Double Trouble

I’ve got a few films stacked up on me, so I’m pulling out the Drive-In classic double feature . . . and as far as double features go, this one’s a doosey. Both have stanch rebels against authority, wily women, shifting alliances and onerous villains. And now on to our feature presentation: Casablanca, followed by Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest!

Casablanca was everything I thought it might be, plus some unexpected bonuses. I suppose this betrays a bit more of me than I’d like, but I’m always pleasantly surprised when I find old movies are crisp and poignant. Set in 1940’s Morocco, Casablanca follows suave cantina owner Rick as he attempts to make an honest living in a crooked world. Confronted with ghosts of his past and specters of the present, the film lets is characters struggle, showing their humanity and their desperate attempts not to loose it in what is ultimately constituted as a rich tapestry of history and character. Featuring lines like ‘Here’s lookin’ at you, kid’ ‘Play it again, Sam’ and ‘Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship’ which have become strayed towards cliché in American cinema, Casablanca is much more than a collection of classic movie quotes. If you like movies at all, give Casablanca 102 minutes of your life and enjoy a film made when Hollywood still wore the glow of youth.

Grade: A

Pirates of the Caribbean was everything you hope a sequel won’t be. Sequels are notoriously difficult to do well, with successful ones comprising a short list: The Empire Strikes Back, Temple of Doom, Weekend at Bernie’s 2. Maybe a few others. Presenting new material, continuing to grow characters and referencing the previous film tastefully are all very difficult tasks, and Pirates II seems to have had moderate to severe trouble with them all. The film have the flavour of a shameless remora, banking on the success of its predecessor and hoping to just enjoy the ride while doing as little work as possible, a poorly conceived follow up to a tight and witty first installment. Jokes were recycled ad nauseam, characters stagnated and plot lines were pressed thinner than Kiera Knightly’s waifish form. What could have been an interesting film with plot devices like confronting the immortal Davy Jones and reconciling Will to his father Bill, the film bogged down for me in some places and flew by at others, leaving me feeling confused and generally uninterested in the plot or characters. The special effects were impressive at times, and new characters such as Jones and the Fortune Teller showed glimpses of original thought and shine which garnered the first film its accolades, but as a whole it is a disappointing installment to an enjoyable franchise. I was left wishing the whole affair had ended with the first film in 2003.

Grade: C

Sound Stage

Ok, so I love sound. Yes, I’m glad that I can physically hear and cognitively decode the mechanical waves into chemical signals my brain then interprets, and I’m fairly confident that if you can hear whether you’ve thought about it or not you’re thankful for the ability. That’s not what I’m talking about, though. What I’m talking about is some subjective, intimately subtle and barely noticeable quality of certain sounds.

Leprechauns that only make themselves known on blue moons when Democrats are in office, the sounds I love require just the right conditions to be detected, and may likely never be detected again. They aren’t everyday honks or bangs or screeches but minute vibrations of atmosphere which are to be captured and relished in memory, not in the prostitution of recording. They are the naked sound of cigarette paper and tobacco crackling as the smoker inhales. The unsullied sound of a knife being whet, grinding viscously and then emitting a slight ephemeral ring as stone releases steel. The felt more than heard sound of a bat’s super-sonic squeal just behind my ears at 3:47 am above Little Yosemite. These are the sounds that I love and with them I am never alone, and rarely bored.

My favourite sound, however, is found in College Station, TX. Rudder Auditorium still sports a very fashionable décor from 1972, and as such is usually as silent as a tomb. While outside the darkened neo-Stalinistic glass walls the free speech area throngs and sizzles with fish and fools, inside you can feel 68^o F silence as you move through the cool stillness like a gauze curtain you can’t quite make out. There is one exception, however. The air conditioning ducts lightly ping, a hollow resonance which somehow only enhanced the quiet. Rudder Auditorium is the best place in the entire world to take a nap. I used to walk through Rudder for a distance of perhaps 87 yards between classes, cherishing every step and trying my best to muffle every thunderous footfall, stifle every hurricane gale breath, shoe-lace ends intermittently providing staccato artillery blasts to my heresy. The sound of Rudder’s silence still takes my breath away.

