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• Sage: DOOMSDAY Sage: DOOMSDAY

  • From: TheFabSage
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    Jan. 29, 2010
    
    
    "The Octagon of Doom" is likely to remain Allen Field House West. I think KU will be favored by three or four and cover. 
    
    
    Why? Lemme count the ways. The Hawks' abominable snowman, Cole Aldrich, has shaken his funk and is ruling the paint again. I'm pretty sure KU is a far better foul-shooting team, and the zebras will likely have quick whistles to prevent brawls. Don't bet on getting home calls. KU's rep will offset the Bram berserkers. Finally, the Hawks are far more used to the national spotlight.
    
    

    Yep, I'm also the dolt who thought Baylor would cover Tuesday night. Excuse me for not knowing we'd shoot 49 percent and drain a freakish 12 of 21 treys after this version of the Purple Popguns (the originals, for the younger of my tens of fans, are Mike Evans and Chuckie Williams) couldn't hit the ocean from the beach against Texas and Okie State.

    
    

    Bet on this: Self won't let 'em get in rhythm. He can keep bringing fresh legs with fouls to give: Collins, Morningstar, Taylor, Reed, even Eilijah Johnson. They've beaten us 21 of the last 22 here, for God's sake, and 38 of the last 40 overall. Last year we had 'em buried in the Bram 30-14 and they still won by 11.

    
    

    I hope I'm wrong and that my prediction is worth what you've paid for it, but the call is clear. Blood will spill, venom will spew, the Frankster could implode, painted roosters, as in the glory days of Ahearn, could hit the court. But the cursed Hawks will escape again, 82-75.

    
    

    TheFabSage@AOL.com

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• G.W. Clift and Civic Duty G.W. Clift and Civic Duty

  • From: gwclift
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    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written January 29,  2010

    Every year about this time I continue my on-going political experiment. I write to my State Senator, my State Representative, and my district's State Board of Education member and ask them to require local districts to, in the future, hire as new teachers only those who have degrees in the primary subjects they will be teaching. If the school boards are hiring someone to teach History, they should require applicants to have History degrees, not administrative ones from some college of Education. I also write a few friends in the state and ask them to write similar letters.
    
    I want to see if we can have any effect on the actions of our elected representatives. Now I think I'm about seven years into this, and only my Senator has shown any interest in the idea at all.
    
    The change I am proposing would likely be a good thing. High school students need teachers who know more about their class subjects than they do. And they need enthusiastic instruction. Our children will learn more from teachers who are actually interested enough in Biology or Geography to have taken degrees in them, rather than preparing themselves for later administrative work as superintendents or principals. This seems self-evident.
    
    One of the things that is holding the idea up just now is that the districts can't find teachers of any kind to teach a lot of their classes. I suspect this is partly because professional administrators have taken over the schools, making things so bureaucratic and ugly that few people want to work under their leadership. And our reaction is to hire more administrators and put them into the classrooms.
    
    Nevertheless, this is my single continuing (and non-partisan) political effort. If I suddenly make surprise headway, I'll note it in a later blog. But don't hold your breath. In part because my reform is non-partisan, it seems unlikely to catch on, no matter how obvious its adoption should be.
    
    Now, on to the Arts, where there is some satisfaction to be got. Last night we trundled up to McCain Auditorium to hear Ricky Skaggs and Kentucky Thunder, and it was a thoroughly professional show. Once one of the stars of top forty Country, Skaggs (www.rickyskaggs.com/) returned to Bluegrass in the 1990s, and has been touring with a fine band including a National Flatpickiing Champion and a bassist so good and so dependable that tempo and rhythm were never a concern. The well-sung program included some stuff too pop for me, some really old Country, some blues, a Django Reinhardt swing number that sounded like the theme song to the "Jeeves and Wooster" t.v. series, and some familiar classics including "Salty Dog." "Kentucky Waltz," and "Uncle Pen." The show wasn't up to Bill Monroe's McCain appearance, nor yet to Earl Scruggs's one with Vassar Clements (which was recorded and released by Columbia in 1972). But it was an easy show to like, and Skaggs came off very well.
    
    I got to see the new Terry Gilliam (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000416/) movie. He's the former Python member who directed, among other things, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Brazil, Time Bandits, and The Fisher King. Heath Ledger died, apparently, as he was making Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, and Gilliam used Colin Ferrell, Johnny Depp, and Jude Law to play Ledger's part in the scenes he hadn't completed. If the photography were a little sharper, the movie would have had a chance. It concerns an immortal (Christopher Plummer) who has made a deal with the devil and who now travels London in a sideshow wagon, horse-drawn, offering passersby a chance to seek their own opportunity to confirm their devotion to good while wandering inside his imagination. A curiosity.
    
    If zombie movies are always about our being suffocated by the encroachment of strangers, vampire movies are always about sex, or so I figured. But I can't see how Daybreakers, the new movie set in the near future, has anything much to do with sex. And it is about vampires, including a biologist played by Ethan Hawke. No romantic hero he. Instead he's just a cog in the machine of international business and government, now that the blood-suckers have taken over the world. They are running out of humans to drain for sustenance. The movie isn't clear about how this is a personal crisis for this recalcitrant daylight-avoider.
    
    The new Amy Adams (www.imdb.com/name/nm0010736/bio) movie, Leap Year, is worth an hour and a half or so. But it is really, really gentle stuff. She plays an American woman on her way to Dublin to propose to her cardiologist boyfriend on Leap Day. Weather forces her plane down, though, and she has to travel up the eastern Irish coast with a broken-hearted pub owner whose mortgage is due in a few days. This is sort of fun--anything with Adams in it is fun--but it doesn't risk breaking its own fingernails.
    
    There's a new western in town. The post-apocalyptic Book of Eli goes like a movie about a gunslinger traveling from place to place before turning into the last chapter of Fahrenheit 451 late. I think I'd call the business about blindness a trick played on the ticketholders, but those of you who are Denzel Washington fans may want to find out for yourselves.
    
    Director Peter Jackson's many fans may feel the same about Lovely Bones. Despite a good cast and an interesting conceit--a murdered girl can't go to her final rest until her killer is identified--the movie just doesn't have any pop. Late climaxes should come at us quickly. Instead they are savored.
    
    Fans of the old Disney live-action family movies like The Shaggy Dog and The Absent Minded Professor might like The Spy Next Door. The aging Jackie Chan (www.jackiechan.com/) plays a retired secret agent minding three difficult kids while he fends off attacks by a costume-loving Russian spy. The movie is surprisingly effective, and yet all the time it is cheesy.
    
    Which may be a little more than one can say for Extraordinary Measures. This Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford movie is about a businessman and a scientist who work together to try to find a cure for Pompe's Disease, a deadly variety of Muscular Dystrophy. The story is too simple. And a little maudlin.
    
    The number of evil angels in human bodies attacking a desert diner is so high that it is referred to as "Legion" in the film with that title. It is nice to see Paul Bettany (www.paulbettany.net/) staring again--go back and look at Wimbleton sometime if you like chick flics and you'll see him in another leading part. But Legion plays around with being Biblical when it isn't, and that may make some viewers uncomfortable. Then, too, it doesn't know when to end.
    
    But I had less fun watching The Rock in The Tooth Fairy, an odd merging of a little girl's fantasy with references to minor league hockey. The latter don't manage to give the movie any grit, by the way. Dwayne Johnson is sentenced to two week's duty pulling baby teeth out from under pillows after he squashes a couple of kids' fantasies.
    
    I liked the premise of Youth in Revolt better than I liked the movie. The idea is to regularly introduce random story turns into a plot about a high school kid seeking his first sexual experience. The best of the random turns is that he invents a French 1950s alterego who frequently appears to guide him deeper and deeper into trouble, and nearer to his heart's desire. But the movie really isn't very funny, ironically. Fred Willard playing a stoned middle-aged "activist" sleeping face down on a living room floor in a town of trailer houses is the only really laugh-out-loud thing in the show.
    
