#119 - Hiawatha and Harry Potter

Hiawatha and Harry Potter

4/12/08 (#119)

There were two essential lessons that the boys in my neighborhood learned from mid-20th-century American cinema:

First, villains make atrocious marksmen. You can put four of the antihero's henchmen in a hallway with semi-automatic rifles, 30 feet from the star, and the sum damage inflicted by 1,000 rounds of ammunition will be the shredding of every door jamb between the shooters. Apparently, villians are not allowed to go to the same practice ranges as the heroes, each of which possessed uncanny shooting abilities rivaling Natty Bumpo's improbably accurate musket shots in J.F. Cooper's The Deerslayer, able to deliver a head-shot in the dark while simultaneously ordering a pizza and balancing their check book.

Second, a villain being an atrocious marksmen is an irrelevancy, as heroes are not affected by bullets. You can disable a bad guy with grazing gun shot across the thigh or even with a hard-thrown walnut, but the hero can take four shots to the torso and still manage to kung-fu his way through a Shriner's parade of enemies and escape, leaving the room looking like the aftermath of an earthquake at the mannequin factory. Better still, each bullet exponentially increases the drama of the event, even if the event is eating breakfast: Will three caps popped into the belly of the star stop him from finishing his Denver omelet? Of course not---what kind of hero loses his appetite after ingesting a few tiny chunks of lead?

These lessons held true for war movies, westerns, spy movies, et al, so their accuracy was irrefutable. Thus, when we engaged in role-playing games, every boy wanted to be the hero, so every boy in my neighborhood considered himself a master at getting shot.* Even the most errant issue from a fictional rifle, shot from behind a bush and midway through a forward roll, offered the opportunity for an overly dramatic blow to the body that would make even the hammiest community theater hack scoff: Slow motion was never slower, the shroud of death never pulled so languidly as it was over the eyes of a victim of one (or fourteen) of our imaginary bullets. Of course, we lived to get shot---maybe in real life the combatants would find effective hiding spots and stay low for hours, but our backyard games featured Hollywood editing, the dull stretches conveniently removed.

In the early 1970's, our most common playtime adversaries were cowboys and indians. Being children, we were unaware of the nuances of the Vietnam war, but at least one of the "big kids" on our block had gone off to war, so it felt too close to home to be an enjoyable game. Cowboys and Indians offered a less ambiguous framework for a shoot 'em up, as the movies had clearly defined the roles: The cowboys were heroes, white-hatted and worthy of adoration; the indians (who were still years away from being called Native Americans) were villains, dangerous and untrustworthy and certain to lose any mock battle.

Since we all wanted to be heroes, almost every boy wanted to be a cowboy; fortunately, there were a couple of kids who regularly volunteered to be the Indians, children who likely grew up to be either liberals (whose early sense of racial justice encouraged them to offer the Indians a fair representation on the fictional playing field) or corporate barons (whose sensed early that much could be accomplished while attention was focused on the so-called hero.) Being an Indian offered the same advantage of volunteering as an outfielder in little League Baseball or opting to play bass when every teenage peer is playing guitar: Less limelight, but more consistent playing time. Indians could plan their attack, develop signals that impersonated sickly birds, sneak up and ambush the enemy; the cowboys, on the other hand, were just waiting for the opportunity to be shot. Not killed, mind you, as our fictional ammunition depots didn't hold enough firepower for the Indians to win. It just didn't happen that way---refer to any movie as evidence.

We didn't have any Native Americans in my neighborhood, so we were never concerned (or even cognizant) that the game was stacked against the Indians from the outset. (In that way, our play was likely an unfortunate reflection of what the Native Americans faced in everyday American life.) The cowboys were valiant and virtuous, saving the day from the heathen hordes who had the audacity to defy our pale-face manifest destiny. We never pondered how the Cowboys and Indians game was played amongst a large Native American population: Was each game a new reenactment of the Sioux and Cheyenne victory at Little Bighorn? Did some Iroquois children grudgingly play the cowboys, requisite roles that were necessary for the game but doomed from the start? I imagine so, as an intrinsic element of these childhood games was a sense of good defeating evil, no matter who you defined as the good guys. Evil needed to be vanquished---I've never heard of kids playing war games where one team was soldiers from Switzerland and the other from Sweden. ("We don't pretend to shoot each other, we just pretend to report on the wars being waged in the next neighborhood.")

The Indians were only one example of Hollywood's history of presenting a contemporaneous version of evil, with art reflecting life with regards to the vilified: In the middle of the 20th century, the Germans were cast as evildoers; during the cold war, Russians and communists received the choice arch-enemy roles; as the date odometer on the 20th century rolled over, the likely nemesis was someone of Middle Eastern persuasion. For a nation that prides itself on being a melting pot, we have a disconcerting history of defining our adversaries based on broad-stroke stereotypes, cultural inaccuracies and irrational fears. "C'mon, they're just movies," some insist, but repeated inaccurate representations establish equally inaccurate perceptions. (If you disagree, ask the nearest blond how they feel about blond jokes.)

