The other day, as I wended my way across the Nike campus on an errand, I saw a remarkably large squirrel leap from a tree to the side of my building. He landed adroitly, clinging to the stone face, and I paused to watch.

He was a most curious beasty, for his head seemed a bit overlarge, and as smoothly, bushily furry as his tail; no ear, no eye, no bulging cheek could be seen, simply a mass of fur. For a moment I considered the possibility that this was in fact a tail and I had caught two squirrels in a particularly twisted and acrobatic flagrante delecto. However, it was clear as this rodent (of unusual size, even) made his way up the stonework towards the windows that he was alone, and whatever oddities he possessed were in his person, not in his procreative proclivities. As he disappeared around the corner of the bulwark, I thought I saw that the smooth surface was in fact an oversized ear, covering some of his face.

A mutant squirrel! I had not seen such a thing since college, where dire rumors spread of the capabilities and arcane origins of the campus squirrels. Why would one appear here, far from Cleveland effluvium and Case science laboratories? Perhaps my eyes had deceived me. Or perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn’t a squirrel at all. Perhaps it was a spy-robot sent by Adidas to peer in Nike’s windows! Its swollen cranium conceals a camera! Its flapping ears rise to expose the lens! I amused myself with this fancy as I walked on my way, until I finally realized why such a thing could be no more than a fancy, a speculative piece of nonsense, a moment’s pleasant imagining… the only design department on that side of the building is Sunglasses.

Obviously it was a mutant squirrel spy-bot from Oakley.

This annoyance is not brought to you from the web, but rather from the Wide World of Business. At my first permanent job, I thought this error was simply a strange mistake of a co-worker’s; now that I have entered said w.w. of b., I seem to see it everywhere.

upcoming: Occurring soon; forthcoming.

up and coming: Showing signs of advancement and ambitious development (often, something which has achieved some measure of success — ‘up’ — and is on its way to more.)

This really, truly, does not seem so difficult to me. And yet it seems that every single bleedin’ thing that will happen soon is ‘up & coming’. Well, world, let me inform you (by posting it on the internet where you won’t see it) this week’s lunch specials are NOT marked by signs of ambitious development! Neither is a meeting of store managers on its way to greatness merely because it will transpire this month! Promising band? Up and coming. Bad movie release? Upcoming. Christopher Nolan? Up and coming. Trip to the grocery store? Upcoming. I know you can do it, world!

In L.M. Montgomery’s [Best part of my workday yesterday was a college friend spontaneously comparing me to Anne of Green Gables. EB, you rock.|text|Anne of Green Gables] books, a Jonah day is one where everything in the world conspires maliciously against you to thwart, enrage and hinder. I thought that was a bit too extreme for my day yesterday, wherein everything in the world conspired to laugh at my expense, so I dubbed it a ‘Dromio day’. I certainly felt I was in a comedy of errors, and kept looking around for the audience I felt certain was laughing heartily at my every mischance. By the end of the day I was monologuing and cursing inanimate objects in a lively Syracusan fashion.

The day began uneventfully. Whilst I had had fleeting dreams of getting in early to begin my task of making namebadges, seating cheatsheets, place-cards, table-cards, and icebreaker clue-cards for 74 people ere anyone else would be at work to distract me, I knew there was no real need, so I trickled in on time. I sat down to my desk, and found half an hour’s worth of urgent registration changes. I did that, and found I needed to pack and send a lot of supplies immediately. I did that, and found more urgent registration changes had arrived. I dealt with those, and found there were calendar changes. I changed the calendar and printed it off, and sat down to begin work on the namebadges.

Just then, El Jefe walked by and said, “Ooh, new calendars! Can I have one?” No big deal, just a few clicks…so I clicked away, dashed to the copy room, and found the monstrous beast of a color copier urgently calling for black toner. So I did the arcane rituals (hitherto unknown) that refill the bowels of the polychromatic machine with a substance neither liquid nor solid. Finally I wrenched the calendar from its grasp, left it for El Jefe, and sat down to work on the nametags.

