December 27, 2007
The 1977 J.C. Penney catalog
This one is making the rounds of the Internet -- excerpts from a rediscovered copy of the 1977 J.C. Penney's catalog, at this link: Strap in, shut up and hold on: We're going back.Many classics here in terms of home furnishings (barrel chairs, shag toilet covers) and clothing (wide belts, jumpsuits, plaids, snap-fronted shirts). "I laughed to the point of tears on this one," my sister Maureen noted.
What was striking to me was the photo of the boy in the Dorkville belt, below, and how much his shirt reminded me of the kind of outfit in most of my brother Paul's school photos of the 1970s.
Lo and behold, I found a picture of Paul in a very similar shirt on my dad's family photo compilation CD, which is fairly packed with gems from the 1970s. A side by side:
Now the question is whether I dare show myself in the outfit I wore to the Rolling Stones infamous Bicentennial Concert in 1976 at RFK Stadium in D.C.: blue halter top, red white and blue bell bottoms with stars everywhere, wide white belt, clunky watch, miles of midriff on show. Someone will have to dare me! It's a little more Late Woodstock than true 1970s to be honest.
- posted by jbelliveau at 11:09 PM in Parodies
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December 25, 2007
The Redskins, Dan Snyder, mojo and female football fans
Well if this photo in the Washington Post doesn't bring back memories of the glory years of the Fun Bunch, as Clinton Portis celebrates a score Sunday night against the Vikings:
There's an expectant hum for hundreds of miles around D.C. whenever the 'Skins are in the playoff hunt. Tomorrow they play Dallas, and if they do well, we can credit a couple of public gestures by owner Dan Snyder, long derided as a meddlesome twerp, in bringing team, coach and owner more closely together than before.
Snyder got the entire team to Miami for Sean Taylor's funeral, and, by private jet, he sent quarterback Todd Collins to Boston to see his newborn son.
The gestures went a ways toward mending a rift that occurred between the team and owner that seems to date from when LaVar Arrington felt stiffed on a handshake deal with Snyder for an additional $6 million. With Arrington and his family still living in Anne Arundel County, and the Redskins and Ravens two teams that socialize with each other and with former players who remain in Maryland, the lingering effects of the Arrington affair appear to remain.
With a coach like Joe Gibbs, and an owner that finally seems to care on a personal level for his players, and a quarterback -- Collins -- who doesn't fold under pressure, we have a transformed team.
The photo above from the Washington Post illustrates for the first time, Snyder, shown at far right, is now coming down to the sidelines at the end of games, because he senses he is more welcome than he was before.
As enthralled and connected as I remain as a nearly lifelong Redskins fan, I do have to agree with a recent commentary in the Post about how miserable and profane the actual attending of games in person has become.
In "No Game For a Family," Dick Meyer notes:
I went to my last professional football game this month. My son and I braved frigid, remote FedEx Field to see our beloved Chicago Bears, the fallen Super Bowl champions, humiliated 24-16 by the struggling Washington Redskins. It wasn't the depth of our despair that will keep us away from football stadiums for good but the depravity of the fans.
I suppose depravity is a strong word. But what better describes drunken adult men, egged on by other grown beer-swillers, belly-shouting the most spectacular obscenities imaginable as they stand next to a 13-year-old boy? Every play was a competition to produce a more vile insult or a different suggestion about which Bear body part might be stuffed up which orifice. When the Redskins scored their first touchdown, four young women -- I'm guessing they were in high school -- turned around and did a little stripper's dance that made my son blush as I cringed. Even putting aside their ages, it was too cold to bare flesh.
While this kind of behavior is probably pretty typical of many NFL games, and actually tame compared to what can go on at a Ravens game (let alone the old Baltimore Colts, with the brawls in the stands), it really isn't what Redskins football was historically about -- which was having great and knowledgeable fans whose language wouldn't scorch the ears of the teams' many female and kid fans.
This article got 312 comments, many preaching "Amen."
I e-mailed my friend Ann Sjoerdsma, who has had season tickets for many years, and even took me in 1991 to the NFC championship between the Skins and Lions, a wonderful experience. She wrote back:
I agree down the line with what he said. In fact, I was thinking about writing a "I second that motion" letter. We gave up our club-seat contract because of all of the obnoxious and potentially dangerous drunks. I read the column hurriedly, but I'm fairly certain that he and his son sat in the club-seat section. The fans are much, much better in any other section of the stadium. I've tried them all.
