I had to go to the local DMV office today to conduct two different transactions. Once upon a time, the prospect of doing such a thing would have filled me with an overwhelming sense of dread. In fact, it did fill me with an overwhelming sense of dread. But the DMV office in question was well-organized and professionally run, and I was in and out of there in less than an hour. Huzzah!
The People at the Gym
Over the last few weeks, I’ve finally been able to start going to the gym on a dedicated basis again. I’d been planning to do so earlier in the year, but all kinds of “life stuff” happened to intercede, the worst of which was that nasty knee injury I had. But I’m better now and back to the gym. Yay, me!
One of the things that interests me the most about attending the gym is the other people. Seriously, folks: if people-watching is your thing, then a busy gym is the best place to be. You’ll see all kinds there. Here are some of the ones that I see.
The super-athletic fat guy. There’s no other way to describe him, but he – and another version of him – has been a regular at every gym I’ve ever frequented. This is a fat guy. Not a guy with some fat on him, but an actual fat guy. He is easily well north of 300 lbs. And he’s (a) really really strong, and/or (b) able to maintain a high pace on a treadmill or other cardio machine for a really long time.
Her Ladyship, the Ligament-less. Watching this woman stretch makes me wonder if her body is made of muscle and bone at all, or if she’s really some alien whose body is made of some form of stretchy super-polymer or something. I doubt I was that limber at birth.
The docs. This is a trio of three guys who are always there when I’m there. They do their own workouts, but they also socialize amongst themselves, often talking shop, the sound of which implies that they are doctors of some sort. They’ll do their own thing for a while, and then they’ll just sort of congregate around a certain machine, at which point they’ll converse for about a minute. You can tell when the conversation ends because all three of them burst out into loud laughter before going back to whatever it was they were doing in the first place.
The strong couple. This man and woman are hard-core. Both could beat the crap right out of me. You can tell they’re super-serious about their workouts. They’re focused and they use impeccable form in every exercise they do. If you overhear their discussion, they’re talking about protein consumption and how much weight they need to work each muscle to overload. They’re fun to watch and a bit inspirational.
Endurance guy. This fellow is skinny as a rail and is all about the endurance. He’ll get on a treadmill for the full thirty-minute period that the gym allows, and when that time is up, he’ll jump off and onto another treadmill for another thirty minutes. Sometimes he’ll come over to the weight training area, whereupon he’ll hop onto a machine, set the weight for a fairly low number and then proceed to do about fifty reps without break. There’s no doubt that I’m stronger than this guy, and there’s also no doubt that if we both entered a distance race, I’d be dead on the ground about half an hour before he even started to break a sweat.
The not-so-strong couple. This couple is interesting to watch in another way. It’s clear that they’re both interested in exercising, but the girl is obviously more interested in doing something else, exercise-wise. He’s into weights, while she wants to stretch, do a little bit of resistance training, and work on her cardio. So she’s hanging out with him by the weights, trying not to look bored as he talks about his workouts just loudly enough for others to hear about what he’s doing. He’ll never admit it, but he sees her as his trophy chick. When you see one of these couples, you can bank on seeing the guy back to working out by himself within a matter of weeks.
The kids who won’t move their asses. I hate these kids. They annoy the hell out of me. There are usually four or five of them, all from the same school, and they’re working out together. Which means that these bozos will set up camp on one machine and take turns on the damned thing for ridiculously long periods of time. The leader of the pack will be wearing a t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off; the next guy down will be wearing a tank top. The newest member of the club is in a t-shirt and you can overhear him asking the other guys if he’s doing it right. The answer is always “No”, not because the kid’s actually not doing it right, but because the leader-guy wants to show off his knowledge.
Sweaty comb-over guy. This is obviously an older man who is working out with sufficient intensity to get his head sweaty to the point that his combover loses its structural integrity, so those wisps of long hair that he has earlier in the day meticulously arranged atop his melon so as to convey the illusion of hair (an illusion which fools no one) are now protruding from his scalp in all directions.
The walk-in-the-park girls. These are women of any age who use adjacent cardio machines – treadmills, ellipticals, anything – as a way of keeping in touch with one another. They cheerfully gossip away as they walk or pedal or whatever.
