Long Way from Celebrating

Day One of National Novel Writing Month is officially in the books. 1,741 words of a novel I’m not sure I want to write, and whose end is completely up in the air.  If I’m able to continue this, I can’t promise how regularly I’ll be posting here.  I know this will come as horrible news to my threes of readers, but I figure it’s highly doubtful that I can crank out roughly 1,600 words of the novel and then write something full of pith and whimsy over here.  But we’ll see.  Maybe I’m more ambitious than I realize.

So, without further ado, the first installment of the novel.  I won’t be doing this daily (largely because I have no faith in how it will turn out), but I figure it’s worth sharing the beginning just so people know I’ve actually taken the plunge.  Comments welcome (but if you nitpick on typos, which I haven’t checked for yet, I’ll kick you in the shin).

*****

Fucking Indiana.

I-70 was interminable on its own, an endless asphalt ribbon that apparently never actually went anywhere, choosing instead to lazily unfurl itself past an interchangeable backdrop that went something like this: strip mall, barren field, rest area, chain restaurant, strip mall, barren field, rest area, chain restaurant.  For the entire duration of that day’s drive, Russell had no sense of forward motion.  He tried to disrupt the tedium by pretending that his pickup was seized in the grip of a tractor beam, and it was only by discovering previously unplumbed depths of mechanical ingenuity that he could break free.  No dice.  The charade lasted just long enough for Russell to lock eyes with the driver of a car passing on the left.  At that point he was thrust back in his seat, hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel, elbows locked, shouting at no one in particular to reverse thrusters dammit. As the passing car slowly overtook Russell’s pickup, he noticed the driver’s look of confusion – eyes narrowed, eyebrows scrunched in consternation – and, suitably embarrassed, tried to pretend he was singing along to a CD.

And that was another problem.  From the time he’d left St. Louis that morning, checking out of the Hampton Inn his father had reserved for him advance, he’d had a constant rotation playing on the pickup’s stereo.  The Clash into Modest Mouse into Magazine into the Chills into Spiritualized.  As soon as one CD ended he ripped it from the dash and forced in another, hoping to gain some kind of musical momentum that would magically accelerate the passage of time.  In its best moments, music could do that for Russell – enforce reverie, cast him back in time, preoccupy his mind with the should-have-dones and the wish-I-could-do-it-agains – and before he knew it it was several hours later and he really had to go to the bathroom. But here and now, against the backdrop of The Most Boring Highway in the World™, it might as well have been Garth Brooks or Justin Bieber.  It all irritated him.  Each band was complicit in his boredom.  In an extremely misguided attempt to force his attention elsewhere he tried listening to Aphex Twin’s Drukqs double-album, hoping that if he forced himself to focus on the electronic bleeps and bloops he could will himself into distraction.  Within two minutes he wanted to drive his car into the highway’s cement divider, knowing that, if nothing else, a fiery crash was at least interesting.

And now – oh, and now – the red and blue flashing lights drawing up on his bumper.  They had begun as pinpricks in his rearview mirror, passable as the fading electronic sign outside a Joe’s Crab Shack or Applebee’s.  But they got bigger, and soon were big enough and moving fast enough to be nothing other than a rapidly approaching police cruiser.  Russell’s eyes flicked metronomically from speed gauge to rearview mirror, speed gauge to rearview mirror, and the lights kept on coming.  He was well accustomed to that divebombing sensation in the pit of his stomach that really only introduced itself when a cop was in his vicinity.  Even when he was doing nothing wrong, Russell got nervous.  Yesterday, stopped at a Wendy’s in the middle of Oklahoma, a state trooper sat down at the table next to him with a tray piled high with food. Russell suddenly found himself eating extra nonchalantly, dipping his fries in his white paper ketchup cup in a way that he hoped seemed especially law-abiding.  And now that it was clear these lights were meant for him, all the usual biological tics sprang into action: jackrabbit heartbeat, sweaty palms, and a sudden twitch below his left eye.

He had made it across the Arizona and New Mexico wasteland unscathed, had barreled down the Oklahoma and Missouri freeway without incident, had even survived Texas for chrissake, and now, just a couple hours from his destination, this.

Fucking Indiana.

Russell was no stranger to tickets.  He knew the drill.  License and registration at the ready, he rolled down the window and waited for Captain Condescension.  The officer did not disappoint.  He leaned down and peered in Russell’s window.  Aviator shades, mustache, toothpick.  Russell briefly wondered if had accidentally driven onto a movie set.

“In a hurry, son?”

