Quiet Bubble

Queen-Cat

Every morning, my cat and I go through our little ritual. The alarm clock goes off at 6:45am, and I hit the snooze for another 15 minutes of blessed sleep. Eliza, maybe mimicking my slap of the clock, began batting me gently on the back of the head. At 7 or maybe 7:15, I decide I’ve had enough and stumble into the bathroom to turn on the shower. As soon as the rumble and psssst of the faucet starts, I hear the cantered steps on cat on floor, and she jumps onto the rim of the tub. She clambers into the tub and begins drinking the water on the tub’s floor.

Within ten seconds, the water’s hot enough for me to switch from main faucet to shower faucet. I rattle my fingernails on the far wall of the tub, to warn Eliza that she’s about to get drenched by overhead water. She jumps out of the tub, I step in, and whoosh the shower curtain shut. For most of my shower, I see her silhouette stalking the rim. After three minutes or so, once I’m into my morning shave, her head peeks between curtain and wall, and she begins sipping the droplets that occasionally fall from the main faucet. She doesn’t care if her head gets wet. If she’s feeling bold, she’ll jump back into the tub, at my feet, with my body (mostly) blocking the stream of water that would otherwise soak her through.

And that’s the opening minutes of my day.

I’m always curious as to how much Eliza behaves like other cats. I don’t have a second cat, she lost her mother within two weeks of her birth, and she hasn’t been around other cats regularly since I took her away from the rest of the litter, when she was ten weeks old. So, whatever behavior she’s learned is mostly either innate to her cat-self or stuff she’s picked up from her environment and from living with me. At regular intervals, I wonder, How differently does she behave from other cats?

So, imagine the jolt of recognition I had when I read the 4 April 2008 strip of Matthew Reidsma’s High Maintenance Machine. Now, despite my antipathy toward the memoir in general (with Brian Winter’s Long After Midnight at the Niño Bien and C.S. Walton’s Ivan Petrov: Russia through a Shot Glass as noted exceptions), I’ve got a soft spot for autobiographical comics. By drawing yourself and the world around you, you’re automatically forced to put an aesthetic distance between events and your rendition that complicates the reader’s understanding of the situations as the “truth.” With photography, cinema, and prose, the reader is inclined to accept what’s shown at face value; with comics, it’s always conscious that the view presented is a subjective, constructed one.

Reidsma’s strip, expressly begun to force the artist to improve his skills, is a joy. He’s not as stylistically dazzling as James Kochalka’s American Elf—Reidsma sticks to a basic 2X3 panel layout, and draws in black-and-white instead of full color—but I like Reidsma’s work better. His daily vignettes are beautifully, cleanly drawn, and are sweet without being saccharine. The cute, clear-line style is jazzy and bold—the pacing seems quick as a result, even when the six daily panels actually show an infinitesimal moment. He dares to show pivotal moments in his spats with his wife, his minor foibles and successes, and himself at his angriest and least likable. I’ve been following his stuff for a few months.

So, there on 4 April, I discovered that he’s a truly keen observer of cats, and that my girl isn’t a total oddball after all. I decided to buy the original art right then and there: $10 plus $5 for shipping. I got the art, charmingly and carefully packaged and with a free sticker to boot, a mere four days later. Reidsma’s a very tight penciler—there are only a few stray marks differentiating his penciled art and the final inking—and the page makes for a cozy feel. The newest acquisition to the Quiet Bubble collection will hang in the bathroom, where it’s most appropriate.

Days of plastic and sunshine

Happy Opening Day.

I was a hell of a hitter, as long as I was swinging with a plastic bat. I batted as a lefty, threw and fielded with my right, and base-ran intelligently if not quickly. We didn’t wear gloves. These were plastic balls, after all, and the mild sting and grass-perfumed smears left on the palm felt good. We played for bragging rights, convenience-store-candy money, and little else.

Wiffle ball, if not a sport, exactly, is a game for the ages. It was baseball with hollow, skinny, yellow plastic bats that whistled when you swung. The airy white balls were as large as softballs but weren’t as sturdy—they split open if you hit them too hard, and changed direction abruptly if the breeze was strong. They took strange hops and deadened in thick grass or small leaf clusters. Because they had holes in them, they got caught on tree branches. Pitching with them made me gnash my teeth. You had to throw a fastball, no matter what else your grip was doing, because a knuckleball or breaking ball might turn out completely wrong if even a slight breeze picked up. Sliders were okay but, again, they had to be quick.

No matter how fast I threw, though, air would seep in between my extended hand and the batter’s swing, and those wiffle balls would look like homemade cherry pie to the batter. And that’s where the damn thing would fool you. A contact hitter, like master Tony Gwynn, would look foolish at the plate against the wiffle ball, trying to finesse it through pockets. Because the ball was so fragile and light, most attempts to navigate it with the bat were thwarted by environmental factors beyond a batter’s control—a single flower that the ball hits down the third-base line, can-hardly-feel-it wind, a small pebble.

