Freewheeling Fourwheeling

The ides of March have passed and earth’s do-si-do with the sun brings the end of NJ’s snowiest winter in two decades within spitting distance. I rarely celebrate the equinox, but this year I might just get all Druid and make an exception. The Chevy Cruze I bought last October (see The Road Worrier ) finally has seen the light of day after two months in my garage. It has all of 1700 miles on it. The Cruze is a fine little fair-weather car, but an alarming drive home from work during a sizable snowfall last December convinced me to shut it away for a while – in fairness, it is no worse in the snow than most other vehicles in its class, but no better. My 1998 GMC 2500 Sierra guzzles like a sailor on leave, but its 4WD proved indispensable. Without the GMC my home furnaces would have shut down: during one of the worst weeks, I daily drove 5 gallon cans of fuel oil to my house because my supplier’s home heating oil delivery truck couldn’t get up the driveway even after it had been plowed. I’ll keep the Sierra for as long as it runs.

Behind the wheel of my Sierra

The penchant of suburbanites for 4-wheelers draws snickers from some circles (“Why? To drive to the supermarket?”), but I learned their value as long ago as 1974 – and not just for weather reasons. In 1974 I still lived with my folks in Brookside. One of our vehicles was a 1970 Jeep Jeepster; I had learned to drive on it, and continued commonly to drive it throughout the 70s. Another vehicle was my dad’s 1965 GMC pickup; a 2WD straight-6 with non-synchromesh standard transmission, it was just a basic workaday simple truck.

1970 Jeepster 

Thanksgiving weekend in ‘74 my sister Sharon flew east from CA with her newlywed husband Frank; they were living in Hollywood at the time. On Thanksgiving morning, my mom asked Frank and me to bring in some firewood for the fireplace; there was a pile back by the barn. The geography of the property needs a description: there were two driveways, one to the house and one to the barn; a stream separated the lawn by the house from the lawn by the barn, and a small footbridge crossed the stream. I suggested to Frank that we take the GMC from the house driveway around to the barn; we then could load up the bed and drive back to the house rather than lug logs a few at a time by hand over the bridge. I drove to the barn and, as I had done on previous occasions, backed off the barn driveway onto the lawn next to the woodpile. I failed to take into account, however, that a rain had fallen early in the morning and had soaked the grass which now formed a slick surface. We soon had reason to regret the oversight.

We both loaded up the truck bed and I got behind the wheel. The ground from the woodpile to the driveway inclined upward slightly, and with the extra weight in the bed the wheels simply spun on the wet grass. The only direction the truck would go in forward gear was sideways. So, I backed deeper onto the lawn to a leveler place with the idea of getting a running start. Once again, my plan failed to take into account the rain. The truck backed downslope easily enough, but the soil beneath the grass in the level area was muddy, so when I tried to drive forward, the wheels spun in place and then sunk in. Frank and I collected rocks from the stream and stuffed them under the rear wheels in hopes of getting some traction. The wheels simply spun and threw the rocks around the yard. A roll of chicken-wire fence was in the barn, and I suggested we lay it down as a track on which to travel. We stuck one end under a rear wheel and unrolled the fence. The wheel gripped the chicken wire well enough, and wrapped it around the axle.

At this point, dad came home. Visualize the scene: there was a truck half-buried in the lawn, tracks running through it, rocks strewn about, chicken wire fence unrolled atop the grass … it looked as if the 1rst Marine Division just had slogged through. As my father thundered his opinions of our performance up until this point, I had my first idea of the day that smacked remotely of intelligence. I got into the Jeepster, put it into 1^st gear 4WD, and drove onto the lawn despite the real risk of ending up with two vehicles stuck there. By putting the GMC into reverse while Frank tugged on the chicken-wire, we got the fencing off the axle. I hooked the Jeep by chain to the GMC frame, climbed back in the Jeep and tightened up the chain. Even with the GMC in neutral (I was worried it might tail-end the Jeep if Frank put it in gear), the Jeepster pulled both vehicles back off the lawn and onto the driveway with scarcely a slip on the grass.

We had our fire – after I was done on the lawn with a shovel and rake. My labor-saving plan for retrieving firewood hadn’t worked out, but it probably did save me time, labor, and trouble in the long run. The events of the day convinced me always to have a 4WD, if only as a back-up vehicle. Sometime in the subsequent 4 decades I surely would have gotten stuck somewhere without it, if only in my own driveway.