Stating the obvious, defining an enemy by race and/or culture has the unfortunate impact of defining anyone of that race or culture as an enemy. In the battle of Us vs. Them, audiences are attracted to these simplified ideas of "them" because it allows for easier sorting; unfortunately, as Timothy McVeigh, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Malvo, and the rash of teens who have dispatched their classmates over the last decade will confirm, the so-called "them" often looks just like us.

So what is the proper Good vs. Evil scenario today, when political correctness (a term I use here to describe racial sensitivity, not inaccurately euphemistic language) makes playing what would now be called Cowboys and Indigenous Americans offensive to more than just those folks who no longer want their high school team to be called the Braves, and war is once again a topic too close to home to allow for enjoyable role-playing activities? How can 21st century children explore the classic conflict without associating a real face with the fictional foe?

Enter Harry Potter. J. K. Rowling's incredibly creative books are worthy of all of the lauding they've received, masterfully imagined and cleverly penned, but they also allow children to take sides in the eternal struggle between good and evil without giving either side a particularly distinctive face. Rowling's characters, generally, look alike. (Okay, when I say "look alike", I'm referring to the characters in the movies, but my wife, whose enthusiasm for the books was such that each new release ensured a day or two of "Mom's busy right now", assures me that the casting was consistently satisfying.) Severus Snape and Mad-eye Moody are both suspicious characters, yet in the battle of Good vs. Evil, they play for opposing sides. (Though perhaps with limited team spirit.)

In Rowling's world, evil is revealed as arrogance, avarice and conceit---a choice of actions, not a color of skin or a cultural birthright. General Custer versus Geronimo involves real people whose successes and failures appear in historical records (though perhaps with limited accuracy); Harry Potter versus Draco Malfoy allows for a battle of apparent peers, even though we're obviously meant to hope that little Malfoy brat will soon be the victim of the Cruciatus curse.

My friend's son is having a Harry Potter themed birthday this week, and I'm eager to observe the role play at the party. Of course, what I really want to see is how many times these faux Potters and Weasleys can be hit by a spell and remain standing, ready for more battle against the fictional Lord Valdemort---if Harry absorbs half a dozen hits of a magic wand and then pause to wolf down a few bites of cake, I'll know the adage is true: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

* This is not a gender-biased statement, but an accurate reporting of facts: The girls on my block never showed any interest in dirt-diving for the sake of collecting fake lead pellets in the chest. Perhaps because they had no role models in the movies, or perhaps because the boys looked like buffoons.

©2008 wpreagan

#118 - Caesar's New Clothes

Caesar's New Clothes

3/15/08 (#118)

I didn't discover the Caesar salad until I was in my 30's. We stood at the counter of Pizzacato, my wife eager to split the salad and assuring me that any horror stories I had heard about the dish were surely fabricated, or at the very least greatly exaggerated. I had heard no such stories, my only recollection of the salad being a query to my mother when I was a teenager, her reply being, "I don't think you'd like it." That was sufficient (as the primary curator of my simple palate, she was probably correct), and never gave them another thought. I saw them on menus for decades, but took my mother at her word until that day at Pizzacato. We ordered the salad, toted it back to the apartment, and I was smitten.

A good Caesar is to the garden salad what a big, juicy backyard barbecue burger is to a McDonald's "hamburger" (how they use that noun with a straight face is a mystery to me), or what a succulent seafood fajita at a gourmet Mexican restaurant is to 99 cent burrito from the 7-11 cooler. (And no, "gourmet Mexican restaurant" is not an oxymoron, despite Portland's spate of mediocre taquerias.) The Caesar is an explosion of flavor, the garden salad a tolerable penance eaten to atone for the sin of fried foods.

For those unfamiliar, there are a variety of salads that fall under the definition of Caesar: Some are spinach based, others feature romaine (I eat only the latter); most utilize a garlic-based dressing, but a few use an anchovy-based dressing (I enjoy both, but prefer a slightly creamy Caesar, not a garlic vinaigrette); some come with chicken, but that's usually an optional side. The key to the salad is the dressing---other than that, it's just lettuce, shaved parmesan cheese and a handful of croutons.

For aficionados, you will likely appreciate both my affection for the salad, and my one complaint with the dish: The Caesar is exorbitantly---and inexplicably---overpriced.

As a rule, restaurants set their prices based on cost of product: Take the cost of the ingredients, add other overhead expenses, multiply the sum by a house-standard percentage and you have your menu price. That's why shrimp costs more than chicken---because shrimp costs more than chicken. Yet the Caesar defies this process, apparently priced by flavor rather than cost of product: The romaine Caesar has no tomatoes (whose fickle value depends, literally, on the weather), no boiled eggs or bacon or strips of prosciutto, no labor-intensive chopping of carrots or celery or radishes or onions. Yet despite this simple list of ingredients, most restaurants have the audacity to charge $7 for a Caesar while selling the garden salad for $4.

It's true everywhere---in even the most paper-napkin of places, the Caesar has a white linen price tag. The Caesar appeals to discerning tastes, which restaurateurs seem to equate with financial liquidity, like it's some kind of fine wine rather than a bowl of lettuce with some cheese shavings and chopped up bread heels on top, as if anyone ordering the Caesar must be stopping for a bite to eat before going back to the yacht or needs nourishment before the polo match. Comparing the cost to make a Caesar to the cost to order a Caesar, you would swear these salads are being assembled by a government contractor.

