They're so cute. Seems they had an election where the old-guard, conservative candidate more friendly to the Russians won under highly suspect circumstances (a number of other countries, the US included, have questioned the election's legitimacy), and the people in the cities aren't having any of it. They've basically shut down Kiev. The supporters of the "elected" candidate, for their part, have threatened to secede if his election is overturned. It's chaos!
They need to look to the birthplace of Democracy for guidance. If you have an election that appears to have been rigged, you don't protest! You don't shut down a major city or disrupt commerce. What you do is, you sit back and wait four years and cross your fingers and hope that next time it won't be rigged. Or at least that it will be rigged more convincingly.
And then, in the meantime, you bitch and bitch. Rinse. Repeat.
Silly Ukrainians.
I have an hour to kill downtown between 5 and 6 PM, so I decide to go into this little coffee shop nestled into the corner of some big glass-and-steel corporate box. The cafe is doing its best to hit that right blend of homey and hip: muted earth tones, comfy chairs and funky artwork all struggling to overcome the most decidedly un-homey, un-hip surroundings. This cafe reminds me of a scrappy little scrub brush clinging to the side of an eroding shale cliff on an old stripmine. But then again I'm an Ohio boy, so lots of things remind me of stripmines.
The lighting is low enough that at first I'm not sure it's open. This cafe features an enormous and what looks to be load-bearing pillar situated right in front of the counter, and in a misguided attempt to mitigate the bad Feng Shui of this somebody has painted life-size silhouettes of people on the side of it. I think it's intended to make the place seem more social, by making it look like there are always people milling around even when the room is empty, but it always makes me jump when I realize that the people I thought I saw from outside are actually just painted on. Like I've just walked into a trap. Looking around I see one or two real, three-dimensional people sitting around sipping coffee so I decide it must still be open. I walk inside and up to the counter and look at the board to figure out what is the cheapest rent I can pay on a seat by the window. I know I shouldn't have coffee because I've already had plenty of that today and eventually, given enough, I will start to oscillate. I look over at the glass case of muffins and cookies and the like but nowhere do I see any prices. I guess if you have to ask you can't afford it.
I settle on a cup of herbal tea, and I ask the barista what varieties they have. He is a late-twenties, indie-rocker looking dude, with sort of mod hipster bangs and a cardigan. In response to my question he gives a barely audible whispered reply, something like "mint or chamomile" as best as I can make out. My immediate reaction is to lean forward slightly to hear him better and to wonder if I'm going deaf, but when he rings me up and tells me the price I notice that even at close range he is barely making any sound. I wonder if he is going for a Clint Eastwood effect or if he just can't muster the energy to talk at a normal conversational level. Maybe he has a cold?
I sit down and start writing in my little book when I notice sounds of motion as he begins doing sidework to prepare to close the joint, and I realize now that this is the end of his day, the hour when he can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I am that one last customer who comes in, orders something cheap, and intends to hang out. Suddenly loud, angsty rock breaks the near-silence of the room, pealing guitars and high, wailing male vocals blaring forth, and I conclude this music serves the dual purpose of getting him pumped up to bust out that last hour of work and get the hell out of here, as well as sending the message to the lingering customers that they are on his time now. No more Mr. Nice Guy! In sharp contrast to his downcast eyes and whispered delivery of a few minutes ago, this music is loud and angry and doesn't take any shit from anybody, and I can hear him singing along from back behind the counter as he hurriedly cleans and races around putting things away.
"Well," I ask myself. "Who knew he was such a tiger deep down inside?"
I am smirking away at this classic display of passive-aggressive behavior: the people who speak in whispers and can't seem to muster up the courage to make eye contact but who are plainly seething just beneath the surface with unspoken hostility, all the more intense for never finding its proper expression. I am also brought back to my own experiences working in restaurants and memories of the music we would use to give customers the hint that it might be time to think about leaving. I conclude that service positions seem to demand a certain amount of passive aggression.
As I'm sitting here scribbling my own passively aggressive mockery of this fellow in my little book, fully ripping into him for being such a sullen, pretentious embodiment of a Seattle stereotype, he comes out from behind the counter and approaches me. He has removed the cardigan and is now wearing a plain blue t-shirt and jeans and I realize he is dressed almost exactly like me, except that he's wearing a cooler belt. He is carrying a tray full of the muffins and cookies. He asks me if I want one. Yes, for free.
This small act of kindness completely short-circuits my previous scorn. I realize that it's the end of the day and he's going to throw these baked goods out anyway. It's not like he's giving me something precious and valuable to him; But the fact is he didn't have to offer and he didn't have to approach the strange old lady in the corner who is talking to herself and offer her a cookie either. Here I was all set to hate the guy and now I don't know what to think. Maybe his haircut doesn't look so silly after all. It kind of works for his face. And you know, not many people can pull off the cardigan look, but he's really running with it and that's admirable. This music isn't so bad. At least the guitars are crunchy.
So now you know the way to my heart, in case you were wondering. And, apparently, it's a day-old blueberry muffin wrapped in Saran Wrap.
"What's this I hear about Bush and Cheney going on a Man Date?"
(thanks to Ms. H.)
