Monthly Archives: April 2013

Thanks a lot TV

Sometimes I feel like I’ve watched so much TV in my life that I’ve done irreparable damage, to my DNA, like I’ve corrupted the very core of who I am, or who I would have been had I not spent so much time in front of the television. One particular way in which I can measure how my soul has been diminished is my reaction to real life tragedy. TV, especially the reruns that I grew up with, has desensitized me. I’m incapable of feeling any sincere amount of empathy when horrible things happen to those around me.

Right before my grandfather died, he was diagnosed with macular degeneration, fated to slowly going blind, unable to see the world in which he was soon no longer to be a part of. Everybody took the news really hard. All of my aunts and uncles and cousins got together, to be close, to mourn the closing of a chapter in our family’s history. People put on a brave face, but there was definitely an underlying sorrow, thinking about my once active grandfather, now no longer able to drive anywhere, soon he wouldn’t be able see anything at all.

And all I could think of was, well, the Fonz went blind on an episode of Happy Days. I forget the specifics, but I think something happened where Potsy smacked Fonzie in the head with a frying pan, and for the rest of the episode, he couldn’t see a thing. Doctors told Mr. Fonzerelli that, unfortunately, the damage was permanent, that he’d just have to get used to being blind, for the rest of his life. The word forever was tossed around at least five times.

Everybody tried to act upbeat while the Fonz wallowed in self-loathing. He tried showing up at that burger joint hoping everything would be the same, until he went over to where he thought the jukebox was, to try that trick where he’d save a quarter by hitting the machine and it would just start playing. But he was blind, so he accidentally hit Ralph in the stomach. Things got quiet before Ralph tried to break the awkward silence by making some jukebox sound effects.

But the Fonz was pissed. Everything wasn’t the same. His life as he knew it was over. Or was it? It wasn’t. It turns out that the doctor was reading somebody else’s test results, that Fonzie’s blindness would only be temporary. I wonder how the other patient reacted to the doctor’s mix-up, “I’m sorry sir, I know I told you that you’d be back to normal in no time, but it turns out I made a mistake. You’ll be blind forever.”

What, were they really going to make the Fonz blind in every subsequent episode of Happy Days? No, the Fonz was blind, for a minute, he dealt with it, or didn’t deal with it, but it doesn’t matter, because stuff like that never really happens on TV anyway. And I watched tons of crap like this growing up. So I couldn’t help not feeling bad for my grandfather, because even though everybody kept stressing that macular degeneration was incurable, I just kept waiting for that doctor to show up, “Sorry for the misunderstanding, folks,” my grandfather would be like, “Hey Doc. No problem. Aaaay.”

It’s like my grandmother. She spent a good chunk of her life in a wheelchair thanks to multiple sclerosis. Again, that’s a really serious condition, and I’m sure it was the cause of a significant amount of pain and suffering. But as hard as I tried to face my grandmother’s reality, I could never shake that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Lieutenant Worf got crushed by a giant shipping container in Cargo Bay Two.

An accident like that would have killed a mere human, but Worf’s a Klingon, and Klingons are tough, so he survived. But he didn’t make it out totally unscathed: his spine looked more like a jigsaw puzzle now, and he was left a quadriplegic. The honor bound security chief was devastated. His life as he knew it was gone forever. What of his duties on the Enterprise? Over.

The Klingon code of honor didn’t help much either. Apparently disabled Klingons are expected to commit ritualistic suicide. Only Worf couldn’t move his hands, so he asked Commander Riker to do it for him. But do the twenty-forth century ethics of the United Federation of Planets allow for assisted suicide? And what of Worf’s young son Alexander? So many hard questions. So much irreversible loss.

Luckily, right after Worf chose to stick it out, to give life a chance, Doctor Crusher heard of this brand new experimental Klingon spine restoring operation. It had never been tried out before, but it just might work. What followed was a pretty suspenseful five-minute surgery scene and, guess what? It worked. Worf was back to normal. Was it too much to expect something like this in real life? Why couldn’t doctors come up with an experimental MS procedure for my grandmother? Why are you doing this to me, TV?

Do television shows think they’re teaching audiences a lesson by having their characters overcome impossible situations? Are we supposed to learn from their experiences dealing very briefly with chronic disease and permanent disability? No, we’re all getting ruined, our ability to cope with trauma eroded by cheap writing and loose plot holes.

