Thanks, Vets

Even though I have to work today, as opposed to Veterans’ Days Past when my contracting boss has gifted us all with a free day off (no clue why he didn’t go that route this year – Low on funds in the contract budget? Just trying to toughen us up?), I still appreciate all that our servicemen and –women have done for the country. U! S! A! U! S! A!

I don’t appreciate the WMATA at all, which is very much the same old story and unlikely to ever change in the future. Apparently they are doing major Orange Line work today, because in their estimation nobody worth worrying about has to work on Veterans’ Day, I guess. So I had to drive down 66 to the terminal station, ride three stops, get off, get on a bus, go three more stops, get off the bus, get back on the train, ride two more stops, get off and change lines, and then ride four more stops to Crystal City. I know I should be equally irritated at the VRE for having no service today, but I’m not. VRE is observing Veterans’ Day and giving their crews the day off, and I respect that. Metro is performing track maintenance on a holiday. Metro is the worst.

Anyway, it’s extremely quiet around here today with only the handful of contractors who are either hoarding or running low on paid time off and/or floating holidays. Last week was five full days which were surprisingly busy, although most of that increased activity consisted of me pulling reports to provide numbers for a problem which everyone is getting frantic about and I personally have no way of addressing. We’ll see how that continues throughout this month, but this week is for all intents and purposes a four-day since today doesn’t count and next week is only three days until Thanksgiving. I reckon I can keep things together for another couple weeks.

Parting observation: I knew the office would be minimally staffed today, which meant pretty relaxed in terms of the typical business dress code. I could have skipped shaving, just like I do most Casual Fridays … but I didn’t, because after not shaving since last Thursday, my jawline was getting unpleasantly itchy. I also could have worn blue jeans, which is usually verboten even on CasFri … but I didn’t, because all of my jeans are totally frayed ragged around the cuffs, and that feels a bit too unprofessional to me even for a working holiday. So here I am, answerable to no one but myself yet perfunctorily groomed and in khakis and a collared shirt. I must be getting old.

The Week in Queen (2)

When I was very young I owned a concert t-shirt from Queen's Hot Space Tour '82. I would have been about seven years old that summer, so clearly I did not actually acquire the garment at a stadium venue. In fact, I believe my dad won it playing a ball-toss game when the carnival came through town, and subsequently gave it to me. At the time I just thought it was cool to have a black rock and roll t-shirt, especially one repping a band I knew primarily from the song "Another One Bites the Dust" (and, of course, the Flash Gordon soundtrack).

It's funny how memory works. In the moment I thought the shirt was totally wicked and I wore it until it literally disintegrated. In retrospect, remembering the scratchy way it used to feel against my skin, I realize it was doubtless a bootleg repro made of the cheapest imaginable materials. Ah, kids are dumb.

On to the task at hand!

Monday: Queen-free! But I did hear Meat Loaf's "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" on the way home from the train station, and that easily took up the airtime slots of two or three potential songs off A Night at the Opera ("Bohemian Rhapsody" excluded, of course.)

Tuesday, 5:05 pm: "Bohemian Rhapsody" on 102.7 Jack FM while driving from the train station to daycare.

Wednesday, 6:15 pm: "Bohemian Rhapsody" on Big 100 FM, literally as soon as I started the car after getting off the train.

Thursday: Also Queen-free. I heard "Land of 1000 Dances" on the Crystal City Underground muzak system, though. Not at all a case of airwave timesharing, since that system plays golden oldies pretty much exclusively, and Queen doesn't fall into that category. "Land of 1000 Dances" simply never fails to make me happy.

Friday, 4:50 pm: "Another One Bites the Dust" on 102.7 Jack FM, once again just as soon as I started the car after getting off the train.

Saturday, 1:35 pm: "Another One Bites the Dust" on Sirius XM Classic Rewind while doing a bit of housecleaning

Sunday: Queen-free.

Saturday Grab Bag Four More Years!

ATTENTION: This SGB is going to be about 90% stuff about the recent presidential election, so if politics really make you uncomfortable or you're just burnt out on all this crap, I understand! Feel free to skip to the last item. I'm just going to purge all my thoughts in one mega-post here and be done with it, so, take that as you will.