It's a shame the frat boy and drunk element has taken over the games. The Redskins used to bring everyone together when they played at RFK, and gained a lot of women fans because of Joe Gibbs (whom my mom loves) and because the stadium atmosphere had a lovely and friendly feel, from the team band, which gave the stadium more of a college than a pro feel, to the Hogs cross-dressing and long-time fans such as Chief Zee.
Footnote: We had our Christmas game-in-the-street in Annapolis Sunday, and I caught a first-down pass and a l-o-n-g touchdown by getting behind the defense and screaming my brother-in-law Rob's name, who noticed me and sent a big fat throw right into my palms. S-w-e-e-t! I was impressed with my nephew's fiance, Andrea, who calmly caught two slants, Rob was quite accurate. Nephew Michael plays football at his school and seems to have an excellent understanding of the game. A good time was had by all. It's always useful to have Rob drawing plays on his sweatshirt front, throwing bombs and changing the rules to favor his teammates.
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:56 PM in Sports
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December 23, 2007
A remarkable vet: Dr. Lisa Tuzo
I've written before about the thoughtful care our geriatric sheltie Beau received from Baltimore mobile vet Dr. Lisa Tuzo: here in The Life and Times of Beau Belliveau and Dealing with Beau's end of life.My friend and soccer buddy Rachel sent me an interesting e-mail this week, it reads as follows:
Jeannette,
This past weekend, my cat had an emergency related to her heart condition and I was advised to put her to sleep. A friend of mine recommended I ask her vet (Dr Tuzo) to come to my house to put her to sleep instead of taking her to my vet's office. Dr Tuzo rearranged her schedule on Saturday and spent almost 3 hours carefully observing my cat & determined it was not time to put her to sleep. It turns out she was right.
I was incredibly impressed with Dr Tuzo's care.
I just "googled" Dr Tuzo and your Beau blog entries came up, and I can see Dr Tuzo also provided great care for him. So I thought I'd pop you a note.
So that's another vote of confidence in Dr. Tuzo. She seems to be quite a gifted veterinarian. Both Rachel and I highly recommend her especially for older and very sick animals. More on the situation with Rachel's cat:
My cat's condition last Friday was dire (blood clot resulting from her long-standing hypertrophic cardiomyopathy condition). I was told by both the hospital and my regular vet that there would only be a small chance she could pull through and it would require lots of tests/treatment & money with no guarantees of recovery. They recommended I put her to sleep soon. I decided it would be best to have her be put to sleep at home. A friend gave me Dr Tuzo's name - Dr Tuzo had provided exemplary end-of-life care for her dog when he was ill last year. Dr Tuzo rearranged her schedule on Saturday in order to come by my house.
In the meantime, my cat had miraculously started recovering on her own (this normally does not happen in her condition). I did not know she was recovering, but Dr Tuzo explained that she was. She decided the cat was not ready to be put to sleep. She carefully and patiently went to work like a detective. Pets can't tell you what's wrong with them - Dr Tuzo has all kinds of techniques to try to figure out what's wrong. She spent almost 3 hours observing the cat (the advantage of having a vet come to your house is they can observe the cat in their own environment - walking, eating, peeing, etc - can't do this in a vet's office). She was extremely dedicated. She gave me a plan of action to move forward with and pain medication to hold the cat over until she could be brought to the cardiologist. She touched base with me daily to check in & discussed the situation with the cardiologist first thing Monday morning.
The cat has been evaluated by the cardiologist and is on a new medication regime now & needs to be retested periodically. She is stable and happy now. There is a chance her condition can be put under control, although there is also a chance her heart could fail. We'll just have to wait and see...
I'm not sure what would have happened if Dr Tuzo did not come by on Saturday. There's a good chance the cat would have been put to sleep at my vet's office.
One of the problems is that I did not follow-up with some tests I had my vet do earlier this year. Lesson is: if you ask your vet to do a test, don't assume they will call you if the results are bad. They might neglect to call you. Call them back and ask them to look at the report & tell you what the results are.
Note how Dr. Tuzo provided followup care and a sincere interest in Rachel's cat. This reminds me, I have already used her twice for followup telephone consultations, for which she later invoiced me at my insistence, when our sheltie Pierre developed a limp. One great thing about this vet is that she will give you a solid 30 minutes or more of the kind of information pet owners crave but can't seem to get from a busy office vet, and she knows how to explain things simply or in detail, depending on your level of interest.