Charles in Charge gets hit in the head and instead of suffering brain damage turns into a badass biker named Chaz. Michelle Tanner comes down with amnesia, but don’t worry, Uncle Jessie and the gang help jog her memory with a best-of Full House video montage. This is the fantasy world in which our generation grew up, where all tumors wind up being benign, and where all cancer scares are inevitably the mistaken results of some radiologist made at the beginning of the episode. Thanks a lot TV.

Waterskiing

Every summer my family heads up to this lake in Massachusetts. We all try to spend as much time as we can up there, and, weather permitting, it’s always fun to take the boat out, do some water activities. Fishing. Tubing. Waterskiing.

Waterskiing isn’t the easiest pastime. It’s like, nobody in my family really knew how to waterski, not at first. My dad just bought some waterskis and we hooked them up. That first summer was a lot of everybody hanging out on the boat, taking turns bobbing up and down in the water, waiting for my dad to take off, just trying to successfully stand up on the skis.

It’s not easy at all. You think about yourself, in the lake, these two giant skis attached to your feet. You can’t swim with them on. It’s really all you can do in such an unnatural position to get yourself into a stance where, when that rope you’re holding suddenly jerks you forward, you’ll be able to balance yourself into standing upright, and then hopefully immediately be able to shift all of your weight into such a way that you’re successfully doing it, you’re actually waterskiing behind a moving boat.

For me, for a lot of people, figuring all of this out took a good amount of trial and error. Boarding the boat, navigating the boat out to the middle of the water, turning the boat off, attaching the rope, putting on a life vest, jumping overboard, getting the skis on, maneuvering into position, holding the rope, waiting for my dad to go, “Ready?” before slowly shifting the boat into gear, watching that line slowly unravel until it’s taut. And then the boat is far enough away where you can’t really hear anybody anymore, you just have to give a thumbs up, like go for it, I’m ready.

And that’s when the boat has to power forward, to pull you up fast enough so that not only are you and the skis out of the water, but you’re standing upright, gliding along the surface, skiing. The first time it’s, ready, set, go, and then immediately falling over without ever having even made it up. The line gets ripped from your hands, you tumble awkwardly over your own body, and maybe one or both of the skis falls off of your feet.

The engine then has to be cut, the line needs to be reeled in, and the boat has to slowly turn around and cruise back over to you, bobbing in the water. Someone throws you the line and the whole process starts over again, everybody on the boat watching you, waiting for their chance to give it a shot. My family has been doing this for like eight years now, so all of my brothers and sisters, we sort of know what we’re doing, in a basic way. But when we were all just learning, still figuring it out? That was so much starting and stopping, trying and failing.

When I went to Ecuador with the Peace Corps, I missed out on a couple of summers with the family. One weekend abroad a bunch of us expats were relaxing on a beach at some small coastal town. These guys would walk around, offering water activites, their boats, tube rides, parasailing, waterskiing. I figured, yeah sure, I know how to waterski. This’ll be fun.

He made me buy half an hour of his services. I got on his boat and we went out past where anybody was swimming. “You know how to do this?” he asked me. I’m sure he had tons of people with no experience thinking they’d just get out there and go. I got in the water, gave the guy a thumbs up, and off we went. I was waterskiing. It was fun. And then two minutes passed, and then five minutes. My back was getting tired, so were my arms. We went back and forth a few times and I waved to my friends on the shore.

And then I thought, wow, this isn’t nearly as fun without anybody in my family here. All of that waiting around with everybody else for your turn, watching people fall and get up and try again and fall again, having your ten or fifteen minutes on the water before somebody else gets to have a go, it’s all part of the activity, part of what makes waterskiing so fun.

Here I was on the Pacific, just kind of standing there, thinking that I still had twenty-five minutes to kill of having this guy tug me around. So I let go of the line. He came over and offered to throw me the rope again. I told him that it was OK, that I was done, that I had had enough. It was only like seven bucks for the half hour anyway. He shrugged and took me back to the shore.