An e-mail waited, asking me if I could pick something up at reception at the Pete Sampras building. Now, while at this point I really didn’t want to agree to anything, Pete Sampras is the NEXT building over and the person doing the asking was off-campus today; I felt I couldn’t refuse. I started my ACTUAL work at last, and was fairly far into my mail merging and data massaging when I got the call from reception telling me to pick up an envelope…a call from the Mike Schmidt building receptionist. I made some calls. “I don’t know why she said Pete Sampras,” the originator of the documents I was to transport said. “I used to be in John McEnroe, so some people still think I’m there.” Well…John McEnroe is a male tennis player…and ‘Schmidt’ starts with S…I guess…somehow… There was nothing for it, I had said I’d do it and there was no other reliable way of getting the stuff on time. I scurried past about five or seven buildings, down some stairs, by a field and a pool, over a bridge, through a Japanese Garden, past a water feature, under a covered walkway, all the way across campus, to Mike Schmidt. All the way I muttered about being sent to the Porpentine and other errands Antipholus saw fit to send me upon.

Slightly winded, neck sore from craning to find the mocking audience, I arrived back at my building, slung the fruits of my errands into the proper office, pulled off my sweatshirt, and flopped into my chair. I jabbed Ctrl-Alt-Del to log into my locked desktop and summon the many documents I was working on, and the monitor flickered into life. Blue life. Page fault. It’s a good thing the lady in the next cubicle was offsite, and not just because she’d want to know how her namebadges were coming. I wouldn’t want to have to tell her whether I was laughing or crying, because frankly, I wasn’t sure myself.

It has recently come to my attention that we are swimming in the middle of National Poetry Month. Who decides these things? Who thought it would be cute to have National Poetry Month and National Physics Day, or Week, or Month, or whatever, overlap? I don’t know.

At first, I had a mad urge to post my own work. But I think you’ve probably had about enough of that. So instead, I will post a poem by my favorite poet, and I hope others will do the same (or contribute their own work) (or do both at once and bear the name of egotist).

A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London
Dylan Thomas

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

Most recent Copyright 1967 the Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas, used without permission don’t hurt me please I don’t have any money.

I think that poem was one of the first ones I ever analyzed, in 8th grade. It gave me a strange feeling, like I was wading out of water, each movement made stately by the weight of water in my clothes and hair; like I had been crying and had found the calm at the bottom of all my tears.

It was the poem I used in Beginning Poetry in college for the Oulipo (the literary equivalent of Dadaist) exercise ‘N-7’...you replace each noun with one seven nouns down in the dictionary. My professor had us read out the results, and say whether we thought it was still poetry. It definitely was.

It occured to me the other day that I am far more likely to post a review of something when I adore it utterly than I am to post a review if I had mixed feelings, or merely enjoyed something, or loathed it. Therefore, so as not to make my reviews section a happy daisy field of unmixed approbation (and to provide background for a happy daisy I plan to plant there in the near future), I am reviewing a movie I saw some months hence; namely, Bullitt.

Like many people, I first heard of Bullitt because of its car chase, which my Dad said, along with a great chorus of other pundits, was the best car chase EVAR. (Okay, so my dad doesn’t say ‘evar’.) My dad had, in fact, called me in to watch said car chase several years ago. I thought it was good, but I kind of wondered who precisely Steve McQueen was chasing, et cetera. So, always eager to watch a good car chase, wonko and I Netflixed the thing.

The single most important fact to understand about Bullitt is that it was made by a director in an experimental school; mainly, a school that experimented with Extreeeeme Realism. If you think this is Extreeeemely cool, may I suggest you stop reading my review before you become Extreeeemely offended, because, based on Bullitt, I value this school approximately as much as I value the late 19th century American Literature school that espoused No Plot.