    I only really managed to read two books in the last two weeks. One was Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, a sort of famous post-World War II book by a blue blood (www.bookrags.com/Nancy_Mitford) who was sister to chief blackshirt Sir Oswald Mosely's convict wife Diana and to Jessica the devoted Communist and so on. In most ways it is just a romance, but it does have some famous quips (calling a woman who left several husbands "The Bolter") and it does introduce the idea of dividing everyone into two camps: "Hons" (for "Honorables," the title given the children of the titled) and Counter-Hons." There are some memorable characters, too, and the book thoroughly understands an interesting cast of mind. But I wasn't enthusiastic about it.
    
    But I think maybe I liked it better than I did Ngaio Marsh's 1941 mystery Death and the Dancing Footman, a contrived and plodding country house mystery which will go over and over the same timing material until readers will want to scream. Marsh can be quite good. I like Inspector Alleyn. But this particular book isn't worthy the vast time it will take to read it.
    
    Since reading is such a pain, I invite you to join me in torturing Kansas elected office-holders with the suggestion that they see to it that future Kansas high school students are taught by instructors holding degrees in the actual subjects they teach. The pitch may be quixotic, but it may also help prepare legislators and State School Board Members for future positive action.
    
    Let me know how you do with that. And check in here again in two weeks to find out what I've read and heard and seen from my perch up the hill from Aggieville.

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• Sage: Come Fry With Me Sage: Come Fry With Me

  • From: TheFabSage
  • Description:

     

    Jan. 21, 2010

    
    

    If I could live life over, I'd live over a bar. -- W.C. Fields

    
    

    WHERE I'VE BEEN     For reasons I won't bore you with (a phrase I'm considering for my epitaph, along with "I toldja I was sick!"), I took a sabbattical from blogging for a few weeks. I thought I should reflect on whether to address more daunting subjects than politics, sports gambling, drinking, K-State sports, health care, the Rolling Stones, infomania, drinking, the elephantine, Monty Pythonish defense budget, why Americans get nothing back for their taxes, the dumbing of America, the secrets of happiness, drinking, etc.

    
    

    I've concluded -- and herewith my New Year's resolution -- that I should change nothing. I resolve only to stop resolving. ("Hey bartender! More of the same!")

     

    BEYOND POL- AND COACH-SPEAK     That's the bumpersticker goal of this blog. Beyond the bromidic (BTB). Have something to say and say it well or shut up. Otherwise, whatever the delusions of journalism and the blogosphere, the show must not go on, for it stinks. Arrange pie contracts on the next coach who says his goal is to make his team better, on the next pol who says we must "move forward" and "You can't fool the American people," and on the next reporter who records such bilge with the zeal of Warren Buffett's stenographer. (Lincoln acknowledged that "you can fool some of the people all of the time." Were he able to watch today's marches of folly he'd surely change "some" to "most." How else could advertising work? American pols are marketed like brands of mouthwash and toilet paper, with the added advantage of being endlessly bribable. They are whores without sex appeal. See Health Care Debate, Winners of.)

     

    The above is in sync with Orwell's great essay "Politics and the English Language." It's a modest but realistic goal at this stage of my glorious career, if a career it can be called. Gawd what po I once had, or so I told myself. Maybe someone will yet discover it. At least I now have what Scott Fitzgerald called the cheap courage that comes from having nothing to lose. That means that after a few glasses of golden nectar I'm a threat to haul off and, in violation of American opinion journalism's chief taboo, actually spew out what I really think, which from time to time may approximate the actual truth, and thus contribute to universal peace and love. Hey, anything's possible.

     

    I'm mindful of at least three truths: (1) these are revolutionary times, and mostly devolutionary for commercial media, (2) those who presume to make the rules for the digital age are self-appointed  -- no one has been elected rule-maker -- and (3) rock the boat for the sake of the rocking. Forget about winning converts. Few are susceptible to conversion, and fewer still are susceptible for the right reasons. Much of their praise should be considered slanderous, and much of their criticism fodder for blurbs. Few minds are truly open to evidence. Either they can't evaluate it or they rationalize it away in fleeing to the comfort zones of their presuppositions. The delusion to the contrary leaves as the controversialist's sole consolation the debatable notion that it's better to be futile than passive.

     

    Among the subjects I hope to address downstream are the myths of journalism and "infomania." Ain't it interesting that our stupidification has accelerated over the decades just as info technology has advanced to giving us mouse-click access to -- what? -- 20 Libraries of Congress? Why has this been accompanied by our Neanderthalization and nannification? Nor has being a nation of degree factories made us wiser, let alone freer. It takes fathomless arrogance and ignorance to call ourselves "the land of the free" when we jail, by far, a higher percentage of citizens than any other nation, and millions of others escape only after endless slugfests in court.

     

    How, in sum, did we end up as a nation of jailers, lawyers, gantrys, grundies, goons, illiterates, robots, Sarah Palin groupies, and pimp politicians? Listen my children and you shall hear.

     

    MARTIN MANIA     It's bonkers in the Bram. Does anyone not love Martin? A real star. Bobby Knight without the meanness. Not to at least double his salary would be penny-wise and pound-foolish. This is only his third year as a head coach at the college level, and he'll only get better. His staff also seems rock-solid.

     

    How long can our magic carpet stay airborne? Fear the Tuesday trip to Baylor. Classic flat spot. It’s the last game before KU comes to town on Saturday the 30th. If we won out through the KU game,  which I hugely doubt, we'd likely vault into the top five -- the top five! But if you're dumb enough to bet, bet the Bears on Tuesday. They play all zone all the time, and with their length and agility they can pressure the perimeter enough to contain Pullen and Clemente. If the zebras don't let our bigs bang, as they did against Texas, we won't escape. 

     

    My money (pittance as it is) remains on KU to win not only the conference but the national title. Yet if in November someone had said that by late January we'd be getting very little mileage out of our McDonald's All-American recruits, Judge and McGruder, and still be 16-2. . . . Or that Texas would hit town unbeaten and numero uno, Clemente and Pullen would have awful shooting nights -- and we'd still win by nine. . . . If this continues, which I can't predict, what would be left to say but the Frankster for president?

     

    COACHING CALAMITIES     Tote 'em up: Mark Mangino (KU), Jim Leavitt (South Florida), Mike Leach (Texas Tech), Frank Martin (K-State). Can Chris Merriewether ever recover from the hand Coach Martin laid on him? Call me a cockeyed optimist, but I think he can. He will survive!

     

    Within the bounds of sanity, I don't care what coaches do to players. They come voluntarily and are always free to leave. The sin of the notorious Bobby Knight, in my view, was to abuse underlings. Those who bully the weak tend to kneel to the strong, and deserve only scorn.

     

    Ever and always: win big enough and you can be Hitler; lose big enough and you can't be saved by being Christ or even Shania Twain. My own all-time fave coach: UNLV's towel-chewing Jerry Tarkanian. When he lost the national-title game to loathsome Duke, a little something in me died. Nuffin' wrong wif' me and Tark.

     

    TheFabSage@AOL.com

     

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• G.W. Clift and Dutch courage, G.W. Clift and Dutch courage, Dutch door, Dutch uncle, Dutch date

  • From: gwclift
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    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written January 15, 2010
    
    The Dutch are by reputation a very orderly people. Neat. Organized. Conformists, one might call them, especially as on looked out on the blocks of suburban apartment buildings on the way into central (or "centraal") Amsterdam from the Schiphol Airport. Stiff-necked, Protestant ethic boys. Not that they haven't fought this national character tendency. When it was illegal to be a Protestant, the Catholic government ignored informal worship. When it was illegal to be Catholic, the government ignored the building of churches in Amsterdam attics--we visited "Our Lord in the Attic," and interesting in situ "secret" seventeenth-century Catholic church taking up three flours of a house (www.opsolder.nl). When the Nazi's army occupied canal town, the Dutch naturally hid Jews in their attics. Now the sidewalk scrubbers allow graffiti downtown, allow hulking prostitutes to display their wares through windows looking out onto the walkway around Oudekerk (Old Church) (www.oudekerk.nl), and they let people buy and smoke pot in coffeehouses near the train station.
    