Information on how to contact her is at her Web site, Vet2Go, here.
- posted by jbelliveau at 2:15 PM in The Neighborhood
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December 22, 2007
Congratulations Lamont on your blog!
Lamont is over the moon at being tapped to write a soccer blog at the Baltimore Sun.Please visit it here: Alive and Kicking.
If there's anyone who knows soccer as much as or more than he does, well, they are probably coaching in England's Premiership.
Lamont is ID'd as "Wes Harvey" on his blog because Lamont is mainly a name that family use and Wes is what he goes by at work and in sports. It's Lamont Weston Harvey in full.
By the way, Lamont has coached the women's soccer team I play on, the Comets, since 1997. In that time we've gone from the basement of Howard County's D league to the top of the A league. So he knows plenty about coaching and strategy, having similarly put together his men's team, Tudor Arms, in Anne Arundel County. He's also got an almost freakish recall of stats and the entire choreography of our matches. The hard drive of his brain must be 72.3 gigabytes of "what happened at every soccer game I've ever played."
Right now, we have started a co-ed Wednesday night pickup game at Soccerdome II in Harmans. I am enjoying a respite from the aggressive attitudes of some women's teams in Howard County with our invitation-only workout that is nearly 60 minutes nonstop. Creative goals and out-of-nowhere defensive stops get cheered, and we are working to avoid almost all contact. The closer we get to the freeform play seen on mile after mile of Brazil's beaches, the nearer we stand to the beautiful game.
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:17 PM in Sports
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December 16, 2007
Procrastinating work-at-home writers, pet-owners division
I recall an awesome Dave Barry column where he betrayed the secrets of the writer at work facing deadline, namely that it would suddenly become imperative to remove his socks and shoes, grab a guitar pick and clean out all his toe cheese.This is uncomfortably close to reality. I tend to find a sudden urgency to clean the spaces between the keys on my keyboard with a rectangle of cardboard, have a little interdental pick session while awaiting inspiration or caulk all the floor joists in the Sportsplex (our basement).
Barry seems so much more honest than Stephen King's wild claims of working from 8 a.m. to noon every day of every year.
For pet owners, the procrastination options multiply nicely. A blogger named littera abactor has captured how those bizarre noises from the kitchen require immediate investigation by the home office dog or cat owner, in this entry:
An excerpt:
Dog: I am starving.
Me: Actually, no. You aren't starving. You get two very good meals a day. And treats. And Best Beloved fed you extra food while I was gone.
Dog: STARVING.
Me: I saw you get fed not four hours ago! You are not starving.
Dog: Pity me, a sad and tragic creature, for I can barely walk, I am so starving. WOE.
Me: I am now ignoring you.
Dog: STARVING.
Dog: Did you hear me? I am starving.
Dog: Are you seriously ignoring me? Fine.
[There is a pause, during which the dog exits the room in a pointed manner.]
Keep reading to see what the dog does next ...
Yes, I've lived this with Pierre and his soft, almost below a whisper exhalations that convey starvation mixed with martyrdom.
I really do have a deadline so gotta go. Maybe to do some work, maybe to trim the cats' nails.
- posted by jbelliveau at 1:11 PM in Parodies
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December 14, 2007
Favorite scenes from 'The Office'
OK, we are per usual behind on watching popular culture, and last night got a little further into "The Office" Season Three.It seems like every episode or two there is something that busts a gut. For me, it can be a big obvious joke or something that you could blink and miss. Last night it was ...
(read no more if you don't like spoilers ... and if you are even more behind the zeitgeist than we are ...)
... as we watched "Benihana Christmas" when Kevin takes the mike to perform the least likely possible public karaoke song in the galaxy, namely Alanis Morisette's "You Oughta Know." Lyrics here ... and no, Kevin didn't skate too close to stanza 4, which will have to wait for the HBO version of "The Office."
Then there was the moment when Michael used a marker to draw a line on the arm of one of two dissimilar looking Asian girls to tell them apart.
Update, Dec. 29: I mentioned to a family member that he reminded me of Jim Halpert. "We know the real Jim Halpert!" he exclaimed. Said "real Jim Halpert" has a son that goes to the same school as our family member's son in Washington, D.C., and the "real Jim Halpert" knows the executive producer of the American version of "The Office."
"He's always watching the show in this state of anxiety, wondering if he really comes off the way the TV portrayal looks," I was told.
The photo above shows the real Jim Halpert, who appears to be a law partner in a D.C. firm. And here's a Washington Post item on him.