Bullitt follows stoic San Francisco cop Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen, natch) as he is assigned to organize protection for a mob informant, which protection proves ineffectual. Bullitt then goes about unravelling the truth behind the man’s death so he can feel better about his failure. So far, so average. However, because of Extreme Realism, we get to thrill to…Frank Bullitt making coffee stoically. Frank Bullitt going to a groovy nightclub with his girl and…sitting around in groovy fuzzy focus listening to groovy tunes. Frank Bullitt comforting his girlfriend (in the other of her approximately two scenes) after she accidentally gets a look at the gory side of police work. Frank Bullitt doing paperwork (a cop in a movie doing paperwork? THAT’S UNAMERICAN!) and my PERSONAL FAVORITE, two minutes of Frank Bullitt and his colleagues waiting for a primitive fax machine to print information. May I reiterate and clarify…waiting for the fax machine. Not talking, not discussing the case, not fighting over procedure or discussing the weather…watching the fax machine. I think this was supposed to add to the tension. Instead, it added to my growing feeling that I was watching Frank Bullitt’s girlfriend’s home movies.

Don’t get me wrong…the movie had some good points. The car chase, and another, earlier car chase, were fine muscle-car action. San Francisco is a jolly place for a car chase, and these old Chargers and so forth make for exciting screeches and fishtails. However, those good points totalled approximately 13 minutes of a 113 minute movie that felt more like 213. Not to mention the fact that the car chase didn’t end up being terribly decisive, or even providing a key clue that unravelled the case, so there was a bit of a let-down when it concluded. (Also, sorry, Dad, but I can think of at least 2 car chases I’ve admired more, one of them from the same general period.)

Steve McQueen may have been a very good actor…I’ve never seen him in anything that really tested it. But the role of Bullitt called for action, a little brooding, and a lot of standing around looking blank and stony. The other actors were also competent, but did nothing so extraordinary as to redeem the film. In short, if you feel you must watch Bullitt to be able to talk about the history of car chases in cinema…just watch the car chase. It’s the only thing anyone ever really talks about anyway—and now I know why.

Bottom line: 4.5 out of 10. The car chases are worth maybe 3 points, and the decent production values and Lalo Schifrin score (sadly underused, I thought, however) give it another 1.5. Draggy, pretentious, full of ‘realistic’ scenes that did nothing but distract from the plot…perhaps with a good, ruthless editor it might have been saved. Watch the car chase, skip the movie.

I shudder to think what new search phrases I may find on my stats page as a result of this title, but I can’t live in fear of perverted Googlers.

So the other day I saw Seven Samurai for the first time. It was, as promised, quite good. It was an entertaining three and a half hours, contained the only katana-fighting I’ve ever seen in a movie that seemed realistic, and was exceedingly pretty (except for the girl. Really, they should have cast the girl dressed as a boy (Shino) as the young samurai with the flowers on his clothes (Katsushiro), and vice versa, because Katsushiro was so pretty the soundtrack got all twittery when he was near; of course, maybe only a Japanese woman can make the horrible whine-shriek-sob ululation that Japanese women make in movies and anime when they get upset.).

However, partway through, as Kakuchiyo (the crazy guy) was bounding through the forest bandit-hunting, the bandit captain and some of his men stood on a low rise. As they turned to go, I snorted. That’s right, I’m admitting I make unladylike sounds. For lo, one of the bandit lieutenants was wearing a a helmet, a breastplate…and nothing else. Okay, a man-thong, but that barely counts. “Good thing they brought along Bondage Bandit!” quoth I.

“Er, that’s normal in Japan, honey,” replied wonko.

“Bondage bandits are normal? And yet the panty machines are what gets the press over here?”

He gave me a look, and explained that in Japan, nudity and partial nudity aren’t such a big deal. “It’s not like there were people running around naked all the time when I was there, but if a person forgot his pants, it wasn’t a big deal.” (Funny, I always thought if you forgot your pants you didn’t notice until you got to class. But then, perhaps my dreams have been ineffective at training me for real life.) This inspires me to ask the wonkofam whether it was during or after their sojourn in Japan that etmorpi inexplicably ran about pantsless in the Colonel’s back yard. Maybe the hidden motive was multiculturalism!