This week I was reading a goofy pulpy high-concept paperback from the used bookstore (as I'm wont to do) which imagines various historical figures trapped together in an eternal struggle for control of the afterlife. It is entitled HEROES IN HELL. I kind of wanted to mention this in the context of Election Day, as either it counts as escapist entertainment because everything turned out OK (read: the way I was hoping it would) and therefore I can indulge in silly speculative shoot-em-ups, or it counts as escapist entertainment because everything went wrong (read: I discover I'm part of the 49.5% minority of the electorate instead of the 50.5% majority) and Che Guevara, Hadrian and Machiavelli duking it out with Satan is more pleasant to contemplate than political reality. (Alternate, much more martyrish interpretation: myself and evryone who thinks like me, we are now the real heroes living through hell.) But on the other hand, I didn't want to mention it in any context for fear of jinxing things. So I didn't mention it, didn't jinx Election Day, and everything turned out OK, whew.

Also, back in October when New York imploded in the ALCS I tried very hard to convey to the universe that I could be sanguine about the Yankees losing provided the trade-off was that Obama won in November.

I guess what I'm saying is YOU'RE WELCOME, AMERICA.

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I don't mean to gloat too much, but I am satisfied with most of the outcomes. But I get that not everyone is. So in the spirit of reconciliation and national unity, I humbly offer

An Open Letter to Anyone Devastated By Obama's Re-Election.

Guys, listen, I understand how you feel. No, seriously, I do. Not in some bleeding-heart, touchy-feely, Clinton-channeling "feel your pain" kind of way that I'm sure Ann Coulter would describe as "faggotty". I mean actual, been-there-done-that ability to relate. The other guy won, upending everything you believed about the ability of a majority of your fellow Americans to recognize how bady things were going in the country and how disastrous four more years of the same executive leadership could posisbly be, leaving you stunned and demoralized? Yeah, that was me (and a hell of a lot of other people) in 2004 when George W. Bush was re-elected. The squandering of global goodwill in the wake of 9/11 was terrible. The Patriot Act was a bad law and the broadening of unchecked presidential powers was worrisome. The systematic deregulation of everything from the financial sector to environmental standards was scary. All obviously brink of the abyss stuff, and we had a chance to turn away, and we didn't. That was a kick in the crotch. Sound familiar?

And then remember how the United States basically imploded, and 2004 was the final presidential election ever, the capstone (more like gravestone) on the Age of Enlightenment's grand experiment in democracy? Remember how nothing ever changed after that and we were permanently trapped in a nightmare world of suffering and ashes? Remember???

Of course you don't, because none of that happened. Despite all the suffocating feelings that life as we knew it was crumbling to pieces all around us, we kept it together, as individuals and as a country. Some things got a bit worse. Some things got better. Some things stayed the same, and then we went to the polls again four years later. And the distribution of leverage among the factions shifted a bit, and things changed. Which means that some things got better, and some got worse, and some stayed the same. I'm reasonably confident in predicting that's gonna be the way the next four years go, too, and the four after that. There is no such thing as a single presidency that can bring this country to its knees, that's the beauty of the system. There can be presidents who intensely piss off whole huge swaths of their constituency, but nothing that can't be course-corrected in due time. Even Supreme Court justices die eventually. In 2004 I didn't fully acknowledge that fact, and I find that deeply embarrassing now. So much so that I kind of want to go back in time and punch that whiny, Bush-second-term-hater in the face, just as much as I want to go back and punch the douchebag high school version of myself who dropped the n-word in a history class discussion of Reconstruction to be edgy and rebellious. And I want to punch that douchebag A LOT. But he was fifteen! '04 me was thirty, so there's a lot less excuse for being so freaking histrionic.

This too shall pass.