    Ironically the net effect of all this for me was that I thought Amsterdam rougher than London, which is literally ten times its size. A shop keeper overcharged me. Small time thieves (we assume) approached John on the street to offer him hard drugs. We didn't see people sleeping on the streets, but we were approached by sometimes fairly demanding beggars.
    
    Don't get the wrong idea. Amsterdam isn't threatening. But the central neighborhood has an edge to it one doesn't ever sense in London. And London can be grand in ways Amsterdam isn't interested in being. It is small scale, street level, its famous history well behind it.
    
    One of the best museums we visited during our recent trip was the Amsterdam History Museum (www.ahm.nl), a rambling but visually unified institution with good collections and an interesting story to tell. It did less than does the similarly large and well endowed Rijksmuseum (www.rijksmuseum.nl) to emphasize the period of the Republic, when the city was the center of history and commerce for Europe. And the center of Art. The Rijksmuseum is justly proud of its collection of Vermeers and Rimbrandts and other Dutch masterpieces. Rembrandt's House (www.rembrandthuis.nl--which shows etchings, no paintings) and the modern Van Gogh Museum (which has a quarter of the artist's 800 paintings, but few of the good or famous ones) are relatively close (www.vangoghmuseum.com), the former to the History Museum and the latter to the Rijksmuseum. It isn't cheap to get into these museums--six Euros (about $9) is about average. But it is convenient to get to them as they tend to be near the train station or out the number 2 or 5 tram lines ($4 for an hour of rides).
    
    We didn't find much Indonesian food, which surprised us. And meals weren't cheap. But they were tasty and we got large portions, usually. There are a lot of Argentinean steak houses, oddly, down in the central city's streets--where one detects the el supremo in every street and in many businesses. Most everyone spoke good English, at least partly because a large share of t.v. programming was in English, sometimes subtitled. In our fifteen-year-old hotel, the basic but well-run Bellevue, we also got Spanish, Russian, German, and Dutch channels.
    
    John's room had a bathroom with a shower in it, and no separation between the toilet and lav area and the shower part. He said it made him think of 2001 A Space Odyssey. The hotel's breakfast room was "Carla's: Peace, Love, and Food." Every piece of bread had seeds or nuts in it. There were juices and fruits. Apparently travelers need laxatives. I found myself looking for the Gents every time I passed Carla's. We almost didn't get to Holland from London. Apparently the northern hemisphere is experiencing a colder than usual winter. Scrambling climotologists who were recently worried we wouldn't accept transferable carbon dioxide permits have now announced we are at the beginning of another "little ice age" that will serve as a pause in the relentless march to global warming. Does anyone still believe these guys' claims can be trusted? Anyway, London got about a quarter of an inch of snow and began canceling things. Soccer games. School days. British Airways canceled our flight to the Netherlands and had to bus us to Gatwick for an alternate one.
    
    But generally speaking, we weren't incommoded by the weather. London was ten degrees cooler than average, but that meant it was twenty degrees warmer than Kansas. And at least one homeless guy we saw had a contemporary answer to the drop in temperature. He was sleeping out wearing a snow-leopard print Snuggie.
    
    Heck, I saw a guy in a box at Covent Garden wearing a sombrero during the first of two ballets. They were performing "Les Patineurs" (about Parisan ice skating, with music taken from Giacomo Meyerbeer), a half hour of delight, followed by "Tales of Beatrix Potter" (with full head masks and John Lanchberry music originally arranged for Sadler's Wells) which told six or seven stories in forty-five minutes. The Royal Ballet is damn good. But there was more to get excited about the night before when the New Adventures company (www.new-adventures.net) again did Matthew Bourne's now twenty-year-old take on Swan Lake at Sadler's Wells. The Bourne is famous for casting men as the swans, and they are vaguely threatening. The casting shift does allow a homoerotic reading to the show, but I don't suppose it demands one. Only the ballet inside the larger performance is actually ballet, I think I'd say, and the rest is pretty high class modern dance. Terrific orchestra. Refreshing take.
    
    We also saw Twelfth Night at the Duke of York's Theater. Last year we saw the same play in the same venue, but with Derek Jacobi as Malvolio. The new production, by the RSC, had moments when it was superior. Jo Stone-Fewings, playing Orsino, started it off fast, getting a wonderful comedy out of that early scene. But the part didn't give him more chances. Richard Wilson (Malvolio) and the others had decent turns, and Nancy Carroll and Alexandra Gilbreath were particularly good as Viola and Olivia. But I'm not sure the whole was consistent or memorable. And the production didn't really solve the problem of how to handle the attachment to Sebastian of the shipwrecked sailor. Still, we enjoyed the evening.
    
    We also liked the half dozen or so museums we managed to visit. The little (and expensive) Fashion and Textile Museum (www.ftmlondon.org) on the South Bank had a good show about Foale and Tuffin, Mod London designers and shop owners. I took Johnny to Vinopolis, the wine and spirits museum which offers (pricey) wine tasting lectures and opportunities. The British Museum (www.britishmuseum.org) had a kind of interesting (and expensive to visit) show about Montezuma, but the interpretation let it down a little--first thing it was correcting our pronunciation and then later it seemed forced to admit that the head Aztec must not have had much popular support among his own people. I didn't see mention of the numbers involved. My recollection is that Cortez took over Mexico with a couple of hundred soldiers. The exhibit reminded us to blame those Spaniards for bringing disease to the Indians.
    
    We also visited the (expensive) Museum of Brands, actually a collection of printed advertising items and packages from the last two hundred years. This institution, near the Portobello Road market, was partly supported by Cadbury, which was trying to fight off a Kraft takeover while we were in town. There's a one room collection called The Stationary Museum in a high grade stationers on New Bond Street, but the products for sale are almost more interesting than the museum collection was. We also got up to University College London to look at the stuffed and dressed body of Jeremy Bentham, though I'm not really sure why we went or why he's there.
    
    I found I didn't much like Oyster cards, the re-fillable bus and Underground electronic tickets. They don't always register the right amount, I thought, and passes are cheaper. We did like the disposable cell phones one can buy cheap at Phones 4 U on the Strand. Last year we found free newspapers being distributed, and this year the Standard had dropped its 20p price. But there are now far fewer newspaper stands on the streets, and I never did read a Telegraph or a Times. Saw an issue of The International Herald Tribune, now openly admitting the NY Times has shunted the Washington Post out of the partnership. On the front page was a story about a man urging scientists to tell the public that weather is still weather and not necessarily an indication of a long-term trend in climate change. If this winter had been warm, would the paper had run the same story?
    
    The t.v. news was all about Blair's press secretary testifying at an investigation into how the government sold the public on the second Gulf War. Let's go back and have investigations into the way the Wilson administration campaigned "He kept us out of war" while planning to enter WWI, shall we. Almost all the other news was about how horribly cold it was. 34--37--40! Time to act like wimps and start canceling things.
    
    They didn't stop my reading, through. I knocked off Robert Pinsky's 1990 poetry collection The Want Bone and the New Poems section of the 96 book The Figured Wheel. Pinsky (www.poets.org/rpins/) makes perfect sense to me, often combining references to widely-known instances of whatever he is discussing into a poem that moves along as it defines different parts and effects of the whole, one at a time. "Three men on scaffolding scatter cornflakes down/For people to see in black-and-white as snow,/Falling around the actor under the lights" begins "Picture," about movie-making. Pinsky's poetry can be difficult and it can be beautiful. I like to get back to him every now and then.
    
    I also like the occasional Golden Age Mystery, and I like Margery Allingham and her detective, the universal uncle Mr. Campion. 1931's The Gyrth Chalice Mystery is a great example of her best stuff, and it is a pretty good book, beginning with Lugg and Campion luring the impoverished heir to the Gyrths' odd and historic responsibility down to Bottle Street and relative safety in an England full of antique snatchers.
    