I am not familiar with the internal machinations of the restaurant business, but I refuse to believe the occasional (and only) alibi that I've heard offered in defense of this obviously-colluded pricing scheme: "It's expense to make the dressing." Okay, maybe making a gallon of it requires a large initial investment, but considering it's then doled out by the tablespoon (and no, you can't have another tablespoon), the economy of scale contradicts that theory. Every dressing other than sour-cream-and-a-packet-of-spices Ranch takes time and effort to repair, but no one is trying to get rich on Raspberry Vinaigrette.

I suspect the reality of overpriced Caesar is this: The garden salad is commonly ordered as an additional item, a side to accompany an entree, so restaurants need to price it reasonably enough that the diner's tab doesn't resemble a premium-channels cable bill; the Caesar, on the other hand, is often ordered as a main dish, being so aggressive in flavor that ordering it to compliment your meal is like asking Don Rickles to compliment your wardrobe. ("Hey, why don't you order the garden salad, take the four bucks you save and replace the light bulb in your closet. Whose your tailor, P.T. Barnum?") A restaurant is never going to be successful if patrons can leave having spent only $4, so the Caesar gets promoted from mere salad to economic manipulation tool.

This blatant gastronomic discrimination has been festering the dark dining rooms of America's restaurants for too long, and only by exposing this Caesarian chicanery to the harsh light of public opinion can we make this stop. Diners need to put their collective feet down and say, "Hey, until this plate of leaves stops costing three bucks more than a burger and fries, I'm not supporting your anti-garlic-lovers agenda!"

I would start this revolution myself, but as I said, I'm smitten. Throughout this protest, I will have to order wilted piles of "mixed greens" (read: weeds), each with a couple of slippery tomato wedges, a lonely cucumber slice or a few shreds of carrot topped with a so-called Thousand Island dressing that ably doubles as a cheeseburger condiment. I know I should celebrate this battle, that I should imagine each boring bite of garden salad as possessing the sweet flavor of justice; but then I imagine iceberg lettuce with bland ranch dressing and...well, that may be too a high price to pay for reform.

©2008 wpreagan

#117 - Barbecued Pennies

Barbecued Pennies

2/4/08 (#117)

"Don't mock him, Kas, he was just raised with a simple palate."

Prior to hearing that phrase, I had never considered that my palate required a modifier, let alone "simple". Sitting there at the white Formica table in Kassie's white Formica kitchen, I thought about the adjective, used in that pre-politically-correct era as a euphemism to describe a person who would repeatedly rotate a balloon in his hands in search of the elusive front. I winced at her easy summarization---after all, I was a teenager, and like all teenagers, my complexity was too vast to be detected by adult methods of measurement.

I can't recall what plated item I had been carefully avoiding to instigate the put-down, but it was probably something pungently unappealing like sauerkraut (which always seems either not yet done cooking or cooked for too long), gorgonzola (a flavor that offended even before I learned about the mold injections) or mushrooms (someone's practical joke that backfired into culinary acceptance.) Kassie's mom often cooked as if she were daring the family to eat it, and while access to Kassie meant spending enough time with her family to prove I wasn't a danger to her either her chastity or her future, I tried to schedule my visits around their appointed dinner hour.

If I had been asked to produce my own descriptive rather than having one assigned to me, I would have claimed to possess a discerning palate: I steadfastly refused to eat anything that a panel of judges would not unanimously define as "food." (Fish got all thumbs-up; potatoes made the cut; Brussels sprouts would have split the panel's votes between vegetable and vampire repellent, so they were off my personal menu.) I didn't subsist on peanut butter and jelly (good thing, as I only liked grape jelly) or grilled cheese (American cheese only, please), and I didn't deserve to be pigeonholed as some gastronomic imbecile just because saffron made me slightly nauseous.

I suspect the comment was an innocent jab at my mother as much as at me, since it would be my mother's fault for not introducing me to the finer nuances of cabbage and for treating Cheddar as an exotic cheese. But I would later learn that my mother's appetites included an array of flavors to which I had never been exposed, and that the lack of international flair in the Reagan household was not a failure of mom's dietary ambition. To illustrate, I present Barbequed Pennies.

It's unlikely that the 1970's will be remembered as a culinary renaissance (despite thorough representation in the Casserole Hall of Fame), a context that is essential to a discussion of Barbecued Pennies. I had three siblings, and while Kassie's mom saw the dinner table as a daily training exercise to prepare her three girls for a future that included snails, seas urchin and ham hocks, my mother wanted to find something that we'd all agree to eat in the present-tense. One of those items was barbecued pennies, a meal that consisted of hot dogs sliced the short way (hence pennies), sautéed in a barbecue-type sauce and served over mashed potatoes. Julia Child might have brushed it off as a meal invented by a cook who was snowed in by a blizzard with a near-empty fridge, but I didn't need Julia Child's approval: My review? "Delicious." 30 years later I still have clear mental images of the red-stained potatoes, the plate looking like the set of a claymation murder/dismemberment scene. ("Officer, the victim seems to have been stabbed repeatedly with a circular cookie cutter.") Barbecued pennies was one of my favorite meals, though at risk of supporting Kassie's Mom's assertion, I enjoyed almost any non-vegetable entrée over mashed potatoes. (Heck, even a few vegetables.)