Just perfect.  Russell didn’t believe in omens as a rule, but as a pragmatist he knew better than to ignore the obvious.  The chickens, those assholes, were still coming home to roost.  Russell handed over his identification and prayed for divine intervention to a God he was pretty sure he didn’t believe in.

**

3:14 a.m.  A ringing phone.

Russell crossed the border between sleep and wakefulness with difficulty, like a prisoner tunneling his way to the light.  Two more handfuls of dirt, then air, then freedom.  But then two more.  And then two more, the light receding.

He opened his eyes.

Ringing, next to his ear.  3:14 a.m.

He grabbed the receiver, picked it up.

“Hello?”

**

Russell crossed into Ohio at Richmond, Indiana.  It was a blessing to be off the freeway and onto the back roads that would take him home.  He loved Ohio in November, and the weather had seemed to realize he was coming.  The sky was flat gray and the clouds hung low in scraps and tatters of dirty cotton above the fields.  In the morning, the fallen, desiccated cornstalks would be rimed with frost, shimmering – almost vibrating – as the sun cast its pallid light upon them.  Now, though, mid-afternoon on this gunmetal day, the stalks were just dead things, fallen and trampled by the huge wheels of the harvesting machines, coated in mud from the cold November rains and melted frost.

But Russell still liked this weather.  The road trailed out of Richmond, crossed into Ohio, and led directly to the tiny town of New Paris.  As he drove slowly down the town’s main street – its only street – he smelled leaves burning in someone’s backyard, and his years growing up in this area had fine-tuned his nose to such a degree that he was able to distinguish that smell from the wood smoke he saw curling from a nearby chimney.  One smelled of campfires and Christmas morning, the other – inexplicably – of pumpkins and heavy frost.  One was inviting, the other stark.  He loved them both.  He rolled down his window and inhaled deeply, forgetting the cop, forgetting the drive from California, forgetting why he was making the trip in the first place, simply luxuriating in the smell of smoke and fallen leaves, the chill air on his cheek.

But now, as he accelerated out of New Paris, the engine of his pickup clearly unhappy with this decision, Russell experienced the opposite sensation of what he had felt on that long stretch of Indiana freeway, when mile markers taunted him with their apparent ability to elasticize time.  Now he couldn’t get it to slow down.

And this was a problem.  Russell tried to tamp down on the vague sense of panic that was slowly rising in him.  The panic didn’t have a name – not exactly, even though it was tempting to give it the obvious one – but he knew it was cumulative.  It was the fireworks stand in Richmond, the Christmas trees that were already twinkling from windows even though it wasn’t yet Thanksgiving.  It was the homes he now recognized – the one with all the inflatable holiday shit outside, virtually unchanged since he last saw it seven years ago; the double-wide by the road that still sported an array of plastic deer around a blue ceramic birdbath – and the familiarity of this road bisecting these fields he now recognized.  Time was simultaneously speeding up – toward the confrontation, the situation that drew him here – and standing still in these perpetual monuments to the very kind of country living he had fled seven years ago.

Sensory overload seemed too dramatic a term for what Russell was feeling – the panic was distant; storm clouds massing on the horizon, kind of threatening but too far away to take really seriously – but there was no doubting the growing discomfort he felt gnawing at his chest.

Spin it, he thought.  It’s only a problem if you make it one.  So in went the celebratory music, a mix he’d put together years ago, starting with “Rock Lobster,” seguing into Junior Senior, continuing into Radiohead’s “Optimistic.”  Russell sang along, full-on, open-throated, letting his voice crack on the high notes, messing up the words and not caring, his own optimism a good-natured sledgehammer, as though he could slow down time through sheer force of will.  It was good for a while.

**

Ringing, next to his ear.  3:14 a.m.

He grabbed the receiver, picked it up.

“Hello?”

“Russ?”

Dad.

Again. “Russ?”

“What is it, Dad?  Is everyone okay?”

Open air down the line.  California to Ohio, no obstruction.  Just air.

“Dad?”

“She’s gone.”

Air again.  With the sound of something, something far away, like sobbing.

**

The street was as he remembered it, huge oaks on either side whose branches, in the summer, would meet overhead, causing the sun to tessellate on the pavement below, a shifting checkerboard of burnished light.  Even though Russell had never been to France, it reminded him for some reason of a Parisian boulevard.  In high school – to cultivate a sense of sophistication he thought was missing from the neighborhood – he took to lounging around outside his house in a beret, sipping Dr. Pepper from an espresso cup he’d stolen from K-Mart, and biting huge chunks off the end of a baguette.  His dad tolerated this with the resigned air of a parent much used to disappointment.  His mom bought the baguettes.