Instead, the best bet was just to wallop the sucker. I swung for the fences every time. Make contact, but hard, and hope for the best. Sure, I played around with bunting or opposite-field hits, but you just never knew where the ball would end up. Hit hard, zinging through the air, I at least knew it would be difficult to catch. I hit it over our backyard fence so often, into our across-the-alley neighbor’s herbs and hops for homebrew beer, that my stepfather haphazardly erected chicken wire, just to make the homer harder. Consider it the ghetto version of the Green Monster. Balls would bounce off it—easy home runs turned into difficult doubles, because the outfield was wider than it was deep—or get stuck in it. The wall occasionally collapsed.

Other obstacles included the two trees that loomed over right and left fields. A friend, watching the sky for a pop-up, smacked into the right-field “widowmaker.” He blacked out for a second but was otherwise unhurt. In left field, you also had to contend with our semi-large compost pile, which my brother and I had to turn daily with shovels. Balls gravitated towards it. A single turned into a double as the unlucky fielder worked up the nerve to stick his hand in the glop—grapefruit rinds, tomato seeds, recycled paper towels stained with who knew what, slimy apple cores—and pull out the ball. Hovering above the backyard, and the wiffle ball field was my childhood backyard, were phone lines and electrical wires. A fly ball often hit these and confounded the fielder by doing an about-face. Beyond the compost pile, there were small bumps, ant hills, the odd fallen tree limb, and the neighbor’s cat. (If she pounced on the ball after it had been ruled fair, well, you just had to work with it.)

We—my stepfather, mom, brother, myself, the neighborhood kids, and whatever friend had spent the night—made our own rules. There are, apparently, official Wiffle Ball rules. Who gives a shit, honestly? I’m pretty sure our backyard rules differed from those three blocks down, and that those differed again slightly from a group playing in Oak Cliff. Hell, the rules changed from game to game. The basics were that it was basically a three-on-three contest; a pitcher, and two fielders. You could bunt as often as you liked; you would not be ruled out for bunting foul on a two-strike count. If you hit the ball more than once (during a single at-bat), however, into Mrs. Bea’s backyard to the right, you not only were called out but had to retrieve the ball yourself. We didn’t like Mrs. Bea, and climbing the fence that split our yard from hers meant contending with her yappy dog. As a lefty hitter, I improved my opposite field just so I wouldn’t pull it into her backyard.

Of course, my tendency to pull the ball under all circumstances didn’t serve me well during my one year on the high school baseball team. I had great bat handling skills, so I always made contact—I rarely struck out, in wiffle ball or “real” baseball, but I rarely did much good otherwise. My throwing arm was erratic. My fielding, trained on a ramshackle with a non-threatening ball, was lackluster when faced with hard leather that could break the fingers if handled without gloves. Hitting with an aluminum bat left blisters on my hands. I never had to wear a cup during wiffle ball but learned, painfully, why they’re necessary when grounders take bad hops. I began to associate baseball with pain, and with being a terrible player. I was sixteen, and didn’t need more reasons to feel lackluster. I gave up on the team after sophomore year. I don’t regret it.

From then on, my baseball has been limited to spectatorship. I don’t live in an MLB city so the closest I get is the Mississippi Braves (double-A squad for the Atlanta Braves), and whatever streaming broadcast of my beloved, beleaguered Texas Rangers I can find. I mind this less than I thought I would.

Still, if I ever discover some underground network of adult wiffle-ball enthusiasts, I’ll be there, cheap yellow bat in hand. No fans are necessary—just a lumpy backyard and the infuriating shifts of the Mississippi summer breeze.

They Might Be Giants might be coming to your town

Saturday afternoon, and I’d just finished my friend’s marvelous book, Long after Midnight at the Niño Bien when I get a phone call. Brünhilde and C. are driving home from Canton, and wonder what I’m up to that night. John Patrick Shanley’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Doubt is being staged by New Stage Theatre, I say, and I’m considering that, despite the $22 price tag. Brünhilde casually asks, “Are you going to the They Might Be Giants show, or are you past that stage of your life?”

“What They Might Be Giants show?” Relatively big-name acts that don’t come from Mississippi, Louisiana, or Tennessee, even those with cult followings rather than blockbuster statuses, usually end up playing in Memphis or New Orleans. They pass Mississippi by, and that’s what I’m assuming here. I’m not up to a three-hour drive to see a band I loved in my youth.

“No, no, they’re playing at Hal and Mal’s”—a restaurant/bar/concert venue about ten minutes from my apartment—“and I think it starts at nine.”

For all the irony and post-pop cleverness TMBG conveys on records, they rock out onstage. I’d last the Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell) in New Orleans, two weeks after 9/11, and found them to be affecting, uplifting, and danceable. The irony and (admittedly good) jokes get tempered by stage theatrics, crunchy guitars, and a super-tight rhythm section. Live, TMBG becomes a full-on band and not just two nerds goofing off in their basement. I reviewed that show for a short-lived zine, and this closing excerpt sums it up:

John Flansburgh surprised me. That’s putting it mildly. He’s one of the best frontmen I’ve ever seen live. He’s a terrific rhythm guitarist—punchy, assured, simultaneously raw and precise. He bounded around stage as if he was on a constant caffeine high, smirking and cracking jokes with just his eyes and grins.