Sing a Song of . . .

A visited a friend’s church last Sunday night; it was a very different and very enjoyable experience. The people who gathered to worship in this church’s basement in a small rural California town sang with passion and reckless abandon, shared their lives openly and intimately with everyone there, and took the immanent stirring of God in their lives very seriously. While their service was full of joy and thankfulness, an outpouring of many of the Body’s experience with God throughout the week, I couldn’t help but think of the Biblical witness to the lives of people who are called to follow Christ. Starvation, explusion, inverted crucifixion. I couldn’t keep the words of the Psalmists out of my head, cursing their enemies. Expressing confusion. Crying out in pain and abandonment. Then I tried to think of songs the Body sings to express these emotions, and the list was very short. This, however, is my favourite. The expression of hopefull injury is something that I think could benefit many if sang from the loft and preached from the pulpit a good deal more than it is.

Come let us return
He has torn us into pieces
He has injured us
Come let us return to the Lord
He will heal us
He will bandage our wounds
In just a short time He'll restore us
In just a short time He'll restore His church
So we might live
We might live in His presence
In His presence

Oh that we might know the Lord
Oh that we might know the Lord
Oh that we might know the Lord
Let us press on to know Him
Let us press hard into Him
Then as surely as the coming of the dawn
He will respond

- Hosea; Shane Barnard

All Too Easy

All hail the power of the information age!

'Bout That Time?

Audience participation returns to the Texafornian! Today's question: If you were a racehorse, what would your racehorse name be?

Practical Theology

"[Forgiving and forgetting or ignoring the past are] a travesty, of course, but it is something to beware of. No, we need something more positive to say about forgiveness. We need to recognize both the reality of the past and the hope of a future of forgiveness. Because real forgiveness is something that changes things and so gives hope. The occasions when we feel genuinely forgiven are the moments when we feel, not that someone doesn’t care what we do, but that someone does care what we do because he or she loves us and that love is strong enough to cope with and survive the hurt we have done. Forgiveness of that sort iscreative because it reveals new dimensions to a relationship, new depths, new possibilities. We can find a love richer and more challenging than before. If someone says to me, “Yes, you have hurt me, but that doesn’t mean it’s all over. I forgive you. I still love you,” then that is a moment of enormous liberation. It recognizes that reality of that past, the irreversibility of things, the seriousness of damage done, but then it is all the more joyful and hopeful because of that. Because this kind of love doesn’t have illusions, it is also all the more mature and serious. It can look at and fully feel my weakness, and still say, “I love you.”

- Rowan Williams in Proclaiming the Scandal of the Cross

In the Beginning

Then Illúvatar spoke, and he said: 'Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Aiunr, that I am Illúvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.'

- From the Ainulindalë¹ creation narrative, Tolkien


^{1. The Ainulindalë is one of the five books contained within The Silmarillion.}

Scene It

I live for the unexpected momments in my life in which reality steps out for a quick cup o’ joe and the fantastic insuperably inserts itself in an all too infrequent cameo. This is probably why I like Scrubs. This morning, having had an appointment cancel on me, I thought I would swing by Barnes and Noble to see if they had in stock a certain book I might be interested in purchasing. As I swung my gallant Honda down the parking aisle feeding directly into the main entrance to my place of previous employment, it happened: The Momment.

“Double-non-fat-three-splenda-extra-hot-half-caf-vanilla-laté for Reality? . . .”

I became acutely aware of the radio, which had been previously blathering some rather innocuous music or another, but now was playing something very similar to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries¹. My point of view shot up 25 feet and I saw my car lurch forward, hammer both sets of front doors from their hinges and spray parchment in every direction with impunity, spin 5 brodies in the cheap carpeting and finally streak off down Blackstone leaving a wake of dangling modifiers and mangled diphthongs.

I didn’t much care for the time I spent employed by Barnes and Noble, nor did they have the book I was hoping for.