Now, though, the bare branches reached toward one another, their spindly ends stretching and failing to make contact.  As Russell turned the corner at his house, he noticed that the grass was long dead – killed off by the first frost that had surely struck weeks ago – but it was also long.  Like it hadn’t been mown at the end of summer.  It was a yearly tradition, that final mowing in late September or early October, a certain sign that the seasons were changing, the calendar ticking over from summer to fall.  It hadn’t happened this year.  The grass – brittle and brown – stood nearly knee-high.  Russell could picture it blowing in the late summer breeze, forgotten and supplanted by what was happening inside the house.

*****

Current listening:

The Men – Leave Home (2011)

This Is Only a Test

Even though he’s not especially popular anymore (except with elderly Jews and youngish movie nerds), Woody Allen remains one of those public figures about whom people invariably have an opinion.  To the casual movie-goer, Allen is “the old dude who married his daughter,” which is how one of my students described him last semester.  He’s referring, of course, to Soon-Yi Previn (the adopted daughter of Allen’s then-girlfriend Mia Farrow), whom Allen married in 1997. This tends to be, I think, the sum total of the information most people have about Allen, even though, as I mentioned in my previous post, he’s released a movie a year since 1969 with only a very few exceptions.

The problem with this revisionist history is that it completely loses sight of the fact that Allen was one of the great comic voices of the 20th Century.  His recent output (inconsistent at best, and this comes from a huge apologist for even Allen’s slightest films) has perhaps contributed to the tendency to overlook his inarguably impressive track record, which began in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.  During that time he wrote for Ed Sullivan, Sid Caesar, and Candid Camera, and honed his act as a regular on the the Greenwich Village standup circuit.

–

I mention all this because, if there’s one thing that should be pointed out at the start of this little experiment (watching and reporting on all of Allen’s films in chronological order, in case you missed it in the previous post), it’s how much of a transformation Allen’s movies underwent during his career.  His early films reflect his sensibility as a comedy writer – they’re much broader, much sillier, with a greater emphasis on slapstick and wordplay.  His later films (beginning with Annie Hall in 1977) are still comedies, but the humor is subtler, more rooted in character than in shtick.  In the 60’s and early 70’s, though, Allen was responsible for a lot of capital-C Comedies that reveled in the absurd.

And that’s as good a place as any to introduce Allen’s first official directing credit, 1966’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily?  It’s an odd movie for me to have to start with because it’s not a directorial effort in the conventional sense.  Allen took two Japanese movies – International Secret Police: A Barrel of Gunpowder and International Secret Police: Key of Keys – and redubbed them in English, turning them from James Bondian cloak and dagger adventures into a spy spoof about a quest to find the world’s best egg salad recipe.  So while Allen’s films would eventually shift from broad comedies starring himself as a neurotic nebbish to urbane, slyly funny meditations on modern life starring himself as a neurotic nebbish, his first “real” movie is one that doesn’t seem like a Woody Allen Movie™ at all.

That said, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? is still very funny, and plays like a precursor to Mystery Science Theater 3000.  As with the movies in that series, the plot is incidental to the jokes, which come at a furious clip.  There’s a dashing hero, femmes fatale, and villains sporting various permutations of ridiculous facial hair – all uttering deadpan dialogue that wouldn’t sound out of place in one of Allen’s standup routines (in the latter example, one character tells another, “Don’t tell me what I can do, or I’ll have my mustache eat your beard”).  Not all the jokes stick, but a surprising number of them still work, and one of the pleasures of a movie like this is the cumulative air of the absurd that encompasses the entire endeavor.  It revels in its own ridiculousness, and for its short running time, the mood is infectious.  While it’s true that parts of the movie haven’t aged particularly well – especially the hysterically incongruous clips of the Lovin’ Spoonful playing to a distractingly caucasian dance party – What’s Up, Tiger Lily? holds up well, and I think it plays even better now, in a culture that has a newfound appreciation for satire, sarcasm, and irony.  (Side note: The clips of the Lovin’ Spoonful were apparently inserted into the movie by the studio against Allen’s wishes, which is one of the reasons why he became so adamant about taking sole creative control of his future films.  It’s a good point.  Those segments play like a parody of a bad 60’s movie, which is a problem when they’re embedded in a good 60’s movie.)

