Peggy Gordon

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

2.5/4 stars
Uneven film. Great to look at but too many cliches. Reminded me too much of Forrest Gump meets Titanic. I didn't like Cate Blanchett's character.
I liked the concept; I liked the idea of showing a main character whose existence is so far removed from everyone else's. I enjoyed the film on the level of a fable or metaphor. Jared Harris was good, he needs to be in more movies. In the end, the film was very sad, but not particularly uplifting.

Movie Update

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl: 3/4 stars.
I saw this originally on DVD in January 2004. Unfortunately it was only a day or two after I saw "Master and Commander" for the first time. The flaws in POTC's logic, and its overall silliness really stood out in comparison. I watched it again on the recommendation of a friend and found that I liked it much better this second time round. The plot holes are still there, but it's also an entertaining and very fun, very watchable film. Good but not great.

Movie Update

Kicking and Screaming 2.5/4 stars.
Funny but benign Will Ferrell comedy. A good movie for kids, probably. I liked the fact that it wasn't filled with gross-out humor. This is probably also the most I've enjoyed Will Ferrell in a movie, and I laughed a fair number of times. That said it's totally formulaic and ultimately a little bit dull.

Interesting Photo

This is a picture of Jacob Lincoln (1815-1889). Jacob's father was Josiah Lincoln, brother of Thomas Lincoln, who was Abraham's father. So Jacob and Abraham were first cousins. The family resemblance is uncanny, isn't it? I found this on a website trying to disprove the rumor that Abraham Lincoln's real father wasn't Thomas Lincoln, but someone named Abraham Enloe, a man who Abe Lincoln's mother once worked for. Even presented as anecdotal evidence, this picture would seem to dispel any such notion.

Bad 70s Song Trivia Question

Listen to the following song. Actually, don't listen to all of it, just thirty seconds or so, otherwise your ears will start bleeding.



OK, bad song, bad hair, bad outfit, bad "dancing", right? Now skip ahead and listen to 2:21-2:29. Sound familiar?

The reader with the correct answer wins a new pair of hot pants.

Tinny Memories

During the 1993 holiday season I worked at the Toys R Us on Azusa Avenue near Arrow Highway in Covina, California. There's still a Toys R Us in that general area, but it's a different building than the one I worked in. The one that existed back in the '93 was a great bolshy, orange and brown monstrosity. When I walk into any Toys R Us now, I can't fully reckon with the fact that I used to work in one. Perhaps it's best that way. But I digress...

I worked the graveyard shift that season. And I also had another job working in a restaurant as a busboy/dishwasher/prep cook. My schedule was like this:

5pm- wake up.
5:30pm- go to restaurant job.
10:30pm- Leave restaurant job and head straight to Toys R Us (usually smelling like cooking grease)
11:00pm-7:00am- work at TRU.
7:30am- go to sleep.
Rinse and repeat

Fortunately I didn't do this for more than about two months. I think if I had I would have gotten really sick eventually.

Since this was the graveyard shift, the manager would turn the radio to Power 106, the disco station, and then broadcast it over the store's crappy intercom system. So, as a result I can't listen to any dance music from that era without being instantly transported to that time, that place. It's really eerie, but it gets me every time. Some examples:







and, of course:



The weird thing is, I've kind of grown to like all these songs. I don't normally like this kind of music and I don't exactly look back on that job fondly, but because they were such a constant presence I naturally grew fond of them.

Movie Update

Religulous: 1.5/4 stars. So-so documentary that claims to be about religion but is really about Bill Maher's view of religion. Even though I basically agree with most of Maher's points, I had some big problems with the film. For one, he only goes after the Abrahamic religions, doesn't touch Hinduism or Buddhism. Second, the film has an almost Tom Green-like confrontational style that I find uncomfortable to watch. Third, he talks to extremists, and spends almost no time talking to people who are more moderate in their religious beliefs, or who approach their faith with their intellect-- too much shooting fish in a barrel, not enough tackling the bigger questions and issues involved. Lastly, I'd compare making a film about how ridiculous relgion is to making a film about how ridiculous romantic relationships are. It's easy to make a lot of good, persuasive points, but the argument ignores something fundamental about the human condition. You can't really dismiss religion entirely, it's not going anywhere no matter how badly you want it to.