Jeepster by T Rex: I suppose he means he would 4-wheel it to get to her, but he calls her a Jaguar so she might be hard to catch on a paved road

Peacocks and Spaceships

Evolutionary psychologists often argue that male extravagance is a peacock’s tail. That is to say, it serves no useful function other than to signal to females that one is fit enough (financially or biologically) to afford it. Take cars. Expensive sports cars outperform cheaper ones, to be sure, and they really are intrinsically fun to drive, but is a new Ferrari Spider truly a quarter-million dollars more fun to drive than a new Chevrolet Camaro? No, but knowing you are driving a Ferrari (and, more importantly according to ev-psy, other people knowing it) instead of a Chevy clearly is, or the manufacturer wouldn’t stay in business. A discretionary $295,000 purchase says much more about a fellow than that he likes firm handling on curves. Still more does a $1.5 million Bugatti.

If there is any hint of disdain in the last paragraph, I don’t mean it. If anyone can afford such toys and enjoy them, the underlying reasons for enjoying them are unimportant, and, in any case, perfectly legitimate. Besides, what more effective way to address income inequality, so much in the news lately, than for the well-to-do to spend what they have recklessly, thereby reducing their liquid assets and putting the cash into the hands of those of us who supply them?

(I’m not entirely clear about explanations for female extravagance by ev-psy reasoning, or about whether any are needed, but we’ll leave those questions for another day.)

An even better way to demonstrate one’s surplus fitness is to buy experiences, since they are not a swap of cash for a valuable physical asset. When they are done they are done, leaving nothing of cash value. A relatively modest example, also much in the news lately, is a horse-drawn carriage ride in Central Park. (The new NYC mayor’s bid to shut down the business so annoyed actor Liam Neeson that on recent TV talk shows he has spent far more time defending the horse taxis than promoting his current projects.) These rides are pleasant enough (yes, I’ve been on them with dates), but part of the charm apparently is the $100-$200 cost. Well, at long last a ride to suit the Bugatti set is on the horizon. Not only does it look to be incredibly fun, but it costs enough to charm anyone.

Back in 1968 Apollo 8 traveled to the moon (without landing) and back. We all were sure that commercial space flight was no more than a few decades away, and that by 2001 there would be orbiting hotels and permanent lunar bases. Inspired by Apollo and perhaps also by 2001: A Space Odyssey in which a Pan Am spaceliner docks with a space station, Pam Am began taking reservations in 1968 for its future lunar flights. The waiting list grew to 93,000 before the airline itself went out of business in 1991. We are more than a little behind schedule, but Virgin Galactic is in the final test flight phase for its 6-passenger commercial spaceliner SpaceShipTwo. SpaceShipTwo is semiballistic: it boosts into space (conventionally defined as over 100k altitude), travels a ballistic arc, and then glides back to the New Mexico spaceport where the flight started. 600 people already have booked. Though SpaceShipTwo is not intended for travel between cities, in principle a similar craft could fly somewhere else with reliable weather and a 10,000 ft (3048m) runway.

The concept of semiballistic HSTs (hypersonic transports) has been around for many decades, and became especially fashionable among futurists when the Concorde SST began test flights in 1969. In an HST, one could fly LA to Tokyo in an hour, albeit at a stiff price. In his 1982 SF novel Friday, Robert Heinlein has a character describe the experience:

“I like to ride the semiballistics – the high gee blastoff that always feels as if the cradle would rupture and spurt fluid all over the cabin, the breathless minutes in freefall that feel as if your guts were falling out, and then reentry and that long, long glide that beats any sky ride ever built. Where can you have more fun in forty minutes with your clothes on?”

That beats a carriage ride anytime. You, too, soon can share the fun at the price of $250,000 per seat, or a mere $500,000 per couple. If you’re a guy and that doesn’t charm the date you just treated to a ride, maybe you’d better start thinking you’re not her type.

The World of Henry’s Orient

Recently having finished a history by Mark Kurlansky (see January 13 blog) written from the perspective of a ‘60s New Left activist, I plumped for one by Henry Kissinger written from (needless to say) a very different perspective.

Henry Kissinger, who in 2014 remains influential at age 90, stirs a visceral reaction among many. Google his name along with the word “evil” and pages of rants will turn up. He is widely reviled as an unprincipled practitioner of Realpolitik. This isn’t an entirely fair portrayal. He is not and never was without principles, but it’s true he didn’t always let them get in the way: “While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.” He never really objected to the charge of Realpolitik, but then why would he? (What exactly is the alternative: Fantasiepolitik?) His basic position always has been that diplomacy can succeed only if it reflects the actual balance of forces.