As it turns out, it’s difficult to have much to say about Tiger Lily.  Finding myself without characters or story on which to report, all that’s left for me to do is describe the jokes – a dubious enterprise at best.  Suffice it to say, Allen and co-writer Mickey Rose wring a lot of laughs out of the standard spy movie tropes, as well as the inevitable culture clash involved in grafting English dialogue onto the Japanese movie.  For instance, the very Japanese hero’s name is now Phil Moscowitz, and when his gun clicks empty late in the movie he speaks directly to the screen: “No bullets? Ah, but if all of you in the audience who believe in fairies will clap your hands, then my gun will be magically filled with bullets.” There’s also a play on James Bond’s lady-killer vibe, as two scantily-clad women frolic in their hotel room (as scantily-clad women around the world are wont to do) and have this exchange:

Teri: I wish Phil would get here. It’s getting awfully late.
Suki: [Running to answer a knock at the door] It’s Phil, bringing the promise of joy and fulfillment in its most primitive form!
Teri: I hope he brought the vibrator.

It’s all profoundly silly in the best way.  As a calling card, What’s Up, Tiger Lily? didn’t turn the world of cinema on its ear, and it doesn’t even really give much of an indicator of what Allen would eventually accomplish.  But it fits in well with the rest of his early work, leaning, as it does, more toward the silly than the sophisticated.  And, knowing the riches that would come later, it’s a lot of fun watching Allen tentatively dip his toe into the cinematic waters.

–

Up next: 1969’s Take the Money and Run

*****

Current listening:

Public Enemy – It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)

Listening Post (5/14/11)

As with the various other incarnations of my blog, music will play a heavy role in this one, too.  So, for the first installment of the Listening Post, it seems appropriate to share a song from the album that provides my new blog with its name.  Hailing from Minneapolis, Hüsker Dü is one of the greatest bands to burble up out of the American underground in the early 1980’s. Mixing punk ferocity with the unbelievable melodic gifts of band leaders Bob Mould and Grant Hart, Hüsker Dü (along with compatriots R.E.M., The Replacements, and Pixies) not only epitomized what was great about American music in the 80’s, but provided what would become the template for “alternative music” in the 90’s.

The band recorded at least three classic albums in its short lifespan – among them 1984’s Zen Arcade and 1985’s New Day Rising – and the title of this blog comes from their final effort, recorded as the band was disintegrating in a storm of mutual acrimony and heroin abuse.  This is the lead-off track from that album, 1987’s Warehouse: Songs and Stories, and it’s called “These Important Years.”  Enjoy.

It’s Beginning to and Back Again

At this point, the news that I’m starting a new blog should be greeted with the kind of annoyed sigh usually reserved for Sarah Palin’s latest Facebook post. There will be probably be eye-rolling in there, too.  And rightfully so.

I first started blogging in 2003, when Blogger was Blogspot.  I switched over to LiveJournal in early 2004 and kept that one faithfully for over two years, until I headed to grad school.  Then, because I’m a free spirit (albeit a free spirit whose free spiritedness only manifests itself in decidedly sedentary ways), I bounced back and forth between Blogger and WordPress for the next several years, interspersing periods of vast productivity with longer and longer periods of not giving a shit.

The problem – lately, anyway – is that I like the idea of keeping a blog more than I actually like keeping one.  I start with the best of intentions, but sooner or later it starts to feel like a homework assignment.  It’s why I’ve never been good at keeping a journal of any kind – anything I feel obligated to do I eventually rebel against.  And my rebellion usually takes the shape of me just throwing up my hands in disgust and taking a nap. So people who know me – or who know my last blog, Three Seconds of Dead Air – should rightfully be skeptical of my latest online attempt at rambling about things in a semi-amusing way.

There’s a difference this time around, though, that seemed to necessitate starting from scratch, rather than simply stumbling along at my previous spot, and doing so with more resolve than usual. In short, 2011 feels like a year during which I should be writing.  My mom died two months ago – more on that in posts to come, I’m sure – and in two more months I’m getting married.  Less personally, there’s an absolute wealth of movies, music, TV, and books worth talking about, and the increasing lunacy of the right-wing – which will only get worse as we ramp up to the 2012 election – is a constant source of entertainment. There’s a lot to say about a lot of things, and it felt like I should turn the page in order to do this already-momentous year justice.

So once again, I, Monty, your faithful narrator, am pledging faithfulness, constancy, and, with any luck, not a little amusement.  As always, comments are welcome.  More to come.

Current listening:

Girls Names – Dead to Me (2011)

Current reading:

Jeffrey Eugenides – Middlesex (2002)

Mary E. Pearson – The Adoration of Jenna Fox (2008)

Last movie seen:

Source Code (2011; Duncan Jones, dir.)