Barack Obama Does Not Care About White People

A picture from North Dakota.

You Know You're a Dork When

You do this.

One Trillion Dollars

What does one trillion dollars look like?

Bill Hicks on Jay Leno

Hits it right on the head:

Movin' on Up

The wife and I have left Manhattan for the slightly greener pastures of Western Westchester County. We know, however, that this was more of a transitional move than a permanent re-settlement. She eventually wants to settle in a small town like the one she grew up in, and I'd just as soon return to New England town life, and leave New York City and environs behind, keeping it as a memory of something cool and different I did for a couple of years.

We're looking to move within the next couple of years. We want to find a place where we can both get jobs, where we can afford to buy a house (eventually), and where we'd feel comfortable raising a family, should we decide to do so someday.

Here's where we're looking:

1. Further Upstate- We would stay in New York State, but basically just move further up the Hudson. Some of the communities we're considering are Hyde Park, Kinderhook, and Saratoga Springs. Each of these places are within an hour and a half of the Massachusetts Berkshires, where her parents will be living year-round. The area isn't prohibitively far from New York, should we want to go into the city for a weekend, and there are plenty of cultural offerings in the Berkshires. Staying in New York State would be easier for us in terms of our licenses. Unfortunately, the nearest big city for us would be Albany, which isn't that great a place.

2. Burlington, VT- I've never been there, but the wife has, and I'm eager to check it out. It's four hours from where her parents will be, but it's a college town, and Montreal is only two hours away, should we want a big city fix. It's supposed to be a nice place and it's right on a gigantic lake. It would be really cold in the winter though.

3. Greater Boston area- We're looking at Plymouth, the Lexington-Concord area, and the Newburyport-Amesbury area. The biggest drawback is that these aren't as affordable as some of the other places that we're considering, but they would provide very easy access to Boston. We both have family and friends in the area, too.

4. Portland, Maine- Portland is only about two hours from Boston, so it's close enough to go there in a day. It would also be about four hours from where the wife's parents would be. It would probably be similar to Burlington, only Portland is more of a city than a college town, though it's a nice one. Again, the weather would be cold, but I'd like living near the ocean.

We're planning to visit each of these places again, and then move maybe as soon as Summer of 2010.

Hello Americans, I'm Dead

Paul Harvey (1918-2009)

RIP

Academy Awards

My predictions were way off this year-- I only got 10 out of 24 right. My sister-in-law got 17. I bet on Benjamin Button winning all the small awards but it turns out Slumdog got most of those. I also thought Mickey Rourke was going to win, and I picked the other song from Slumdog to win Best Song.

A few observations:

Hugh Jackman was fine, I guess. I liked that they changed it up and had a non-comedian. Not as many smarmy one-liners and insults as in earlier years (read: Chris Rock). Jackman was good because I feel like I barely noticed him-- probably how a host should be.

Sean Penn's speech was annoying and all over the place.

The Pineapple Express bit with James Franco and Seth Rogen was lame.

The cutting back and forth between Jennifer Aniston and Brangelina was pointless and in poor taste. Why was Jennifer Aniston there anyway? What movies has she been in the last few years, and how many of them were any good?

Why was Phillip Seymour Hoffman wearing a do-rag?

When Mickey Rooney saw the "In Remembrance" montage, did he think, "I'll probably be up there next year."

Bill Maher presenting for Best Documentary is a bit like Ronald McDonald being a judge on Top Chef.

Three Things

It seems to me that there are three things that are really most important to me. These are basically my long-term, short-term life goals. These are the desired end result of all my new years resolutions and any actions I take to better my life.

1. Have a happy home- I mean a place that's comfortable, where the people I live with are happy. I want to make sure my wife is happy with where she lives. I want to be able to feel good there too. I want to make sure that the place is clean and well kept-up, and that it's a place where I can actually feel at home.