Here's a couple extra things to keep in mind: the President really doesn't have that much control over the economy. Before the election most economists were predicting 12 million new jobs would be added over the next four years no matter the outcome on November 6. Kind of adorable that Mittens was promising as President he personally would create 12 million jobs, when really he'd just be taking credit for some natural cycles. And don't get me wrong, I'm sure Obama will help campaign for the Democrat's candidate for president in '16, and I'm sure he'll take some unearned credit for the job creation of the next four years. Politicians, man. But the point is if you think we're going to end up with 27% unemployment and our Chinese debt-holders rationing out food and utilities ... no. We're gonna be all right.

Also, I can't help but notice a lot of people who are rending their garments and gnashing their teeth are saying things like "Stockpile guns while you can, patriotic lovers of liberty!" OK, seriously, guys? You gotta stop with that shit. When I insist that the system works beautifully, the Bill of Rights is a big part of that. All of it, Second Amendment and everything. The Democrats do not want to abolish guns. Assault rifles for private citizens? Yeah, a lot of Democrats would make those illegal if they could, but that's pretty specific. There is no secret plot to disarm the citizenry and then impose a new world order at government-only gunpoint. When you express a deep-seated fear of that, you just sound too dumb for anyone to want to engage with you.

So, keep your guns. And be pissed off that your party is out of power. Those are your rights, and I admit it's a little alarming to me to think about people with both of those in combination, but I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. You keep telling me that you're a law-abiding citizen whose guns don't endanger anyone, so just go ahead and live up to that. But being pissed off, and having half the country pissed off with you, is not grounds for a revolution, not when peaceful transition of power is guaranteed to be just three years and change away. Be frustrated that things aren't the way you would like them to be. But overall, calm down. Don't insist that all is ruin, because you're wrong. I was wrong when I thought that eight years ago, and I would have appreciated someone telling me so. I'm going to strive to never think that again, because it's pointless and self-defeating. Agreed?

Thanks,
me

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Standing room only on the first VRE home on Election Day, which makes perfect sense as you gotta figure a lot of people either planned all along on leaving early to vote in the afternoon/evening, OR showed up in the morning at the polls, were shocked by the long lines, and decided to come back later and give themselves plenty of time for attempt two. So then the question is, why didn't the VRE plan accordingly and put extra cars on the train? Ah, well.

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For what it's worth, I received most of my results coverage from three sources: Slate's mobile site on my smartphone, NBC, and Comedy Central. At this point in my 21st-century adult life I can't imagine a day when I won't stay up on election night specifically to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. But prior to 11 p.m. I was in Peacock country. Perhaps this was due to a certain amount of partisan homerism loyalty to my beloved Community (back on Thursday nights as of February 7, 2013 woohoo!) or perhaps because Brian Williams strikes me as a stand-up dude (who is, of course, always game to make with the funny tete-a-tetes with Jon Stewart). But honestly I flipped around the networks a few times out of curiosity and I really think NBC was doing the best work with the material.

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From the Vanity Plates Archives: On Election Day, I noticed parked near the polling place a PT Cruiser (seriously, the correlation between owning a PT Cruiser in the first place and obtaining custom tags for it is anecdotally off-the-charts; I dub this the PT KRUZR effect) with tags reading 02BNSTX. "Oh to be in" I get, but is that South Texas? Or Styx? (OR IS THERE REALLY ANY DIFFERENCE? Hiyo!) Or some other shorthand with which I am not familiar?

Then while I was standing in line outside the polls (49 minutes total from the time I got in line until I walked out post-voting) I saw another PT Cruiser, this one a ragtop, with GN2STX tags. I might quibble with the vagary - "gone to"? Or "going to"? - but I was more amazed by the fact that apparently there's a couple who lives in my town who both bought PT Cruisers, and both filed for custom tags which essentially convey the same idea. If I were writing a dissertation, this would be my clincher.

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Finally, something which has nothing to do with Election Day other than a tangential connection to fiscal policy. At one point this week I was logging in to one of my online banking sites and they had an interstitial ad about how it's never too early to teach your children about savings and responsible financial management. Which actually got me thinking, yeah, man, I really gotta get on that. Until I remembered that we're still at the point where responsible financial management includes admonishing the little guy not to put dimes and nickels in his mouth. So, one step at a time.

