it "the facial" for the sake of the metaphor) surrounded by the worst acting and writing any show has ever mustered, really.  In fact, I have seen more compelling love stories play out in actual porn films.  Yes, I agree with the views of the show, but the pretense and smuggery of Sorkin's masturbatory politics are too much to tolerate.

The best part of the last episode is when a younger producer punches a monitor on which Rush Limbaugh is seen doing his normal schtick.  This might have been the stupidest and least convincing moment of TV in the last 30 years.  I remember moments of West Wing that came close to being this idiotic, but not quite.  Besides, the shows were fundamentally different.  The West Wing was a counter-narrative to the Bush Administration.  It followed the events of the day fairly closely and imagined what a reasonable President might do.  Newsroom is revisionist history.  It takes us back four years and attempts to show what things might have been like if we only had a free and skilled press.  Sorkin is right to see the American media for the failed, prostituted servant of the rich it has become, but his inability to be so self-congratulatory gets in the way.

So it's liberal porn.  You can watch it for 10 minutes, get your leftie rocks off and move on.  Like actual porn though, it gets old.  You start to think that maybe if you weren't watching porn all the time, you might get laid.  Newsroom won't win over any hearts or minds, and it won't change the media process.  In the real TV news world, even Al Gore will fire Keith Olberman.  In any case, as cheesy as it is, True Blood is better written and more interesting than Newsroom.

Holden Caufield meets Peter Pan

If you haven't seen Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom yet, and have no plans to do so, you're probably not a very good person.  Watching this movie was like looking at an old 110 photograph picture cube.  If you remember the acrylic photo cubes containing muted pictures of women with big hair in pastel mini dresses or boys in scouting gear or men with crew cuts and short sleeve dress shirts, then the first five minutes of Anderson's latest, best film will move you to tears.

The film is quirky (not that I would expect less from the thinking man's Tim Burton) but unrelentingly beautiful and perfectly nostalgic.  Not nostalgic in a smarmy way that idealizes the past, but nostalgic for the look and feel of a time when we were young, when love was the fiercest and a kiss was everything.  The film works as a visual reenactment of e.e. Cummings "Anyone lived in a pretty how town", with Sam and Suzy, the film's love struck pre-teens, as Anyone and No one.  And like Cummings poetry and world, Anderson's is one where the magic and the beauty are all too human.  There are no aliens here, no ghosts, no chocolate factories, only deeply flawed people in a nearly real world.

It's my 45th birthday as I write this and I can't help feeling a bit old, out of sorts.  That I can still go to a movie and leave with tears in my eyes is testament to the power of the medium.  That movies like Moonrise are still being made and that people go to see them suggests that we are not as doomed as the local news suggests.  There have been people who have criticized the mild sexuality between the two young actors, and others who feel that the affair between Mrs. Bishop and Capt. Sharp should have been resolved.  The truth is that kids on the cusp of adulthood do explore sex and people do have affairs and, to the film's credit, it doesn't really matter.  The sex wasn't the story; it never really is.  I would live, have lived, in Moonrise Kingdom for 45 years and it's nice to see that other people know how to get there.  Thanks for making me feel 12 for a night Mr. Anderson.