I did not notice when Mom stopped serving barbecued pennies, and since our plates always had something else in its place (American chop suey, cowboy casserole, shepherds pie, etcetera) no one called attention to the missing entree. Time passed, years even, and one day Mom was making her grocery list and asked if there was anything I'd like for dinner. "Barbecued pennies", I enthusiastically replied, "We haven't had those in forever."

"Yeah, but Dad doesn't like them. Anything else?"

Dad doesn't like them? There were six of us in the house, and his vote alone was enough to make it law? Was this any way to teach one's children about democracy? I offered that Dad could just have the potatoes and vegetables, or Mom could cook his franks and remove them from the pan before adding the sauce. This did not seem to be a complex work-around.

"Well, he doesn't like the smell of them cooking, either. How about fish sticks?"

The smell? It was at that moment that I understood who wielded the scissors that had clipped my culinary wings. How many other entrees had been sacked by the delicate sensibilities of that nose? How many flavors had been forbidden from our refrigerator because they failed to pass muster with one set of Reagan taste buds? (Not that this gastronomic censorship offered no benefits, as I am still grateful for growing up at a dinner table that had never hosted either lutefisk or calamari.) I would have asked him to explain himself, to justify his totalitarian domination of our dinner table options, but I had eaten enough of my Grandmother's cooking to know why he was the way he was: Her cooking skills were culled from a volume apparently called "The Joy of Boiling", a book she likely inherited from her mother. My father and I were products---and victims---of the same meat-and-potatoes lineage. I resigned myself to accept that barbecued pennies were a treat to be enjoyed only when Dad was out of town.

The "simple palate" condemnation stayed with me longer than Kassie did. I became Dicken's Pip to Kassie's Mom's Miss Havisham, vowing to expose my sheltered taste buds to the vast array of flavors that the world had to offer: I embraced the full spectrum of offerings from the local cheese counter; I explored the cuisines of Thailand, India, Jamaica, Latin America and a dozen other pastel-colored nations on the family globe; saffron once made me queasy, now I count scallops and saffron rice among my favorite meals. I have benefited greatly from these explorations, and I sometimes marvel at the impact that one little comment had on my life. I'm sure Kassie's mom had no idea that I would be quoting her over a dinner table 20 years later as I stabbed a tiny fork into my third garlicky escargot.

Of course, while that offhand comment catalyzed a lifetime of expanded menu options, genetics has not completely relinquished its influence: I still wretch at wine vinegar (bleach and sulfar are air fresheners by comparison), sauerkraut (smells too much like vinegar) and mushrooms. (In my own defense, I have genuinely tried to develop a taste for the foul little spores, if only because eating at a vegetarian restaurant and not liking mushrooms eliminates more menu choices than eating at a steak house and not liking beef. Unfortunately, without success.)

These dietary decrees make dinner more enjoyable for me, but they have also instilled a fear of the inevitable, that my daughter will develop a love affair with shitakes, porcinis and morels (oh my!) and question the fairness of the democracy in our house. (I'm certain that my wife, whose courtesy of depriving herself of mushrooms for my benefit is sure to expire eventually, will not defend me with the stealth that my mother showed my dad. In fact, I'm sure she'll offer to script the prosecutorial opening statement.) Will I be forced to acquiesce to the will of the masses and allow the addition of that most-dreaded of pizza toppings? Perhaps---but on that day, I intend to broaden the lessons on democracy by demonstrating another element of the process: "Yes, you do have the votes, Sage. But before you make that victorious call to Nicola's, let's talk about a concept called gridlock."

And on that day, grilled cheese sandwiches it will be. (They can order that pizza when I'm out of town.)

©2008 wpreagan

#116 - A Ginormous Problem

A Ginormous Problem

1/21/08 (#116)

Just as it is fascinating to live in a city on the cusp of exponential growth, the skyline growing more jagged by the week as each new junior-varsity skyscraper arises to hold another few hundred Portland couples and there .2 children, it is enjoyable to live in a language that perpetually expands and contracts with each passing fad. Sure, it's disconcerting to hear a fifty-something white man use the word "shiznit", but it's also disconcerting to see a fifty-something man in a bikini---and that's hardly the fault of the bikini. For the most part, I embrace such linguistic developments (even if don't adopt the new terminology into my daily vocabulary), but there is one word that I hear with growing regularity that causes me to lament that the English language has no bouncer at the door:

Ginormous.

This adjective is apparently a mash-up of gigantic and enormous, emerging to describe that specifically particular size that is slightly larger than gigantic but not quite enormous. Or perhaps enormous is the lesser adjective? Considering that they're nearly perfect synonyms, ranking them is like identifying the largest egg in a full carton of "large" eggs.