So the latest Netflix selections just arrived. They are:
1. Alex and Emma. Apparently a romantic comedy starring Luke Wilson and Kate Hudson.
2. Pootie Tang.
And...
3. Daredevil. Again. Presumably because our disc was damaged last time around.
You are all my witnesses. He's trying to drive me insane. Like in that movie Gaslight.
On the plus side, last night J brought over Bad Santa (actually Badder Santa, which featured an extra sequence that wasn't in the theatrical release,) and Fahrenheit 451 (the Truffaut adaptation of the Ray Bradbury story.) I'm pleased to say that Bad Santa holds up on second viewing as being quite possibly the best Christmas movie ever. And that I managed to stay awake through all of Fahrenheit 451, though not without effort.
Neither movie featured Ben Affleck.
So, our household decided maybe six months ago to go in on a Netflix subscription, with the account in Mr. Galt's name, and ordering of movies done by him ostensibly taking into consideration all of our suggestions. This process has broken down somewhat, resulting in Mr. Galt being the only person who regularly places orders for movies. Apparently the criteria he has currently adopted is "only rent movies that could be found in the VHS rentals section of any locally-owned convenience store."
You know what I'm talking about. Those corner stores that sell beer, cigarettes and lotto tickets? How they have a video rentals section right across from the magazine rack that's always stocked with a completely incongruous collection of movies you've either never heard of or forgotten ever existed? Like Highlander 2 or Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead? Yeah, well apparently Mr. Galt has decided that the transfer to DVD has brought new quality to those kinds of movies, because he's really been hitting the action-adventure shelf pretty hard lately.
With somewhat mixed results. While the option of hearing a commentary track done by a professional wrestler does sometimes add a dimension of entertainment value to a movie (I think this feature could benefit some movies that don't even have one in the cast, but that's just one man's opinion,) the most remarkable thing so far has been the stunning regularity with which these movies meet my low expectations. There have been exceptions where the movies were actually worse than I imagined; The most prominent of these being Governor Schwarzenegger's 1985 release Commando (Tagline: "Somewhere... somehow... someone's going to pay! ") which actually broke through the bad barrier into the rarefied air of the so-bad-it's-good zone.
I've always been skeptical of the claim about a room full of chimps on typewriters eventually generating Shakespeare's works, but I will allow that, working from the "action/adventure" templates of Final Draft Pro, they could turn out a script like Commando's in an afternoon and still have time for naps and feces-flinging sessions. I was in such awe of Commando's by-the-numbers ticking down the list of necessary genre tropes that I actually had to go back and skim through it again to marvel at its efficiency. Yup, there's the petting-the-dog scene (in this case a petting-the-deer scene) to establish the character's likability and devotion to his daughter. This movie knows that the audience is in a hurry to get to the shootin' so the petting-the-deer scene takes place under the credits. The motive-for-revenge-and-merciless-bloodletting scene is already taken care of ten minutes into the movie, and the unrelenting carnage of Herr Governor's one-man army pretty much proceeds from there, complete with clever quips, uttered in a thick Austrian accent, to punctuate the messy deaths of his foes.
Unfortunately, not all of Mr. Galt's selections have been as entertaining as Commando. Here is a brief summary of some of the recent highlights:
the Day After Tomorrow: Brought to you by the team that brought you Independence Day, and continuing that movie's fine tradition of showing alarming shots of recognizable, iconic buildings being blown to smithereens, Day After Tomorrow replaces the menacing,evil aliens of Independence Day with the menacing, evil troposphere. In an attempt to make global warming scary enough for jaded moviegoers, the creators of this film decided to put it on fast-forward, so the ice age comes on in, like, a day. None of those slow, creeping glaciers for this movie. These are glaciers on steroids! The evil troposphere just flash-freezes the entire northern hemisphere. This creates a perfect environment for the deadly, marauding packs of CGI wolves! Grrr!
To be honest, I fast-forwarded through most of the standard disaster-film character development and family drama, only pausing for one subplot about a ten-year-old blind cancer patient boy and the doctor who refuses to leave him behind because Mr. K and I both thought this subplot was hysterically funny. I learned the fast-forwarding trick from my other roommate, Jakk, and it's now my preferred method for watching movies like this one. I mean, come on, it's obvious where the filmmakers spent all the money. I could see all this crappy melodrama on any movie of the week; Take me to the CGI tidal waves and tornadoes! If you're gonna make a movie just so you can have five minutes of cool shots to put in the trailer, that's the way I'm going to watch it. I'm a busy man.
Daredevil: All I'll say about this movie is that our copy of it was badly damaged, rendering entire scenes of it unwatchable, including the motive-for-revenge scene and the climactic battle scene, and still I couldn't bring myself to get upset. Even without seeing these key scenes, I felt like I got the idea.
Tonight's selection: Walking Tall. The remake. Starring the Rock. I'll let you know.
You know how when people are talking about something they'd like to do but can't afford, they sometimes say "Maybe when I win the lottery, I'll (fill in the blank?)"
And how some people, to express the same sentiment, say "Maybe when I rob a bank, I'll..."?
Are the "bank-robbing" people, as a rule, more proactive?
Just wondering.
Seriously. Don't even bother with them skinny ones.