Americans always have been uncomfortable with unabashed power politics. They prefer to couch policy in seemingly selfless terms (defending freedom, promoting democracy, or what-have-you) even though this makes foreign policy incoherent – for selfless terms inevitably clash frequently with practical national interest. Kissinger admits that what he “tried to do was unnatural,” and therefore encountered domestic political difficulty.

Whatever one thinks of his analyses, policies, and legacies, Kissinger’s books are always fascinating reads; whether he is writing about diplomacy in general, the 1815 Congress of Vienna, or recent history of which he was a part, they are intelligent, insightful, and full of dry humor. As National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon and Secretary of State to Gerald Ford, he was an engineer of rapprochement with China, détente with The USSR, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and numerous other successes. (Discussing his memoirs, he quipped, “I am being frank about myself in this book. I tell of my first mistake on page 850.”) There was, however, a colossal failure – the source of most vitriol aimed him from (for very different reasons) both political directions. He dedicates a full book to it: Ending the Vietnam War. It is worth a read not just for historical value but for the relevance it has to a war-weary US polity today – and to our allies overseas.

The Nixon Administration took office at a time when 540,000 U.S. troops were fighting in Vietnam with no clear objective and no exit strategy. The only terms for ending the war on offer from the North Vietnamese were immediate US withdrawal and the overthrow of the Saigon regimen on the way out – a position to which they stuck until October 1972 after a ground offensive involving 12 of their 13 combat divisions had failed and bombing of the North had resumed. (They did propose on several occasions a coalition government in the South to negotiate a final settlement, but since they always insisted on a veto on who would be in it, this was just an offer to negotiate with themselves.) There basically were three options in 1969 for ending the conflict. One was to do precisely what the North Vietnamese demanded. There were then (and are now) many people who thought this the right and moral thing to do: the end result would have been no different and additional years of war averted. It’s hard to prove them wrong. The second was to escalate the war. There were then (and are now) many people who thought this the right and moral thing to do: they argue the terms obtained in (ultimately) January 1973 thereby could have been had in 1969 and an ally would not have been abandoned. It’s hard to prove them wrong. The Administration opted for a third strategy which they believed matched not just the strategic but political realities: a staged withdrawal of US troops over several years coupled with a build-up of ARVN (South Vietnamese) forces – the inelegantly named “Vietnamization” – so that the US could disengage independently of any diplomatic settlement while giving Saigon a reasonable chance to survive on its own.

In the event, Vietnamization strained the patience of an increasingly war-weary US public. Still, after the Paris Accords of 1973, it might have worked; it depended, however, on open-ended and open-handed resupply of the South Vietnamese (and Cambodians) for the indefinite future. (I’m not addressing whether this would have been a proper or moral course, only stating that its aims were plausible.) This, however, was something Congress by mid-’73 was no longer willing to provide; patience had run out. Mired in Watergate, the Administration had lost all ability to influence Congress or the public on the matter. Congress cut aid to the South to a small fraction of what was needed for the strategy to have any chance at all, and soon forbade any re-intervention with air power. When the final offensive from the North came in 1975, Saigon was rationing ammunition; the outcome was no longer in doubt. The frantic evacuations from South Vietnam, and, to a much lesser degree, Cambodia are images most Americans like to forget. Not everyone at risk chose to leave. Sirik Matak, former Prime Minister and member of the Cambodian government, sent this reply to US Ambassador Dean during the evacuation of Phnom Penh:

Dear Excellency and Friend,

I thank you very sincerely for your letter and your offer to transport me towards freedom. I cannot, alas, leave in such a cowardly fashion. As for you, and in particular your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and there is nothing we can do about it.

You leave, and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But, mark it well, that if I die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is no matter because we all are born and must die. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you.

Please accept, Excellency and dear friend, my faithful and friendly sentiments.

S/Sirik Matak

When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, Matak was shot in the stomach and died three days later. 2,000,000 more people died in the next few years as the new regime implemented its utopian vision.

I don’t wish to rehash arguments over who was right and who was wrong about what in the whole debacle, or about who was a war criminal and who was a patriot. Fierce opinions abound. They were unreconciled at the time and are no more reconcilable now – the mainstream ideological divide that impedes everything in the US today retains deep roots in them. (Since none of us, try as one might, is inhuman enough entirely to escape “spin,” to help the reader judge mine, I’ll mention only that I belong to a minor third party that opposed the Vietnam and, from the outset, both Iraq wars.) I don’t know whether or not things fundamentally would have been different in Southeast Asia sans Watergate, and Kissinger himself admits to doubt, but it is clear he underestimated just how much the domestic public wanted to be completely done with the whole business once US troops were gone from the scene.