So getting back to the show itself, here are some of my favorite laughaloud moments so far, focusing on ones that caught me by surprise:
• Kevin does the aforementioned Alanis Morisette karaoke.
• Dwight and Michael trying to push the morbidly obese new guy, Tony, from the Stamford branch onto a platform at a meet-everyone exercise in the conference room. Each strains against part of a butt cheek. (Episode: "The Merger")
• Creed leading the boat band on the Booze Cruise (Season Two) in a smooth blues in E after Michael flounders with some badly played Deep Purple "Smoke on the Water" riffs. This may be on the extras rather than the actual show.
• "Dwight's Speech" (Season Two) to the sales reps based on a speech by Mussolini.
• Angela appears on camera to discuss how she is doing and says she's in the "most fulfilling relationship of her life." I figure, huh, she must have someone fabulous off-screen who hasn't been introduced in the series. The show cuts to her and Dwight awkwardly trying to pass each other near the coffee machine. It took me a full 24 hours to realize OMG she is talking about Dwight.
Favorite episodes so far: "Booze Cruise" was just funny and poignant, Michael the ham as ever and Jim and Pam at their most awkward.
Then there's "The Client," when Jan and Michael take an important client (cameo by Tim Meadows, formerly of Saturday Night Live) to Chili's, to Jan's horror as she wanted to go to a stuffy hotel conference room. Here Steve Carrell's Michael begins to depart strongly from Ricky Gervais's David Brent in the BBC version. David Brent was more train-wreck awful than Michael and couldn't do anything right. Michael Scott gets it right singing "I want those babyback babyback babyback ribs" from the Chili's jingle while Jan watches with consternation and then admiration as Michael's goofy method works to land a big contract.
Watching Season One of the American "Office," I thought this is 90 percent as good as BBC version ... having worked in offices in the U.K. for three years, and seen the phenomenal devotion to social outings and pranks over actual work there, plus been able to keep up with the numerous Anglicisms reasonably well, I thought nothing could touch the British version.
"The Client" was when the U.S. version seemed to come into its own. Lamont likes the U.S. version much better because he thinks Pam is way cuter than Dawn. I think that's what it boils down to.
Some others' favorite moments roundups:
Notes the brilliant "Diversity Day" and "Health Care" episodes, with the fabulous line about "government created killer nano robots" being a disease requiring health coverage. My god the writers' meetings for this show must be hysteria.
Rolling Stone's "The 25 Greatest Moments from "The Office"
Oh here's a good one, from "Diversity Day," Season One: Michael shows his employees a Diversity Tomorrow video presentation in which he proclaims, "Abraham Lincoln once said, 'If you are a racist, I will attack you with the North."
- posted by jbelliveau at 12:41 PM in Books, Music, DVDs
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December 13, 2007
Hello, any female sex travelers out there?
This is a fairly sincere question.I received a call last week from a producer at ABC's "20-20" program. They are doing a series of investigations on the topic of taboo behaviors that are just becoming barely known and a little more acceptable.
They want to look at female sex tourism. The producer asked me did I know any women that they could interview.
This is always a stumper. The BBC and other British television production companies call me and ask this question steadily. I may have to put up a forum to try to create a community that could be tapped for these sorts of questions.
I do have one correspondent in Germany who has made herself available for interviews. In the United States, most of my informants are the sort of friend who you really couldn't even ask if they would go for an interview -- high school classmates, soccer teammates -- and their experiences are in the past, whereas ABC wants women who plan to go seek travel trysts.
So, I said there was a woman from D.C. on the Baltimore Sun's "Open Mike" chat forum I would try. This woman -- she and I have led some boisterous forum discussions of women, travel and sex -- is thinking about helping. I e-mailed another rather trusted colleague and am receiving a loud silence.
Update, Dec. 29: The trusted colleague has gotten back in touch with me to note that her friends, even the most adventurous, are not willing to be interviewed. This is exactly what I would have predicted.
Their reluctance is telling.
I've posted the question of "can anyone help this media person talk to some women sex tourists please" with permission of site owner Drew Curtis of Fark.com in the past, as well as on the Lonely Planet Thorntree. All it gets is a lot of snarky comments and funny but made-up stories.
Anyway, please contact me if you want to know more about this producer and her plans. Confidentiality assured.
