- Anxiety - I was just reading a relatively random IMDB entry, and it made me realize that I’ll be 43 in less time than has passed since The Wonder Years and Life Goes On [Editor's Note: Admittedly, I never actually watched this show by choice. This will sound abominable, but my capacity for empathizing with characters who are defined by their learning disabilities is severely circumscribed. Okay, when I say it like that, it sounds more pompous than heartless; that's a near-optimal outcome.] were canceled. I think I need a paper bag; I’m about to hyperventilate.
It’s not that 43 is terribly old, in the abstract, or that seventh grade feels like last Tuesday. Up to this point, however, I’ve been living under the assumption that my mid-life crisis years were more distant than the release of Under the Bridge, and that heuristic no longer stands. I need to get a career and and a wife and start making a whole lot of disappointing compromises, and I need to do it right now, if I’m going to try to use those life choices as an excuse for the whole slew of rash, foolish changes I plan to make in the vicinity of 2030. Oh, crap - where did I put that paper bag?
- Review - None of the facts surrounding Big Trouble led me to believe it would be good. Tim Allen plays a prominent role. It’s adapted from a novel by Dave Barry (which wouldn’t be bad, but I was only aware of Barry as a humorist, not a novelist). Running time is listed at 85 minutes, which is 4 minutes shorter than Office Space, the shortest excellent movie known to man. Unfortunately, the trailer piqued my interest.
A catalog of inane absurdities, Big Trouble is basically a goyish Woody Allen movie: lots of nonsense and half-assed neurosis sans witty dialogue. Given my frustration with films like Babel, Crash, and Traffic that attempt to tie together seemingly unrelated incidents for some epic effect, I should give Big Trouble credit for making no such attempt. The descent into Seinfeldian frivolity, however, is equally distasteful. Boo this movie. Boo.
- OlympiXXX - I think it was Thursday night that I woke to hear one of my roommates use the phrase “hot-assed Nastya Liukin.” Disregarding the question of whether this statement is better rebutted on grounds of taste or decency, it’s a solid lead-in to one of my favorite little-reported stories of any Olympics: hedonism in the Olympic village.
Perhaps this notion has never crossed your mind. If not, you might take a moment to consider that the athletes are segregated from the general populace. For the most part, they are astoundingly well-built individuals still enjoying their youth. They’re in a high-stress situation and surrounded, likely for one of the few times in their lives, by people of like minds and experiences. Once one’s event has been completed, he or she has whatever time remains before the closing ceremonies to distract from disappointment or celebrate success. Motivations notwithstanding, the potential for fornicatory international incidents is unfathomable.
If you Google “Olympic village hedonism,” you’ll get articles like this about the amenities available to the athletes in Beijing. If, however, you Google “Olympic village orgy,” you’ll meet with a quite narrow selection of legitimately interesting articles such as this, which, though written four years ago, offers an anecdotal history of Olympians’ penchant for Bacchanalia. Supporting evidence might be found in this article, which notes the 100,000 condoms the Chinese government has provided for use within the Olympic village (roughly 6/person or 12/pairing of Olympians). That’s only 40% of the 250,000 condoms distributed throughout Beijing for the games.
I understand that Olympic coverage is a family affair, but, for all the unnecessary time spent broadcasting Michael Phelps’ family, someone could at least acknowledge the fact that the Olympic village is the U.N.’s answer to Freaknik.
- Amendments - In an earlier post, I referred to China as “totalitarian,” which is incorrect. “Authoritarian” is a more apt description.
Also, I may have implied a suspicion that the U.S. Olympic swimming team uses performance-enhancing drugs. Although I remain suspicious, this article from NPR covers a few reasons why the Water Parallelepiped (clearly not a cube) likely holds the world’s fastest pool. This Slate article addresses what it calls “Olympic inflation.”
- Influence - How do you measure America’s cultural influence on the rest of the world? During the medal ceremony for women’s all-around gymanstics, some asshole in the front row leaned over to wave a Chinese flag behind the medal stand while the Star-Spangled Banner was playing. Yes, even the Chinese can be “ugly Americans” - and on their home turf, no less. Now I just need to see some Frenchmen wearing patriotic jumpsuits.
- Gymnastics - Other notes on the women’s all-around:
- Between events, while discussing the addition of a heretofore unseen twist to Shawn Johnson’s floor routine, Bela Karolyi shook his fist, shouting past Bob Costas to the distant Johnson, “Go, girlfriend!” Someone else must have seen this.