Though published in 2003 when the national mood was much more belligerent than today, Ending the Vietnam War perhaps is more relevant now. There is a war-weariness in the land after a dozen years of war that is very reminiscent of that period in the mid-70s. It has not escaped the attention of our partners and those who are… well… not our partners overseas, as recent events make clear. In the current mood there is a risk of making promises (or threats) that the public no longer is prepared to keep. Another letter like the one from Phnom Penh is not something anyone wants.

As mentioned in an earlier post, there is value in going outside our comfort zones in our reading material. Including authors with whom we know we’ll disagree among the mix is as rewarding as it is (sometimes) upsetting. Love Henry or hate him, there’s no better expositor of Henry’s point of view than Henry.

Hugo Keesing taught psychology classes to troops near Saigon and compiled a 13 disc set of Vietnam War songs: “By the early '70s, as troops were arriving in Vietnam, they were singing I-Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-to-Die Rag. It was an indication, not only of how divided the nation was, but there was almost a gallows humor in singing, ‘Whoopee, I'm going to die.’” 

Waiting for Google

I have a fairly good head for trivia. Not a spectacular one. I won’t be replacing Mark Labbett on The Chase or even be facing him as a contestant. On most trips aired on Cash Cab, however, I’d have made it to the destination – with a strike or two and with a shout-out to be sure, but I’d have made it. The ubiquity of smart-phones, however, has altered the way a grab-bag of facts and factoids held by one’s personal memory plays in casual conversation. Anything one purports as true is open to immediate fact-checking and contention. Far more than in the past, not being a computer, I’m likely to be corrected on things I haven’t recalled perfectly – perhaps you are, too.

As an example, something about Alaska came up in conversation not long ago, and I made the throw-away remark that the place was a pretty good deal for $7 million. Tick-tick-tack went fingers on a phone. “That’s $7 million two hundred thousand, Richard,” I was told in a self-satisfied tone. So it was. (In fact, I knew the purchase price of Alaska in 1867 was $7,200,000, but to protest that I was rounding the number would have sounded unconvincing and pettily defensive, so I let it go – until now. I settled for, “Ah.”) In the same conversation roller derby (a sport which readers of this blog know I enjoy as a spectator) arose as a topic, and then movies about derby. I commented on the flawed flick Kansas City Bomber, which I identified as having been “made back around ‘71 sometime.” Tick-tick-tack. “1972,” I was corrected. My interlocutor then read off an IMDB list of derby films, none of which he himself actually had seen. “Ah.”

All of this continuous access to information is a good thing. I like being able to learn more about some random subject at a moment’s notice. Who has time to dig out an encyclopedia or to visit the library over every minor question? True, partners in conversation sometimes are inordinately proud of their ability to use Google in order to catch spoken errors, but sometimes their research is socially rewarding, too. If no correction follows the sound of tick-tick-tack, I know I got the datum or quote or whatever right. That’s (perhaps also inordinately) enjoyable.

But is our new-found reliance on virtual memory making us weak-minded? It seems that it is, at least to some degree. Nicolas Carr (author of The Shallows) addressed this question a few years ago. Referencing several psychological studies, he reported that the internet has diminished the time we spend deep reading. We skim. We follow link to link, flitting around the net like butterflies, often losing track of our initial query. The more hyperlinks an online text contains, the lower our comprehension of it when tested afterwards. Carr quotes T.S. Eliot when describing online multitaskers, saying they are “distracted from distraction by distraction,” which is precisely the kind of quote unlikely to be employed by someone who hasn’t done any deep reading in his past. Creativity and insight largely involve connecting one piece of knowledge with another in a new way, something much more difficult when the pieces of knowledge aren’t in our own heads. He concludes, “What we seem to be sacrificing in our surfing and searching is our capacity to engage in the quieter, attentive modes of thought that underpin contemplation, reflection and introspection.” We become shallower.

None of this is inevitable for any particular individual. Nothing prevents us from reading Nietzsche or Camus cover-to-cover. But we may need to push ourselves to do it, much as we need to push ourselves to do physical exercise as vigorous as ordinary people once got in their everyday activities. If we do, the internet becomes the great bonus it should be. As for those of our fellows with no patience for books (or exercise), I want them to Google as much as possible. Virtual knowledge is vastly better than none at all. They and we are better off for their access to it, and it’s easy enough to respond to their corrections with a polite, “Ah.”

Students Sans Google

Ten Spot: 10 Mini (and not so mini) DVD Reviews

DVDs continue to spin their way through my player from time to time, so the moment again has arrived for mini-reviews: this time an even ten, all of them deserving a thumbs up. Bad reviews we’ll leave to another day.