I had a fairly indepth discussion with the producer and e-mailed her a pdf of Romance on the Road. I said she had to imagine for a minute that a woman was someone who had engaged in a holiday romance. If she was single, she would certainly not broadcast it on TV, radio or print. If she was married post-fling, she couldn't let her husband know about it.
I said I was in a sort of unusual position in that I am not single and my husband is very encouraging of me writing about this topic ... it's like a Venn diagram that excludes almost all women, barring myself and possibly a few other either brave or exhibitionist writers, from talking about these affairs. In other words, travel romances remain fairly taboo.
There is also the angle of, What exactly is it the TV producers want you to confess to? Being an older white woman chasing young Caribbean islanders? Well, good luck there. For women in their 20s, who are fairly attractive and have a boyfriend/husband in the wings, yet still find themselves steppin' out on vacation ... well, they aren't going to have much to say, either.
I did suggest she tap into her friends ... she might be surprised who had done what. She said her circle comprised women with young children, not a promising demographic for sex travelers. I said, "Well, often the women you need to talk to are all around you, start saying you are researching this topic and watch how people react."
Another wise colleague suggested when told of this dilemma that it is assumed of almost all single women traveling that they may be open to overtures from foreign men. This is quite true and one way to discover the intended interviewees would be to talk to single women travelers.
I suggested to the producer that she simply had to send a reporter down to Jamaica's Negril Beach and win some of the visiting women's trust using whatever means might prove workable, and this would be far more direct than trying to find women stateside. I've since sent her some more ideas on strategy and nightclubs to visit.
A bit more background. This ABC contact comes in the wake of a Reuters article, Older white women join Kenya's sex tourists, that appeared on the Drudge Report and MSNBC.com and was forwarded to me by about six people.
To my surprise, the writer did not contact me in advance (Google seems to lead 99 percent of sex travel researchers right to my door), and I couldn't readily find how to contact him to offer any followup information he might need. I have an entire chapter on Africa in my book, Romance on the Road, including information on white women in Kenya, and lots of information on female trailblazers there.
This article was picked up all over the place, and I commented on it at a number of blog sites, including World Hum. Also, angrygayblackCanadianman and Emerging women blogspot: Getting what they want: Women as customers in the international sex trade.
My favorite blogger in terms of her comments on this article, Echidne of the Snakes: Sex Tourism Reversal, noted shrewdly that following:
... how I would feel about the article if the older women went to, say, Florida, for their sex tourism and if the younger men working in the industry were of the same race and with other alternatives to escorting as a way of making a living. Would the arrangement then be just fine? After all, it is mostly viewed as just fine when it is older white men who do this by paying for mistresses or casual sex. I'm not sure.
My final thoughts had to do with wondering about how all this would be explained by the misogynistic section of evolutionary psychologists. Women aren't supposed to do this kind of stuff, and certainly not older women.
She drew this response from me:
Echidne, I deal with many of the ethical questions you raise in my book, Romance on the Road: Traveling Women Who Love Foreign Men, and spent six years researching this topic.
What bothers me about the Reuters report, aside from the fact this is very old news, is the focus on the racial aspects.
Just because the media focus obsessively on travel by white women to Africa and the Caribbean, doesn't mean that this is representative of what is going on.
Black and Asian women also travel in search of love on foreign shores. And they visit Nepal, Thailand, Latin America, Oceania and most of the world's travel destinations in search of it.
So, this is not a simple case of neocolonial exploitation or immorality, as many try to make it to be.
As you point out, if this would be just fine if it were occuring in Florida, then what is the problem? Is there some rule that women cannot seek love and affection outside their own race and age? That foreign men in countries with rampant unemployment cannot seek to better themselves via their winning bodies or personalities?
I personally know of a young man in the Caribbean, with limited prospects otherwise, whose college tuition is being paid for by his foreign girlfriend.
And you are correct in noting that the evolutionary psychologists are completely buffaloed by female sex tourism. I write in my book about wretched social science study designs where women are asked by men on their own college campus whether they would go for a quickie with an attractive men if there were no repercussions. This fails to account for the fear of the slut label, which can only be avoided by travel far from home. Once that fear is removed, we see an openness by women to what outsiders would call hedonistic behavior, and the women might term acting on a hunch that this new guy they met on the beach really is all about some uncomplicated fun without pre-judgement.
Two prominent exceptions to the blindness of the social scientists are Donald Symons of UC-Santa Barbara and April Gorry, whose doctorate at UC-Santa Barbara correctly notes the search for romance by traveling women and the lack of racial fetishism by participants. Gorry found that women traveling in Belize simply admired the daily competence of the local fishermen and tour guides, which seemed so much more appealing than the beat-down office men in their orbits at home.
