Decrepit Old Fool

The new movie Watchmen sounded interesting, but it will have to wait for video because I just can’t pull 3 hours in a theater (or any other kind of chair) without serious painkillers.  So I got the book for ten bucks from Amazon.

The danger of hype is that it can interfere with actual enjoyment.  Watchmen is one of Time magazine’s “100 best novels”,  and the co-creator of the TV series Lost calls it “The greatest piece of popular fiction ever produced.”  Several of my friends have told me that it is just… “wall-to-wall awesomeness”.  Some of that is well-deserved.

The story is about a group of super-heroes and their complicated lives.  You have to know that putting on a funny suit and beating up criminals requires a… certain kind of mind, and a certain kind of surrounding society.  Authors Moore and Gibbons do a great job of exploring on a human scale just what that might be like.  It’s a grown-up story not only because of the violent and sexual themes and language, but also because it does a very good job of exploring how relationships blow up and become painful (or pleasant) memories, and how that affects the present and the future.  This is something adults know from experience; insignificant moments we treasure in our mind, scars that we hide or deny.

On reflection you might not expect superheroes – or super villians either – to be virtuous people, and you’d be right.  In Watchmen, most of them are violent, internally conflicted, living out the compulsive results of twisted childhoods.  They get old, they grow fat, they die of cancer.  Politically they range in all directions.  An attempt to get them to join forces fails utterly, which becomes a major plot point. 

The novel does a good job of explaining connections and background, though it is a staggeringly complex story.  This is not; “alien threatens city, Superman beats up alien.”  But I was able to follow it easily enough.  Complex stories may be a unique asset of graphic novels: plot points become associated with images, and flipping through the book at high speed allows the reader to return to the relevant portion in seconds to refresh their memory. 

The novel begins with the brutal murder of one superhero, and as the story continues (moving forward and backward in time, developing the lives of all the characters) we aren’t really sorry to have seen him go.  Yet in his brutally amoral way, he was a mentor to even more powerful and intelligent characters. 

Only one character really even has super-human powers, and his biggest challenge is that he is so powerful, humanity seems remote to him.  How involved should he be?  Should he interfere at all?

It ends with a moral conundrum; an act of mass murder rivalling anything in human history, which has the effect of saving humanity.  At least, it will have that effect, provided the few people who unwillingly know about it know about it agree to remain silent.  One person does not agree, the terrifyingly uncompromising vigilante named “Rorshach”. So what ought to happen to him?

Some people don’t like the term; “graphic novel”, opining that “it’s just a fancy term for comic book”.  Well sure, and “Great Expectations” is just a soap-opera series collected into one cover.  Fact is, I’ve seen some truly great stories put together that way: Maus, The Crow, Batman: Year One, and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns to name a few.  There’s no question in my mind that it deserves a place in the pantheon of literary types alongside text novels and story anthologies.

One point where Watchmen falters, artistically, is that the color pallate could use refinement.  It was an annoying distraction in an otherwise great work of the imagination. 

There are thematic similarities between Watchmen and other stories.  For instance, The Incredibles also posit a future in which costumed superheroes are not really welcome, and someone is methodically killing off the ones who retired from the business.

I won’t try to go into more detail – it would require a post as long as (and far less interesting than) the novel itself.  You can check out Wikipedia’s Watchmen article or better yet, just read the novel.  I look forward to seeing the movie.  Frankly it strains my imagination how it could be committed to cinema and still make sense.

I’m seeing a lot more movies now that I have a cardio workout machine with a DVD player right in front of it.  Yesterday and today I started and finished “Fargo”, a dark, violent 1996 comedy about a kidnapping and several murders.*

A little filter here: if you like the radio program; “Prairie Home Companion”, you will probably enjoy Fargo, and the reverse is probably true as well.  The Minnesota characterizations are as familiar as if ol’ Garrison Keillor himself were narrating the film, which he isn’t.  The film is like being IN one of his stories, instead of just hearing it on the radio.