On my way out to the door

It's a boy! I meant to update yesterday's post yesterday evening, but meaning to do something and actually having the time to go ahead and do it are pretty alienated concepts for me these days. But yes, the ultrasound appointment went really well, the baby was healthy in every way, including an apparently robust self-esteem and ease with his own body which precluded any shyness whatsoever about letting us know he is totally a he. My wife and I marveled at how far ultrasound technology has come in only five years, to the point now where the technician was pointing things out to us like the baby's well-developed diaphragm, clear as anything on the screen. Neato.

Anyway, there's nothing like a full five-day workweek to make you lose track of time, and/or leave you fairly spent and out of things to say by Friday. And the office is closing a little on the early side today because of the long Veteran's day weekend. Don't worry, I'll be here a'bloggin' on Monday because it's a federal-only holiday, but I do have some things to get done for my government colleagues before they all stampede for the doors in a very short while.

So excuse the short and rushed post, please.

The rubber meets the road

Are you a sharp-eyed blog reader? By which I mean, did you happen to notice in my inaugural Week in Queen post how I very nonchalantly slipped in a reference to driving to CarMax? It’s true, on Sunday afternoon (and well into the evening), rather than traumatizing our offspring by gluing ourselves to the couch and shouting at the back-and-forth battle between the Giants and the Steelers*, we did something much more beneficial to our brood in light of its imminent expansion. So we are now the proud co-owners of a Toyota Highlander hybrid, which emerged as a surprise favorite thanks to having three rows of seating but not driving like a beached aircraft carrier. Granted, the legroom in that third row is close to nonexistent, but the little guy’s legs are still pretty short, so the Highlander will work for a few years.

Overall the experience was about as great as we could have hoped for. I had bought my Mazda at the exact same CarMax with in-house financing, so it was a pretty frictionless process to sell that car back to them and have the outstanding balance on the loan settled immediately, and then use the (surprisingly significant) remainder applied against the new vehicle’s price and finance the rest. So my little beater is part of the family fleet no more, and I’m driving what was formerly my wife’s Honda Accord, which is kind of a mixed bag. I will miss driving a stick, but I was getting pretty tired of the lack of power locks and power windows and whatnot, so that’s an improvement, at least.

The little guy and little girl were really angelic, too. My wife and I decided that she should go and test drive the Highlander alone; I’m sure they would have accommodated us in installing our carseats as part of the overall pre-buying preview process, but that seemed excessive, and if my wife didn’t care for the Highlander much then all four of us trekking to the dealership would have been a colossal waste of time. Once my wife has test driven and decided to move forward with the purchase, it was time for me and the kids to catch up so that I could give it my own cursory look-see and thumbs-up and then trade in my car plus co-sign the loan and all that. The CarMax folks were extra-graciously indulgent about letting our son and daughter climb in and out of basically every floor model in the joint, which the kids thought was ridiculously fun. The dealership also had a playroom with a high toy truck quotient, as well as a plastic push lawnmower my daughter was quite smitten with, and a jungle gym with slide. And they had snack and soda vending machines that take debit cards, which, COME ON. (Why don’t more places upgrade to those? How many times have I been perfectly willing to part with a couple bucks but light on cash?)

So yeah, hours and hours doing boring grown-up stuff and nary a fit was pitched. Well, maybe half a fit, when the playroom tv suddenly started showing a Mickey Mouse cartoon and the little guy got sucked in, right before we had to head into the home stretch in the (much more utilitarian, bordering on kid-unfriendly) finance department to ink our paperwork. But we bribed the little guy with promises of a make-up movie at home, and it all worked out.

I had to remind my wife that our third bundle of joy is due in just about four months; her mental clock had gotten stuck at five months somehow. But at least now we have one vehicle in which all five members of our family can ride at once. Now we just need to get an infant bucket seat between now and mid-March (with “just” being operative only in regards to transportation needs; there’s kind of a ton of other stuff we need to do before the spring to really get ready for the baby) and since today is our hurricane-delayed ultrasound which may incidentally reveal the baby’s sex, hopefully we’ll know whether or not it would be appropriate to get a bucket festooned with pink bows as opposed to blue fabric printed with images of dogs using power tools. Update to follow!