    That was maybe higher class than Angela Thirkell's Private Enterprise (1947). In this Barsetshire series book, the author sets her comic sights on food rationing (which went on in Britain from the beginning of the Second World War to the 1960s, I believe) and manages to work in several complicated romances including one of her damaging but innocent flirtations that I never understand. Decent prose. Some big laughs.
    
    I saw no new movies since my last posting here. So I guess I'd better get back to work tonight. No kidding. Vacation's over. Dutch self-discipline commands me to do my duty at the twelve-plex. In two weeks I'll be back to tell you what I saw.

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• G.W. Clift and a nation of wim G.W. Clift and a nation of wimps

  • From: gwclift
  • Description:

    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written January 1, 2010

    
    How wimpy have we become? It snowed here on Christmas Eve. On Christmas morning we loaded up the car and drove to Cheryl's father's house in Wichita to celebrate with her sister's family. Once I got  out of Manhattan, the roads were completely clear. But news reports had scared people into staying home. There was no one else on the interstate. I made record time.
    
    I shouldn't complain. But the recent snow storms prompted things I found surprising. A drive-in we wanted to patronize was closed on the twenty-sixth, either because the help didn't feel up to driving to the restaurant or because management thought the customers wouldn't be out. If one can believe t.v. crawls, churches all over the area canceled services on Christmas Eve (when we went to church), Christmas Day, and the following Sunday.
    
    During my twenty-five years of association with K-State, the university was only closed once, for one day. But under the new president, the campus was closed for the twenty-fourth IN CASE there was snow.
    
    Much of the time when one worries that standards have come down and folks have gotten soft, one is only misremembering things from his childhood. But in this case I'm certain that a similar storm in 1964 would not have closed the university. Or businesses. Or have kept people from driving home for Christmas. We used to sort of enjoy the novelty of snow-packed slickness. There were a few wrecks then. But heck, that's why we had insurance.
    
    Remember, too, how few Americans died during the recent "swine flu" epidemic. Some of us were really worried about that. When did we become such a nation of wimps?
    
    I love Dickens (www.dickensfellowship.org/) but don't care very much for his most mawkish or most topical stuff. The Pickwick Papers is my favorite. Bleak House, Our Mutual Friend, David Copperfield, Great Expectations--there are a lot of damn good ones. Some of his novels are difficult--including Little Dorrit--and some that are uneven--the Gordon Riots in Barnaby Rudge are wonderful, but the rest of the book is not really very interesting--and some are amusing even if they are pretty stagy--Nicholas Nickleby comes to mind. But I don't like Oliver Twist much. It is too much the model Victorian melodrama. And I don't like Hard Times. Even Dickens can't make political crusading work as story telling.
    
    And I didn't used to like A Tale of Two Cities (1859). But this time through it, I found it to be, well, lean in an attractive way. It makes progress front to back. And nobody describes the red bureaucratic mentality as well as Boz does. Its psychology seems dated, but it was ahead of its time. I just saw Precious last night, and the explanation for the behavior of the mother owes something to Dickens's explanation for the behavior of Dr. Manette. And, then, A Tale of Two Cities has some terrific rhetoric in it, from "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." (which opens to book) to "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known..." (which closes it). It is a historical novel, and the self sacrifice seems about as odd as the vindictiveness in it. But I read the book with pleasure.
    
    I'm still looking for the scanned copy of the last story in H.C. Bailey's first collection, Call Mr. Fortune (1921), which I just reread. Bailey's Reggie Fortune (www.mysterylist.com/submissions.htm) was one of the detectives whose exploits appeared first in the popular press (I believe in The Strand Magazine) in much the same way episodes from Mr. Monk's career appear on our t.v. They were collected in a series of books. The only Fortune novel I can remember, 1934's Shadow on the Wall, isn't nearly as much fun as are the stories. Fortune is a medical doctor who first comes to the assistance of law enforcement in that capacity. But he is a sort of universal dilettante who knows a little about most subjects, no matter how arcane. His interest in eating makes him expert at finding the best muffins in London. His interest in being entertained eventually leads to his marriage to a successful stage actress. He is not an action hero. He is sometimes wrong. But he uses his quirky knowledge and his sensitivity to detail to help him isolate motivations and evidence. The strange thing about the stories is that Bailey, who was about the most popular mystery writer in Britain between the world wars, uses almost no physical description--one doesn't get setting; all is talk. The books are mildly amusing, and will please readers who didn't get enough of this sort of thing from Hugh Greene's Rivals of Sherlock Holmes series, which I recommend.
    
    There probably ought to be a new Hugh Grant (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000424/) comedy film out during the holiday season, but I'm not sure Did You Hear About the Morgans? isn't a Sarah Jessica Parker movie with Hugh Grant tucked in. She's playing a mindless, spoiled New Yorker who wants to get pregnant and has scared her poor husband (Grant) away. But he wants to come back to her. On their get reacquainted date, they see a murder. The feds rush them to rural Montana for their own protection, and you can guess the rest. No taxis. No cell phones. Just books and fresh air and a rodeo coming. And several small town characters. Viewers may despise Parker's character so much that they will be rooting for the hit man to chase her down. Too bad about Hugh.
    
    The previews for Avatar made it look even worse than it is. The animation and effects are all effective. The story has been done so many times that it goes like a dude ranch horse following a trail. And it has Sigourney Weaver (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000244/ ) in it. Gone are the days when director James Cameron makes action pictures with sound plots--Aliens, The Terminator, and T2, for example. Avatar is more like his Titanic, a three hour love story about kids from different backgrounds. The rest is just stock crud--an evil company, military guys who want to fight just to fight, spiritual natives, and an ending in which a newly introduced power suddenly settles all issues once and for all. I wish this was the last time I'd ever see a movie with this plot, but experience suggests I'll be seeing it again next year, maybe more than once. Again the 3D works but is not worth the additional admission money.
    
    Who would Precious entertain? It is a movie about a young woman, poor and fat, who has been let down by societal systems including Welfare and the public schools. But she maintains her ability to fantasize about a celebrity life. Incest is a problem for her, as are an HIV infection (the story is set twenty years ago), two teenage pregnancies, physical and sexual and emotion abuse, the death of a parent, and the birth of a little girl with Downs Syndrome. But let's not have a movie about the failure of government interference. Let's not have anybody get a job. Instead let's pay student Precious a stipend for going to school and introduce some positive influences who are also civil servants--a lesbian teacher (at a GED prep school where her all-day English class has only eight or nine students), a multi-racial social worker, and a food faddist male nurse each appear and behave well. So the message of the movie is, what? Keep on the sunny side? Don't make me laugh.
    
    I didn't expect Guy Ritchie's (www.imdb.com/name/nm0005363/) movie Sherlock Holmes to be very much about Conan Doyle's stories and characters. And it isn't. But the movie is amusing, one of the most amusing films I've seen in a month. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are fine as late Victorian street fighting men, and if Rachel McAdams is miscast as belly-club wielding Irene Adler, she goes after the part with laudable energy. The story is more like the one for Murder by Decree, an earlier Holmes movie, than it is like anything in The Canon, as they call the original stories and novels. The sets are fine, and the movie has pace. And who doesn't like Downey and Law? A pleasant two hours plus of entertainment.
    
    Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Squeakuel is about an hour shorter. Would that it were two hours shorter. Betty Thomas has the high-singing, animated rodents going to high school while David Seville (Jason Lee) calls in occasionally from off-stage, as if he were Chrissy in late Three's Company episodes. David Cross is again the villain; this time he has three female, singing chipmunks to manage. I suspect little kids will like this. If you must take them to see it, consider hanging out in the lobby while the film runs. You can read down there.
    
    The new film called It's Complicated really isn't. The complications aren't really very important. Meryl Streep has been divorced from cheating Alec Baldwin for ten years when she begins to date Steve Martin and to bed her ex in different hotels. He leaves his wife, the woman he left Streep for. Then Streep decides she actually prefers Martin. I don't think the movie means to suggest she has sex with Baldwin just to hurt his current wife. Her twenty-something but childlike kids think this is all puzzling. Her coffee club gal pals think its a hoot. It really isn't either one. And it really isn't much.
    