At any rate, Ryan’s point was carried, for no sooner had he explained why no one seemed to be pointing and laughing at this bandit for running around pantsless in a temperate forest with pointy things than our hero slayed the Bondage Bandit and took his armor…pantlessness included. Kakuchiyo spent the rest of the movie runnin’ about two cheeks to the wind. “Ack!” said I.

“I totally based Hiro on him,” said wonko. (Hiro is his character in Buffy the Vampire Slayer: the Role-Playing Game. Hear that, Internet? Ryan’s a big geek!) Off my look, he hedged, “Just the running around high school naked with a sword…”

While Kakuchiyo’s bare-bummed exploits do explain a lot about Ryan’s character – since they are both volatile, immature and inexplicable samurai-posers, I hardly credit his assertion that the similarity is only skin-deep – I still am utterly confused by them in general. How can you go into battle with only a piece of twisted cotton between your bottom birthday-suit and the spears, swords and arrows of the ravening horde? Don’t you get COLD?

The only thing I can conclude is that it adds to the warrior’s bragging rights — after all, you must be pretty brave to take on forty bandits in your underwear, especially if it’s a man-thong. I envision aging samurai swapping stories over cups of sake. “That Katsushiro…what a fighter! He took out five ninja sent to assassinate his lord…with a bamboo spatula!” “I heard he did it wearing nothing but a man-thong,” another grizzled warrior adds, and they all nod in respectful awe. Of course, it’s Katsushiro, so a one-eyed samurai marked with many scars adds, “I hear there were flowers on the thong.”

I was just pondering the fine sibilant shape of

Now, this word is less obscure than my usual fare; but it has fine qualities to recommend it. Chief among them is its sound and cadence, the way, after the secure ledge of the ‘pre-’ you are suddenly tumbling down the slope of ‘cipitous’, which you can hardly help but say very quickly, slipping and sliding from sound to sound until you skid to a stop with the ’s’. Or I could be crazy. Or both.

I also like the interplay of its practical, concrete meaning and roots with its more abstract application; a lot of the lovely words we get from Latin are like that.

If a midshipman don’t check his impetus, he’ll descend in a manner precipitous!

Ev’ry day, I do declare,
When ‘pon the Intarweb I’d creep,
I’d find a friendly marmot there —
Or later, ‘ere I went to sleep.

But woe, of late I find no more
The bubbly sciurid’s ranting,

And thus, because I’m really bored,
I summon her with chanting;

O Marmot fair, O blogger bright,
Return to lonesome fans forlorn!
Don’t let duty’s irksome blight
Keep thee from blogging every morn!

And thus my plea, and thus my cry,
So pitifully doth terminate;
And whilst I wait its muse t’espy,
Some meeting notes I’ll tabulate.

I still have not exhausted my hiatus-born glut of comic books. I’ve found I’ve slowed in general…I’m more prone at present to organizing piles than to sitting down and enjoying piles that I might organize them only partially (most of my comic book boxes are in storage, still). And this morning, as I pondered the preponderance of printed pictorials piled around my place, I sighed, and for a moment, didn’t wish to read them.

Madness! Perhaps it is the death of Spoiler that has me down, or even the death of Tim’s dad, which I still haven’t found in all my back-issues, even as it reverberates forwards through those I’ve read. It bothers me; Tim’s my favorite character, give or take, and they kill his girlfriend and his father at a stroke? How much of this is the eternal pressure to change and disturb the inevitable status quo? How much is lazy story-telling, coping with Tim’s promise to his dad not to be Robin again by eliminating the present Robin (Tim’s girlfriend) and offing the disappointed dad, giving Tim an angsty impetus to keep going as Robin in the bargain? Is keeping up with comic books, in the long run, like keeping up with soap operas? An exercise in frustration, for those things which could fruitfully change are too dangerous to mess with, and those small things which provide comfort and pleasure are fair game?