Ender's Game (2013)

I read Orson Scott Card’s well-regarded scifi novel Ender’s Game about 20 years ago. It was no surprise that movie studios would bid for it despite the fx budget it necessarily entailed. It is Harry Potter in space (though Card’s novel preceded Rowling’s) with a large helping of Starship Troopers. The war against the formics (hive creatures like giant ants) is directed much a like a video game, though the casualties on both sides are real enough. Since kids are better intuitive game-players than adults, kids are recruited and schooled to command the action. Ender Wiggins (that’s a name) is the youngest of three gifted siblings. His brother washed out of the program because he is sociopathic while his sister washed out because she is too empathetic. Ender needs to balance the two: to temper ruthlessness with the empathy needed to understand the enemy. 

The movie portrays the orbiting military school very well, including the elaborate free-fall battle training area. Ender, though still a kid, is older than in the book, partly (I presume) to broaden the audience appeal, but also to sharpen the unexpressed but present sexual tension between Ender and fellow cadet Petra. The moral crisis he faces at the end when the war is carried to the formics’ home world is also properly chilling. A viewer is better off having read the book first, but this isn’t essential. Ender’s Game may not be a new classic, but it is solid SF. The novel Ender’s Game is the first book of a tetralogy to which a fifth book may be added later this year, fodder for movie sequels to come.

Short Term 12 (2013)

In this Sundance Award winner, a young (20s) staff of a halfway house for troubled teens – an interim residential facility pending permanent placement – try to keep order while counseling the residents. Two of the adults poorly conceal their romantic liaison. Staff-member Grace relates all too well to one of the girls, whose self-cutting over issues with her father evokes Grace’s own past. This is a much better film than you might expect, and Brie Larson is excellent as Grace.

Afternoon Delight (2013)

I had mentioned this film after its brief theatrical run last summer, but I rewatched it on a newly released DVD a few days ago, which is enough of an excuse to mention it again, this time in a bit more depth.

The trailers represent this as a kind of light-hearted romantic comedy, but it isn’t. As so often in Juno Temple movies, the script doesn’t fit a neat category. Rachel (Kathryn Hahn) is a well-to-do suburban mother with a committed upright husband (by no means perfect, but who is?), a healthy normal pre-school son, and a beautiful house in a nice neighborhood. She is aware intellectually that her problems are First World ones. She feels guilty enough about her privilege, in fact, that she involves herself in countless do-gooder events and fundraisers with her neighbors. (None of these are of a sort that possibly could raise significant amounts of money, so they have more than a little social pretense to them – a way of showing off one’s “giving back.”) This intellectual awareness of her advantages doesn’t prevent her from being unhappy anyway. “Is that all there is?” (to steal a line from Peggy Lee) is the gist of it. Despite the trailer’s insinuation that Rachel’s husband Jeff (Josh Radnor) is the one who is disinterested, it is Rachel who has deflected sex for the past six months; she would like to feel amorous, she tells her therapist (Jane Lynch), but she doesn’t have any enthusiasm for it.

On the advice of her girlfriends, Rachel takes her husband to a strip club, where he buys her a private lap dance from a free-spirited dancer/hooker named McKenna (Juno Temple). Later, Rachel encounters McKenna outside the club at a coffee vendor. Unlike Rachel, McKenna seems quite happy with her life. When McKenna needs a new place to stay, Rachel, for complex reasons, invites her into her home as a nanny despite the reservations of Jeff. McKenna still services her favorite tricks on the side, however; Rachel accompanies McKenna on one occasion as the observer for an older (perhaps not outright ugly, but certainly unhandsome) client who likes it when someone watches – creepy as this sounds, he is surprisingly gentlemanly about the whole thing. Rachel is very disturbed by the experience. McKenna is an unexceptionable nanny until a neighbor (unaware of McKenna’s side job) asks to borrow her as a babysitter one night, and Rachel nixes the idea as inappropriate. McKenna, quietly offended, retaliates by behaving as precisely the untrustworthy tramp Rachel has just treated her as being. A marital crisis ensues, but at the end of it Rachel feels (as well as knows) just how fortunate she is in life, and for that matter so does Jeff. She even likes sex again.

This movie gets very mixed user-reviews (Quentin Tarantino praised it), but I think much of the problem was the way it was marketed. It’s not the movie most viewers expected – or wanted. Nonetheless, I give it a thumbs up.