2. I want to do my job well- I've never really given this one much thought prior to the recent past. I've always thought of jobs as a kind of necessary evil. Something you have to do to get money in order to live in this society. I still kind of feel that way. I'm not a big believer in all that "follow your bliss" stuff, (although I think if you really want to get into a particular profession you can, so long as you're willing to stick with it for a long time and be patient and persistent, but that's a different post). But doing my job well makes me feel better not only about my job, but it makes me feel better overall. Not doing my job well makes me feel awful, and I'd rather feel good than awful.

3. Be financially stable- If I ever become rich it will be by accident. I'm not concerned with being wealthy, but to not really have to worry about money (meaning, not having to worry about how I'm going to pay my bills, not having to worry about having enough money to meet my basic needs, etc.) The less I have to think about money the happier I seem to be.

These things are all tied in together. If one starts to fall apart it tends to affect the other two. And all three things, when it comes down to it, take work. Daily work and daily sacrifice. Even if it's taking the trash out, keeping up with all my paperwork, or budgeting our money for the month. None of it is hard work, it doesn't require an incredible amount of strength or intelligence, but it requires a kind of consistent, persistent work, a little bit each day-- doing things when you don't want to do them. This seems to be basically how one is rewarded in this life.

Norwegian Ancestry

I've always been a little bit obsessed with my genealogy. I'm not exactly sure why, but I imagine it has something to do with maybe not feeling at home with where I grew up. The general region as well as the actual physical house. I always knew that both my father and mother were of largely Irish ancestry, so to simplify things I thought of myself as typically Irish-American.

There was a problem with this though, in that I wasn't raised Catholic. Being on the East Coast, and having lived in Massachusetts for a couple of years, I realize that being Irish-American has all sorts of different connotations associated with it. Ironically, the most Irish-American person I knew was my stepfather's mother, who could trace all of her ancestry to the Emerald Isle. Her father spoke Gaelic, and she held a lot of the old Irish superstitions. Her father had actually grown up in the Five Points during the 1870s and 80s, so I'd heard about Paradise Square and the Old Brewery well before Scorsese's film. She was a window into a past which is as dead as she is now. Go raibh math agut.

My father's mother was of Finnish and Finnish-Swedish ancestry. She used to cure fish in her refrigerator bought from the Vietnamese markets in San Gabriel and serve it to me regularly. As a result I'm pretty sure I'm immune to any and all seafood-borne illnesses, and am usually able to eat all kinds of sushi that even seasoned purveyors of the dish are utterly horrifed by. Raw sea urchin, no problem. I've mentioned our linguistic adventures together in an earlier post. She hated Russians and used to put cardamom in desserts. I'm super-white but her influence is about as ethnic as I get. She's dead now too, and has been for many years.

I've found out over the years, from talking to relatives and doing my own research that I have ancestors who were born in and had relatives who came from the following places:

-England
-Ireland
-Scotland
-Wales
-Netherlands
-Sweden
-Finland
-Denmark
-Germany

Basically places where Celts and Germans (in the broad sense-- Germanic, Teutonic, Norse, whatever) live. Finns can claim some uniqueness because they speak a non-related language, but all the recent DNA analyses that have come out show that Finns and Swedes are bascially genetically indecipherable from one another.

Ancestry is a weird thing. If you go back to your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents, the generation likely born around the middle of the 18h century, contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson let's say, you'll find that you have 128 of them. It's hard to wrap your mind around a room full of 128 people. Ultimately, how much can you have inherited from any one of them?

All this investigating has also led me to wonder, what does it really mean to have Irish or Dutch ancestry? My mother's father was born in Germany but he wasn't ethincally German at all. His mother was Danish and his father was Dutch. I'm sure if you go back far enough none of them were from Denmark or the Netherlands either. Ultimately, all of our ancestors were from Africa. It's probably just as valid to say that I'm of 100% australopithecus afarensis ancestry as it is to say that I'm 3/8ths Irish, etc.

The one country in that corner of Northwestern Europe that was always missing from my ethnic makeup was Norway. But recently I found someone who eventually passed their genetic information on to me, that could claim that nation as their homeland. Someone with the last name Sommerfeldt who was born around 1820. I still find it interesting, but I guess I'm realizing, the closer I look, the less it really means anything. Perhaps Lincoln said it best when he said "I don't know who my grandfather was; I am much more concerned to know what his grandson will be." Yet somehow I can't help but think that finding out my great-grandmother was half Lapplander will help explain why I hate getting up early and why I get nervous around horses. Go figure.