^{1. Scroll down to track 6 for a sample if you're unfamiliar . . .}

Diggin' Dogtown

My Junior High really only had two factions growing up. There were some ethnic minorities along the fringes that clashed from time to time, but in my North Clovis school the battle for campus hegemony was between the Skaters and Jocks. I wasn’t really part of either camp, weighing 115lbs soaking wet, sporting glasses, and yet not owning a single pair of Vans or cords. As chance would have it, however, I became friends with one of the Skater Barons, Anthony, and we remained friends throughout high school. There was a brief halcyon period between the two factions in the spring of ‘97 when a political marriage was hammered out between Skater Queen Amanda and Ronnie the Jock, but peace was brittle and the tenuous truce followed the unfortunate fate of its initiating liaison. The jocks were just too mainstream. Too clean-cut, too button-down to mix with the skaters. Both smoked pot, drank heavily, drove recklessly and despised authority but found themselves in the ironic position of the Nazis and Communists during the 1940’s; the two ideologically opposed factions found themselves pursuing similar goals through similar means with differing aesthetics and despised each other for it.

Dogtown and Z-Boys was my Silmarillion of skating culture. Providing a richly textured examination of skate boarding’s nativity from the economically depressed 1970’s Venice surf scene into a fully developed and independent sport as well as character sketching skate legends Tony Alva and Jay Adams, all the drama I saw unfold in my adolescent years suddenly made so much more sense when informed by this film. Set to a mishmash of 70’s rock, raw footage of long-haired bedraggled street hooligans bumming around on homemade decks and contemporary contemplations on the birth of the other true American art form, Dogtown and Z-Boys traces the roots of the Zephyr Skate Team from rag-tag surf rats to international icons. Exploring the urban-guerrilla mindset of pool riding, the fiercely territorial mindset of the sport’s first superstars and reckless pursuit of perfecting a craft, Stacey Petralta’s work behind camera draws the honesty and authenticity only a lifelong friend could from his subject. Whether you wore battered cut-offs cords or Tommy Hilfiger plaid button-downs in high school, Dogtown and Z-Boys is worth a watch to gain an appreciation for what has emerged to be a significant subset of youth culture today. A labour of love which easily held my attention through an enjoyable 90 min.

Grade: B+

God Bless America

If they ever digitially remaster The Goonies, they should totally put one of these things in.

Talladega Naps

Disclaimer: I don’t much care for Will Ferrell.

I didn’t have many expectations coming into Talladega Nights, mostly because of the disclaimer above. I’ve seen Anchor Man, Old School, Zoolander the BOSNL disks and found very little that wasn’t passé by 5^th grade in Ferrell’s arsenal. If this makes me sound like I have a stick up my ass and I don’t really know how to have a good time then so be it. I know a few people who thoroughly enjoy Ferrell’s antics, I even think some of them are reasonably intelligent people, I just don’t happen to be one of them. Besides a good laugh at Eleanor Roosevelt’s spurious quote to open the film and a few of the PSA’s, I had to remind myself that this was a comedy consistenty throughout the movie. The plot was as fresh as a driver’s jock after lap 700 and the vast majority of the jokes laboured harder than a wound-out big block V-8 trying to pass to the outside. Sacha Baron Cohen’s Jean Girard managed to finagle a smile from time to time solely on the tenacity of his ridiculous French accent and TR reminded me of my second cousin from Greensboro, but in general I found very little to salvage from this wreck of a movie. If you are a die-hard Ferrellite you’ll probably love the flick, but I found myself glad to start cleaning my apartment ¾ through it. The Ballad of Ricky Bobby was more a dirge for me.

Grade: C

Staind

“I ruined my witness to those guys,” divulged our Pastor one Sunday evening service as he was recounting his life as a former MTV cut-out Fratboy. I slipped on the comfortable phrase as I have countless times before, but this time I’d had my hair cut in it. It itched and itched for almost two full days until Tuesday night when I had to rip it back over my head and check out the damage.

What does ‘our witness’ mean in front of people who do not share faith in God the Father, Christ His Redeemer and the mysterious Spirit? What carries a better witness and a more authentic picture of discipleship and the Christian life: The perfection persona or being honest about the change which is taking time to be perfected in us? Should we flee our previous crowd upon conversion lest they tempt us or ‘bring us down?’ Where is the line between the two, because I don’t pretend that the answer hangs cut and dried on one side of the smoke shed or the other.