When I began contemplating the growing ubiquity of ginormous (both number of users and number of uses seem on the rise) I suspected the origin lay in each generation's desire to create a language of their own: The flappers of a century ago spawned an amazingly creative argot full of reinventions (Fire Extinguisher: The chaperone on a date; Smudger: A person who likes to dance closely) and creations (23 skidoo: To ask/order someone to leave), a manner of speech that surely sounded like a foreign language to the generation that preceded them. (Peruse the "Flapper" section of any slang dictionary and you'll see how extensive their reinventions were, and how influential their vernacular was to our modern English.) After that, the Beboppers arrived with another personalization of the available language, and the soldiers of World War II generated new phrases of their own. Then came Bobby Sockers, hippies, hip-hoppers, gen-Xers, skateboarders, ad infinitum---each generation modifying the language to suit its new tastes. Just as General Motors urged young drivers that "this is not your father's Oldsmobile", the latest generation doesn't want to be saddled with having to use their parent's vocabulary; just as Kerouac doesn't mirror the syntax of Shakespeare, modern generations want to redecorate the sentence to reflect their new personality.

While I thoroughly support the mashing of two unrelated words to create a new adjective (I've created many of my own, collected in my Ridictionary), the vocabulary mash-up requires the application of creative sensibilities: The new word should shine in a way that the old words no longer did. For instance, I coined the word "Spamphlet" (a mash of "spam" and "pamphlet") to refer to the unsolicited handouts one sometimes receives when accosted on the sidewalks downtown. I'm not bragging that the new word is brilliant, but it's a more modern and enjoyable way of describing those unwanted items versus "tract" or "handout".

But with ginormous, there is no creativity displayed at all: The mashed words have nearly identical meanings, and the word produced by their union is yet another synonym. That isn't expanding the language, but merely cluttering it, like a person who gets three copies of "Huck Finn" and then claims to have a collection of works by Mark Twain. Think of the $100 bill, which once garnered the nickname "the C-note" (based on the roman-numeral "C", meaning "100"), later re-dubbed the "Benjamin" (a reference to Mr. Franklin, whose visage adorns that denomination), and how both new descriptions bring more color and playfulness to the English language. But by the ginormous method of word manufacture, that currency would become a "hundobill"---sure, life is short, but not so short that we need to save the time of two syllables with that clunky term.

It's the lack of newness that makes the use ginormous inexplicable: Why would one use the wrong word---or in this case, a non-word---if it sounds similar to and means the same thing as an existing English word? But perhaps its value lies not in what it is, but in what it is not.

Many of us have an gnawing suspicion that some of the people with whom we talk are marking our conversations with a red pen as the words come out of our mouths. We are all subject to the fear of appearing uneducated, and if we use a word with a real meaning, we can also misuse it---for instance, "that enormous matchbook" or "the gigantic cotton swab." Both of these are likely inaccurate (unless you're at a Ripley's Believe it or Not museum), and may expose the speaker as dictionary-challenged. But by using a non-word, the speaker has tossed Strunk & White out the window at the start---there's no misusing the word because the word has no actual meaning.

Think of diction as table manners: Attend a formal dinner and with each course you'll have to decide whether to use the salad fork, or the dessert fork, or the dinner fork; as the flatware inventory increases, the diner is faced with the awful prospect of exposing themselves as incapable of dining with the queen. But add a curling iron along side the plate and even the most snobbish will refrain from saying, "Did you see the barbaric manner with which he used that curling iron?" The curling iron has no correct or incorrect use as the dinner table, and thus all use of it is correct. (Though plugging the curling iron in before eating is universally frowned upon.) Obviously, ginormous is the curling iron in that analogy.

My adviser in college once told me, "It takes a great deal of courage to use the English language properly", his assertion based on the reality that our language suffers from so much widely accepted and regularly perpetuated misuses that wielding it correctly may cause the speaker to look foolish, supported by the style manuals but mocked by a group of people who think that stating "I'm not averse to it" demonstrates a hilarious lack of knowledge of the word "adverse." I suspect ginormous is a manifestation of that fear, a linguistic Golgotham conjured by speakers who seek protection from those judgmental coworkers and dinner guests who mistakenly believe that vocabulary is the hallmark of intelligence. (While it does reflect the attention paid in secondary school and/or a voracious reading habit, vocabulary is unlikely to help you compute the interest on your mortgage, solve a leak in your bathroom sink, or help you escape unscathed if you accidentally fall into the tiger cage at the zoo, so its value should be kept in perspective.)

Whatever the origin of this unnecessary etymological redundancy, I hope its life span will be worthy of measure by the Macarena standard. I fully support the continuing evolution of the English language, to the point where I'm even willing to let "shiznit" sneak through the door. But ginormous? 23 skiddoo.

©2008 wpreagan

#115 - Santa's Secret Service

Santa's Secret Service

1/7/08 (#115)

Watch any movie that involves a fairy tale ending and you will surely see some straight-laced, overly-sober "realist" chastise the hopeful hero with a variation on, "you want everything to be like a fairy tale, but that's not how things work in the real world." (Usually delivered one implausible-plot-twist prior to the ensuing fairy tale ending.)