One thing I look for in a story is whether I care about any of the characters.  Right away I cared about Mr. Lundegaard, who is plotting with a couple lowlife characters to kidnap his wife and split the ransom money with him.  Not to say I wished him well, y’know, but I did care what happened to him.  He wasn’t so much unlikable as frustratingly, criminally stupid. 

And the two lowlife characters, well you just can’t help caring what happens to them, y’know.  Without worrying about spoilers (since I’m pretty sure that I am the last person in the world to see this film), it works out very satisfactorily.

There were two super-competent people in the movie; a very likable, pregnant detective, and a silent, lethal murderer whose stupendously idiotic and talkative accomplice was incredibly entertaining in his own right.

There are a few scary moments.  See, I couldn’t help caring about the lady detective when she goes tramping off through the snow through the woods against the murderer, carrying only her little service revolver.  He was the kind you couldn’t glance away from for an instant.

I loved the ending with the lady detective and her husband.  It made me want to buy a three-cent stamp.  Anyway, in the unlikely event you have not seen the film, and now that it has percolated down to the discount DVD racks, yard sales and video store clearances, I definitely recommend it.

*(When people recommend movies to me, sometimes I don’t get around to seeing them right away.  Same with books.  There’s no rhyme or reason to it.)

MrsDoF told me about this one.  Given a bit of grant money, a grade school PE teacher here in the district bought 30 pedometers*.  The kids check them out at the beginning of PE class, and try to rack up the largest number of steps in the given time.  They record their achievement and check the pedometers back in.  Some of them are so excited they hop up and down to record more “clicks”.  They get some kind of prize for improvement each week.

Yeah, so?

So she’s got kindergartners learning to handle equipment, collecting data, using numbers, exercising, and reading comparitive charts.  Not bad for kindergarten, not bad for a very small grant.  Smart thinking on the teacher’s part.

*(Like this one – about five bucks each.)

Y’know, jump drives aren’t totally reliable.  Their little bits go bad sometimes and the document you were working on becomes corrupted.*  This happened to a professor today, and several hours of his work was at stake.

Trying to retrace your steps from memory on a complex document that you are producing under deadline is no fun at all, and we have all been there.  I quickly copied the document to the desktop and tried opening it again.  Nope, Microsoft Word 2007 wanted nothing to do with it, not even with the “Repair” and “Recover” functions.  I opened it in Notepad++ and recovered at least most of the text, but the formatting was gone.

But I had one other trick up my sleeve.  Copying it to a network drive, I went back downstairs to the desktop computer in my office and opened it up in the Open Office word processor.  Almost all of the formatting was intact. I saved it again with a new filename and a .doc extension and emailed it back to the professor.

Not that it would work every time, but it’s worth a try. 

* (A couple strategies here.  First, “Save As” multiple versions of your documents as you go, like this: Mar09report_ver1.doc, mar09report_ver2.doc, and so on.  If the document is really important, copy to more than one drive – perhaps a jump drive and a network drive.  If it’s really, really important, burn it on a CD and take it offsite.  Also, every once in a while, burn the contents of your jump drive to a DVD, check that the copy is good, then reformat your jump drive and copy your files back onto it.  Keep the DVD as a backup.  And don’t use a jump drive for more than a year or so.)

It’s been there for years, a circle with a “Y” in it, and the word “Peace” underneath.  Not quite a correctly cricket complete or correct peace sign, but it must have satisfied the original spray-can wielding dimwit who put it there.

Apparently it bothered somebody, though.  A compulsive copy editor, perhaps, who walked by it every day and just… couldn’t… take it anymore!  That’s not a correct peace sign (sound of steel ball rattling in spray can), this is!  (Hissing sound; “Pssssht”  “Psssht” “Psssssssht!”)

History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure. – Thurgood Marshall

I finished watching the movie; Swing Kids, starring among other famous names, Robert Sean Leonard and Christian Bale.  It was, as I mentioned earlier, a truly scary movie about a bunch of kids who liked Swing music, which did not endear them to the Nazi regime.