Bound (1993)

Mobster girlfriend Violet (Jennifer Tilly) and visiting plumber Corky (Gina Gershon) find affection in each other’s arms. They plot to betray Violet’s boyfriend Caesar by stealing millions of mob money while scapegoating Caesar for the theft. Is there a male-bashing subtext here? A sense that the mobsters are despicable as much for being guys as for being crooks? Yeah, some. But it doesn’t matter. The film is well plotted, the villains truly villainous, and the actors on their marks. I surely was rooting for Violet and Corky to give the criminals their comeuppance (even though the two ladies aren’t exactly honest themselves), to get away with the cash, and to live happily ever after. Definitely worth a look.

Red (2008)

This is not the Bruce Willis movie of the same name.

When I was young the country was full of older men with stern values but a willingness to give second chances – the sort who, if you played a prank, would make you work as punishment but then would pay you for what you did. My father fit the description. My dad was a builder, and one time when I was a kid some neighborhood teens slashed tires on construction equipment on one of his sites. Even then the damage was $800, which would be thousands of dollars today. They were spotted by an adult and their names reported to my dad. Today, teens vandalizing a job site this way almost certainly would be reported to the police and charged with a crime – “zero tolerance” and all that. Back then, my dad called their fathers. He didn’t want their parents to pay for the tires; he wanted the boys to pay for them themselves from summer jobs. They did, too, and their parents backed my dad up. No police ever were involved and he shook the hand of each of the boys when he had finished paying off his share of the damage.

Men with this perspective are far rarer today, but some are still out there. In Red, one such older man named Avery, played by Brian Cox, has an old dog named Red. While he is fishing, three teens come upon him in the woods. They try to rob him, but he has nothing of value, so, in annoyance, a teen named Danny shoots Red. Avery finds out who the shooter is (from the local gunshop owner) and goes to meet the boy’s father. All he wants is for Danny to acknowledge what he did and to express remorse. Instead, Danny smugly denies everything and his father – a completely amoral wheeler-dealer who surely believes Avery but doesn’t care so long as he can’t prove it – throws Avery out. Another of the teens is Danny’s brother, who is remorseful but too scared of Danny and dad to cross them. The working-class parents of the third teen are just as unhelpful. Meantime, we learn of some terrible things in Avery’s recent past that explain much of his current behavior.

Since this movie is based on a Jack Ketchum novel, we know things will escalate into bloodshed. Avery persists in pressing the point. He never initiates violence but when threatened with it he stands his ground. It all culminates in an ending that is disturbing and satisfying – and disturbing that it is satisfying.

Paper Man (2009)

In a gender-reversed parallel to Afternoon Delight, gifted but commercially unsuccessful author Richard (ahem), played by Jeff Daniels, has pretty much everything he needs in a material way. His wife Claire (Lisa Kudrow) is a successful surgeon who brings home more than enough cash. Yet, Richard is troubled. Also, he is facing a deadline, which a serious case of writer’s block makes him likely to miss. Oh yes, he still has (and frequently interacts with) his imaginary friend from childhood, Captain Excellent, played by Ryan Reynolds in superhero costume. If that were the least of his quirks, he would be almost normal.

Richard tries to break his writer’s block by staying by himself off season in Montauk while his wife spends weekdays in NYC. In Montauk he strikes up an unlikely May-December friendship with teenager Abby (Emma Stone) who has troubles and quirks of her own. A mutually beneficial friendship is really all it is, though naturally Claire has a hard time seeing it that way.

This is a talky film without a lot of action, but the talk is well-scripted. If you don’t mind a flick about oddball people getting past their personal demons, you might like this.

Small Apartments (2012)

With an ensemble cast including Billy Crystal, James Caan, Johnny Knoxville, Juno Temple, and Dolph Lundgren, among others, this odd but likable film follows the interactions of several residents of a seedy Los Angeles apartment building. The most central character is Franklin Franklin (Matt Lucas), a marginally functional misfit with a brother in a mental institution; Franklin Franklin has just killed his landlord and dreams of moving to Switzerland. Billy Crystal is the investigator who by the end has pieced together events, but nonetheless hopes Franklin gets away free. So do we.

Wishful Drinking (2010)

In 2009 Carrie Fisher’s one woman show opened at Studio 54 on Broadway. Based on Carrie’s autobiography of the same title, the show exposed growing up in Hollywood (as the child of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds), her life as a Star Wars princess, her various relationships (including with Paul Simon), and her struggles with mental illness. Carrie pulled it off with wit and humor. HBO recorded one of the shows, which it aired in 2010 and released on DVD the next year. This intelligent, funny, and informative look into one corner of celebrity culture is thoroughly enjoyable.