Garbage-bag guy. This fellow wears workout clothes that look like they’re made of black garbage bags. Seriously. They’re real workout clothes, but they’re shiny and crinkly like garbage bags. This dude looks weird, every time I see him.
Office-at-the-gym Man. Here’s a guy who brings paperwork from his office, which he then does while pedaling away on a stationary bike. I have no idea how he manages to do this, but there he is, pen in hand and flipping through a manila folder of stuff every time he’s there, all the while getting all sweaty on the bike. I’m not sure if I admire this multi-tasking skill of his or not. Probably not.
The Lit Critic. This woman always reads on the bike or treadmill she’s using. Nothing abnormal here; lots of folks read. I remember her because one time I was on the bike next to hers at the moment she decided that the book she was reading was apparently crap, because she suddenly said, “This book sucks!” and dropped it on the floor.
The business woman. This lady does cardio only; I’ve never seen her do anything weight-training related. She’s extremely trim and fit, she works out with her machine set at high levels of intensity, she always reads a business magazine, and she never, ever, ever, sweats. She could probably pay someone more than I make in a year to erase my existence from the planet.
Range-of-motion man. This guy cracks me up. I love watching him. When I started going to the Y, three years ago, I saw a Harley chopper parked in the lot, and as soon as I saw this fellow, I knew that it was his. And sure enough, when he left, it was. He looks a bit doughy at first, but he’s clearly got muscle underneath it. Dark hair, dark beard, and dark body hair. He puts the maximum weight on every machine, but when he starts the exercise, he only budges the weight a few inches one way or the other…but he does dozens of reps like that. I’m not sure how this workout benefits him – I’ve always read that working a muscle through its entire range of motion is key – but it must, because he’s really strong, apparently. He can lift all that weight in the first place, but he’d likely be a lot stronger – and shapelier – if he actually exhibited decent form!
Techno-rower. I don’t see this guy all that often. He likes the rowing machines, and he has a rowing program on his laptop, which he hooks up to the rowing machine so it can track his progress with scrolling graphs and an animated guy on a rowboat that pushes and pulls the oars in tandem with whatever our guy does in real life. I’m not sure what the point of the whole laptop thing is, but there he is, tracking his progress or something.
The iPod addicts. There are many of these folks, male and female. Their purpose is to take up space, standing in the way, oblivious to all things around them like other people, while they scroll through their songlists and playlists in search of a tune to play during their next burst of ninety seconds of exercise. These folks are pretty annoying.
Flannel man. This old geezer – sorry, there’s no other word for him – shows up to work out in jeans and a flannel shirt. I’m always afraid he’s going to give himself heat stroke. In January.
The lady who looks like another lady I used to work with so I always end up staring at her too long as I try to figure out if she’s really the lady I used to work with. Only she isn’t, so I end up looking creepy. She’s not unlike The teenage girl who goes to my church but whom I couldn’t recognize in her gym clothes so I stared at her a little too long trying to figure out why she looks so damned familiar.
The overweight folks approaching middle age who go to the Y in hopes that they can recapture some of whatever these younger, and deeply annoying, people still have going for them. Sadly, I fall into this last category myself!
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Something for Thursday
A Random Wednesday Conversation Starter
X-Files Case Report: “Shadows”
“I’d say you people already suffer from full denial.” (Agent Mulder)
The X-Files was so much more than aliens and government conspiracies; it actually drew on just about every occult phenomenon it could find over the course of its run. Here we have a good, old-fashioned ghost story.
A businessman named Howard Graves has committed suicide, leaving his trusted assistant, a woman named Lauren, to clean out his office. As she leaves, though, a desktop memento suddenly moves, and she turns back to see it in a different spot than where she left it. Not thinking much of this, she takes it with her. Cut to later, when she stops at an ATM on her way home. She is jumped by a couple of hoodlums who drag her, screaming, into an alley. Cut to still two hours later, when two young people come along, looking for a place to “crash”, when they find the bodies of the hoodlums. The men were killed by having their throats crushed from the inside, and they’ve been exposed to so much electrostatic electricity that even though they’ve been dead for six hours, their bodies are still twitching on the slab and their tissue hasn’t even started to cool.