A lot of recognizable names in the movie (some not even credited), including music by James Horner, and it shows.  I am especially fond of Robert Sean Leonard, who now plays opposite Hugh Laurie in House and is an extraordinary actor.  Would you have thought that a person could convey a tortured agony of the soul while dancing alone to Swing music?  Me either. 

There isn’t a lot of graphic violence onscreen.  For example there’s torture but we don’t see it; we see the victim’s son realizing later what it all meant. We don’t see gas chambers, we see a cold, brutal delivery in a nice inlaid box.  We see kids soon to be caught in the thuggish maw of history. 

This is another one of those little historical tidbits I never knew about, but apparently there really were Swing Kids in Nazi Germany.  They didn’t single-handedly bring down the Reich or anything, and many of them paid for their lives for the desire to enjoy an art form that wasn’t approved by Himmler.  They started out, apolitical; they just wanted to dance and enjoy their subculture.  The film is an impassioned answer to the question; “Why not just go along?  What does it matter if we sing one song for the Fatherland?”

If we think we regulate printing, thereby to rectify manners, we must regulate all recreations and pastimes, all that is delightful to man.
- John Milton

I guess totalitarian regimes need to control the artists.  At one end you have Steve Martin paying for the production of a play he wrote that got banned from a high school, then the school authorities that banned it, and then Tipper Gore trying to keep smut and violence away from kids.  Somewhere to the right-of-center you have Nazis insisting that all art glorify the Fatherland, and at the far extreme you have the Taliban destroying all the musical instruments they can find.  They are the answer to the question: “What would it be like, a society without art?”

I don’t read a whole lot of fiction but when i do, the fact that it IS fiction allows me to enjoy it as a pastime.  It is a dramatization, not a documentary, but it recounts a real time and real situations.  In the not-so-distant past, our kind actually went there.  Standing between us and a repeat performance is the poet, the playwright, the musician, the dreamer, the intellectuals and artists.  You know, the ones who misshape the human spirit to fit in a totalitarian box.

UPDATES:

• Swing is not the first forbidden music and dance.  Even the Waltz was once forbidden.

I’m just getting started reading The Watchmen.  It’s very good.  But the characters are not happy ones.  I’m two chapters in, and these guys make screwed-up sociopath Bruce Wayne look like Norman Vincent Peale. 

I’m one week into learning to ride a unicycle.  So far I’ve gotten to where I’m able to ride 15 feet while holding onto a rope.  My son reminds me that I am no longer young and have multiple concussions to my detriment, so progress may not be rapid.  He is right.

I’m in the early stages of a new website for the college – the meetings and information-gathering stage.  It occurs to me that static pages may not be the best model for the next iteration.  Would anyone like to share thoughts on your favorite Content Management System, and reasons why you like it?

My left shoulder is beginning to heal, but slowly.  Whatever I did to it 10 days ago, I should avoid doing again.

I’m midway through watching Swing Kids.  One of the main characters is played by Robert Sean Leonard, better known as “Wilson” on the TV show ‘House’.  Another character is played by someone named Christian Bale.  It’s a very scary movie. 

Every day, I carry my bike up the same set of stairs to ride across the same plaza toward my job.  Apparently at least three other people use these stairs every morning, too:

The stairs are just about one cigarette’s walk from the parking garage. 

Totally ripped off from Les at Stupid Evil Bastard:

I’m not a terribly hip person (so far behind the times that I still say “hip” when I mean “currently fashionable among stylish rich young people”) and beat poems usually cause me to click “Next”… but I really like this one!  Despite having absolutely no idea who Tim Minchin might be.  Some bloke with a(n) British Aussie accent, anyway.

Here’s a little thought for the day: a large Shop Vac can quickly slurp up more water than you can easily lift when emptying the container.  For example, if your Vac is 16 gallon capacity, that’s 133 pounds.  Keep a capacious ladle of some kind handy.

(Rips up English Ivy that channeled storm water down side of house to foundation, lays long strip of roofing rubber along foundation to divert spring stormwater away, while uttering invectives both vulgar and profane…)