Rush (2013)

In the 1970s, there was a much ballyhooed rivalry between British driver James Hunt and Austrian Niki Lauda on the Formula One racing circuit. James was flamboyant, uneven, but occasionally brilliant on and off the track. Niki approached the sport and life with Germanic regularity and thoroughness. In 1976 they faced off as frontrunners for the championship. Hunt’s team faced disqualification issues over F1 rules, and Lauda, far more seriously, was severely injured in a crash. Yet both continued to drive. This film adaptation, directed by Ron Howard, is surprisingly engaging, even for those who care little about racing. It also proves that Chris Hemsworth can do far more on screen than swing around Thor’s hammer.

Dakota Skye (2008)

Dakota is a recent HS graduate who has a superpower: she not only knows when people lie to her but sees the truth as subtitles. This has its plusses and minuses. She meets a young man who never displays any subtitles. Is he some rare duck who really doesn’t lie, or is he her kryptonite: the one person on whom her powers don’t work? She suspects the latter when she catches him in an apparent lie. This throws her since she never had to deal with uncertainty before. She breaks up with him over it. Things complicate further when she later discovers that from his perspective he might have told the truth. I would have opted for another resolution to the plot, but nonetheless the movie isn’t bad.

Well, more than one of us has been tripped up by the often subjective nature of truth, as those who point thumbs a different direction on any of these flicks can attest.

Of Cats and Naps

This morning I had the hangover experience without the benefit of alcohol. Lack of sleep was the culprit, not that last night involved any wild times: a late night movie (Enders Game: not bad), a few book chapters (Postwar: an informative history and analysis of the post WW2 era by Tony Judt), and a Lydia Lunch double album (Widowspeak: not for everyone but inventive) took me into the small morning hours. Then, at the crack of dawn one of my cats started complaining at my door because it isn’t summer outside. I know how he feels.

My wake-up time largely is regulated by my cats, especially in the winter when both are inside all night. I no longer let them sleep in my room since Mini and Maxi (Mini is the big one) have developed unacceptable quirks as they have grown older. Maxi is restless at night: he jumps off the bed, he jumps on the bed, he sticks his nose in my face, he walks on me, he moves from one side of the bed to the other, he cleans, he sneezes, he kneads, etc., etc. I don’t get more than 15 minutes of uninterrupted sleep at a stretch with him allowed in the room. (He conks out in the daytime after all that activity at night.) Mini is happy to let me sleep, but lately she has decided that the litter box, which is at the other end of the house from my bedroom, is an unreasonably distant journey for any cat to be expected to make in the middle of the night. So, she poops on the bedroom carpet instead. Since I refuse to live with the smell of a litter box (or cat poop) in my own bedroom, for the past few months I have locked both of them out of my room at night. That doesn’t prevent them from raising a fuss at my door when they are tired of waiting for me to get up in the morning: this can start anytime between 4:30 and 8:00 a.m. depending on the season and their moods.

With regard to logging hours of sleep, the only variable within my control (other than the choice to be a cat owner at all) is the time I retire for the night. The late evening hours can be spent much more enjoyably than by snoozing through them, however. In consequence I rarely get the traditional 8 hours of sack time. Some days less than others.

There are health consequences to lack of sleep. According to health.com it diminishes memory, longevity, flexibility, creativity, athletic performance, academic performance, attention span, weight loss, sex, and contentment. Yikes! Yet, too much sleep is bad, too. According to WebMD, it increases your risk of diabetes, heart disease, and death. Also, yikes! So what is the right amount? It is different for each person, and the advice here tends to get annoyingly tautological: get the amount that’s right for you, which is the amount that’s right for you. In my case, “more” is probably a safe answer.

I do know from experience, though, that if you stay up long enough, you get something like a high instead of a hangover. In 1974, the last year before hippiedom removed its headbands and donned disco shoes, we knew a lot about highs, but the one I had after staying up 78 consecutive hours (without the assistance of any stimulants other than modest amounts of caffeine) was unlike others I’d experienced. Staying up that long wasn’t a mindless exercise. I had just finished two papers (Impact of a Vulnerable Grain Supply on the Imperialism of Fifth Century Athens and Demographic and Geographical Aspects of the South African Separate Development Project) and had three days to wrap up two more before their due date: A History of Land Use in the Township of Mendham from Colonial Times to 1974 (about 40 pages plus graphs and notes) and Classical Influences on the U.S. Constitution and the Great Seal of the United States. Fear not: I have no intention of inflicting those page-turners on readers of this blog, and somewhat (only somewhat) regret having obligated my professors to read them, if indeed they did. I finished typing the bibliography to last of those only minutes before class.