And then you get to the second issue: piles. By the White Wolf, I’m trying to organize and minimize in my life, and here are these piles of sliding, slippery comic books tromping into my apartment every week, needing to be bagged and boarded, alphabetized in boxes…then the boxes need to be stored, and shifted from time to time as DC Comics: Bat through Teen becomes too much for one box to hold. Do I really want to commit to having two allosaur-lengths of comic books in my closet forever? Not to mention the compsognathus-length of yearly growth!

The answer is, no, I don’t want that. I don’t want to be carting this tonnage of story with me through life. But I still want to read my comics, and I’m not ready to give up on them, yet. They’re expensive, sometimes frustrating, and a major mess, but I still love them, the sweep, the majesty, the fiddling little relationships and intertwined histories. I love the myths.

Anyone know if DC comics will let me subscribe to a digital version yet? sigh

I have to admit, shaming as it is to me as a [Comic Book Geek|text|CBG], I haven’t read Sin City. I’ve seen a few pages, enough to recognize the style if I bump into it in an alley, but that’s all; so this review comes from a place of even greater ignorance than most of my comic book rants. My only bits of Frank Miller knowledge are Dark Knight Returns and the many-splendored Batman: Year One. (I skipped Dark Knight Two. Call me crazy, but if I want to see Superman and Wonder Woman having rough sex for two issues…oh wait, I never want to see that!)

From the little I’ve seen, Frank Miller is in love with noir, and Sin City seems to be his most masterful sonnet. It explores not only the tropes and trappings, but the ambiguous heart of the genre. What’s the difference between a hero and a villain? That we’re rooting for one and not the other? That the reason he does the same horrible things is a ‘better’, nobler one?

The movie Sin City is built from three stories, with an interlocking supporting cast and three her—er, protagonists. Each story explores the same theme; how men try to protect women; how they can, how they can’t, and how they shouldn’t. Based on my first sensing of this theme, and the general time period, the genre, and, frankly, my limited exposure to Frank Miller, I was expecting to have to dial my ‘Feminist Sensitivity’ control down a great deal. However, the female characters were varied not only in personality but in ability, and I wasn’t left with a sour taste in my mouth. There’s a great deal of cheesecake, but if I hadn’t learned to cope with that, I would have dropped comic books long ago.

The movie is engaging and very fast-paced; you’re swept along by the emotional drives and urgency of the characters. It is, as you will likely hear, bloody. But it isn’t the fetishized violence of Kill Bill or even Once Upon a Time in Mexico; as an NPR critic noted, the blood is rarely red; it’s usually white or black…it isn’t a splash of visceral revulsion, it’s a part of the story, a paint in the palette. The violence is a second soundtrack, pulsing and present, moving you along. You aren’t encouraged to either judge or agree with the horrible things some of the protagonists are doing, merely to recognize them and, perhaps, their inevitability.

The acting was excellent; almost stylized - voices roughened, delivery taken just to the edge of ‘too much’ but not beyond. It’s hard to talk about specifics like acting or shots, because everything in the movie was so interwoven. The acting, the makeup, the lighting, the sets - they bleed into each other. Seldom, perhaps never, have I seen a movie that seemed so seamless, as if every aspect of it were an expression of the same mind and intent. Maybe that’s what you get when you let a writer/artist co-direct a movie of his own work.

Oh, and when we walked out of the movie, wonko (who chronicles his revulsion from his fellow man and his adoration of this movie here) said, “Hard to believe most of that was shot on green screen, isn’t it?” Well, ladies and gents, I couldn’t tell. Maybe my disbelief is a particularly advanced suspension bridge, but it never crossed my mind to question the reality placed in front of me for a moment. Beautiful.

Bottom Line: 10 out of 10. A gorgeous, engrossing movie with all the trimmings, from titles to soundtrack, perfect. If you can’t hack violence or blood, or require your heroes to be squeaky clean, you might want to avoid it. Otherwise, it’s a fabulous movie, and you have no excuse not to see it.