    Which leaves us with Up in the Air. George Clooney plays a man living in a totally artificial and detached world. Unfortunately, the movie is also totally detached. It expects us to believe a likable guy can reject all on-going human associations, reject all possessions, fire people for a living, and aspire to nothing more than the acquisition of a huge total of American Airlines frequent fliers miles (www.aa.com/aadvantage ). In more than a few ways, this is "Fight Club Late," a story about a middle aged commercial travel who has no response to his own (unexplained) discovery that he is alienated. This isn't to say the movie, by Ivan Reitman's son, is dull or uninteresting. It is simply unfair to corporate America and to the Great Plains (where we aren't suffering from massive unemployment) and it is unable to tell its relatively simple story.
    
    But here's a simple story for you: we have become so wimpy that some people actually believe KU fired their football coach for hurting the feelings of one of its players. Golly. That fat guy could have hurt that tight end by poking an index finger in his breast bone. Right?
    
    Well, here in Manhattan we haven't fired Coach Martin for appearing to be angry on the sidelines. Perhaps that's because a few of us still around can remember how angry Jack Hartman seemed to get at his players sometimes. Perhaps its because Martin, whose players seem to like him, has a sense of humor about himself. He recently told a reporter that when he starred at center Luis Colon, the Puerto Rican stared back. Its practically death beam carnage on the floor at Bramlage this year. The team, by the way, is ranked twelfth in the nation.
    
    Looking ahead on the calendar to see when the games are, I discovered that I'm likely to have some amusing stuff to tell you about in two weeks, perhaps a day or two late. Please check back then. Merry Christmas to you, and Happy New Year from three blocks west of Aggieville.

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• G.W. Clift and Christmas tree G.W. Clift and Christmas tree weather

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    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written December 18, 2009

    It snowed several inches here last week sometime, and the temperature has not been above freezing ever since. I know it's winter, but winter in Kansas doesn't usually mean weeks with snow on the ground, especially not in early December. But, then, the weather this year has been goofy. Cool and rainy all summer. All the farmers had more trouble getting crops out of the fields than they did growing crops. And now the wheat, where they could get their wheat planted, is sleeping comfortably under a blanket of white.
    
    One is tempted to understand all this as anti-global warming. I read that we've gone eleven or twelve years without an increase in atmospheric temperature. But then I also read that the guys keeping track of atmospheric temperatures for the UN have been caught cooking the books. I was more willing to believe humans did have something to do with causing temperature changes before Gov. Sibelius began telling us it was the carbon dioxide we were releasing that did the trouble. Isn't that what we exhale? Isn't that what plants breathe? Do we want plants to grow? I'm terribly confused by all this. So I seek solace in things I understand: novels, history, movies, dance, music, and the like.
    
    Every time I pick up a copy of another of the Angela Thirkell series novels that I'm currently re-reading, in order, I wonder what's wrong with my taste. The books are social satire, I explain to myself. They have a romance element which peeks its head up at the end of each volume, but they are mostly about how the qualities of rural middle-class life declined during the first half of this century. Peace Breaks Out, for example, includes references to the Labor victory which, immediately after World War II victory, turned Churchill out of office. The folks who are for the socialists, so goes Thirkell's idea, are the lazy and the selfish. The Labor politicians will, she predicts, send their food abroad and otherwise benefit foreigners at the expense of the victorious but exhausted English. I remind myself that there was still food rationing in Britain until the late fifties or early sixties, and try to make that recollection pay off relative to her fears. And I remember that when I first visited London, in the early 1980s, there were still bombed out sites in the center of the town awaiting redevelopment. I suppose I'm in sympathy with some of her political worries. But I don't think this is why I read the books. I read them because they are funny, and because one gets lost in them in a way one almost never gets lost in better writing, or at least not in better and newer writing. Peace Breaks Out isn't one of her best novels or one of her worst. In the end all sorts of people become engaged. And I think the next book in the series is Private Enterprise.
    
    I put down Peter Dickinson's 1976 fantasy The Blue Hawk (www.peterdickinson.com/), though I know the author is skilled. I just wasn't in the mood for that kind of book--and I find I often have some trouble working up an appetite for fantasy. Then I picked up The Homeland Association's pocket book Round About the Adelphi by W.G. Morris (from between the World Wars, I think--price "6d" or sixpence). The Adelphi (www.emporis.com/application/?nav=building&lng=3&id=186048 ) is an Adam brothers residential development in London south of the Strand and east of Charing Cross Station. So what the book does is guide your walking tour of the area, telling you who lived were, when hotels were built over alleys, and so on. This is the fifth in a series of six "Lunch-Time Rambles in Old London," though they were promising more were "in preparation." There's a decent map on the second page that I kept flipping back to as I followed along in my imagination.
    
    Every once in a while I pull out my copy of Hugh Tinker's 1966 South Asia, A Short History (journals.cambridge.org/production/action/cjoGetFulltext?fulltextid... ). I got the paperback when I was taking Ken Jones's famous Indian history classes nearly forty years ago, when K-State's South Asia Center was going strong and there were more Urdu students on campus than there were anywhere else in North America. Whenever I get the book out, though, I soon remember its odd shortcomings. It tells the complete history of immigration into the sub-continent in about fifty pages. Then it backs up and discusses economic subjects. Then religion. Then it picks up with the political history of the last four or five-hundred years, explaining how the European nations came to India and how the British came to rule it--the story is not nearly so straight-forward as I always expect it to be. Tinker is a decent writer, not so much good company as someone really knowledgeable who is willing to explain to the uninitiated without patronizing them. It isn't the ideal book. But I don't know of an ideal brief history of Indian, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Ceylon, and Burma. And I don't know that such a large topic can be handled much better than this book does it.
    
    The Christmas show at McCain this year was Big Bad Voodoo Daddy (www.bbvd.com/). This is a band that tries to simulate late swing. Unfortunately, the whole ninety minute set sounded like "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree" over and over again with slight changes in tempo. The horn solos were brief, planned, and (I thought) unimpressive. The rhythm section was good. The vocals were acceptable. The majority of the folks in the crowd seemed to enjoy themselves, albeit quietly. The minority--and I was spoken to by a couple of them--hated the show. I think I was pretty much indifferent.
    
    I had a better time at the annual post-WinterDance show called "Dance Spotlight." This Nichols Theater performance demonstrates the class projects student choreographers have been working on, and I think we saw thirty different dances in a little over an hour and a half. Ballet doesn't much figure here. There were a couple of tap numbers and a bunch of modern dance ones, usually using casts of four to six. They were surprisingly well-costumed and pretty well-rehearsed, and they used pop music and serious music. Some of the dancers were accomplished, but this is really a choreographers' show, and I felt as if some of them showed some real talent. In the old days of the dance program, Winter- and SpringDance would each include a piece or two by students. With this new outlet, those big recitals are now more professionally managed. Altogether I'd say the dance program seems to be in pretty good shape just now (www.k-state.edu/sctd/dance/). There are even some male students showing real skill at performances.
    
    The new American version of the Danish movie Brothers is almost without interest. It has Tobey Maguire and Natalie Portman. They aren't bad in it. But the story calls attention to itself by being so ill-conceived that it gangles, and that distracts from the characters (as if the characters really ever amounted to much). The good guy Marine brother is captured in Afghanistan and tortured until he does something awful he is ordered to do by the evil terrorists. Meanwhile his brother gets to hanging out with his family. This brother, the ex-con, begins to be a better guy. The Marine is rescued and acts psycho when he returns home, but soon enough seems ready to confess and be done with the past. Does this sound like fun to you?
    
    Seeing Nimrod Antal's Armored reminded me of his Vacancy, a better movie from a couple of years ago. The director likes to use name actors, even if that means he doesn't have budget money for settings. So he likes one setting stories. Armored is about some security guards whose scheme for stealing two armored cars' contents is complicated when a tramp sees them hiding the dough. It is quick and active, but nothing more.
    