The problem with the fairy tale is not its incongruity with our so-called reality---after all, all the world's a stage, and for the duration of our show, we are the primary scriptwriters for our own stories: Penning a fairy tale isn't a lot harder than writing a drama about family conflict. (Though on the latter, you'd have the advantage of collaborators.) Unfortunately, the curtain rises on our play at the same time is rises on a thousand other plays, and they're all being acted out on the same stage---if can be hard to concentrate on the Princess' soliloquy if Blanche Dubois keeps interrupting the scene.

The key to staging a successful fairy tale is also the key to planning an elaborate surprise marriage proposal in a crowded restaurant: Getting the bit players to cooperate with your script. And just as the future groom must contend with some members of the impromptu cast caring more about their poached salmon than the ceremonial ruse concocted for his fiancée, there are more than a few bit players who will volunteer to improvise the role of the ogre in your fairy tale.

Santa Claus is a central character in the most perpetuated of our common fairy tales, and over this past Christmas season, I began to realize how difficult it is to protect Santa, to maintain the illusion that he is the real deal. Frankly, even the logistics of that fairy tale are a bit preposterous to maintain in the 21st century: One man with one sleigh delivers a billion toys in 24 hours? Heck, even our UPS driver had a helper with him for most of December, and they worked five days a week. And they could deliver to the front door.

My daughter is five, and while she started the Christmas season as a true believer, there were several incidents that led me to lament the previous year's tutelage in the value of analytical thinking, occasions when this production of the fairy tale seemed genuinely threatened:

Previous Scripts for the Same Story: We watched a lot of Christmas movies this year, and I was flummoxed to find so many tackling the question of "believing" in Santa Claus. From Charlie Brown to a pint-sized Natalie Wood, children are presented with an array of variations on faith and frustration. The trouble is, even though Natalie Wood eventually believes in Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street, the damage was done with the initial expression of disbelief: Midway through, Sage turned to me and asked, "Why wouldn't she believe in Santa?", as if she had heard someone refuse to believe the ocean is blue. Any explanation I could offer was irrelevant, because the seed of doubt had been planted. (Hollywood is the most difficult bit-player to urge into cooperation.)

Casting Overlap: Santa came to Sage's school, a larger-than-life man in a flawless costume (complete with a bushy, real beard) who distributed presents (supplied by the parents) to the students and told trie little elf stories with perfunctory Kringlese. (Though after he asked the children, "Does anyone know who Jesus was?" I suspected he was going to refer to his reindeer as "Peter, Paul, John, Matthew...".) Afterward, Sage asked if that was the real Santa. "It sure looked like Santa", I assured her. "Yeah, but he looked different than the one at the mall downtown." (We had not "visited" that Santa, but he had come into view when we breached the border of the Pioneer North Pole when looking for something for Sage's mom.) It's tough to keep up a fairy tale in which the hero continually changes their physical appearance---it's like trying to believe "Darren" was actually Darren when he seemed to be a completely different person in random reruns of Bewitched. (Worse, imagine Bewitched with dozens of different Darrens.)

Prop Problems: Sage and I sat watching one of the holiday cartoon movies when she asked, "If Santa comes down the chimney and out the fireplace, where does he get out at our house?" Her curiosity was genuine: Our 1924 bungalow has no fire place, no wood stove, no possible portal between the rooftop and the living room. It was one of those moments that you see in an advertisement, the dad speechless to such a simple yet complicated question, except there was no voice-over narration to mask the awkward silence that followed. I goggled my brain for something...anything...plausible. "There's a little door in the base of the chimney", I explained, then immediately recalled that the little door I was picturing was actually located on my parent's chimney, in a house they sold 20 years ago. I don't like fibbing to Sage (though when necessary, I will obfuscate the truth verbal gymnastics that would leave even the Dad in Calvin and Hobbes dizzy), and this was a lie that she could fact-check during a commercial break. A man shouldn't be subjected to such dilemmas---parenting is expansive enough without an additional section of the test featuring logic puzzles.

Too Many Writers: In our family, Santa brings one gift; Mom and Dad supply the rest. (Santa already has a billion toys in his sled, he can't be bringing the whole Smurf village to every little girl who asks.) But in Sage's cousin's house, Santa brings most of the gifts. Thus, when the kids got together that night, Sage's cousin rattled off a long list of gifts delivered by jolly old St. Nick, while she stood by with her single Santa-supplied toy in her hand, a puzzled expression on her face: Why is Santa so disproportionate in his generosity? Was her letter to Santa too specific in its request? Or had she deceived herself into thinking she would be on the "nice" side of Santa's ledger, and in fact had a line reserved for her name under "naughty"? I watched from across the room as she wrestled with these puzzles, knowing that my involvement would only exacerbate the problem because it would give her a forum for articulating her uncertainties, each question (and its noncommittal answer) begetting another question. She shrugged it off as they got down to the serious business of playing with their new toys, but at that moment I felt Dickens' ghost of Christmas Future creep onto the stage.

He looked like an ogre in a fairy tale.