The distressing thing about the Reuters article is that it depicts a preference for socially competent men met while traveling as freakish, as though a black man cannot be perceived as an attractive or in fact preferable dating partner by anyone. This type of writing is neocolonial exploitation, not the behavior of the women interviewed.
- posted by jbelliveau at 6:13 PM in Love, Sex, Romance and Travel
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December 8, 2007
Stephen Hunter captures Baltimore ... and sex tourism, and more
OK! Here is an older post -- and much revised and I hope improved post -- from just before my blog got broken back around July 25, when my Web host moved from California to Ohio and my shopping cart also got wrecked in the process. I've finally got the wonderful Richard Kersey at SlickRicky.com to get me up and running again, with this entry lost however. Now I will figure out this newfangled Movable Type 4.0. To resume ...
Anyone interested in Baltimore should not miss this terrific essay by Stephen Hunter, the movie critic for the Washington Post (and formerly the Baltimore Sun).
Hunter channels Tom Wolfe's various takeouts on hair (most especially in The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby) here:
Hat tip to my former Sun colleague Duncan Moore for pointing this one out.
Hunter looks at how both Cal Ripkin and John Waters are in the news. Hunter notes how Waters transformed the view of outsiders of Baltimore into his own vision:
That image of Baltimore, changing merrily, became the Baltimore of record: so unhip it was hip, so uncool it was cool. Long forgotten is the fact that in the beginning many Baltimoreans hated Waters for his trick of processing an elegant, intellectual city with powerhouse financial, advertising and shipping chops into a kind of Happy Valley U.S.A. of mild, funky rebels and hair enameled lifeless and piled to the stars. Soon the Waters view prevailed, not necessarily a bad thing, and everybody bought into it. "Hon," that exemplar of down-home Bawlamore charm (and not mumbled, embittered Baltimore condescension), became so positive an identifier it was featured on a welcome-to-Baltimore sign on the B-W Parkway.
It's okay. That's the way it goes. When the legend conflicts with the truth, print the legend, as John Ford knew. Waters is not a documentary filmmaker; he's a mythmaker, a parable-spinner, an illusion merchant. But you can't forget what's there, too, a vast, flat, hot tragedy, where young men pop each other at record pace and nobody seems to know why or what to do. In a few happy glades -- Federal Hill, Homeland, Canton -- one can live as elegant an urban life as anywhere in America, enjoying a Georgetown at Patapsco River basin prices. But go out on Federal Hill at night, and you see before you the Inner Harbor all agleam, the bold new downtown skyline, and have the sense of a town that seized on the fame and momentum Waters and Ripken lent it, and did its best to become what it seemed to be.
But don't listen to the sirens that blaze into the dark night, or pay attention to the blinking police and emergency service vehicles that look like blood-red pulsing pinpricks in the dark seen from the sleek buildings around the harbor far from where the real dying happens far too frequently.
(Baltimore)'s a place of funky neighborhoods, populated by happy peasants, some of them cross-dressed. The defining mark is the hairdo, a kind of individual tower of protein, a high-rise lacquered in place by aerosol droplets so that the ziggurat is as motionless as if built by slaves on the Mesopotamian plain. As for the men, the hair is weighted with glowing unguents that play sparkle games with the light.
I think the wildly individualistic hairdos that once defined Baltimore are disappearing as the older set dies off. What you now have to visit the Honfest to see, used to be just everyday Baltimore. We seem to be getting more homogenous as time goes on.
But on to the important point. Baltimore can be Heaven, Hell, or Camp, or sometimes all three.
It depends on whether you are walking along the Canton waterfront promenade or playing soccer at Tudor Arms (Heaven), or getting stabbed and beaten to death with a shovel in Washington Hill (Hell).
Hell was perpetrated on a Marine on leave who was murdered in June, according to police charging documents, by a girl I've known since she was 8 years old, maybe four blocks northeast of our house.
Then we have Baltimore as Camp -- Travolta as Edna Turnblad in "Hairspray," with her "arhnin' (ironing) and howled elastic "no" ("noeeeewwwh-ha" in Balmerese).
The "Hell" aspect seems to be predominately lately, with two savage beatings of individuals overpowered by youth gangs: that of Hopkins financial analyst Zach Sowers near Patterson Park by four yout's -- they took his watch, credit card and $10 and he remains in a coma -- and a female bus rider outnumbered nine to one.