I’m still brushing the barbs out of it all, but the question is one that I’ve been wrangling with for a while in several different iterations. To what extent do we really believe that the light will shine in the darkness and that the darkness will not overcome it? Also, does that light come from us being behaviourally perfect or from letting others see the darkness fall off of us as we follow Christ?

I Flick, You Flick

I've been toying with the idea of introducing a regular feature on The Texafornian for a while now. Now I know that some of yall might be thinking, 'Shawn Simas has been at the movie reviewing game much longer than you have, Micah. Who do you think you are muscling in on his racket?!' Well, my fine fellow critics, there will undoubtedly be some overlap in our catalogue, but it is my intention to review the movies sent my way by the benevolent Netflix, so this is your chance to get reviews on films that either haven't been in the theatre for 20 years or never made it to a theatre in the area. Our first feature, however, is a recent blockbuster staring The Cowboy Christian Bale and everyone's favourite to play Smurfette should the live action Smurf movie ever get the green light, Katie Holmes. Also present: Lliam Nielson (apparently unable to turn down any cameo appearances his agent throws his way), Michael Caine (keeping the investment portfolio alive w/ bit parts) and Cillian Murphy (of zombie movie fame).

Batman Begins was actually an enjoyable movie and arguably the most well crafted of the series. It covers an incredible amount of ground, zipping through Wayne's adolescence, nascest development and on through to his institution as Gotham's cowled crime fighter all in a reasonably coherent package. The characters have just enough depth to hold the viewers interest and the plot is strung together just enough that you don't feel like you're being completely left in the belfry. This is a military jet of a movie: It moves at an incredible rate of speed, is rigidly but not superfluously bolted together and has a mission to accomplish. A thoroughly enjoyable addition to the saga. B+.

Other recent flicks:

The Producers (c. 1968): B, enjoyable and lighthearted with Gene Wilder is in his prime and Mel Brooks as a singing Hitler. What else do you want?

Thank You For Smoking: A, great movie about the art of discourse. Immaculate and savoury film.

Little Miss Sunshine: B, enjoyable movie with a few entertaining shifts. The Vow of Silence and Young Tail monologue alone pull this movie up from a likely more accurate B-.

Babel: B-, lost out on hype factor. An ok movie about global cooincidences and people's lives that go awry, but I just coudln't get myself into it. Go figure.

The Unmentionable

I've stumbled across another interesting passage in my reading and thought I would toss it up here for some public reflection. People in every emploi in the Church have debated for centuries about the issue of homosexuality and our appropriate response to it, and I think this guy has something to say worth considering. I don't by any stretch of the imagination agree with everything that he says, but this small bit struck me. This is Willard S. Krabill in Chapter 7 of a book entitled 'Sexuality: God's Gift.'

We have not broken fellowship with those whom we disagree on business practices and ethics, on the payment of war taxes, on registration for the draft, on lavish versus simple lifestyles, on the use of alcohol, and on many other issues. Instead, on these issues we keep talking, praying and striving for the will of God.

Althought the issue of homosexuality tends to be diverse, must it be a matter over which we divide our communion? Personally, I hope not. I believe that, mindful of the inexhaustible grace of God, we need to work responsibly on diverse issues and seek God's will in both our lifestyles and our discernment proceses. This will enable us to maintain fellowship with our fellow believers.

What Might Have Been

Thomas Alva Edison once said, "Opportunity is missed by most because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." This one's for the Jameses.

Friends are Friends Forever

The sculpture above is entitled Friendship by Miguel Guía. This week while reading a chapter on intimacy for one of my classes, I read this section I wanted to share with yall.

Most people don't realize that relationship success also creates systemic pressures that make balancing closeness and intimacy difficult. The more valued the relationship, the more there is to lose. We feel more anxiety in being intimate in the sense of being honestly and fully ourselves. Yet if we want passion, we need the spark and invigoration of intimacy. One of the central dilemmas of [relationships] is that the more important a relationship becomes, the more difficult it is to sustain passion. This is so because the tension between closeness and intimacy becomes increasingly profound. The paradox of closeness and intimacy is that the only way to really have either is to be willing at times to sacrifice closeness for the sake of intimacy. In other words, to be liked we have to be willing to risk not being liked, for the sake of being known accurately.