Mulder and Scully get wind of this when they are brought in to consult by a pair of taciturn NSA agents (or CIA or some other shadow government group). When they share no information with our FBI heroes, Mulder speculates that they are involved because the case shows earmarks of psychokinesis. They begin to suspect that Lauren is somehow psychokinetic, but it gradually turns out that it’s really Howard Graves’s ghost that is behind everything.
A fairly standard story plays out: Graves, it turns out, was actually murdered by the business partner who claims to have loved him like a brother, and Graves felt a father-like devotion to Lauren, owing to his having lost a three-year-old daughter years before who would have been Lauren’s age in the present day. Howard Graves has not left this mortal coil because he still has work to do.
This tale, of course, is somewhat strongly reminiscent of the movie Ghost, which had come out a few years earlier. It’s a nicely done episode, mostly interesting for the performance of Lisa Waltz as Lauren, for some nicely brisk writing, and for the fact that the show seems to be going in one direction at first (psychokinesis) but actually turns into something else (ghosts). It’s also interesting in that Scully’s skepticism is dialed back a bit, and at the end she seems quite accepting of the ghost story.
Finally, this episode continues to demonstrate just how the world has evolved in less than twenty years since it originally aired. When Mulder and Scully must look for information on Howard Graves, they aren’t able to just Google the guy; Scully has to spend quality time with a microfiche machine, manually searching through newspaper archives for a mention of the guy. Shadows aired about eighteen years ago; eighteen years before that, I suppose Kojak was the norm of teevee police procedurals. The distance between the world depicted in Season One X-Files and Kojak seems a lot closer than the present day and the world of Season One X-Files. I even remember reading commentary on Usenet, back during the first couple of seasons, in which Mulder was made fun of for always having his cell phone with him!
Next up: “Ghost in the Machine”.
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“Two drifters, off to see the world….”
I need to watch Breakfast at Tiffany’s again, because I’ve only seen it once and it’s just silly to allow a film you loved the one time you saw it to go unwatched again. I’ve just read a new book called Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M., by Sam Wasson, about the making of the movie. Interestingly, the book takes a wider view of the making of Breakfast, by showing us the lives of the principals involved in the film leading up to the project that would bring them all together. He gives biographical sketches of Truman Capote and Audrey Hepburn, of screenwriter George Axelrod and costumer Edith Head, of Mel Ferrer and Blake Edwards and many others who came to make the movie. Wasson’s approach is almost novelistic, and if it’s not an exhaustively detailed account of a single film’s production, it compensates for that by being more of a portrait of sorts of the film’s genesis.
It’s not a portrait in which all the particulars look perfect, either. Truman Capote was apparently a fairly odd individual with a train-wreck of a childhood; Audrey Hepburn is seen as something of a tragic figure as well, enduring multiple miscarriages in a marriage that doesn’t appear terribly happy. For all the skill Blake Edwards brought to the film, he is not without fault: he cast Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi. And though he is only in the book briefly, George Peppard — the film’s male lead — was apparently a colossal jerk on the set.
Here is an excerpt from the book, detailing Henry Mancini’s efforts at coming up with a song for the movie…and more specifically, a song for Holly Golightly, Audrey Hepburn’s troubled and wounded character.
For a full month, slouching on the rented piano he kept in the garage, Henry Mancini agonized over the song. What had he gotten himself into? Over and over again, he replayed, again and again, Audrey’s voice in his head. He caught Funny Face [a musical Hepburn had done previously with Fred Astaire] on TV a few nights earlier, and with the short range — her range — of an octave and one, tried riffing on Audrey’s rendition of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” I could cry salty tears….Everything he tried died on the second or third note. I could cry…But for lack of an alternative, he stuck to it. Cry salty…cry salty tears…But the stucking didn’t stick. Nothing did. If Mancini didn’t deliver on this, what would he say to Jurow and Shepherd [the film’s producers], or to Blake [Edwards, the director], who’d had faith in him, who stuck his neck out? Even worse, what would he tell himself the next tim ehe sat down with a pipe at the piano? “You’ll do it, Hank”? There were only so many times his wife, Ginny, could say it to him. Only so many more times he would let himself go on to her about what kind of song this girl would sing. Was a Broadway-style melody actually the right choice for “travelin’ through the pastures of the sky”? That didn’t seem to fit with the private moment on a fire escape. But maybe the blues would. Where have I…Maybe like a jazzy pop thing. Or a country thing. Was that what was in her heart?