In a sublime moment, the band burst into the faux-lounge crooner, “She’s Actual Size.” Midway through the song, Flansburgh paused to lead Hickey in a drum solo. But not a normal one. Flansburgh screamed, “Press 1 for Latin Dance!” and Hickey drummed a pattern fit for conga lines. After a few seconds, “Press 2 for Ringo Starr!” Hickey performed a drum fill that could have come straight out of Abbey Road. Flansburgh ran through three through five. “Press 6 for Mid-1970s Power Ballad!” At this point, the audience began to laugh uproariously. “Press 7 for Keith Moon!” Hickey emulated the high-voltage tom-tom flares of the Who. The fan favorite? “Press 9 for Animal from the Muppets!” Deafening cheers and laughter and pumping fists in the air.

So, yeah, I suppose TMBG is the same it’s always been, inspiring giggles, awe, and the movement of butts. But, finally, it’s figured out a way to do all three at once. In the 1980s, Flansburgh and Linnell started shows with a prerecorded tape pronouncing them to be the “Twin Quasars of Rock.” It was a joke at the time, but I think they’re serious now.

So, I spent my $22 on a rock show instead of a play. After 25 years together, this would be the band’s first-ever concert in Mississippi. I’d be foolish to miss it.

Hal and Mal’s caters more to the “bar” end of the venue than the “concert hall” end—there’s three bars, and either the stage needs to be raised higher or the audience floor leading up to it needs to slope slowly; or maybe I’m just too short. In any case, the sightlines aren’t great, and are hindered further by blocky, thick support posts. The cigarette smoke casts such a haze that I periodically thought my eyes were out of focus, and there’s precious little ventilation. (I’ve always rock clubs and dry cleaners were in collusion, but I can’t prove it.) Even John Flansburgh made jokes about it—“The only thing we ask is that you please don’t start smoking menthols, for Christ’s sake.”

Once the band got started, none of this mattered. With two encores, the five-piece band throttled through about 25 songs in 90 minutes. The band rocketed from song to song, often with only a second’s pause in-between. The opener, “Doctor Worm,” was still finishing when Flansburgh announced “This one’s called ‘Cyclops Rock!’” and off we went. Flansburgh barely had time to close the minute-long “Boss of Me”—better known as the theme for Malcolm in the Middle—with the line “Life is unfair” before the equally caustic “I Palindrome I” kicked in. Though Flansburgh’s movement was limited due to the small size of the stage, the band was energetic. Flansburgh and Linnell’s banter and winks to the audience were well-practiced and elicited laughs, though occasionally they went on too long. Their voices—nearly identically nasal Brooklyn whines—sounded in good form, and I was able to make out words and phrases above the din, despite the mediocre mix that bled the guitars too strongly into the rest of the sound. The rhythm section was notably solid and popping.

It should be noted that TMBG has fallen off my radar since 1998’s Severe Tire Damage. I was vaguely aware that the band had released three or four studio albums since then, and that its recent series of children’s albums have perhaps sold better than its “regular” work. While this was partly an exercise in nostalgia for me, it’s pleasing that TMBG didn’t wallow in past glories. I recognized only half of the songs played. They gleefully played two rousing songs—“Alphabet of Nations” and “Apartment Four”—from the kids’ albums. The golden oldies played from their early, mid-1980s albums were not the expected “Don’t Let Start” or “Ana Ng,” but instead “Put Your Hand Inside the Puppet Head” (fueled by Linnell’s accordion) and the b-side favorite “Hey DJ, I Thought You Said We Had A Deal.” The band mixed new and old songs with abandon, and even the ones I didn’t recognize were enjoyable and sharp.

The standards were there, of course, but took on new dimensions in a live setting. “Particle Man” became a toe-tapping zydeco number; “Older” was a mock dirge, with confetti spraying the air during the first chorus; “New York City” remained a cheesy parody of a girl-pop song but felt genuinely (as opposed to ironically) jovial; “Birdhouse in Your Soul” soared and uplifted despite the lyrics’ best intentions of letting our expectations down gently.

After the unexpected “It’s Not My Birthday” (from 1988’s Lincoln) ended the first encore, the braying drunks behind me (two nice guys, but still…) shouted “ISTANBUL! ISTANBUL! ISTANBUL!” which became a rallying cry for the 300+ crowd. Soon enough, it became “CONSTANTINOPLE! CONSTANTINOPLE!” which is harder to chant out rhythmically. I remarked to Brünhilde that it would be perfect if the band decided not to play it. After all, it’s their version of Los Lobos’ “La Bamba”—an early cover song that’s inexplicably more popular than most of their original material.

