Category: Arts and Culture

For the most part, I’ve tried to keep Matthew Sperry-related info at matthewsperry.org and not x-post here, but this is exciting: The big benefit concert scheduled for this Thursday, which was already looking really exciting, just got bigger. Tom Waits has confirmed that he will perform, so it should be a sold-out house. Details here. If you’re in the Bay Area, definitely consider turning up – it was going to be great even before Waits confirmed. And Stacia and Lila could really use the financial support.

On the way out of Home Despot today (planting urn, blinds, butterfly bolts), found that the fastest line seemed to be the one with no tellers at all. It’s finally happened — fully automated checkout. You scan and bag your own items as a gentle robotic female voice describes your purchases and tells you whether any “unexpected objects” are in the way. If you have anything too large, an attendant overrides and runs over with a hand scanner. When done, pay the machine via cash, credit, ATM, even get cash back.

Technically, it’s not that different from a you-pay petrol pump. Conceptually, it seems like a leap forward as significant as the ATM machine – humans gave up their jobs for your convenience (Home Despot claims that no one has been laid off as a result — clerks have merely been moved onto the floor, which in their case makes sense – nowhere is it harder to get floor help).

During the industrial revolution, saboteurs fearing that machines would leave humans high and dry threw their boots into the cogs of machines to break them (sabot is French for boot, hence the word saboteur. No one at Home Despot seemed to have any similar inclination, the system works marvelously. It was a trip to think that Miles is born into a world where the checkout clerk is becoming a thing of the past.

On 4th St. today, in a toddler shop, a pair of books caught my eye. Little Golden Book Classics The Good Humor Man (1964) and Scuffy the Tugboat (1946). The idea of of these reprints is to cash in on the sentimentality of people who were raised on the same titles and now want to share them with their own children. The pictures were groovy and the plots innocent (or so I thought), so we bought them.

Once home, it dawned on us that “The Good Humor Man” is not called “The Ice Cream Man” — that the book cover uses the actual Good Humor logo, followed by a trademark symbol. It’s the oldest example of product placement we could think of. The stereotypes inside are excellent: Mommy with her apron, Daddy with lawnmower and pipe, Tommy and his trains, Dinah and her dolls.

It takes a deeper read to uncover the insidious subtext of Scuffy the Tugboat. Scuffy starts out secure, at home, floating in the bathtub. But he soon grows discontent, wants more out of life. Gets his wish, ends up floating down streams, caught in a logjam, tossed in a flood. In the end, Scuffy is back home, in the tub, higher ambitions dashed, wings clipped, more than happy to conform to standard expectations for toy tugboats. “This is the life for me!,” Scuffy exclaims. One of the reviewers at Amazon cites the book’s “important lesson.”

Of course, for Miles it will be more like “bo!” (for “boat”). But it will be fun to pretend he’s being spoon-fed a diet of “the man”‘s pre-PC propaganda.

Part of the fun of breaking limbs (Amy commented today that I’m starting to look familiar in a cast) is staying home, checking out, and renting movies. Saturday brought home a pair of John Waters films.

Waters’ goal for years was to make sure that each film outdid the last in bad taste … though Polyester broke that tradition somewhat in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. It’s still my favorite, and I still have one of the original Odorama cards in a box somewhere.

Desperate Living somewhat harder to watch unless you’re thirsty for 90 minutes of extreme, wonderful trash. Picture Queen Carlotta as a “special” actress missing two front teeth, half-spherical, giant red hair, ruling prone from her perch on a four-poster cot held aloft by Castro boys in leather motorcycle caps and black mesh shirts.

Peggy Gravel: The citizens of Mortville are beneath contempt. Only the rich should be allowed to live.

Queen Carlotta: I like the way you think. I’ll give you a trial run. Your first duty will be to help my soldiers spread rabies to the whole town. Do you think you can handle that?

Gravel: Oh, yes, your majesty. And I know just the person I want to give it to first.

Now imagine 90 minutes of similarly insane scene making and you get the basic idea of Desperate Living. If you’ve already seen your share of Waters’ films, his directors’ commentaries on the DVDs make them worth re-watching.

Matt and Trey Stone of South Park etc. are creating a new movie called Team America, this time using marionettes as actors rather than cardboard cutouts. A nod of respect to Thunderbirds Are Go! A $20 million nod.

“Our cast will be deliberately made of wood, but that will only be taking to the extreme what is evident in many Hollywood movies right now,” Variety quoted Matt Stone as saying about the movie.

Thanks Sean.

Saw Winged Migration with Mike tonight. 90 minutes of footage of birds migrating (some up to 12,000 miles, North pole to South), shot from radio-controlled planes, balloons, gliders — they get right in there alongside the birds and come up with stunning footage nobody has ever seen before. I mean, we’ve seen birds migrating, but not from their perspective, not from within the flock. To get a camera up there and to have it accepted as if it were another bird, to experience the pace of flight, the view of land mass from that particular height… breathtaking. No special effects, it is claimed at the outset. Four years in the making — an experience. See this in a theatre, not as a rental. And forgive it the often Enya-like soundtrack.

Update: Discovered later that Matthew and Lila were in the audience with us that night. It was Lila’s first trip to the movies, and it would have been our last chance to see Matthew alive. 12 hours later he would be dead.

Fascinated by comments in Peter, Paul, and Mary from people who have lived in or who currently live in France and Spain, saying that those countries’ governments maintain active lists of allowable names for babies. Naturally, these lists are Biblically derived. The thought of a similar tradition continuing on in the U.S. is almost impossible to imagine, and it amazes me that Europeans are sufficiently complicit with the tradition to not be rioting in the streets over such a fascistic and unfree practice. How can such a personal choice be considered government business in 2003?
Continue reading “France, Spain Control Baby Names”