This was a time when Holly would cut through the pretense and show, for the length of a song, who she really was beneath all the sophistication. Right: beneath the sophistication. Whatever that sounded like, it had to be simple.
And then — as these things tend to happen — it came suddenly. Three notes: C, G, F. It was promising. Not a song, but a beginning. Staying within the range of an octave and one, and being careful to keep the melody all in the same key — much simpler that way — Mancini turned out the next several notes, all on the white keys. They didn’t sound bad — actually, they sounded good. At first, he went ahead carefully, mindful of not leaping too far beyond his flow, and then, as he gained momentum, proceeded half consciously. Now it was all falling out of him. A moment later it was automatic — he was taking dictation. As if they knew just where to go, as if they had been there many times before, the remaining notes obediently assumed their place on the page. Twenty minutes later, the composer looked up from the piano. The song was written.
The next day, Mancini made a record of it and took it in to Edwards. Blake loved it. Then it was to Paramount to play the tune for Shepherd and Jurow. “Hank brought a 78 record up to our office,” recalls Shepherd, “and he said, ‘Let us know what you think of it.’ He just laid it down and left. Marty and I listened to it and we thought it was terrific.”
“Who do you want to write the lyrics?” they asked.
“Johnny Mercer,” was the reply. Mancini didn’t even have to think about it.
The result, of course, was “Moon River”.
Maybe I can’t hold myself up as any kind of expert, but this surely has to be one of the perfect moments in all cinema. This woman is having a moment all for herself, on the fire escape at the back of her apartment. We first saw her in an elegant black dress, but now she’s in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair beneath a towel. She has no idea anyone’s listening, and maybe she doesn’t even care; all she is doing is singing this simple tune with its lyrics that are both sad and hopeful. And the setting of the music is so wisely done, the way the muted strings rise up underneath the song in the second verse. Hepburn’s Holly Golightly seems so sad here — but the nature of the sadness isn’t spelled out at all. Does she miss something or someone? Does she feel that her life has gone awry? The film will fill in some of those blanks, but the song is, all at once, sad and hopeful and mysterious.
And that little thing Hepburn does at the end, there, when she’s done singing? When she looks up and sees her upstairs neighbor listening? And without a trace of embarrassment, she just smiles and says “Hi”? That’s one of those Audrey Hepburn moments, the ones that make me want to give her my heart, just because.
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Sentential Links #242
Linkage for the weary….
:: So now we have a fully functional, though still far from finished, kitchen. I suppose I would be betraying The Sisterhood if I admit that I’m excited about something as domestic as a sink but you know what? The Sisterhood can kiss my big fat lily-white hiney. (Why would the Sisterhood be annoyed at a good sink? Sinks are important for everybody, right?)
:: I love money. I hate money.
:: In Murder on the Orient Express, I wanted Ingrid Bergman to play the Russian Princess Dragomiroff. She wanted to play the retarded Swedish maid. I wanted Ingrid Bergman. I let her play the maid. She won an Academy Award. I bring this up because self-knowledge is so important in so many ways to an actor. (This is actually Sheila O’Malley quoting Sidney Lumet. But what a great quote!)
:: Blade Runner isn’t about our AI offspring, it’s about us and how we treat each other, our hubris and our compassion, or lack of it. It’s about becoming human, the changing nature of humanity. I don’t think we’re born human, I think we become slowly human, if we learn, over a lifetime. (A fantastic article about Blade Runner, a movie I’m doomed to wish I liked more than I do. By the way, apparently it’s “Dystopia Week” over at Tor.com.)
All for this week. Tune in next!
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Sunday Burst of Weird and AWESOME!
Oddities and Awesome abound!
:: Remember how disillusioned you were when you discovered that the Big Mac you actually get at McDonald’s bears little resemblance to the perfect-looking burger in the commercials, the one that towers so high you wondered how anyone could open their jaws enough to bite the thing? Sure you do.