Strawberry Fields, Whatever

I still work in New York two days a week, all on the Upper West Side. I have a few hours to kill between my late morning and early afternoon sessions, so I usually spend them walking around Central Park. For some reason I always end up around Strawberry Fields, near the Dakota around 72nd and Central Park West. Strawberry Fields has no strawberries and isn't a field. It's just a little section of the park, a walkway really, where they've built a mosaic that says "Imagine", in honor of John Lennon.

I used to work on 70th and Broadway, and when I walked home to the east side, I would always go through Strawberry Fields, just because it was the most direct route. Apparently I have a big sign over my head, only visible to foreign tourists that says "Directions" or "Ask me to take your picture", depending on the situation. Foreign tourists love to approach me in the city because: a) I generally look like I know where I'm going and b) unlike most New Yorkers, I'm not walking 25 miles per hour while swearing into a cell phone at the top of my lungs. So I'm more approachable than your average bear.

True story, for a while I kept getting approached by elderly German tourists, speaking to me in German. I know a little German, so I would often answer back to them in German, but usually they had no idea what I was saying and would move on. This started happening to me on a weekly basis, I kid you not. Confounded, I asked a German friend, who theorized that most of the Germans approaching me were probably from the old East Germany, so they never learned to speak English in school (they learned Russian instead). She (my German friend) didn't think they thought I was German, so much as I looked approachable and looked like I might possibly speak German, which was a better risk to take than on some random Puerto Rican family walking through the park. She also said that (former) East Germans (or any Germans, for that matter) aren't used to hearing German spoken in a heavy American-English accent (I didn't think my accent was THAT bad) which probably explains why they didn't understand me. Overall, I thought her reasoning explained so much, yet so little at the same time.

Anyway, Stawberry Fields in Central Park is always covered with tourists, and I can't really figure out why. People are always getting their pictures taken in front of the mosaic, and I personally have taken at least 15 pictures of people in front of the 2'x 2' green NY parks sign that says "Strawberry Fields". John Lennon isn't buried there, and it's not even the same Strawberry Fields that the song was written about (which is somewhere in Liverpool, I think). It just happens to be sort of across the street from the building where Lennon lived and where he was shot. That's it. Nothing magical happens there, unless you count Beatles fan tourists congregating magical.

Recently they posted a sign near the mosaic that says "any items left on the mosaic will be considered abandoned, and will be removed", which is a nice way of saying "quit leaving crap here-- John's not going to get it anyway."

Standing by the mosaic, the windows of the Dakota are visible. I have to assume that Yoko Ono (who I know still lives in the Dakota) lives in one of those windows-- it would make sense that their apartment overlooked the spot where the mosaic was built, right? Apparently every year on John's birthday Yoko comes out and places flowers on the mosaic. I'm not sure when Lennon's birthday is, but I think it's in October. If I ever see her there I'm going to do my bad John Lennon accent for her and tell her that I'm Julian Lennon, John's son from his first marriage, and ask if I can borrow $100 million. All you need is love.

Rich Little Christmas Carol

This has to be seen to be believed. Rich Little doing impressions of actors doing performances of characters in A Christmas Carol. This was made in 1978, but even so, none of the imitations seem to be of people born after 1875.

Movie Update

The Dark Knight: 2/4 stars. I couldn't find much to like about this movie. Bruce Wayne was kind of a jerk. I didn't believe that two highly successful men would be fighting over Maggie Gylenhaal. Heath Ledger's performance was good but didn't blow me away or anything. The movie has no climax and no resolution which I found frustrating. The film is riddled with too many unbelievable situations as well. On top of that it's completely humorless. Was Nolan trying to channel Ang Lee?

The difference between this film and the movies from the earlier Batman series (none of which, granted, were all that good) is that there was a sense of playfulness and hero worship in the earlier ones. Silly rabbit, comic books are for kids. When all that youthful excitement is stripped away you're only left with pain and brooding. What's the difference between this movie and one of the Mission Impossible films? Nothing, so far as I can tell, except that it uses characters who dress up in funny outfits.