You have no idea (what your body is capable of)

The other day I was out on a really long run. Halfway through, my stomach drops. Does that make sense? That’s what it felt like. It felt like everything holding my insides in place suddenly vanished, gave way, and in the span of about fifteen seconds, I went from perfectly fine to total agony. Did I mention that it was pouring rain? It was pouring rain. And when I say really long run, it’s like much longer than you’re imagining, twice as long. I hobbled along for another mile or so before coming across the most disgusting public bathroom in some park by the Williamsburg Bridge. There was a group of homeless people inside, taking cover from the rain, passing around a bottle of hooch. As soon as I open the door they all turn to me. Man, what do I do? I just kind of motioned toward the stall. It’s amazing what your body is capable of in moments of extreme duress.

Last spring I was biking to work. It was total gridlock, everywhere, all the way from my house to my job in the city. The cars were at a complete standstill. So I’m just flying in between rows of parked vehicles, weaving in and out. I get to the Queensboro Bridge. Usually I’d just stay in the bike lane, but traffic wasn’t moving in the car lane, and I figured, what the hell? Why not? It would save me a left turn going downtown. At first everything was great. The lanes are so wide on the bridge that I basically had my own lane in between lanes. And I’m just feeling fantastic, cruising past all of these cars, them totally stuck, and I’m just flying.

But then like halfway across traffic opens up, and not gradually, but all at once. Like something must have been stuck up ahead, an accident, I have no idea what, but something. And now, nothing. Traffic picks up. The cars start flying by. They’re honking at me and cursing at me out the window, and while my lane is still somewhat wide, I mean, it’s hard to stay in a perfectly straight line with cars zooming by me on both sides, fifty miles per hour. And it’s a long bridge. Finally, and I don’t know if it was my fault or the taxi’s fault, but this taxi kind of clips me, just barely. And so I kind of ricochet into the next lane, and another taxi clips me, again, just slightly. And so I’m bouncing back and force in between these two cars, like I’m in some weird pinball machine. All I’m thinking is, I’m so fucked, this is it. But it gets worse. Another car comes up and hits me, and my derailleur gets actually physically stuck in the hubcap of another car in front of me. Did I mention that it’s a police car? So I’m riding in tandem with him, but he doesn’t know it. He sees me, he thinks I’m up to something, apart from just being in the car lane, he thinks I’m up to some stunt, which I kind of am, but not this stunt. And he’s out of the window, “Slow down!” and I’m like, “I can’t!” and he’s like, “You can’t? You will! I’m the cops!” It’s crazy what your mind is able to make your body do in insane situations like that, using all of your reflexes, having a conversation with a policeman while barely maintaining control of your stuck bicycle, then getting off the bridge, dislodging your bike and making a break for it before the cop figures out what’s going on.

One time I was skydiving. Did I mention that there was a tornado warning on the same day? The pilot was crazy, like a total adrenaline junky crazy person, and as the sky blackened and the hailstones started to fall he looked me dead on, a real insane glint in his eye, and he just said, “I’m good if you’re good.” And I’m so stupid, I was just thinking, well, this guy’s a pilot, I’m sure he’s been through it all. Did I mention that there was actually a tornado on the other end of the runway? “Don’t worry!” he yelled back, “I think I can beat it!” He took off and yeah, he actually beat it. But the canvas roof of the plane got ripped off and that’s when I started to get really worried. When I wasn’t getting smacked in the head with hailstones, all I could hear was the pilot going, “Yeeeee-haw! I ain’t fraid a no tornados!” We got up to jumping altitude and I realized, shit, I totally forgot to bring my parachute. Did I mention there was a tornado? There were actually three tornadoes, and we were in the center of the tornado triangle.

Just when I make a move to tell the pilot, that we better land, that I don’t have a parachute, a huge hailstone comes out of nowhere and knocks him in the head, knocks him right out. Then the hailstone ricochets off of his head and onto the cockpit, hitting some of the airplane controls. The whole thing goes dead. My only idea is, is there some way I can get inside this guy’s skydiving outfit, lug his unconscious body out of the plane, all while it’s in a total freefall, spiraling out of control, and activate his parachute without getting eaten up by one of those tornadoes? Did I mention that the three tornadoes had since splintered off into nine tornadoes? And that there was a constant web of lightning bolts connecting all nine of them, like an octagon, but with nine sides instead of eight, and us plummeting to our doom in the middle? I mean, yeah I made it, I’m alive, right? But still, you never know what your made of until you’re looking death right in the eye, or in the gaping hole where his eye would be if he had one.