Alas, it was not to be, but TMBG made it worthwhile. Lead guitarist Dan Miller came out onstage, with an acoustic guitar. Spotlighted, he essentially played “Istanbul (Not Constantinople” as a guitar solo without singing. It was intricate and gorgeous, growing more intense in strumming and faster in tempo. Gradually, the rest of the band joined him—drums first, then bass, and then the Johns. Finally, Flansburgh and Linnell sang it, complete with Flansburgh’s fake muezzin call during the bridge. Brünhilde said that the shrieking drunks were worth it all just for that version of the song.

Flansburgh and Linnell, however, weren’t satisfied with that. They closed with the slow and hilarious “How Can I Sing Like A Girl?” which belts out a line that could serve as a call to arms for the band and audience alike: “I want to raise my freak flag/ Higher and higher.”

—————————————

It’s good to see TMBG passing on the meta-pop torch to the kids. The night’s opener was Oppenheimer, a young duo from Belfast. Shaun Robinson drummed and sang most lead vocals—it’s hard to do that well, and he pulled it off, with an earnest high tenor and crackling, inventive drum fills. Rocky O’Reilly bounced around the stage, pounding out guitar riffs, stepping on distortion pedals, singing through a vocoder, and manipulating keyboard effects. There was shtick—O’Reilly’s robot voice, a brief shoehorn solo, stage banter about the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day, handclaps, and goofy jokes—but the band seemed genuinely excited to be on stage, and thrilled to be playing for a reasonably enthusiastic crowd. I imagine that, twenty years ago, They Might Be Giants projected the same onstage aura.

Oppenheimer’s music mixes loud and slurring guitars, vocal harmonies, fast tempos, and the prominent use of Farfisa organ and Moog keyboards. The vocal delivery is sunny and lulling, even with the robot voices; the lyrics reflect complicated young love and causing ruckuses in clubs. Like TMBG, they keep the songs fast, funny, and short—nothing clocked in over 2½ minutes. The duo was impressive enough that I bought its full-length CD, which is even more fun without the drunk guy yelling in my ear for “They Might Be Giants!”

Two representative songs from the debut album, both of which were played at the show:

“This is a Test” and “Saturday Looks Bad to Me.”

These will stay up until 1 April 2008.

Greenness and sunlight

It was the kind of October day for which residents of New Orleans endure the summers, sparkling blue-gold with just a touch of crispness…

—Poppy Z. Brite, Liquor (2004)

Brite could have been writing about Jackson, Mississippi, in February.

While those north of the Mason-Dixon line are swaddled in overcoats and scarves until April, I’m out walking the neighborhood in a t-shirt and jeans, taking photographs (like the one above) of clear skies, blooming flowers, and sunlight. Every time I imagine myself in Chicago or New York or Seattle, I think about what winter is like in those cities and chuckle.

Yes, you can laugh at me in mid-July, when I’m cursing the 95-degree heat by 9 a.m., and sweating through my light cotton shirts. For now, though, I’m reveling in the walk I just finished, during which I saw Mexican teens playing soccer, homeowners out raking leaves, and green-draped trees everywhere. I’m making tea and preparing to finish reading a book… on my balcony.

Thurber, 1993-2007

Last Tuesday, I spent ten minutes wandering around a Kroger parking lot, wondering what the hell had happened to my car. The grocery cart’s wheels rattled and squeaked on the pavement. The bags of food and toiletries rustled. The guy in the security cart crept by me again and again. I figured the gorgeous, balmy weather must have gone to someone’s head. I half-whispered to myself: “Who would steal a dinged-up, 14-year-old Honda Civic with stick shift and no power windows?”

That’s when I remembered: I was looking for a car that was never there in the first place.

The night before, I had done something completely new in my 15-year history of driving. I bought a new car—a silver 2008 Honda Fit, four-door liftback, with automatic transmission, power windows, rear window wipers, a sound system that’s worth a damn, and side-impact airbags. It’s beautiful. That car was the one I’d driven from home to work, and from work to the grocery store. The car I was imagining, that I know the contours and idiosyncrasies of as well as I know those of my seven-year-old cat, now resides at Paul Moak Honda. I traded it in with I bought the Fit. It’ll probably be stripped for parts or end up in some used car lot. So. I had spent ten minutes roaming around in search of an afterimage.

As much as I love the new car, it’s obvious that I’m not quite used to her.

Yes, it’s a “her.” As soon as I stepped inside the Fit, inhaling that new car smell of plastic and fresh cloth, I knew it was a girl, though I haven’t decided on a name. Zora? (For Ms. Neale Hurston.) Zadie? (But I’ve already named my computer after Ms. Smith.) Teela? (After the Masters of the Universe character.) It’ll probably end up as Maysie, simply because I don’t know how that name popped up in my head; it’s go no prior associations for me, but it seems to have stuck in my mind.

But this essay isn’t about my new Fit, but instead it’s about a boy. A boy named Thurber. I owe him a tribute; he’s been good to me.

