No Rest for the Wicked

At some point, the anti-establishment crowd goes mainstream.

Poem of the Week

Thanks for the Garlic
by Alice Walker

Thanks for the garlic,
I think I'm going
To plant
It now

Not wait
for spring.

The bulbs are
So fresh
And white
Their skins
So tight.

I love it
That you did
Not want to send
Them in anything
That would
Crush
Them. Though
Crushing is likely surely
to be
their offsprings
Fate.

That you waited
to find the perfect
Box.

Do you understand
how like you
This is?

There they sit
A smartly demure
Row
On the counter
Near the door
That leads
To the beginning
Of their future
lives;
Fiery at heart,
you say.

Your hardy
Garlic
Souls
Unrepented
of their inner
Flame
Serenely
Awaiting
My gardener's
Pleasure
of time
And Place

Unabashed
By whatever's
to come

Cool

As nuns.

***

A great poem. One of my favorites, actually. Ms. Walker employs clear, unique metaphors to describe the garlic - "fiery souls," "cool as nuns" - evoke a powerful image of these tiny bulbs. The poet's gratitude is abundantly clear. "Thanks for the Garlic" just reminds me to be grateful for the little things as much as the big ones.

You Build Up My Senses

Once upon a time, I had the delicate, expressive soul of a poet. I wrote, read, and sometimes even bathed in poetry. I've since given the practice up, since poetry baths tend to leave one smelling like wet corduroy in the worst way. However, even though I've sold my poetic soul for Batman Legos, I still have a love for the subject. A nostalgic love, perhaps, but a love nonetheless.

The other day I had a good long sit down with a friend who came to me for writing advice. She meets with a tutor, who instructed her to include good sensory detail in her writing. Turns out (to the surprise of no one but me), I had opinions to share on the subject.

Sensory detail, to me, serves a very distinct purpose. Good sensory detail - by which I mean descriptions of the scenery through any of the senses - does not just to create a mental image in the reader's mind, but evokes an emotion. The same fact can be used to evoke several different emotions. For example, a warm room can be described by saying "The heat pressed down on his shoulders, forcing him deeper and deeper into the sofa," and that feels completely different from saying, "Sweat ran down the side of his face like his mother's carressing finger." Both denote heat, but both evoke different emotions.

I advised my friend to read poetry to help her get an understanding for sensory detail. After all, poets are brilliant at that sort of thing. Sadly, though, I'd realized that it had been a long, long time since I had made poetry an active part of my life.

So I've got a book of poetry in my bag right now (Michael Ondaatje's The Cinnamon Peeler, if anyone's interested), and I think I'll be posting more poetry on the blog here. Not original stuff - I haven't written a poem since... September, I think - but just good poetry that I've come across that makes me feel better about things and such.

That's my way with words. I'm, like, really good with words.

From the Shadows

It's been months since I sat down and played around with charcoal. Wound up being a very therapeutic exercise.

I didn't really have anything in mind when I started drawing, so I can't really say much about the process of putting this piece together. When it was done, though, I only had one thought going through my mind:

"It's ten o'clock. Do you know where your douchebag is?"

The Politics of Posture

Cooking with Braddy: Glazed and Confused

Money’s going to be a bit tight this week, so I decided I would try to cut back on food expenses. Yesterday, rather than whip out one of the big fancy recipes I’ve collected over the last months, I whipped up a quick batch of Pasta Roni Shells in White Cheddar. I lived on this stuff in college, and loved it, too. Easiest thing in the world to make – boil noodles in water, add a packet of powdered cheese, and serve immediately. Once you’ve got it all done, toss it in the bin. Seriously, this stuff was NASTY. Burned my tongue, too.

Learning to cook real food has ruined frozen meals for me forever.

I’ve given two new recipes from Desperation Dinners a try recently. First up, we’ve got Apple-Glazed Burger Steaks.

I’ve never bought ground meat in a tube before. It was kind of traumatizing. The ground turkey gets mixed up with an egg white, a couple of different spices, and two tablespoons of applesauce. Cook the burgers in a skillet, and then make gravy from the juices.