What surprised me this season is that I had not anticipated any of these spoilers, yet they were hammering me on a near-daily basis, making the holiday season feel less like reveling and more like spin control. I think we managed to keep the ruse in tact, and next year she will again be excited to believe that this particular fairy tale will come true again. I just have to remember: First, don't let Santa tell any Jesus stories; Second, keep a keen eye out for rogue Santas lurking behind department-store snow drifts; Third, investigate financing on the installation of a fireplace, and finally....well, sorry Sage, Santa's going to stick to the one-gift-only rule. More than one gift for each child and, well...then the story just wouldn't work in the real world.

©2008 wpreagan

#114 - Brindle (Eulogy for a band)

Brindle (Eulogy for a band)

12/4/07 (#114)

Every day in America, somebody's favorite band breaks up. On November 18th, it was my turn.

The dissolution of a band is a common tale, the rate of successful longevity so pathetically low that it makes even the most volatile marriage seem like a sure thing. As musicians often say, being in a band is like being married, except your married to two or three or four other people, and for "date night", you attend drunken bar scenes, display yourselves on a cramped stage and hope nobody boos your romantic bliss.

A band is susceptible to myriad intrusions upon its creativity: The quiet or clamorous clash of egos as members jockey for navigational control, the constant allure of new and potentially more satisfying projects that form on the periphery of one's circle of friends, and/or the tedium of playing songs you no longer wish to play, to name just a few. Even simple logistics outside of the musical realm can inflict a fatal blow: The bass player gets a job working nights, or the drummer gets an opportunity to move back to his home state and rediscover family, friends and familiarity.

It is the latter that brought down Brindle, a modest little duo that played sporadically in the Portland area over the last half decade, always to appreciative crowds that understood they were witness to something precious. Watching them play, you just knew Brindle wasn't going to "make it big", because "big" would have been cosmically (and comically) incongruous: They were intimate, and the rooms where they sounded best were ramshackle little places that scoffers would dismissively refer to as dives and regulars would proudly refer to as dives. When Brindle played, these rooms became a sonic geode: A gritty, unimpressive exterior disguising the gorgeous, colorful, multi-faceted beauty that existed within.

Their audience was heavy with friends and fellow musicians, most wearing a smile like they were getting away with something, privy to a secret spoken in a language that couldn't be understand beyond the walls of the room. When the band began its set, the crowd inevitably encroached Tim McMurrin (and his uniquely detuned guitar) and Josh Gambrell (and his uniquely arranged left-handed drum kit) because the music had irresistible gravity---all fleshy excess and muscular poses had been been boiled off, leaving a sonic skeleton that revealed the genuine grace and power of rock and roll. As my friend Paul Bryant noted on a web site upon hearing the news of their demise, "Brindle is some of the most satisfying live music I've ever heard. Their music is somehow secretly formulated in its simplicity to move me and choke me up while totally rocking me out."

Corralling their sound into a small collection of adjectives is a pointless procedure, as the contradictory modifiers "simple" and "complex" were immediately appropriate and simultaneously accurate. Their music bounced as if it was navigating a hopscotch game that stopped at 5 ½, often beginning with an irregular gait before revealing a strange yet lissome cadence. Such revelations had to be quick: Most Brindle songs clocked in around 120-seconds, with a rare few stretching toward the 3-minute mark and others stopping half-way to that point. Where most bands find a catchy riff and try to maximize the utility of the hook by repeatedly returning to it in the same song (verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus), Brindle allowed the hook to shine brightly then disappear, a formula written as "verse/chorus/next song". This could be heartbreaking, as it was disappointing if they never went back to a particular cool part, but that ache was soothed by the next song, which was always just as good as the one that preceded it. Two minutes later, fresh heartbreak ensued, a cycle that repeated throughout their set. The most accurate description of the band's sound involves no adjectives at all: "Rock smarter, not harder" was their unofficial motto (everything about Brindle seemed unofficial), and a more apt summation could not be written.

There are some bands that flash with stunning brilliance, but whose passing is accepted with little more than a shrug of regret. This is not a commentary on quality, but is instead essential to the natural order: Music is constantly evolving, and a particular bloom can be thoroughly enjoyed and then allowed to fall from the vine, to be replaced by a new bud. But there are some bands that urge us to break this order, that possess something inexplicable in their biology that makes us want to pluck the flower and press it, preserve it, prevent time from taking it from us.

Brindle was one of the latter bands. They will be dearly missed by many.

©2007 wpreagan

#113 - Aquatic Engineering

Aquatic Engineering

11/14/07 (#113)

There are several small lakes that form at this time of year in North Portland, waterways that rise and engulf vast tracts of land to form landmarks such as Lake Chautauqua (occupying the same general coordinates of N Chautauqua Blvd) and Halleck Pond (located where N Halleck St. was known to have existed in September.) These recreational areas abut the curbs of my neighborhood, formed by the confluence of rainy rivulets that flow along the gutter toward the city block's topographical low point, the storm drain, carrying on their waves the thousands of horse chestnut leaves that have spent an unhurried season papering the neighborhood in a veined, pale-yellow wrapper.