Movie Review: 42

42 is a hard movie to review. I feel bad saying anything negative because the subject matter, the real life struggle of the first black Major League Baseball player, it’s so important. Seeing in film where we’ve come from as a nation, where we’re at right now, how we got here, how much further we have to go, it’s everything you think it would be: inspiring, uplifting, motivational. But at the same time it’s big Hollywood making a huge big Hollywood biopic (I don’t even know how you pronounce biopic. Is it bio-pic? Bi-opic?) And Hollywood gives us everything you’d think it would give us.

You get a big star, not in the guy who played Jackie Robinson (Chadwick Boseman,) but in Harrison Ford, playing the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a guy named Branch Rickey. It took me a good fifteen minutes to even recognize that it was Harrison Ford, and when I finally did, all I could think was, Jesus, Star Wars VII is going be terrible. In preparation for this role, I imagine Ford went to the public library and checked out a book titled, How to Act as a No-Nonsense 1940s Cigar-Chomping Baseball Team Owner for Dummies. You could do this yourself. Say something in your normal voice right now. Now make it two octaves lower. Now add a little rasp. Bingo.

You get the sweeping score. The music was like the themes from Superman, Jurassic Park, and ET all rolled into one epic soundtrack, then made just slightly more generic, and finally added way too liberally throughout the course of the film. Yeah, I get it, a huge orchestra overlay felt right as Robinson walked onto Ebbets Field for the first time, but that grand music lost a little of its luster used on top of Robinson taking his first integrated shower in the locker room.

You get a real life story that’s kind of flattened out somewhat. Everything’s just a little too much and not enough all at the same time. The dialogue felt forced; I can’t imagine anyone talking the way that these characters speak. And I’m not referring to the vitriol, the large doses of racist hate, always accentuated with heavy usage of those hard n-words. It’s the conversations that the main characters have amongst themselves. Every sentence sounded like it was written as a potential one-liner for a commercial. Cheesy stuff like, “The world’s not so simple anymore. Maybe it never was,” “The world is waiting for us,” or, “It doesn’t matter what I believe, only what I do.”

And then there’s the tricky subject of race, of our country’s racial history, of its continuing impact on society. Even in this seemingly innocent tale of clearly good vs. blatantly evil, the way that this story is told is still somebody’s point of view of American history. The movie opens up with Mr. Rickey shocking a bunch of midlevel managers, telling them that he’s going to bring a black baseball player to the big leagues.

I felt similar pangs of discomfort when I saw Lincoln a few months ago. It just feels like Hollywood, in trying to reach out to audiences both black and white, in trying to portray certain real struggles in our history, it can’t help but come off as patronizing. In a way, this movie isn’t just about what Jackie Robinson did for baseball, for America, but it’s about what a bunch of white guys allowed Jackie Robinson to do for baseball, for America.

There’s a scene after Jackie and Rachel Robinson have their baby where the title character gives this monologue standing in front of the newborn. He talks about how his dad left him when he was six months old, how this time it’s going to be different, how this baby is going to know who his dad is. I couldn’t help but imagine Hollywood as this big predominantly white institution almost giving a public service announcement to the black community about parenting. Which … is it OK? I have no idea. I don’t claim any authority on race relations. President Obama has made similar remarks; so why do his sound more genuine?

Ultimately this movie is fine for what it is, which is something pretty much readymade to be shown in high schools across the country whenever teachers feel like phoning it in for the day. It’s a movie aimed at general audiences on the widest level imaginable. It’s an important subject, almost impossible to believe that this stuff happened not even a hundred years ago. Despite all of its big-budget flaws, it made me think, about America, about race, about how far we’ve come since segregation, about how, as a white person, how many black people do I really know?

Are we really an integrated society? I kept thinking about Jim Crow, about Civil Rights, about how during World War II, black and white men served together, died together. All of that must have forged connections, real human connections that served as some sort of a foundation for the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. But what do we have now? Why does it feel like so much is still separate? Maybe this generation is lacking in a huge event bigger than race, something like a World War or a national protest movement to really break down racial barriers.

Or maybe we’ll never really get there, maybe it’s always going to be this continuing conversation, people making movies, always reintroducing our history to the present day. In this regard, any movie that makes these questions relevant, important, I think it’s a success, not to mention a tribute to an incredible man and his inspiring story.