    I took the older Marks brothers from down the street to see Disney's new musical The Princess and the Frog, a well-scrubbed fairytale set in New Orleans. Somehow Andy managed to get his arms out of the sleeves of his little shirt before falling asleep about an hour into the film. I don't know that the entertainment is particularly distinguished. But kids will sort of like it. It won't do any harm. I wish I'd taken them to the 3D A Christmas Carol instead.
    
    Clint Eastwood's Invictus is a Rocky plot movie set in South Africa in the mid 1990s and showing how Mandella helped make his countrymen come together in their celebration of their national rugby team's performance at the World Cup tournament they hosted. Morgan Freeman is good as the President. Matt Damon has been lifting weights so that he looks like a tommy tippee mug on tree trunks, and he's quite good as the captain of the Springboks. But the Rocky plot never takes off. One sort of likes the main characters, but the movie doesn't show much rugby, it shows what it does too close in, it complicates its painfully simple story with all sorts of red herrings, and it makes no attempt at showing the complexity of human feelings and fears In South Africa at the time. In fact, it is only about Pretoria Boers and ANC followers, and it doesn't tell us much about them. Where's Winnie? Is she in jail already for torturing enemies? Showing the flaming tires around poor guy's necks wouldn't have made much of a Christmas movie, I guess. 
    
    And with that negative image in mind, I believe I'll close. This afternoon, after a lunch at the Hibachi Hut spent picking winners in the many good bowl games, I'm taking Jim Roper out to our pasture to cut down his very own Christmas tree. It'll be picturesque out there in the snow. Let's hope the truck has enough traction so that we don't get stuck in a ditch.
    
    Assuming we make it back, I'll check in again in two weeks to tell you what I've read and seen from my perch three blocks west of Aggieville. That'll be Christmas night, so you may expect an early posting.

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• G.W. Clift recommends Christma G.W. Clift recommends Christmas presents

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    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written November 27, 2009

    I've got an idea for your Christmas shopping.
    
    Let's say you're not going to buy books for everybody on your list. That's o.k. Probably everyone has some poor, misguided relations who go from year to year without reading anything any more intelligent than old People Magazine issues in the vet's office. Consider buying them tickets to live performances.
    
    Or buy them for yourself. In the immediate neighborhood of Manhattan, Salina's Stiefel Theater (785-827-1998, www.stiefeltheatre.org) Wamego's Columbian Theater (800-899-1893, www.comlumbiantheatre.com), and Junction City's Hoover Opera House (785-238-3103, www.jcoperahouse.org), to say nothing of the Manhattan Arts Center (785-547-4420, www.manhattanarts.org), all offer entertainments. For example, something called Yesterday and Today will appear in Junction on January 8. The Four Freshman, who had tons of hits, will be there May 15. And get this: The Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra on April 10. I'll buy my father tickets to this last.
    
    Or consider what's showing on campus at K-State. The spring McCain (www.k-state.edu/mccain) offerings  include Ricky Skaggs on January 28, Momix on February 4, and the Moscow Festival Ballet dancing Cinderella on April 25.
    
    You can use McCain's box office (the number is 785-532-6428) to order K-State theater and dance performance tickets, too, most of them in Nichols Theater. Big Love will run February 4 through 6, Hotel Casablanca March 3 through 7, SpringDance March 26 and 27, and Our Town April 22 through May 1. Heck, for $7 a pop you can get tickets to shows in the haunted Purple Masque. This spring they're doing a play called "Almost Maine" April 15 through 17, and Nathan Jackson is coming back to stage something with Ebony Theater there in February.
    
    That's pretty much something for everyone. If somebody doesn't like Bluegrass, they're likely to go for modern dance or ballet. And compared to a lot of things being advertised to potential Christmas shoppers, good live show tickets aren't very expensive.
    
    I always feel as if Winterdance is the start of the Christmas season. This is the K-State dance program's fall semester recital, and it is always held in the intimate Nichols Theater. It is usually atmospheric. The printed programs didn't arrive for the Thursday show, though, so Neil Dunn, one of the faculty members, had to act as master of ceremonies. Consequently things weren't as formal as usual. But it turned out the show didn't need that formality. After a little service work, we got to three odd, unsettling pieces in a row, each by a different faculty member. Then the guest choreographer's contribution (about the music which companies play to customers who are "on-hold") was amusing, there was an imaginative ballet piece, and the show ended with Goodman and Astaire. Dance is much under-appreciated, and K-State has a good dance program.
    
    My wife likes to read detectives novels set in the places we are going to visit. When we went to Melbourne this last summer, she got books written by Peter Temple (januarymagazine.com/profiles/ptemple.html) and passed along Black Tide, the second of his books featuring lawyer, cabinet-making apprentice, and investigator Jack Irish of the Fitzroy neighborhood. The book is fine, but it is so very Melbourne I wasn't always sure I understood whole chapters of detail. Jack talks Melbourne. He talks about Melbourne issues (the moving of the old Fitzroy Aussie Rules Football club to Brisbane), and he refers to Australian geography in a way that made me sometimes a little uncomfortable. It didn't help that there are actually at least three mysteries being investigated as we go along. But Temple has in some ways revitalized the form. I'd read another book in the series.
    
    At one of the airports we flew through on that trip, I picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (www.chroniclebooks.com/index/main,book-info/store,books/products_id,7847/title,Pride-and-Prejudice-and-Zombies/), which was worth buying if only for the cover, a bloody knock-off of the standard trade paperback edition of Austen's most famous book. Seth Grahame-Smith has taken old Pride and Prejudice, added scenes of and references to zombie slaying, frequently referred to the Bennet girls' kung fu training in China, and simplified the language of  the text. So the book doesn't have the charm of the original, which is almost entirely in the prose style. But the zombie attacks are sort of fun. Still, the concept is what Pride and Prejudice and Zombies has to offer. And one gets enough of the concept pretty early on.
    
    Recent movies haven't been great. The Box is based on an aged barroom philosophic question: would you push a button to kill some stranger far away if you were paid $1,000,000 to do so. For some reason Frank Langella, who is offering folks this choice at the behest of aliens, appears in the film dressed like a pimp. The movie tries to be mysterious but is inconsistently successful. With local hero James Marsden.
    
    The animated Planet 51 asks another old thought provoker: what if instead of being the space explorers we were explored? A planet of English speaking, air breathing green sea-monkeys is enjoying its 1950s when an American astronaut arrives. The movie probably tells too much and shows too little, but it will amuse kids.
    
    The latest Rocky plot movie is The Blind Side, a Sandra Bullock film about a large and poor high school student who, from our point of view, lucks into a Memphis private school and into the family of an Ole Miss basketball player who now owns a hundred Taco Bell franchises. The story is practically Radio 2, but the developments are varied and solid, perhaps in part because the story is based on the experiences of a fellow who went on to be an NFL draft choice. This movie is proof someone who cares about a project can make it go by concentrating energy on it.
    
    Twilight: New Moon is a bore. This is soft-corn porn for young women, all shirtless guys and scenes of romantic longing. Of course the guys represent vampires and werewolves, but that doesn't mean there has to be much action here. And there isn't.
    
    In fact, there's more action in any twenty minutes of Boondock Saints 2 than there is in the whole nearly three hours of New Moon. This sequel to a 2000 film about Irish vigilante brothers killing Boston mobsters has a silliness about it that made me uncomfortable for a while, trying to figure out if the movie was a failed comedy or an action picture with a blinking tone. The movie introduces its cursing, shooting characters and, eventually, brings them all together for a couple of shoot-outs. Nothing very sophisticated, but not dull.
    
    The new Disney film by the director of Wild Hogs, Old Dogs, is both unsophisticated and dull. It feels like a series of under-developed sketches, some of them based on good ideas. The central idea is that Mork from Ork discovers he has twins to take care of as his company nears an lucrative agreement with a Japanese outfit. The two things, you see, interfere with each other. But if you've seen Seth Green in the preview, you've seen all of the funny stuff here. Or all of it except what Rita Wilson does as a cross-eyed hand-model.
    