Edna Turnblad, played by John Travolta, and daughter Tracy, played by Nikki Blonsky.
Now with these observations about Baltimore made, let's return for a bit to the writing of Stephen Hunter.
I heard from Stephen with a thank after this blog entry originally went up in July -- a little note of appreciation that made me want to bow like Wayne and Garth chorusing, "We are not worthy," and also shamed me into realizing that Steve deserved a lot more praise than in my original quick-hit blog entry.
Some background. I first encountered Stephen face to face at the Baltimore Sun when I was sent back, circa 1988, from the copy desk to the Features Department. Everyone in Features called him "Hunter." He wore a short beard and cargo pants and had a powerful, animal-like quickness as he moved around the department, rolling to his desk to file stories, spending most of his time elsewhere, screening films.
As a fill-in assistant features editor, I couldn't believe my luck when I was asked to edit Steve's reviews, which I already enjoyed tremendously just as a regular reader of the paper. I found Steve reliable, observant and tremendously skilled at just nailing the essence of any movie he reviewed, and doing so with elegant, precise and darned funny text.
So here I was going to be the first person to read a future Pulitzer Prizewinner's reviews. I could feel Steve's eyes on me from across the room as he surreptitiously tried to see if his first reader would react with a smile or laugh out loud. He often succeeded.
Editing his reviews consisted really of reading for pleasure and changing nothing, but on one or two occasions, I made the tiniest of suggestions -- one word for another -- and he enthusiastically agreed each time.
For a writer, le mot juste, l'idee juste, the exactly correct word and concept, forcing your brain to really THINK all the way to the implications of a work of entertainment ... it's hard work, like chipping rocks in the prison yard. So many writers skim on the surface and never get to the perfection that even a simple movie review can aim for.
I've taught travel writing on book tours to Colorado and San Francisco and tried to make it clear to those present whenever they are writing, to ponder, "What do I think about this. Why is it important?" Notice and then dig and polish.
I taught as an example part of a chapter on the Yucatan, in my first book, An Amateur's Guide to the Planet, where I write about having a panic attack on top of the Maya pyramid of Tikal. As a writer, first you describe the panic, and then you have to dig awfully deep to really understand why you want to share it with others ... does the panic suggest something about the awfulness of the human sacrifices at Tikal, or how a phenomenal travel destination can induce trembling wonder?
Somehow Steve could arrive in one afternoon at the sort of insight that would take me 17 revises (yes, that's a real number for some of the chapters in my books). And do this routinely.
Read his reviews of "Lord of the Rings" ...
I suppose if you're shooting three movies back to back on the other side of the world and it's one of the biggest gambles ever in the entertainment industry, a detail might have slipped your mind. In Jackson's case, that little detail was shampoo. He either couldn't afford it or he forgot all about it. The result is that you never saw so many greasy, tangled, thorny, wet, lusterless protein brambles as are on display in this movie. Viggo Mortensen, with a haircut that looks like a drowned swamp rat floating belly up in a bayou, leads the troop.
(Director Wolfgang) Petersen is an old pro. His is a narrative sensibility, and he's capable of keeping the story moving and subplots straight. He's got an eye for beauty too, though mainly of the male kind. He so loves the image of the helmeted, husky warrior boys, bulgy of bicep, lean of loin, aglow of sweat, eyes feral and fierce in the slits of their art-deco steel pots, that he hits it over and over and over. Many a gay man will consider this the ultimate date movie.
One morning -- the portents have been over-dramatic -- the Mayans arrive in force. And why, you wonder, would the Forest People not even have heard of them and made no preparations, as they are about two days' march from a Mayan urban center? The only answer is that it suits the political agenda of the picture, which is to subvert notions about the "innocence" of native peoples and the "guilt" of usurpers from the outside. In other words, in Gibson's worldview, the Mayans are to the Forest People exactly as, sometime later, the Spaniards would be to the Mayans. It's all a question of empire prerogative.
The results are not pretty.
Many times after we've seen a movie, Lamont gets to have the entire review read to him aloud as he pulls on his work shoes near my computer.