My dad bought Thurber for me for Christmas, in 1993. I was 17, and—unlike most boys my age—not much interested in driving. I hadn’t even gotten my driver’s license until four months before then, though I’d turned 16 the previous October, and I still hadn’t embraced driving in general. I walked from my school bus stop to my house—45 minutes or so—five days a week, and didn’t see any reason to change this. When I shook the awfully-light, gift-wrapped box, I knew that a key was inside. Dad led me to the garage.

I wish I could say I jumped up and down, or wept, or hugged my dad, or did anything normal or respectful of the tremendous purchase he’d made, and the alarming degree of trust he’d put in me. I wish I had said something that I was proud to remember.

Instead, I shrugged, and sighed. I thought to myself, Isn’t life stressful enough without this added to it? Dad probably should’ve slapped me. Instead, he began excitedly showing me the features of this 1994 Honda Civic DX, semi-dark blue, and explaining that he would start giving me lessons on driving standard transmission—I’d learned on automatic; I had never even pressed down on a clutch pedal before—the next day. Great. All I had wanted was the new Public Enemy CD and a book or two. Why did he have to go overboard like this?

After five minutes or so, I tried my best to be as animated about the Civic as Dad was. I ran my fingers along the hood. I ooohed and aaahed. I paid attention to the hour-long lecture on maintenance, faking an understanding of what Dad was pointing at under the hood. As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, “you must be careful what you pretend to be, because in the end, you are what you pretend to be.” Sure enough, by the end of the day, I was hooked on the idea of having a car.

Ideas, of course, differ from reality. From day one, the car frustrated me. That first day of driving the car, starting at a steep incline especially picked out by Dad to test my ability to shift gears, nearly drew Dad and I to blows. With 2 x 4’s and baseball bats. Even on flat terrain, I stalled out the car regularly. The car hadn’t come equipped with a radio, so there weren’t even pop songs to entice me into the car. The Dallas freeway system, particularly the Mixmaster, scared the pee out of me. For the first three months of driving, even after mastering the foot-hand coordination of the clutch, I was never comfortable behind the wheel. The car never felt like an extension of me.

Because of this, I never even thought about naming the car. It’s not a part of me, I thought. It’s this weird, noisy, rattling thing that frightens me. Sure, it was useful—I no longer needed my parents to drive me everywhere, though it should be noted that my vehicular privileges during that first year were limited. It wasn’t, however, part of my routine, my day-to-day life.

Gradually, this changed. Oddly, the affection for the Civic began on a night in March 1994, when I hurt the car. Eric and I had just emerged from Poor David’s Pub, where we had seen a friend play a show as part of her folk-rock trio (the Ideal Females), and we needed to get home before our parents busted our collective asses. We jumped into the car, turned on the heat—it was freezing—and I backed out, all in what I thought was a single fluid motion. The parking lot was cramped and tight. The back side of the car in front of me, which I wasn’t watching since I was looking behind me as I drove in reverse, got scraped by my front headlight. Compounding the issue, the car belonged to the same friend who had just finished singing inside.

“Oh hell,” I said, “I fucked up my car.”

My car. I had never before made that sentence construction. For better or worse, it was a part of me. After taking down Emily’s insurance info, and driving Eric home, I faced a long ten minutes from his house to my home, wondering what on Earth I was going to say to my parents. All the while, I kept saying that I can’t believe I hit someone. “I hit someone.” There was that “I” again—the car and I were one, after a long apprenticeship.

Things went better than expected. Mom and Dad didn’t yell (much), I was grounded, and driving privileges were revoked until further notice. But I didn’t end up hanging by my toenails in a dungeon, and there were no beatings, so I considered it moderately successful.

The newly re-implemented walk from the bus stop to home afforded me lots of time to reflect, and to consider a name for my car. I nursed a James Thurber fixation—my stepdad had showed me his copy of The Thurber Carnival a year before, and I’d never been the same since—so it’s no surprise that I named the car after my then-favorite writer. After all, the car, with its fresh smear on the front amidst an otherwise unblemished exterior, was somewhat comical. The color was all wrong—blue’s my favorite color but, hilariously, Thurber was clad in the only shade of blue (not quite purple, not quite sharp blue) that I disliked. It lurched when I drove it, because I still wouldn’t completely master the stick shift for another year. I was taller than it was. Seen from a distance, it was squat and cute. But it had verve, and handled smoothly, much like the tart and no-nonsense prose of Thurber, whose efficient sentences hid delicate absurdities.

Sound systems never lasted long with Thurber. The JVC system I bought in Summer 1995 had to be fixed two years later, and replaced four years after that. The speakers blew within 18 months—it’s amazing what a steady diet of Sugar and De La Soul can do to subwoofers—and the sound remained a little grainy from that point on. Five years ago, the radio antenna snapped off (long story), and a year later, the left speakers decided to quit working.