The result looks a lot like a Swiss steak. Easy to cook, and easy to eat. I expected a much sweeter end result when I read the recipe title. It was almost disappointing to only use two tablespoons of applesauce. Still, this dish was a nice contrast to usual beef burgers. Whether it was the applesauce or the turkey, though, I can’t determine.

I spent all last weekend baking (and eating) cake bites. Come Sunday evening, I just was NOT hungry. So I made myself Buttered Rum-Glazed Ham, just to be an idiot. A FAT idiot.

I had to speak to the woman at the grocery deli counter to get ham steaks the right size for this recipe, which… man, I may have to do that more often. Grocers are great people. Seriously, have you thanked your grocer today? You should. Go do it now.

The glaze was made with butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and rum (flavoring – I’m a good Mormon boy, after all). I stuck it all in a measuring cup and microwaved it. Brown sugar and butter make a crazy combo – they boiled up even after getting pulled from the microwave.

The recipe calls for raisins, but, if I make this dish again, I’ll probably leave the raisins out. They absorbed a lot of the glaze in the broiler, and reconstituted grapes are kind of gross. Otherwise, though, this dish was really quick and tasty. Portions wound up being pretty small, though.

One of these days, I should really practice putting together a full meal with side dishes and everything. Maybe.

Braddy Reads The Killer Angels

So I'm in a book club that is composed of far more women than men. We met last night to discuss July's selection, Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. First words anyone said about the novel? "I thought this would be a book the guys would love."

Sadly, I'm not really one of "the guys." I've never had a fantasy football team. My high school gym credit was covered by Social Dance. And, frankly, I was not all that excited to read The Killer Angels.

I was actually pretty biased against the book from the beginning. A while back, I read another fascinating book on the American Civil War, called Race and Reunion, where the author posited that the way the Civil War has been remembered set back the civil rights issue by nearly a hundred years.

Basically, in an attempt to reconcile the damage done by a divisive war, the American people chose to remember the war as a test of the nation's mettle, an honorable meeting of gentlemen soldiers, rather than a war to define the freedom of a repressed people. As a result, when people discussed the Civil War, they spoke only of the valor of the soldiers, while the plight of the slave who was supposedly freed by the war was ignored.

The Killer Angels mostly avoids the issue of slavery in its discussion of the Civil War. One black character appears for maybe four pages - a barely literate runaway described in almost animal terms - to illustrate how complex the issue was for both North and South, but no blacks appear in the story again. Frankly, as an avid "white guiltist," I was pretty upset with how the race issue was completely glossed over.

But that was me judging ONE book based on the opinion a DIFFERENT book thought I should adopt. So maybe I was being a little unfair.

I had to learn to accept that the book was intended to show the valor and courage of men on both sides of the conflict. It wasn't about the race issue because, in the middle of the conflict itself, the issues weren't all that important. This isn't a book about ideals and policies. It's about soldiers.

And, with that in mind, the book's a success. The Battle of Gettysburg is presented from the point of view of several different soldiers, each one given a distinct voice by the author. The reader comes to feel for each of these individuals as their inner turmoil is laid bare.

Of course, that raises the issue of how could a novelist KNOW what these men were thinking over 100 years after the fact, but I'll save that discussion for later.

In the end, The Killer Angels isn't my type of book, but it was well-written, well-researched, and worth diving into.

On the Opposite End of the Hitchcock Scale...

...there's Birdemic.

Last week I settled down with a bunch of friends to watch Birdemic, a film legendary for it's... well, horrifyingly low quality. And as far as bad movies go, I can't say that I've ever seen worse. Birdemic has got some of the worst production values I have ever seen. Ever.

I mean, the CG birds look like they came from After Dark.

I'm pretty sure you can still see the orange tips on the guns people shoot:

Overall, the film has all the crisp video clarity of a low-budget porno... or, um, so I hear.

Speaking of "porn" (please don't read too much into that, Mom), I don't think I've ever laughed harder than I did during the "love scene" in Birdemic. We see our two lovebirds shacked up in some third-class hotel. As they snuggle down for the night, the camera pans tastefully down to their feet, where we see...