And, I've had a note to myself for ages to commend Stephen for his fantastic review of Heading South
, titled "The Job Of Sex in the Third World." Here is possibly one of the best ever examples of Hunter owning his topic:
, titled "The Job Of Sex in the Third World." Here is possibly one of the best ever examples of Hunter owning his topic:You see it all over the Third World, anywhere poverty and beauty converge under balmy skies, and the liquor is sweet and hits hard. A Westerner, north of 45, with fallen arches, hair, belly and spirit, clearly no longer sexually competitive in the meat markets of the big city, shows up, hunting an arrangement.
The arrangement will be with a younger, suppler body, owned by a younger, duller, more beautiful person. The two will share not an hour of anonymous sex, a la the streetwalker and her beau, but something tangentially more dignified: a kind of ersatz relationship, with life narratives exchanged, laughs and drinks sampled to lubricate the awkwardness, day trips to the mountains or the monuments to eat up the afternoon hours, and then discreet nights of sweat and bliss. Finally, certain monies will be quietly exchanged, "gifts," not payments, addresses passed between the two for the letters that will never get written, the photos that will never be sent, and ... that's it.
Hello, Monday morning, back in the office. Hmm, you look so refreshed. Have a good time down south? That glow in your face? You must have gotten good weather. Meanwhile, you are thinking, Good Lord, I didn't even notice the weather.
This passage has all the knowledge and the insight one could possibly muster to separate common notions of sex tourism as evil exploitation from the reality of a relationship, albeit an ersatz one, with "life narratives exchanged." I flashed when I read this on my event-packed several days with a Bahamian lobster fisherman with whom I spent a staggering amount of time talking and dancing and strolling and sharing meals, as I recounted in Romance on the Road.
It was challenging to return to a conference around the National Desk of the Washington Post and think, "Well, I just had an X-rated vacation ... now it's back to this dead world."
What is astounding also is Hunter's concluding sentence about the film "Heading South."
"It's quietly terrific," he writes, words that shocked me to read ... so many light-years from pretty much the entire universe of white male reviewerdom who can't stand ... you can feel them getting sick at the very assignment ... to sit through "Heading South," which must feed every insecurity known to the paunchy cubicle worker lacking the sculpted body of a Caribbean beach boy.
Thanks Stephen on behalf of your readership for nailing so many reviews like Michael Jordan winning a threepeat via a hotly contested jumper.
To learn more about our era's most gifted reviewer, here's some links:
An excellent profile in the Baltimore Sun:
Stephen's astounding take on the Virginia Tech massacre:
Oh, and on to yet another tangent, check out this credit to Weyman Swagger on the Unofficial Stephen Hunter Web site:
Weyman Swagger: He's actually a photo editor on my old paper, The Sun, and a grizzled old truck-driver looking man, without college education and a little rough and hilly in his ways. He's also a brilliant natural editor, who has helped me immeasureably; he knows things the pros in NY don't and my books are much the better for his ideas. I don't always use them but they are usually so provocative that they jigger me into something that works. He's also a very smart perceptive line reader, who's got a sense of voice and timing and colloquialism bar none. It's a privilege to have him help me.
I had no idea! One of my favorite people at the Baltimore Sun, photo editor Weyman Swagger, helps Hunter with his books.
I shouldn't be so surprised. Weyman and I used to collaborate on that old newspaper tradition of creating stories for a mock front page whenever someone leaves the paper. When a colleague named Bill Higgins moved along to the Minneapolis paper, we wrote a spoof of him becoming a champion ice fisherman -- full of deliberate factual errors and internal contradictions -- and laughed so hard at our own creation (yes, this violates the first rule of comedy) that we thought we might as well just delete the whole thing, we'd had so much fun just creating it.
Weyman and former colleague Peter Meredith also collaborated on hilarious send-ups of AP stories capturing all the peculiarities of wire stories -- comparing the acreage of foreign countries to U.S. states or portions thereof ("the size of East Texas"), the mysterious AP-speak on updates and corrections slathered across breaking stories, the goofy quotations. Many on the internal Sun e-mail loops enjoyed their running collaborations on stories about coupon-stealing rings, lists of notable vehicle accidents involving cows, surfboards, chainsaws or Kelvinators, and even some stories written entirely in a pretend version of Dutch that could be readable in English.
Disclaimer: Hunter once praised and warned me in an e-mail reading something like, "You're too obviously intelligent for this place, you'll have to hide it better." It's the kind of compliment that really creates a lifelong buzz ... and creates an added loyalty to the speaker ... and tells a little truth about how being too smart is just as tough, or tougher, than being not smart enough, in most workplaces. I know I would praise and enjoy Steve's reviews only 0.0001 percent less without that little career moment.
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