Birthday parties and Power Rangers piñatas

When I was a little kid, all I ever really wanted was a big birthday party with a piñata. I pictured all of my friends taking a shot at it first, blindly swinging away, but nobody really doing any significant damage. Then it would be my turn, the birthday boy going last. I’d walk right up and take a huge swing, perfectly placed, dead on in its accuracy, and the whole thing would just explode, candy showering down everywhere, everybody cheering, chanting my name, dancing around in the downpour of individually wrapped sweets.

Obviously that’s kind of a difficult fantasy to exactly make happen in real life. There are so many variables out of my control, like all of the other kids. I wasn’t the smallest kid in my class, but I definitely wasn’t the biggest either. And in terms of skill? Of being able to accurately swing a stick, blindfolded, and crack it open on the first try? Yeah, I could think of like five other kids who would’ve had a better chance at that than me.

But my whole plan, to actually set it up, I just had to do the best I could and leave the rest up to chance. Or I could have acted like a spoiled little birthday brat and told everybody to miss it on purpose, watching them carefully as they all went first, having a mini breakdown temper tantrum if any of the kids started swinging too close, you know, starting a little screaming fit, just being totally obnoxious, and then when it’s my turn, I could have had them lower the piñata to my exact specifications, make myself a custom blindfold that only looks like a blindfold, like you’d think I’d be blinded, but I’d actually be able to see everything. And then even if I missed, or if I hit it but it didn’t break apart immediately, I’d start whacking it again and again, until that candy shower that I was talking about before … yeah, I wouldn’t want to do that. That wouldn’t have felt right. It wouldn’t have been that organic moment of pure joy that I was dreaming about. Plus my mom would have definitely yelled at me for acting like such a baby.

My birthday was coming up and my mom let me have a party in the backyard. Maybe I’d have like a birthday party guardian angel watching over the whole fiesta, making sure that my friends couldn’t swing, or that they could swing but they’d miss totally, or they wouldn’t miss totally, but their whacks wouldn’t do anything, wouldn’t even make the piñata move at all, it would be like hitting a tree, or a piece of steel. Maybe that would happen.

I was really into the Power Rangers at the time, and I really wanted a piñata of Tommy, the green Power Ranger. Tommy wasn’t one of the original five. In fact, he wasn’t even really a Power Ranger at all. Not at first. Well, he was a Power Ranger, but he was evil. Get it? Like Tommy the person wasn’t evil, but Rita Repulsa used him as a vessel for the evil inherent in the evil Power Ranger medallion that then turned him into the evil green Ranger. It’s complicated, and very evil; I think you’d have to watch the show.

What I was getting at was that I really wanted a green Ranger piñata, but he wasn’t an original Ranger – even though he wound up overcoming the evil and joining the Power Rangers as the sixth Ranger – so the piñata store didn’t have a green one on hand. Just the classics, red, yellow, blue, black, pink. I picked out the blue one, thinking that I could just customize it, make it green myself. Even though, I thought, it would probably be easier to turn the yellow one green than the blue one, but the yellow one was Trini, a girl, and if my plan didn’t work out, I didn’t want to be stuck at my party with a girl Power Ranger piñata, everybody would have made fun of me.

It came out OK. It didn’t exactly look green. It looked green, kind of, but you could still totally see the blue underneath. I made the special gold green Ranger shield, so, you know, maybe the parents didn’t get what was going on, but all of my friends, they got it, they were like, “Wow! Rob! That’s so cool! Where did you get a green Ranger piñata?”

So far, so good. Everybody lined up. Mark went first, definitely the biggest of my classmates. I figured, universe, or God, I guess I still believed in God when I was a little kid, I was like God, just let Mark miss, and I’ll be golden. My mom tied the blindfold really tight. He stepped up. Whack!

Direct hit. Mark knocked it right in the homemade chest plate. It was like all of the green came off first, so it was this blue-green, mostly blue explosion, and Mark was just standing there, getting showered in candy by himself. And he didn’t even realized it at first, but as soon as he did, he untucked his shirt and held it out underneath the candy shower, just collecting so much candy, the lion’s share, all of the good stuff. Then when it stopped he ran off to some corner, he hadn’t even taken off the blindfold yet, and he sat down and started in on his loot. Everybody else kind of just ran to the grass to see what was left. Then some of the parents started clapping, then everybody had cake, and then everybody went home.