    I've not been a great fan of the work of Roald Dahl (www.roalddahl.com/). Tales of the Unexpected just doesn't grab me. I didn't read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or The BFG when I was the right age. But I do like Wes Anderson's quirky movies, especially The Royal Tannebaums. Well, Anderson has made a good-looking stop-action animated version of Dahl's Fantastic Mr. Fox. The look of the film is nearly perfect. But the developments aren't all that imaginative--Fox is fantastic mostly because he keeps digging his way out of stuff--and I didn't think George Clooney right for the lead voice part. Clooney has the voice of a Mutual of Omaha salesman in a mall kiosk. Anderson needed someone more like David Niven here.
    
    And the makers of Ninja Assassins needed more lighting equipment unless, as I suspect, they just didn't want to bother with the details of the fight scenes that take up almost half the movie's running time. We hear sounds and see gore. But we don't see much human action. So what's the point? Part of the problem with this movie may have been that I saw Shaolin Warriors at McCain recently, so I know what series of martial arts moves are supposed to look like.
    
    I saw that show in McCain because somebody bought me a couple of tickets for it. Now you can play Santa by ordering live show seats for anybody left on your Christmas gift list. Tell them they'll see me at the show.
    
    Or they can check on me here. I'll write again in two weeks about whatever it is I've been reading the seeing and hearing here, three blocks west of Aggieville.

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• G.W. Clift and his brother's a G.W. Clift and his brother's amusement park

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    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written November 20 2009

    
    Tomorrow I'm taking off from show-going, sport-watching, and farm-tending to attend the reception associated with my parents' sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. This will be in Winfield, and after the reception (in the church), we're invited to go out to my brother's to eat and talk and so on.
    
    David has a five acre place I am tempted to call a ranch. He has a couple of horses. He has a couple of multi-bay garages. He has a spring and both sides of a stretch of Black Creek. And it is all in the city. His property corners are marked by manhole covers.
    
    Dave's rolling stock includes our grandfather's 1962 Buick Special (which is being restored), a new Mitsubishi four-wheel-drive truck that isn't legal on federal highways, a couple of riding mowers (although the mowed portion of the property amounts to only about a fifth of it), and The Danger Cart, an electric vehicle originally intended for the golf links but now geared for maximum acceleration.
    
    In short, the place is a sort of amusement park. There's room for disc golf, and probably for ball golf. There's a place for wading. There may be a little modest fishing. On the Fourth one can sit on the lawn and watch the city's fireworks being shot off in Southwestern College's Sonner Stadium. There's a grocery story about four blocks away. But back toward the spring the property isn't over-looked by any of its neighbors. In town. And not.
    
    Also dependably amusing is Manhattan High annual musical, with its huge cast all-comers. The sets, lighting, and sound are all pretty basic. The deployment of the big cast sometimes make problems. The pit orchestra seems sometimes to be sight reading. But the musicals are, as whole entertainments, quite good . They are well costumed and choreographed. The performers sing well. And they usually have good actors for the lead parts. All of this was the case for the recent Bye Bye Birdie (www.byebyebirdieonbroadway.com/), as show I think deserves more serious attention than it has gotten--it isn't mentioned in The Cambridge Guide to American Theater or The Oxford Companion to the Theater. Most people seem to know its movie incarnation, with Dick van Dyke and Paul Linde (holdovers from the original Broadway production), Anne-Margaret, Bobby Rydell, Janet Leigh in the part Chita Rivera originated, and Jesse Pearson playing Conrad Birdie (a part Dick Gautier had on the stage). The show has five memorable musical numbers, and the kids at the high school sang them and danced to them, delighting large crowds. Dwight Tolar's son and Kim Riley's daughter were among the stand-outs, by the way.
    
    The KSU Theater Guys and Dolls (www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/albm39.html ), directed by Michael Gros, who replaced Lew Shelton, gave us well-costumed actors well-prepared, talented, well-choreographed, and appropriately cast. The show is, of course, terrific--loaded with good songs. And so it was a sure thing, right? Well, the audience wasn't convinced at first. The orchestra in particular and, to a lesser extent, the staging were lacking the sort of snap one expects from a musical comedy. The basketball pep band has this pop, even though they don't necessarily have any of the assets the pit orchestra had. Eventually the show won hearts, but it should have grabbed the crowd by the throats during the first number.
    
    We drove out to Salina to see East Village Opera Company and Parsons Dancers (www.parsonsdance.org/ ) perform together at the Stiefel Theater, one of the non-profit revitalized opera houses and ancient movie theaters that have gone into operations in a lot of towns around here--Junction, Wamego, and so on. Actually only the two singers from the band were there. One at a time they sang to recorded EVOC Prog versions of famous arias as the hyper-athletic dancers performed Parsons's "Remember Me," and hour and a quarter narrative piece. The story doesn't much matter. But the dancing was terrific. The eleven incredibly strong dancers, several of them also good actors, ran through demanding and in some ways eloquent series of modern and ballet moves. EVOC is sort of fun to see. If Parsons Dance performs anywhere near you, buy a ticket and a car if you need one to get there. If you don't remember the dance boom of the late seventies and early eighties, you won't believe how much you will be entertained. The rewards of such a performance are just about beyond what it is we'd call "amusement."
    
    Not every live show is. Last night I saw a performance called "Shaolin Warriors" at McCain, a show demonstrating the training rituals of athletes trained in the "martial arts" according to the methods of one 1500 year old Chinese Buddhist monastery. This sort show sometimes fails to entertain me. There is no language. There is no plot, and little structural development of any recognizable sort. I am used to the conventions of dance, and usually a story (or more than one) gets told in a dance performance. Music is fairly obviously developmental in organization. What are we waiting to see when see guys in orange pjs leaping and spinning across the stage, preparing moves to use in hand combat? The performers were good and the "production values" were high. I wasn't actually bored.
    
    One of the strangest books I've read in a long time is Jeremy Lloyd's The Are You Being Served Stories. These are basically narrative versions of episodes in a cheap 1970s BBC sit com (www.imdb.com/title/tt0068040/) set on the ready-to-wear floor of a department store. The apparently un-proofed text (KQED Books--the show appeared on PBS stations) shows that the laughs grew out of double-entendres and the plots involved devices like closing characters up in murphy beds and such like. The introduction by Lloyd (who co-wrote the series) is fairly interesting. You know, PBS stuff is often low-brow crap dignified by having a foreign origin.
    
    The Brits can turn out pretty good low-brow crap. Spy stories are an example. Hugh (editor of the Rivals of Sherlock Holmes series) and (his brother) Graham Greene's The Spy's Bedside Book contains some of these (though the best complete story is O. Henry and thus American) as well as lots of snippets of things out of spy stories, true and fictional. Baden-Powell tells what a good cover butterfly hunting makes for a spy in the Balkins. There is a recollection of the fate of Major Andre, Benedict Arnold's British contact. James Bond explains why he peppers his vodka. There's a fine description of an anarchist leader (can there be such a thing?) offing a traitor during a secret meeting. And so on. Wonderful winter bedtime reading. The Folio Society (www.foliosociety.com/) has a nice boxed edition of this available for sale.
    
    The 1935 Murder in Mesopotamia shows what Agatha Chrsitie did routinely during her middle period. She finds a way to use a female narrator, introduces a sort of exotic setting, tells the reader early that there is a murder to be studied, then pads like crazy, thowing in description, repeating setting (with limited access) and character sketches, directing suspicion at several of her people, and then introducing one of her detectives, in this case Poirot. The solution, then, is nowhere near the most simple one possible, and it usually relies on the detective's having several sets of research (prompted how?) to refer to during a long explanation at the book's end. This isn't a bad mystery. But it isn't what one would call efficient or reasonable.
    