:: Remember how creepy you thought Steve Buscemi’s eyes were, the first time you saw him in a movie? Sure you do.
:: Remember how you’ve always wanted to be able to zoom around the Solar System and look at stuff? Sure you do.
:: Are you getting tired of the endless debate over whether video games are or are not Art? Sure you’re not!
More next week!
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My greatest Sabres playoff memory
The other day, as I was driving home from work, the guys on the radio (Schopp and the Bulldog, WGR-550 AM!) were asking callers for their “greatest Sabres playoff memories”. The NHL season is ending and the playoffs are getting ready to start, and the locally beloved Sabres have managed to play their way back into the playoffs after a sluggish start to the season; thus, hockey fever is starting to sweep around the region again after falling off a bit in the last year or two. (Plus the team has new ownership that is so adept at saying the right things, that it’s almost like Buffalo’s hockey fandom has found itself inside a corny sports movie. But anyway….) So, here’s my personal greatest playoff memory.
The NHL endured a lockout earlier in the 2000s that wiped out an entire season, but when the league returned to play a year later, suddenly the Sabres were…really, really good. They went to the Eastern Conference finals both years, and most folks around here tend to think that, with a few luckier breaks (especially in 2006, when injuries ravaged the team the longer the playoffs went on), one or both of those teams would have brought home a Stanley Cup. (And believe me, folks: if/when the Sabres actually do win the Stanley Cup, this entire region is going to throw a party that will make Mardi Gras look like Thanksgiving with the Donner Party.)
Here’s the thing about me, though: I’m not much of a hockey fan. I enjoy it when I see it on teevee, but that’s not very often because we don’t have cable and I don’t go out much. (I should go out more, but I don’t. Because I’m dull, you see.) And because I don’t get to watch much hockey at all, I end up not knowing all that much about it. Remember back in the 1990s when whatever teevee network had the NHL rights decided to make the game “easier to follow” by superimposing a blue dot on the ice wherever the puck was? And whenever someone would actually shoot the puck, there’d be a red laser-streak thing on the teevee to show where it went? Most hockey fans I knew back then scoffed at this and made fun of it…but I was the guy that was meant for. No more could I complain that I had no idea where the puck was! I could follow the most important aspect of the game, and thus could turn my attention to other matters, like learning the rules. I remember seeing games, getting caught up in the action of the guys skating every which way, the sheer speed of it all, and then everyone suddenly stopping skating. “Why are they stopping?” I’d ask. “Icing,” came the reply. I’d just nod, because no matter what sporting event is on teevee in a bar, you do not want to be the guy asking for explanations of the rules. Even if it’s the Winter Olympics and you’re watching curling, a sport which by all accounts has no rules at all and only crowns a winner by an off-screen game of Rock-Paper-Scissors after the curling is done.
So anyway, the Sabres in 2005-2006 were really good and only got eliminated from the playoffs pretty much because by the end of their run, injuries had reduced their team to seven guys and two Zamboni drivers. The next year, though, they were better: they won more games than any other team in the league, and were strong favorites to win it all. They dispatched the New York Islanders with ease in Round One of the playoffs, but their Round Two opponent, the New York Rangers, proved a bit more difficult.
Gave Five of the second round in 2007 came on May 4. This happened to also be the opening release date of Spiderman 3. A friend of mine at work was going to the movie, so we agreed to meet at the theater. Problem was, he was going to the game. Now, we were going to a late enough showing that this shouldn’t have been a problem — it was a 10:15 pm showing or something like that, and the game should have been over somewhere shortly after 9:00. So I hung out at home with my family, noodling about on the computer, doing this and that. I couldn’t watch the Sabres game, so I brought up the game-tracking page on FOXSports.com and kept refreshing. And I was torn.
See, the Rangers led the game 1-0 most of the way. So on the one hand, I’m rooting for the Sabres to come back and tie it. But on the other hand, I know that if this game goes to overtime, my friend is unlikely to be able to make the movie. Thus I was rooting strongly for the Sabres to put two quick goals on the board, take the game in regulation, and then everybody goes on. Except that didn’t happen, and with 8 seconds to go, the Rangers still had their 1-0 lead. So I was resigned to the Sabres losing, but my friend making the movie.