The above paragraph was written with romantic couples in mind, but I think the points presented are readily applicable to all types of relationships. Does this paragraph resonate with yall at all? The line that keeps coming back to me is '[we must be] willing at times to sacrifice closeness for the sake of intimacy.'

SAT Prep

Directions: Fill in the blank to complete the analogy. Answer any or all questions, and there is no penalty for guessing. Feel free respond anonymously.

1. Pornography : Men :: _______ : Women
2. Christ : Church :: Church : ______
3. Cookies : Cookiemonster :: ______ : You

Point :: Counterpoint

James Lyons is rightfully burnt out on the contemporary music scene. Hell, I gladly listen to ex-jocks blather on and on about the same handful of inane topics on sports talk rather than sit through most music on the radio. For me, the only fix is a magical one.

CTRL + ALT + DEL

My wife was a double major in college: English and Journalism. She is a fabulous writer, a better wife, and this weekend while perusing through one of her old text books I learned the distinction between the two commonly misappropriated words 'nauseous’ and ‘nauseated’. Things which are nauseous cause one to feel nauseated, but technically speaking one does not ‘feel nauseous’ according to the Holy Bible of proper English utility, The Elements of Style. These are the kind of things which interest me, and in this case haunt me.

This weekend I attended my godsister’s wedding in Seattle with my wife, mother, father, sister and brother in law. After arduous hours of travel by land and by air (and very nearly by sea a few times, thanks to the legendary Pacific Northwest weather systems) we toured Pike Place Market, nearly got embroiled in a lover’s spat involving one exceptionally large and irate black man, one small but hurtful black man and one perplexed black woman, enjoyed the local cuisine, and sat through a lovely ceremony eternally and existentially smelting my godsister and her then fiancé in the bonds of Christian marriage. After the festivities died down, we decided as a family to take in the one essential feature of downtown Seattle: The REI. After skittering up and down narrowly glistening streets towards our destination, we came to a public parking structure half a block from REI and decided to make use of its services. We waved at the attendant, parked in the section labeled ‘Visitor Parking for Local Retail’ and ran like cows to feed toward our destination. The time: 6:17pm. 90 minutes and $120.00 later, we left Bobo Mecca contentedly laden with our purchases and headed back down to our tan rented Mercury van, only to discover that our every ingress to the previously hospitable parking structure had been cinched down tighter than a bullfrog’s rectum¹. On a wall near the main gate of the parking structure in unobtrusive letters a small sign read: ‘Sat: 8:00am – 7:30pm.’ Hello, Nauseous. Hello, Nausea.

We managed to track down a very convivial and very helpful security guard girl who went to extraordinary lengths to help us extricate our vehicle from the acquisitive parking garage, and after nearly 50 minutes of chicanery and a good measure of Tom-foolery we were back on the road towards Portland. I never thought that the movie Dodgeball would be apropos to anything in my life, but reading that stupid sign I found myself wanting to quote Christine Taylor’s character: “Yeah, I just threw up in my mouth a little bit . . .”

¹That is: Water tight.

The Miracle of Music

If (when?) I form a face-melting rock band of mythic proportions, this will be our first album cover. The only appreciable difference will be the light rays forming the shape of a Gibson Firebird.

I've been trying to blog for the last three days, but every time I sit down at the computer I feel my brain congeal to concrete and my fingers consolidate to inarticulate flippers. Tonight as I was sitting down to bang my concrete head against the proverbial wall, I actually came up with an uncomfortably personal topic to write about. Thankfully, 'Video Killed the Radio Star' came up on my iTunes shuffle and inspired me to write about the magical ability music has to modify (most frequently mollify) my mood.

Audience participation portion:

1. What bails you out best when you're feeling beat down?
2. What does the song 'Video Killed the Radio Star' remind you of? (and yes, there is a right answer to this question)
3. Suggestions for the afore mentioned face-melting rock band's name.