I remember very little about what was in any of those papers, but I remember vividly my walk from my dorm to class in order to turn in the last one. The sense of being tired actually had vanished about 24 hours earlier, and had been replaced by a generalized haziness. The world looked fuzzy and all the sounds were muted. My feet felt as though pillows were strapped to them. Door handles seemed to melt to my touch, though somehow the doors still opened in rubbery fashion when I pulled on them. It was not an altogether unpleasant sensation. I didn’t experience outright hallucinations (seeing what wasn’t there, as opposed to registering oddly what was there) though in all likelihood I was mere hours from that stage. I returned to my dorm room around 3 p.m., lay down on the bed, and woke up 11 a.m. the next morning. It took a while for me to be sure what day it was.

As interesting sensations as those were, however, I don’t really wish to go through the process necessary to repeat them. Come to think of it, now is a good time for a catnap.

I’m guessing Sleeping Beauty’s hours would be considered excessive. Trailer for Maleficent, Disney’s retelling from the viewpoint of the villain, opening May:

The 50s of ‘60s

It’s always 50 years after something, but in the present decade we’re working our way through 50^th anniversaries of the 1960s. The ‘60s are the decade dearest to the hearts of Baby Boomers, born 1946-64, who, in the US and much of the West, form a huge bulge in the population pyramid; they felt they owned the 1960s, and, as consumers of popular culture, they very nearly did. (In the 21^st century, the Millennials finally have edged out the Boomers in absolute numbers, but they are a much smaller percentage of the total population than the Boomers were at a similar period in their lives, and consequently have less proportional clout.) In the ‘60s, most Boomers reached their tweens, teens, and/or 20s (I was ages 7-17), which always are the years that weigh heaviest in one’s life. Boomers’ own direct nostalgia is accompanied by a second-hand nostalgia by younger people who see the ‘60s as a colorful era – akin to the way I once thought of the 1920s.

The ‘60s indeed were a colorful decade, and one full of significant events and social changes. (Boomers like to act as though we were responsible for them, but, by and large, we really just experienced them, riding the wake of people older than ourselves – including The Beatles, none of whom was a Boomer.) The anniversary gaining much retrospective attention this past week is that of the first American tour by The Beatles. Some of the commentary on the anniversary has been a little over the top: “…and the world was never the same,” in the words of one newscaster. Well, it never was, true enough, but then it never is. Nevertheless, the ‘60s were pivotal years, and The Beatles to a very large degree were their soundtrack.

Stylistically, The Beatles were not, in fact, a particularly innovative band. What they did in 1964 wasn’t much different from what Bill Haley and His Comets had done a decade earlier; when they experimented with psychedelic rock a few years later, they were following the lead of numerous pioneering California bands. They usually did it better, though, and they did it at exactly the moment when the largest audience was ready for it. (Here the Boomers can take a little credit: we were a very willing audience.) Moreover, they did it with their own original music; there is no denying the skill and prodigious output of the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team. Tom Wolfe once said that it doesn’t pay to be more than five minutes ahead of your time. The Beatles always were spot on with the zeitgeist. You can hear the progression of the ‘60s in their music and see it in their very appearance; even their eventual break-up paralleled the way ‘60s idealism soured in the ‘70s.

Yes, I saw the famous Ed Sullivan Show broadcast: the family watched it on a black & white TV in a motel room in Islamorada FL. At age 11 in February 1964, I listened to the musical advice of my savvier worldly-wise 13-year-old sister and became a Beatles fan. I still have the well-worn 1964 Introducing the Beatles album, bought that same month, on my shelf. I followed her advice a year later, too, by shifting preference to other bands of the era, though our tastes started to diverge at that point: she became a Rolling Stones fan while I tended more to The Animals and edgier (for the day) bands such as The Sonics. (Actually, I still like Eric Burdon, vocalist for The Animals, and bought the septuagenarian’s 2013 album a few months ago.) But that didn’t mean either of us ignored The Beatles. They were much too embedded in the era to ignore. Whatever else we played, Beatles records always were part of the mix. It simply is not possible to have a proper ‘60s music collection without albums such as Sergeant Pepper and Abbey Road.

Soundtracks, whether to movies or to life, are just that. 2001: A Space Odyssey would have been a good movie with a theme by someone other than Strauss. The ‘40s would have been just as world-changing a decade (far more so than the ‘60s) without Glenn Miller or the Andrews Sisters. But both would have been poorer without them. For the ‘60s, we could have done a lot worse for an iconic band. Many of the upcoming 50^th anniversaries will be grim ones. This one isn’t, so if some of the nostalgia for the Fab Four is over the top, at least this anniversary is frownless and harmless.