- Was anyone else distracted by the unnervingly long fingers and feet on a few of the young Olympians? It’s as if their bodies are pleading to be allowed to finish growing.
- Commercials - Since there are more hours of Olympic coverage than there are hours in a day, it tends to get left playing while I do other things (like writing this post). Because I’m not actively watching the idiot box, I don’t always have the wherewithal to avoid commercials, and I continually find myself aggravated by both the existence and content of said advertisements. Who, for instance, watches The Biggest Loser? What possible rationale could exist for subjecting humanity to a second season of Lipstick Jungle? Where I can bet on the O/U for Knight Rider? These are the kind of questions that keep me distracted enough to breathe.
- Danger - Spotters stand downfield of javelin throwers to immediately mark their distances. Such would not be my risk-taking behavior of choice.
- Commercialism? - Time|Life is selling this boxed set of Vietnam DVDs. The TV commercial leaves me apoplectic. Yes, this collection holds unique educational value, but the way they count down battles like the track listing of a Greatest Hits CD is appalling.
- Coverage - I’d like to thank the human interest piece NBC ran the other night for making me think “Pelligrini? That slut!” when the Italian swimmer took the lead in the women’s 200m freestyle swim. No matter how hard I try, I can’t completely disregard the terrible crap they run on network TV.
- Phelps - As of 4am EST on 13 August, 2008, Michael Phelps could secede from the United States, form his own country, and still be tied with the U.S. and Korea for the second-most gold medals behind China. He would be 12th in the total medal count.
- Review - I don’t understand how I keep forgetting to hold forth on the topic of Black Snake Moan. We’re talking about a movie concerning sex addiction with a titular entendre. It was made to be fodder; unfortunately, it wasn’t made to meet exceedingly high standards.
For starters, it’s difficult to suspend disbelief long enough to see a victim of adolescent sex abuse cured of her self-destructive coping mechanism by being chained to a radiator for a few days. Needless to say, the research I’ve read does not support this plotline. [Spoiler Alert] It gets even worse when the film tries to generalize a particular dysfunction in the last fifteen minutes.
As much as we all love Christina Ricci and Samuel L., they didn’t quite fit the parts. Yes, Christina Ricci specializing in making movies that are too realistically creepy for Tim Burton, but Taryn Manning is the gold standard for your “promiscuous white trash” (oh yeah, I said it) casting needs. For his part, Samuel L. is a bad motha - shut yo’ mouth! (R.I.P. Isaac Hayes) - with a penchant for making movies destined for obscurity. Sadly, the badness didn’t always comport with is character in this case. I wonder if they could’ve gotten Lawrence Fishburne. Justin Timberlake performs admirably.
- Gymanstics - Look…Either way, I’m going to get worked up about the women’s gymnastics team final, so you might as well get some notes:
- You’re supposed to turn 16 during the year of the games in question to qualify for the Olympics. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) allowed China to verify the ages of its more questionable competitors by providing passports. Yes, the IOC allowed an interested party to prove its case by providing documents it could produce from thin air that no other party could dispute. By contrast, the American justice system appears quite sophisticated. I can’t prove those passports included falsified birth dates, but Deng Linlin is 12 years old if she’s a day.
- Who came up with the various apparatuses that make up the gymnastic canon? The fixed rings and various bars (parallel, high, uneven) seem natural enough, as do the floor exercise, pommel horse, and balance beam, but I want to know who looked at a balance beam and said “You know, if I got a running start, I could really hurl myself over that thing.”
- Can anyone get enough of Bela Karolyi? I know I can’t. The guy is animated, he’s got an accent, and his blatant irreverence with regard to Bob Costas is refreshing. How many letters do I have to write to get Bela Karolyi to replace (the idiot) Joe Theismann on Monday Night Football. I’m sure Kornheiser’s on my side.
- I keep trying to work in a Club Dread reference, but it makes me feel kind of dirty. Those of you familiar with the film should know the scene to which I allude.
- NBC’s commentators love to reference the Chinese training system as being one that produces outstanding gymnasts by sort of, maybe infringing on the individual’s human rights. Now, I know that Chinese commerce is crucial to the American economy and the Sino-Soviet split provided a major opening for the “free world” team in the Cold War, but I think these Olympics would be more enjoyable if the coverage gratuitously demonized the Chinese government. I’m not saying they need to incite a riot, but a few strategically placed Tibetan flags could go a long way. Is a Costas satellite interview with the Dalai Lama entirely out of the question? [Editor's Note: Take a moment to check out His Holiness's marvelous website and compare it to Pope Benedict XVI's site. I think it's clear which religion has a better design team.] I guess the subtext of command v. market economy (or Democracy v. Totalitarianism, if you want to get polemical) just gets me nostalgic for the glory days of known enemies and Mutual Assured Destruction.