Performance-wise, though, Thurber was fantastic for over a decade. It got close to 28 miles per gallon in the city, and I boasted that I could drive from Vicksburg to Dallas—about 400 miles—on a single tank of gas. (I rolled into a Dallas gas station on fumes, sputtering, on two occasions, just to prove the point.) Thurber survived hail, a blown axle caused by my driving over a curb at 20 miles per hour, crappy Auto Zone batteries, fast-food stains, and a New Year’s Day ice storm that left us slip-sliding along I-20. Its exterior gained inexplicable dings, and I never washed it as often as I should have, nor did I touch up the paint where I’d scraped Emily’s car.

All the same, though, Thurber got me through 145,000 miles in 14 years. He lived long enough to have the timing belt replaced twice.

By the end, though, he was struggling. The fuel efficiency petered out around 21 miles to the gallons, its lurches were no longer caused by my lack of hand-foot coordination, and the wheels wouldn’t stay aligned for longer than a month or two before needing to be re-adjusted. (Multiple mechanics were baffled by that last problem.) The shocks blew out ages ago, so I felt every pothole, no matter how small. During an 18-month period beginning in December 2005, I spent over $2000 on maintenance, knowing that the car wasn’t worth more than $1000 in perfect condition. As I looked at repair bills and at the eventuality of more to come, I couldn’t justify keeping it much longer.

Two months ago, I started shopping for new cars, and ended up with the Fit. Again, I love the new car. Still, last Monday, I felt a pang as I drove away from the dealership in my shiny new vehicle. I glanced, one last time, at Thurber—the Phish, Beulah, and Guided By Voices bumper stickers; the cracked windshield; the missing driver’s-side mirror; the large dent on the roof; his closeness to the ground; the wind-decolored windshield wipers. He looked a little forlorn—or maybe that’s just how I felt. He’s battle-scarred and probably headed to that great junk heap in the sky.

Part of me hopes that Thurber will be scrapped for parts. Another small twinge, though, hopes someone will buy him. It would be a kick, a slightly sad one, to see him bopping around the Jackson streets one day, with someone else coaxing him along.

First!

Here’s an fun time-waster for bloggers, courtesy of Lance Mannion. We’ll let him describe it:

The premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into Google (preferably Google.com, but we’ll take the other country-specific ones if need be), you’ll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

So, here’s mine, as of 28 October 2007.

1. slip on your dancing shoes (from here)

2. the daily grind in dreamland (from here)

3. the invigorating, maddening mess of America (from here)

4. Let the turkeys fend for themselves (from here)

And my favorite…

5. I said more variations of the word “fuck” than I thought I knew. (from here)

What about you?

Will I remember what this post was about in the morning?, or, stray musings on cultural memory and people who do more than one thing well

My timing is impeccable. As soon as I note the decline of Armond White’s film criticism, in part because he favors broad assertions over detailed examination and sweeping denunciations over arguments supported by details, here he comes with a small gem on Jonathan Demme’s Jimmy Carter: Man from Plains. I saw most of this documentary on Jimmy Carter in Toronto, in the lovely fairie-world Wintergarden Theatre but had to bolt 75 minutes into it to catch another movie I’d scheduled. (Besides, I saw Carter get introduced by Demme, then get a standing ovation from the audience, and then give a short speech before the movie. I was satisfied.) I had seen enough, however, to know that I would revisit the movie. Now it’s out in limited release, so I may get my chance. In his essay, White marries his always-forceful rhetoric with, for once, actual content:

On one level, Man from Plains can be watched for biographical information; flashbacks to the late-1970s Iran hostage crisis provide evidence of Carter’s personality as key to his performance in office, which presaged such post-White House activities as his hands-on work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center, his public policy institute in Atlanta. But Demme’s mobile camera, scanning tight spaces as well as airport lobbies and the areas around post-Katrina Louisiana and Carter’s Georgia home, keeps situating the former president in the always-spinning world.

The information age makes it impossible to create Presidential legends like Washington’s and Lincoln’s, but Demme creates a folk narrative that uses the irrefutable evidence of the photographic image to accomplish something approximate to a Davy Crockett ballad—but better. Scenes of Carter facing his critics and defending his position aren’t hagiographic but proof of character in action. The iconic shot is Carter looking out a car window as the world moves by, but Demme’s peripatetic crew keeps expanding the locales, thrusting into new situations. Visible facts counter denigrating rumor.

As prosaic as that car window footage might seem on the page, White is right—the shots are quite resonant within the movie. It’s a quick visual metaphor to shows that Carter is always on-the-go, always in physical and mental motion. At age 83, he’s more plugged in, and moving more briskly, than most people half his age.

31 candles, or, this blog's proprietor celebrates yet another birthday

Meta-me. Photo by QuietBubble, some time in November 2006.

Side-scrolling samurai

Every now and then, at parties, people get nostalgic, and I’m asked, “What was your favorite toy growing up?” I could aim for architectural brilliance, and say how much I played with Legos as a kid. I had a big, gray plastic tub of assorted Lego pieces—mostly from the Space set—in which I could elaborate intergalactic stations, alien hospitals, and in-orbit communes. According to my mom, I played Lego over my phone with my friend Brian Winter. I believe it—he was a Lego nut, too—but I can’t quite imagine how we did it. Were we building identical buildings, or comparing our sets, or what?