Which is why I both cheered and became dismayed when Sabre Chris Drury put in a shot with 7.7 seconds to go to tie the game. Into overtime it went. Now the start time of the movie was less than 45 minutes away, and I knew that getting out of a sell-out arena and getting to the movie theater (about ten miles away, maybe) in that time was unlikely. My friend called me at home from the arena (I could barely hear him over the crowd noise in there) to tell me that if the game ended quickly, they’d still try. I told him I’d wait outside until the last possible minute.
Overtime didn’t go on too long, but long enough to make me think that there was no way he was getting there on time. The Sabres won the game, though, and the nature of that win — snatching victory away in the face of certain defeat that would have had them trailing in the series had they lost — only fueled the Sabre-fever that was sweeping over the town. I saw online that the Sabres had won, and then I left for Regal Cinemas to hopefully await my friend.
Who got there ten minutes after I did. Before the movie started.
He was actually riding with another friend of his; how that guy got his car out of parking near the arena, out of postgame traffic, and onto the highway south out of Buffalo in that little time, I consider among the things I’m probably better off not knowing. But they got there. I’d already bought tickets, so we went inside. The ticket-taker guy saw that my friend and his friend were in Sabres gear, and said something like, “I can’t believe I had to work through that game.”
“Oh dude, it was awesome,” my friend said. “I was there.”
“You were there?” the ticket-taker said. “Didn’t it end, like, fifteen minutes ago?”
“Yeah. I’m still tingling.”
And away we went into the theater, with the ticket-taker guy probably wondering if they’d driven from the arena to the theater in the Batmobile. (Which would have been ironic, as we were seeing Spiderman 3. You know, using a car from DC comics to see a Marvel movie.)
Funny thing was, the movie didn’t start on time. They never do, and there was the fifteen minutes or so of trailers, Coca-cola commercials, and all the rest of it. The auditorium was pretty full, and as it filled up, there was one final great thing about that game that happened: every single time someone else came into the auditorium who was wearing a Sabres shirt or jacket, everyone in there would cheer. One guy came in wearing a Chris Drury jersey, and he almost got a standing ovation. Everybody was a fan. Everybody was talking about that game. That game wasn’t a Cup-winning game; it wasn’t even a Conference Finals-winning game. It wasn’t even a series winning game: the Sabres only had a 3-2 edge in the series after that one, and ended up dispatching the Rangers from the playoffs two days later in Game Six. At that point, no one thought for a second that the Sabres were doing anything other than winning the Cup, and that that game would give them the unstoppable momentum that would carry them to winning it all.
It didn’t work out that way, unfortunately; in the next series, the Eastern Conference Finals, the Ottawa Senators would leap out to a 3-0 series lead and then eliminate the Sabres in five games. And during the ensuing offseason, a bunch of miscalculations and errors by the Sabres management led to the team’s best players, including Chris Drury, leaving for other teams. But on that night, that was it. The Sabres were on the way. Before the movie started, I said to my friend, “Do you realize that you were present for what may end up being one of the very greatest moments in Buffalo sports history?” And even though that win didn’t lead to ultimately winning the Cup, it was still one the greatest moments in Buffalo sports history.
And that’s my greatest Sabres playoff moment. From a game I didn’t see.
Go Sabres!
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Saturday Centus
This week’s prompt is one of those that seems prosaic at first, but it really isn’t, because it’s the prosaic ones that really make one dig a bit deeper to come up with an idea. Anyway, here’s mine. I went in a much sillier direction than usual….
(From a teenage notebook of one Bill Shakspur, Stratford-on-Avon, 1578.)
Florolominio: Sweet, sweet Rosalinimundia! Hath I come to you but too late to enter your embrace that outshine’d the very Sun?
Rosalinimundia: Verily, knave, too late thou art. Another doth carry my troth now. Stew, then, in the vile pot of your own dalliance! Stew, I say!
Florolominio: ‘Til the Moon shines not, shall I stew! But ere I depart, dear heart, know this: April showers bring May flowers to sweet maidens in their bowers. Ne’er hath your bower seen such throbbing as I would bring!
Rosalinimundia: Kiss me, you big–
(Here the excerpt ends.)