- Hold on…Is the Chinese women’s gymnastic performance really being relegated to “highlights-only” coverage so I can see Michael Phelps continue to bludgeon the world’s swimming records? That’s disappointing. Televised gymnastics may be more spectacle than sport, but at least there’s some element of suspense. Phelps’s races confirm foregone conclusions.
The eldest member of China’s women’s gymnastics team actually fell off the balance beam. I don’t know if Nelson is a familiar character in China, but I’m sure a few million Americans just went “Ha-ha” in staccato, descending notes.
- Oh no -someone call the SWAT team; disaster has struck. My DVR quit recording soon after Alicia Sacramone finished choking her way through the floor exercise, and it’s too late to catch the replay of that coverage. Maybe it’s some kind of digital mercy instinct. I wouldn’t know, because NBC failed to adequately account for scoring delays when they scheduled their coverage.
- Dissent? - Perhaps it’s just that I’m in the heart of the Obama demographic, but when I hear the list of occasions on which John McCain has “fought his party,” I start to think, “Gee, maybe the old man’s just too pig-headed to join the correct party.” Then, I see his record supporting Dubya.
- “Sports” - It hasn’t been very long since I criticized equestrian as being undeserving of Olympic recognition, but I’d like to revisit this topic on a larger scale. There are a whole slew of ludicrous Olympic events; besides, you have to kill a horse before you can kick it.
My basic argument is this: any Olympic event should require more skills than “aiming, taunting, and alcohol tolerance,” the skills listed under the Wikipedia entry for beer pong. Okay, that’s not really my argument, but I had to plug that wikipedia entry.
Nevertheless, someone needs to prune the Olympic tree. For instance, I like to watch athletic women in bikinis as much as the next guy, but I don’t see the need for both regular and beach volleyball. What about swimming? That sport accounts for somewhere around a billion Olympic medals. There are people winning medals for marksmanship with air rifles; yes, that’s a glorified BB gun. “Shuttlecock” is a fun word, but badminton, like equestrian, is an old British game, not a valid Olympic sport.
Conversely, I turned on a women’s field hockey match in the hopes that they’d wear checkered skirts like my high school’s team only to find myself being impressed by the action. Field hockey can stay.
- Mad Men - Is anyone else watching the new season of Mad Men as it happens? Given the ubiquitous Emmy nominations the show received for its first season and the glut of publicity leading into the second, I’ve been meaning for some time to gripe about its status as the most excessively hyped show on television. To my mind, Mad Men is somewhat akin to The Wire - a critically acclaimed show that, despite brief, shining moments, tends to leave me feeling like I’ve missed something. This, however, is not intended to be my main point.
Excepting characters who are compulsively soaked in gin, the acting in Mad Men comes across as stilted. The show’s protagonist is the dapper Don Draper, a square-jawed man who suffers existential crises and generational conflict with the same deep monotone voice he uses to instruct his young daughter on the proper way to mix a Tom Collins, and such [ahem] subtle inflection pervades the cast. Maybe I’m just viewing an accurate portrayal of the early 60’s through Millennial eyes; I’m open to that possibility, particularly given the ends to which AMC has gone to produce a show that’s historically accurate. If such is the case, then I’m gaining a much deeper respect for the transformative power of my parents’ generation.
If it is indeed the case that the flat delivery in Mad Men is an intentional reflection of the time’s speech patterns, then the question of whether such accuracy makes for good television remains. Certainly, there is value in historical accuracy; I believe I’ve recognized some of it in the preceding paragraph. What such strict accuracy fails to recognize, however, is the perspective of the contemporary viewer. Steeped since birth in overwrought acting, my cohort spends its days before perched before sparkly monitors, listening to iPods as we navigate cacophonous streets. We are not attuned to the subtleties of mid-century vocal sensibilities. Thus, what Mad Men gains by historical accuracy it loses by dismissing its audience’s perspective. Perhaps this gets back to my original point. Mad Men is overhyped because it’s damned good, but there’s good reason it’s the best show no one’s watching.
- Combat - You know, I can respect sports of pure exertion like distance running, rowing, and swimming. I can’t jog more than a couple of miles. I’ve been exhausted by an erg. I swim well enough to love a few wacky noodles. Thus, I recognize the nobility of many Olympic endeavors.