(* I tip my hat to my wife's beloved Steelers for holding off my G-Men. Halfway through the season and both teams are technically in playoff contention!)

An urban legend in its own mind (Candyman)

Somehow I missed seeing the horror film Candyman when it was released at the beginning of my freshman year in college. Probably I was busy acclimating to college! But acclimate I did, and by my junior year I had decided to try writing an honors thesis the following year, eventually honing in on urban legends as my topic of independent study. Several times during senior year, when I would explain what I was researching and writing about, people would nod their heads sagely and ask, “Have you seen Candyman?” Three years apparently was more than enough time for the film’s reputation and regard to have grown, to the point where I was getting this question from people I never would have pegged as horror fans. It may go without saying that whenever I said “No, not yet,” the response was invariably “Ah, you really should.”

I did not track down Candyman on VHS during my thesis-writing, presumably out of some sense that I needed to keep my thought process relatively undiluted by others’ visions. (I have to presume at my own motivations because twenty years of hard living dulls a lot of memory capacity.) All research-based writing is synthesis, of course, but I had bamboozled the English department into letting me complete a creative writing thesis rather than a literature thesis, so I needed to be especially guarded. And I was able to glean at least that much from talking to people who were being reasonably circumspect and spoiler-free (back before everybody used phrases like “spoiler-free”) in urging me towards Candyman: that it focused on an invented urban legend which drew on the broader American tradition, and that its protagonist had an interest in urban legends which drew her into the plot. What no one told me was that the protagonist, Helen, was in fact a grad student writing a thesis on urban legends and thus even more of a parallel to me personally (notwithstanding Helen being a married woman living in Chicago).

In any case, the years go by and nowadays I participate in the 1001 Movies Blog Club and I was looking over my viewing options for Spooktober(vember)fest and lo and behold, Candyman is actually on the master must-see list. The Blog Club hasn’t gotten around to reviewing it as a group yet, but I figured I was long overdue to check it out.

Here’s the thing I suspect many of my well-meaning friends may have overlooked: it’s true that I have a long-running fascination with folklore in general and urban legends as modern examples of the oral tradition in particular, which makes me pre-disposed to enjoy the subject matter. But because I’ve studied urban legends and picked them apart to see what makes them work and then indulged in attempts to stitch them back together in new and interesting ways, the bar is set pretty high for anyone else trying to dazzle me by doing the same. (I know that’s another sheaf of evidence for the swollen file on me marked Arrogant Cerebral Elitist but so be it.) Candyman tries to be dazzling, oh me oh my it does try. But it is also pretty much a complete dang mess. (Yeah, spoilers.)

There is another version of this post (which I gave myself a geek-headache trying to write yesterday) that is about 5000 words long, in which I indulge in unpacking the byzantine plot of the film and then go through which twists and turns are simply needless and which are disruptively illogical. But I’m going to spare you guys all that. However, if you ever run into me at a party and you’ve seen Candyman and you want to talk about it at great length, I’m all over it. For purposes of this post, suffice it to say that Candyman is not just a kitchen-sink movie, it’s a utility-sink-shared-by-a-burger-stand-and-a-landscaping-company-and-a-golf-pro-shop movie. If anybody trying to get me to watch this movie had laid out there case by describing just how much is crammed in here, I would have called them out as a liar, and a bad one at that.

And some of that crammed-in stuff is really quite good, no denying. Urban legends are like modern day fairy tales, equal parts collective fear and instruction on social mores and taboos. So the movie uses the Cabrini-Green housing projects as the deep, dark fairy tale forest, which works pretty well symbolically, and the legendary (and as it turns out as the movie progresses, all-too-real and powerful and terrifying) Candyman as its dragon, complete with an abandoned Cabrini-Green apartment as his lair. The set design for the lair is phenomenally evocative, turning mundane elements like crumbling cinderblock walls and chaotic graffiti into a sinister realm of fear. And Tony Todd freaking owns it as the Candyman, from his voice to his crazy-eyes to the sheer intensity of his presence. It’s understandable how the original film could be seen as a can’t-miss proposition for an enduring horror franchise with Tony Todd as Candyman comparable to Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger.