Anyway, Lego is my stock answer. It’s a good one. It makes me look deep and cool. But it’s a lie.

I grew up with the Nintendo Entertainment System, and I belong to the first generation of people for whom a home video game system was the norm rather than the exception. Oh, we 1980s kids! The lifelines of my youth were the following: The Legend of Zelda, Rad Racer, Bionic Commando (in which you get to blow up a cyborg Hitler, in a pretty gory final sequence for 8-bit graphics!), Duck Hunt, Contra, RC Pro-Am (the best racing game ever, and which was based on that other 1980s fad, remote-controlled cars), Wizards & Warriors.

Even the lame games held some appeal on rainy days. Shadowgate and Déjà Vu tried to make gameplay emulate books, with still pictures and a inventory that you had to browse through—failed but worthy experiments that I admired. Star Voyager and 3-D Worldrunner—yes, an attempt to make a 3D video game, complete with crappy red-and-blue-lensed plastic glasses, free with every box—were both terrible but I liked them anyway. I was the master of Kung Fu, even though it bored me to tears.

I bonded with my dad over epic bouts of R.B.I. Baseball; it was our method of communication during my teenage years, when nothing else would do. Beyond this, I wasn’t much for sports games, though I could clean up on Tecmo Bowl and Excitebike if I absolutely had to do so. I remember cheering out loud when I finally kicked Mike Tyson’s ass on Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!—it had taken a year of hard practice, and being pummeled by the likes of Super Macho Man and Soda Popinski.

At school, we traded for NES games like candy bars: “No way I’m giving up Double Dragon for two weeks for that lame-ass Uncle Fester’s Quest, unless you throw in Legend of Zelda 2, man!” “Oooh, that’s hard. What about Fester’s and Super Mario Bros. 2.” “Is that the one where the Princess can fly? Okay, deal.”

It’s romantic to say that I loved Legos, and it’s true. But I would have slept with my Nintendo on my pillow every night, like a teddy bear, if I could have.

For the most part, I gravitated toward role-playing games—which were just then making the way west from Japan—such as Wizardry and Dragon Warrior, which were so long and complex that they came with (faulty) memory packs in the cartridges, and for which I needed graph paper to make maps.

The other games of choice, my true favorites, were side-scrolling adventure games. These 2D games didn’t try to replicate depth of field as did later PC games such as Wolfenstein 3-D, Doom, and Quake, and they certainly weren’t as violent. Sure, you bowled with turtle shells and stomped on cute furry things that nevertheless meant you harm. The primary purpose, instead of killing or simply finishing a level, was to explore. Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, in particular, held so many hidden nuggets—secret corners, power-ups, oddities, shortcuts—that players often kept playing them, even after we’d beaten them, just because there was so much to find. Yeah, it was cool to rescue the Princess and all, but a true point of pride was to know the nooks and crannies that even Nintendo Power (yes, I subscribed to the monthly fan magazine; I wasn’t alone, either) hadn’t uncovered. These games has guidebooks that you could buy at the local bookstore.

As the 8-bit cartridge technology improved, you could save a game in progress, instead of starting over from scratch each time you slid in the cartridge. For this reason alone, The Legend of Zelda was legendary. It was also revolutionary in that you could backtrack, going over terrain that you’d already traversed—something that, for instance, could not be done in the original Super Mario Bros.—and finding that the things you had changed in an environment (a bombed-out hole in the cliffside, a lake turned to sand) remained changed. Metroid—perhaps the best combination of action, exploration, and graphic design ever made for the system—went further. Not only could you scroll from left to right and back again, you went up and down, too. Metroid’s world was huge and immersive in four directions; other side-scrollers, even the more graphically superior R-Type for the TurboGraphix System, seemed small in comparison. Space-age scrollers such as the Mega Man games rocked my world.

Side-scrollers, at their best, mixed knuckle-whitening action with exploratory relish and a splash of pure whimsy. The Super Mario games were full of mushrooms and plants that gave you magical powers, backgrounds that seemed like a psychedelic Japanese man’s idea (untested by reality) of Hawaii, and creatures that would have been oppressively cute if they weren’t also menacing. Castlevania dealt with gothic ghouls and monsters, but the vampire realm felt oddly benign—you wanted to be there. Side-scroller game designers invested so much of themselves into building these nutty worlds—as gamers, we owed it to these kind men (and they were mostly men) to traipse through their elaborate fictions until we could walk through them as comfortably as we walked through our own neighborhoods.

After all, these virtual neighborhoods didn’t have real barking dogs, or bullies around the corner. Exploration didn’t have real risk, unlike walking around in the real world.

Now, I did get outside. I was physically active. Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me spend eight hours at a time maxing out on video games—in fact, they’d generally cut me off after an hour or two. That made Nintendo time all the sweeter.