That said, there’s a part of me - probably the coarse, rural, red meat-eating, porn-watching, colloquialism-spewing part that’s lent to curse like a sailor on shore leave in Bangkok - that holds gladiatorial sports in higher regard. There are no world records for combat sports (wrestling, judo, boxing, etc.), and I suspect that if there were, those sports wouldn’t be the same. Say what you will about the purity of speed; the simplicity of the ethos “two man enter; one man leave” is inarguable.
Perhaps this is merely a matter of identification. [Editor's note: When writing the remainder of this paragraph, I failed to rein myself in. The upshot is that every sport I've played has been one of dialectic achievement (for someone to succeed, someone else must fail - and vice versa), and I find that model more appealing than sports in which competitors are ranked by the extent to which they reach a common goal (most often, speed). Feel free to skip ahead to the next paragraph or bullet point. You've been warned.]Built with short legs and a thick neck, I have a speed which has never drawn a (complimentary) remark. I have, however, stood on the mat and taken the measure of the man across the way. I have trained beyond my motivation to ensure that the blows I delivered were stronger than those received. I have felt visceral Zen focus, felt the exhilaration, fear, and finality of conquest and defeat, comforted by the soft solace of knowing no better could be done, so it comes as no surprise when I now assert gladiatorial sport to be more noble competition than is merely going fast.
Okay, okay - that got a little out of hand. If you’ll take a moment to read the last four sentences aloud (not too loud, if you’re cubicle-bound), I think you’ll find the soliloquy has a nice rhythm. Nice? I’d say “driving” or “powerful,” were I not so astoundingly humble. It may not earn forgiveness for subjecting you to such self-indulgent, overwrought prose, but oratorical transcription can be a virtue, too.
- Gymnastics - Like many Americans, I care so much about gymnastics that I’m transfixed every four years. The storylines in this year’s Olympics are better than usual. It’s the U.S. v. the home team, and the Chinese are downright amazing. Adding to the drama on the women’s side is the fact that the team has been depleted by injury, meaning that when Chellsie Memmel (that appears to be her chosen spelling) fell from the uneven bars in the qualifying round, she was left no redemptive outlet. For his part, Bela Karolyi enacted a mutiny over Bob Costas, using his interview to rant about politics being revealed by the judges’ scores.
For the Chinese women, there’s the small matter of their actual age. This article from the NY Times gives a description of the situation that’s both brief and candid. All I can say is that those tiny, determined Chinese girls, with their hand-chalk and eyeliner, really creep me out. If one of them keeps performing after her head pops off, I won’t be surprised.
- Gymnastics - Watching NBC’s coverage of the men’s finals in gymnastics, I hear a commentator say “If there was gonna be a place where he would have a problem, it was gonna be the dismount.” Disregarding the lack of a “then” to go with that “if,” that sentence would make perfect sense, but for the fact that I’m watching the floor exercise. How does one dismount - or mount, for that matter - a floor? Somehow, I imagine a guy doing gymanstics on one of those floating 8-bit floors from Contra…
“How do you think he’ll do with the dismount?”
“I don’t know. Even if he has the distance to clear the waterfall beneath the platform, he’ll still have to time his jump and execute a tight aerial somersault if he doesn’t want to get shot by the wall turret or tagged by that freaky foreign soldier who just keeps running across the top level.”
“Hunh.”
“You’re gonna frag him, aren’t you?”
“Dude, I just got ’spread;’ it’s like God wants this gymnast to croak.”
- Swimming - Am I the only one with the impression that about half a dozen world swimming records are being broken every day? This phenomenon is like steroids for my already strong general skepticism. Did I say “steroids?” I meant “nutritional supplements.”
- Bias - If you’re like me, you’re watching the Olympics on NBC (mostly, anyway) in these United States of America. When you see Bob Costas give a rundown of the medal count, countries are listed in order of total medals, which reliably puts the U.S. on top. Given that you’re reading this blog, I’ll assume you have internet access and little or no learning disability, so you may have already searched for a medal count online. Like me, you may have found this page, which is updated regularly. Notice that URL ends with a “.cn” extension, denoting its source in China. Notice, also, that though number rankings are given based on total medals earned, the list is displayed in order of the number of gold medals earned, which reliably puts China at the top. Clearly, this is a government that knows more about propaganda than it does about subtlety. Then again, the implication that only gold medals count isn’t without merit.