But ultimately the movie falls victim to too many pitfalls of invented mythologies. The film wants to play around with the ideas of urban legends not just as contemporary fables but as contemporary religion; the character of Candyman talks about his “congregation” and makes vague pronouncements about how his power is fueled by people’s belief in him and all the lore associated with him. So it tries to amplify Candyman’s potency by making him an amalgamation of multiple urban legends: Bloody Mary, the Hook-Handed Killer, and various wrongful death vengeful spirits. (Also, bees!) And that wrongful death is part of a convoluted 19th-century origin story (recounted by a condescending professor) that is equally random and shoddy, so much so that for a while I honestly believed that part of the resolution of the movie was going to hinge on Helen (who as a grad student should maybe represent rational thought?) poking holes in Candyman’s origin story, such as:
- They cut off his hand with a rusty saw? Who keeps rusty saws on-hand? Wouldn’t it be far more likely that the nearest saw would be in good working condition?
- Then they replaced his hand with a hook? ‘They’ meaning the lynch mob? Why give him even a crude prosthetic if you’re just about to murder him?
- Then they smeared him with honey from a farmer’s beehives and the bees were drawn to him and stung him to death? Isn’t it ants who are drawn by honey? Wouldn’t the bees attack the people who broke open the hives?
And then, poof! Candyman would be destroyed by the irrefutable evidence that he never existed to begin with. But I guess that’s way too meta. The fact remains, though, that Candyman’s abilities and powers are ill-defined and inconsistent, and that makes the whole movie hard to get invested in. This is the bad, unentertaining kind of chaos in horror movies, where things just get crazier and crazier for no real reasons. And it all leads to a twist ending where, after destroying him shortly before dying herself (but only dying after saving the life of an innocent baby), Helen herself becomes a supernatural creature of vengeance like Candyman. Although apparently her whole thing is not going to be shedding innocent blood, but punishing adulterous men. If any adulterous men happen to say “Helen” five times in the mirror, that is. Which, beyond Helen’s own cheating husband, seems unlikely! The implication of course is that Helen becomes another real urban legend, but I fail to see how her legend would spread beyond what’s covered in the runtime of the movie.

There are moments in the movie where it seems to want to be a meditation on late 20th-century race relations, the legacy of slavery, the impossible realities of life in the projects, and so on. Candyman is the son of a slave, killed by a lynch mob for falling in love with a white woman … but he builds his lair in Cabrini-Green and seems to mainly kill black people. There are other moments where it seems to want to satirically skewer academia (Helen’s relentless striving to be published, the condescending professor, and Helen’s husband cheating on her with a young coed aka the oldest cliché in the book) … but once Helen gets disabused of her book-smart conviction that Candyman isn’t real, all the university trappings fall away pretty fast. There are moments near the end where a tragic love story comes out of nowhere, as it is abruptly revealed that Helen resembles Candyman’s lover for whom he died, and that’s why he wants Helen to surrender to him … except that for most of the movie he’s threatening her (but failing to kill her) for telling people the Candyman was a myth that local gangbangers cloaked themselves in for the intimidation factor … and then also at the end is he trying to trick her into killing herself, because that’s the only way he can have her? He has a chance to kill her and lets her go only to lure her into a deathtrap which does in fact kill her? But the reason it kills her is because someone sees a glimpse of her but thinks it’s the Candyman, which means people still believed in him even when he was ranting about renewing their faith … gah, I’m on my way to 5000 words again. Contradictions abound, is what I’m saying.

Basically, Candyman has some cool imagery and a magnetic villain, but the core story (or stories) can’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. It also has cheesey special effects which have not aged well, and some regrettable sub-par acting throughout. For cult-classic midnight movies, that’s not that unusual. But for once I think I’m going to be able to resist the siren call of tracking down all the subsequent sequels and spinoffs for completeness’s sake. I can finally answer yes when people ask me if I’ve ever seen Candyman, and that’s good enough.

Civic obligation = met

And you should, too. Yeah, I said it.