After high school ended, in 1995, video games got less sweet. 8-bit side-scrollers, no matter how fantastical or hardboiled, felt essentially sweet and innocent. This, in part, was a limitation of the graphics. As 16-bit systems were introduced, and PC technology evolved, graphics and sound could get closer to reality. The primary colors and simple design of shooters like 1941 or the trippy submarine game Sqoon were replaced by subtler earth tones, textures, shadows, and sound effects that were realistic rather than tinny. Automobile simulation games, which sought to emulate the technical sophistication of real airplanes and cars, were concerned more with the gamer’s ability to keep track of onscreen numbers and stats than with the ability to improvise a cool, physically improbable move. More detailed graphics meant, mostly, more detailed depictions of carnage. Oh, and the role-playing games? More breasts, their bounce and glistening of skin delicately rendered by souped-up graphics engines. As processors got faster, the side-scroller lost out to first-person shooters; no longer would you see the character you were playing onscreen. The gunfire emulates more accurately the trajectory of real bullets, right down to wind resistance. As the games became more complex, so did the controllers. My Nintendo games had two buttons, a four-way directional pad, a button for pausing, and a button for selecting options. The Xbox 360’s controller looks like you need a manual to operate it.

Within all this advance, there are still plenty of open-ended exploratory games. Nintendo remains the standard bearer. Super Mario 64 took the psychedelic world and journey-based nature of the older games in the series, and successfully transplanted them into a three-dimensional world. The Zelda games are still based on finding out how the world works, instead of just bending it (or breaking it) to your will. But even the great Grand Theft Auto games depend on alarmingly realistic depictions of splashy, nihilistic violence.

I suppose I could have gotten used to the new controllers—hell, even I nearly beat Quake and Tomb Raider. And I’m not pushing for a return to the gaming dark ages of Atari. Still, I retreated into Lucasfilm’s adventure games: the Monkey Island games, the Indiana Jones games, Freddy Pharkas, Frontier Pharmacist. I went big for text-only Infocom games that were old hat before my time.

Honestly, though, I miss 8-bit side-scrollers. I like the limitations imposed upon a designer by not having three-dimensionality available. With 2D, a designer has to create a captivating world with a limited, forced perspective. Graphics can’t be used (entirely) to suck you in—the world being traversed must be engaging on its own terms. You must feel able to dive deep into the game world, even though there’s no physical depth present.

Well, I missed them, anyway. It turns out that the side-scrolling community has continued right under my bulbous nose. Programmers design them as tests for themselves, and release them for free online. Intrepid designers—i.e., teenage boys with lots of free time—have written software that emulates my beloved NES. More significantly, new side-scrollers are being created for home computers. Many of them are free.

The best that I’ve played recently are products of Nifflas’ Games. The controls are uncomplicated—only the directional keys on the keyboard, and a button or two are used—but allow for supple, intuitive gameplay. The games—Knytt, Knytt Stories, and Within A Deep Forest—feature simple graphics combined with wonderful music and evocative sound design. The whispers of wind blowing through tree leaves, the surge of a waterfall on rocks, and the character’s clip-clop clambering up and down rock faces… it’s all rendered beautifully.

The mix—thoroughly realistic sound design with graphics that are only two steps up from stick figures—is mesmerizing. Nifflas designs backgrounds with subtle shades and layers but that nevertheless so simple that they’re almost abstract. We’re drawn in by the simplicity—instead of being so detailed that we make distinctions between Knytt’s world and our own, it’s so basic that we identify this world with our own. We fill in the gap between reality and ultra-reality. We hear the world of our offices and neighborhoods, rendered fully, but we see something so rudimentary that we have to imagine the intricacies.

It works because the worlds created are worth seeking out, and treasuring. Neither of the Knytt games are particularly challenging—in fact, the first of the series gives the gamer too much help—but each step opens up a new scene that we want to step into. Some of the animals here can harm you, but most are present for atmosphere—a girl wistfully dangling her legs off a cliff, a boy lying on the ground, looking up at the sky; a bizarre animal rooting in the soil for food; a bug drifting through the air. The music is technopop but with unexpected blips and echoes. The terrain, in all directions, invites wandering. Colors, while solid, are rich. You feel like you’ve entered one of Frank King’s Gasoline Alley Sunday strips, but with more right angles and straight lines. The world is modern—that careful sound design!—but veers back to the 1980s with every step.

Nifflas’ Games is worth the trip. (I’m not alone in thinking so—the designer has a fansite.) Let’s hope the site has more journeys in store for us.

A pause in the life of...

Lonely duck. Photographed in October 2006 on Lake Michigan, Chicago, by Quiet Bubble.

I swear I’m not neglecting my faithful readers on purpose. Work, however, has caused some complications that nearly drowned out my free time, and I’m just now bobbing back to the surface, gasping for breath. Enough with the mediocre metaphors (and apparent alliteration)— I’ll be back later this week. For now, though, check out the sites to your left.