...that our lovely leading lady has been running around in the parking lot outside.

Oh, and then there's the music, which mostly sounds like someone made MIDI files of the bass track of several popular songs - like John Lennon's "Imagine," for example.

Really, we could talk about all the terrible aspects of Birdemic and be here all day. Seriously, if you took all this movie's faults and laid them out flat, to look at it all would somehow take longer than it takes to actually WATCH the movie.

Which, by the way, you should never do.

This may sound strange coming from someone who (almost) unironically called Shark Night 3D the best movie of 2011, but something about the way Birdemic was put together REALLY rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was the outright theft of classic music. Maybe it was the less-than-YouTube camerawork. Maybe it was the complete insanity of the presumption that somehow global warming causes birds to explode acid.

Actually, I can sum it all up to one word: effort.

See, even when a movie (like Shark Night 3D) KNOWS it's going to be bad, the production staff can still turn the movie into an enjoyable experience. Bad writing can be spiced up with a tongue-in-cheek tone. Bad effects can be played up for their cheesiness. Movie makers can give the audience SOME sign that they're in on the joke.

That's what I loved about Shark Night 3D. Everything about the movie - from the camerawork to the performances to the plot itself (I STILL go ga-ga for the concept of "shark snuff films") - indicated that the minds behind the film were trying to make an enjoyable movie experience, if not a particularly QUALITY one. Birdemic, on the other hand, takes itself ENTIRELY too seriously without ANY of the skills it would take to back it up.

And, yes, I mean skills. Surprisingly, as much fun as I had watching Birdemic, I was ultimately kind of offended that this movie, which gave no indication that it was actually TRYING, achieved some sort of cult status. The actors phoned in every line, the plot was poorly thought out and formulaic, and the camerawork was so amateurish it actually sent my filmmaking friend into spasms of physical pain.

If I got the impression that Birdemic was some kind of labor of love, I think I'd be a bit more generous in my evaluation. Of course, if Birdemic HAD been a labor of love, there is NO WAY its mother would let it come outside dressed like it is.

Catching Up with the Classics: Vertigo

Still working on plugging up those holes in my movie history knowledge. I think this is the last Hitchcock film I can count towards completing my goal, although I'll definitely be coming back for more. Heck, I might even watch The Birds again.

Of course, that might just be to wash the taste of Birdemic out of my brain.

I'll admit I was a little disappointed in Vertigo. Some scenes were genius - especially poor ol' Jimmy Stewart's dream sequence, but, all in all, I found myself getting BORED.

The bulk of the movie is just watching Mr. Stewart trailing a woman he's been hired to stalk. There are a lot of driving scenes and almost no dialog. I spent about 30 seconds wondering what the woman was up to, and then another two minutes asleep on the couch.

Sorry, Mr. Hitchcock, but you're just not that good at suspense.

Like the rest of Hitchcock's films - and really the suspense genre in general - Vertigo gets a twist ending that's the REAL payoff. Sometimes, a film endures even when you know the twist ending. Psycho, for example, has a lot of very compelling acting and memorable scenes that are a joy to watch even when you know the twist. Unfortunately, Vertigo just wasn't as compelling. The twist was good, I guess, but the ending felt far too abrupt - there wasn't really enough time to process it. You almost missed the fact that you'd been fooled.

I'm not saying Vertigo was BAD at all. Neither, for the record, is The Sixth Sense. I don't feel a strong urge to watch EITHER of those films again.

The Morality of Fiction

I spend a lot of time reading books and watching movies, probably more time than I should really cop to on the internet where (I hear) ladies have been known to spend some time. Truth is, though, I love fiction.

There's a morality behind every story told. I would wager that the vast majority of storytellers - be they writers, artists, or actors - imagine that they're a force for good in the world. I don't know anyone who writes stories with an intent to harm. Stories are written to entertain, to motivate, and, on occasion, to teach.

Of course, some stories are more competent at teaching than others...

If you're wondering whether I'm really so petty that I would snipe at a random Facebook wall post... well, you have your answer now, don't you?