The chestnut leaf is enormous, shaped like a droplet of water if a droplet of water was the size of an adult's gym sneaker, and usually falls in the same cluster in which they grow, five leaves fanning out from a single point of connection with the branch, together large enough to form a plausible placemat for a formal dinner on Gilligan's Island. On a day with legitimate rain (not that ubiquitous Portland drizzle that is often referred to as rain), these enormous leaves are hurried to the sewer inlet where they are promptly splayed across the iron grate: In a matter of minutes, the drain is clogged and a pool begins to form. It's not uncommon for the pool to swallow the pavement completely, as the storm drain on the other side of the street is usually clogged with leaves as well.

Growing up in New England, I learned to regard standing water as the enemy: As one old-timer in my town told me years ago, "If it doesn't go where I want it to go, then it'll go where I don't want it to go." In Maine, water that backs up at a street drain will seek the next available low spot, which is most likely our or our neighbor's basement---it's a civic duty to make sure that the drains are flowing freely, as no one wants to hear the sound of their sump-pump turning on every four minutes throughout the night. (Plus, standing water breeds mosquitoes, and the battle against the mosquito never rests: I don't care if it's a puddle forming underneath a slowly melting icicle, sop that slosh up with a towel or it will soon look like the pool at a Las Vegas hotel, with bug larvae taking the place of uncouth brats on spring break.)

Armed with this history, I could mount a nurture-based defense for the behavior that, when seen through the plate-glass window of a cozy living room, must look like madness: A grown man teetering on the edge of the curb, stabbing at the water with a felled maple branch, too foolish to come in from the rain. I could argue that I deserve their thanks more than their ridicule, saving their basements from certain flooding by allowing the city's drainage network to perform as designed, but honestly, I don't do it for them. Benefit to others is simply an ancillary bonus: Mine is a primarily selfish act, aquatic engineering for fun and adventure.

If you're thinking that standing outside on a rainy day poking blindly at a puddle in order to find a storm drain doesn't sound like fun, then you have a stunted definition of fun. (And you can count my wife among your allies, as she invariably delivers her standard "So I'll see you at home?" whenever we approach one of these spontaneous lagoons.) The evacuation of these impromptu ponds provides a three-point fulfillment that is not readily available within the confines of our hectic and overfull days, especially not readily available on the average 35-minute dog walk through the city, including (but not limited to) these pleasures:

An opportunity to reconnect with the simple joys of childhood: The neighborhood where I grew up was bordered on one side by Chartley Brook, a stream that originated somewhere in a Norman Rockwell painting. In this stream I learned about pollywogs, frogs, turtles, crayfish, and a guidebook's worth of other small water life. During summer vacations, or even after school on sunny days, I loved to visit that stream and play for hours: Standing in the water with old sneakers on, I arranged rocks to make breakwaters and harbors, created tree bark boats that sought refuge in the harbors (or missed the harbor and fell victim to the "whitewater" that percolated under the dense copse of birches downstream), and assembled a world where my imagination could spend unfettered hours. Frankly, my adult life doesn't have enough of that type of recreation, so the clogged storm drain is like a portal---as the Chestnut leaf seal is broken, small whirlpools form and gain velocity, sucking nearby flotsam into their inverted cone, and I suddenly have the enthusiasm of a boy standing at the bank of Chartley Brook, unaware of anything except the manipulation of the flow. This is more than mere nostalgia; it's just short of time travel.

Negotiating peace between nature and man-made infrastructure: The clogged storm drain is a microcosm of the battle between earth and industry (don't fool yourself, industry and the environment rarely meet with a genuinely cooperative spirit, even when the best intentions are present), one of Mother Nature's myriad miniscule retaliations for the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan Project, Love Canal, etc. (The earth can certainly justify a grudge.) Yes, I'm aggrandizing, but this small lubrication of the friction between nature and technology provides a palpable sense of harmonic restoration.

The satisfaction of a job well done: My life is cluttered with tasks in various states of completion: Some of these projects require me to conform to someone else's schedule (which can prevent them from getting done punctually), others allow me to work at my own pace (which also can prevent them from getting done punctually.) As such, my brain is constantly being tickled by the loose ends of these endeavors, each of which distracts from the other until I feel like a man populating six crossword puzzles simultaneously. ("Where was that 8-letters down for 'overstimulated'?") But when I chance upon a flooded street, I can enjoy the satisfaction of overseeing a project from start to finish: When I arrive, there is an impasse; through my efforts, there is resolution; when I depart, fishing season is over.

This season I have enjoyed having an apprentice, as my five-year-old daughter precociously recognizes the enjoyment of this seasonal pastime, exercising her body and brain with an improvised deployment of strength and strategy. (Either that, or she simply relishes the opportunity to splash about in an ankle-deep puddle with parental approval.) This companionship does more than provide a semi-plausible alibi for my playing in puddles---aquatic engineering offers a bundle of teaching opportunities: Choosing a suitable poking stick (we discuss the tensile strength of different woods, how to identify hardwoods versus softwoods, what happens to wood when it rots), identifying different leaves (we examine the various shapes of the leaves, searching out as many variations as we can find), and observing the water flow (what makes a whirlpool, why more holes makes for faster draining, how the city's drainage system works.) In fact, I could pitch the whole process as an unscripted biology and physics seminar, a chance to reinforce that the world is a giant science lab and that class is always in session.

That it also looks like two kids and a dog playing in a puddle is purely coincidental.

©2007 wpreagan