    Above I was remarking on the lack of POP in a live performance. Well if you want pop, Spark's mid-sixties novella The Drivers Seat is insistently PRESENT from its first page. The protagonist is about to buy a gaudy dress when the sales clerk mentions its material is stain resistant. This irritates the customer, who leaves the shop and buys a different but similarly loud garment in a different store. The third chapter begins with the information that our anti-heroine will, the next day, be found bound and dead in a foreign city park. This makes the character's on-going search for a man who is "here type" both quirky and creepy. The Driver's Seat isn't my favorite Spark (I like A Far Cry From Kensington), but it is a good brief introduction to her intensity.

    Charles Simic (www.poets.org/csimi/) may come off better at a reading than he does on the page. His best-of anthology, Sixty Poems, was released when he was made (as everybody is these days) Poet Laureate. Simic's poems are about as accessible as are Ten Koosers's, but they are urban in setting about the sort of barely perceived mysteries a foreigner might be concerned with--Simic emigrated to the U.S. from Yugoslavia as a teenager. The poems tend to be twenty-four lines or so, and lines of middling length, and they feature book learning, a sort of toothless supernatural, and the details of a young person's life--toys and drive-in theaters. Brisk, attractive stuff, but not necessarily my ideal.
    
    I've quickly forgotten The Men Who Stare at Goats, a movie staring Jeff Bridges, George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, and Kevin Spacey. I suspect the thing was made to belittle Army experiments--apparently at one time the branch set up a unit of psychics to see what they could do. The belittling motive would explain Clooney's appearance--this and the Middle Eastern desert setting. Given the material, the film could hardly have been less funny. And the point of view is botched so that McGregor's reporter character, who has to be the central person, simply tells us whatever should have been dramatized that has to do with him.
    
    How can the same Robert Zemekis that made the awful, anti-heroism Beowulf movie a couple of years ago have now made a film A Christmas Carol so true to the Dickens that it maintains the ungainly forecast of the hours at which the ghosts will appear to Scrooge. The film makes great use of moving and craning camera. It is, like the Beowulf, computer generated animation based on live-action filming, and I hated the flesh tones. Otherwise there's nothing here not to like. TBS will one year soon have a holiday season day when they play this movie over and over again for twenty-four hours.
    
    The latest in the line of quasi-documentary horror movies is The Fourth Kind. The movie has a good cast (Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton), beautifully photographed Alaska scenery, and a hulking apparatus it has to carry along like a dead Siamese twin. The apparatus is "real life" footage, sometimes even shown in split screen opposite "re-enactment" footage of exactly the same scene from the life of an insomnia scholar whose husband, she is loath to admit, recently committed suicide. The evidence that aliens are kidnapping (and, usually, returning) humans is almost an afterthought in this mess of a film.
    
    But The Fourth Kind is probably more fun to watch than is the huge budget 2012, a Roland Emmerick movie about the date for the end of the world supposedly predicted by ancient Mayans. Actually the end of the world just turns out to be a massive flood. To survive it by catching on with the government constructed giant arks, John Cusack must drive a limo faster than a fissure can open up the asphalt behind him and must fly a plane before a fissure can crack the runway beneath him and must luckily meet a Chinese wielder with a scheme for getting on one of the boats just before the final gate locks. These running crises make up the movie. Oh, and there's a little sentimental family business about how men don't stay with their children and so on. Dull, dull stuff.
    
    Instead of watching a film like this, I'd much rather be out at David's, playing with the dogs while he gets the charcoal going. The movies are not always amusing. Hanging around David's little ranch is.
    
    Back in two weeks with observations about shows I attend and books I read. And maybe I'll tell you how I do on The Danger Cart this Saturday.

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• Combat Aviation Brigade road t Combat Aviation Brigade road to Iraq

  • From: Combat_Aviation_Brigade
  • Description:

    Fort Riley’s Combat Aviation Brigade deploys to Iraq in the spring of 2010. This blog will provide a venue for the commanders and command sergeants major of the brigade and its battalions to inform the citizens of Manhattan and surrounding areas what their units are doing to prepare for this deployment.

     

    Additional information about the Combat Aviation Brigade can be found on the 1st Infantry Division’s web page, or the Cab’s Facebook page.

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• G.W. Clift and the most effect G.W. Clift and the most effective of pastimes

  • From: gwclift
  • Description:

    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written November 6, 2009

    We can be interested in all sorts of different divergence. Lots of guys are interested in politics these days. A few of us still like the arts. There are those who skateboard, play handball or pool or golf or just jog. Some like cards. Some like cars, and working on them. Gardening, jigsaw puzzle solving--there must be a million things we do to fill the time. But none of them work on me quite the way college football and basketball do.
    
    Right now the Cats are winning more than their talent should allow. They are three and two in the Big XII, with important games against North Division foes coming up, two of the three of them here in town. Not only do these games provide a predictable climax for the week, but also they give everybody in a college town something to talk about and wonder over. And the funny thing is, when the team is winning, this seems to make everything a little better. Every day we get up with something to look forward to and talk about.
    
    Now, we've just had a couple of gubernatorial elections in eastern states. The poor saps interested in politics stayed up late to watch returns and spent the next day or two figuring out how to understand what occurred. Politics is supposed to be important. We have a civic duty to pay attention and vote intelligently. I think maybe in Australia it is illegal not to vote.
    
    K-State football isn't nearly that important. Except that it is. More Manhattan moods are altered by a routine college football conference win or loss than by any but the most important elections. People don't pay attention to the team because it is their duty or because they are constantly told how important the games are to their lives. They pay attention because they can feel the significance of the season. Or at least I can. It's KU week. To heck with who's New Jersey governor-elect.
    
    And on to my reading. I gave up on Michael Innes's Death at the President's Lodging about halfway through. I couldn't keep the hundreds of significant characters straight, couldn't follow the geography of the locked room mystery, couldn't bear to wait through another fifty pages of exposition before we got to another event, and just plain didn't care. I finish most of the books I get started on, but I've failed to complete Innes books before. I'm sure the weakness is in me, and the books are actually just dandy. But I was going so very, very slow on this one.
    
    Then I picked up Michael Frayn's play Benefactors (www.imdb.com/name/nm0292450) and read the whole thing in an hour and a half. This is the playwright who gave us Noises Off, a fine translator of Chekov. And I suspect this is his best serious play. You may remember its opening reference to Basuto Road, a south London address where one of the four characters (two married couples) is designing a public housing block. The architect, David, is a representative of the competent, caring people who think they can solve other guys' problems or at least help them by working through the system. The play shows how this idea costs him his profession, his marriage, and his friends. It is a dramatized list of complaints about the nanny state and a prediction about its demise. It is also a dart at any sort of romance, even the romance of the guerrilla who decides to bite the hand that feeds. Great stuff with an ending which must be summary, probably. Give it a read and see what you think.
    
    Julian Symons (www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/s/julian-symons/) was for a long time a big name in the detective story business. During the fifties and sixties, it seems to me, this British writer commented on the genre and contributed mystery novels of his own. I read one of them, The Belting Inheritance, and thought it only o.k. The young man narrator belongs to a family living in a huge old country house. His aunt still lives there, as do her two surviving sons, a divorcee and a fellow with a wife. Her two older sons died in Europe during the Second World War--probably. A man comes to the house claiming to be one of those sons, a former Soviet prisoner who seems to be implicated in the death of his business partner just before his plane was shot down over Germany. I'll bet you recognize the plot. Outsiders who knew the son before the war are called in, and none can identify him or completely dismiss him. But then the story takes off to Paris where both heroin and romance figure in the vaguely disappointing resolution.
    
    For the second time in its fifteen-year history, Tap Dogs (www.tapdogs.com.au/) was brought to K-State's McCain Auditorium. The Australian show tries to make the show dance form of the twenties and thirties into something contemporary by using the six man cast (in Penney's young men's wear) performing on different microphoned surfaces. There are some features here: a guy in a harness dancing upside down; angle grinders used to throw sparks on a soloist; dancing in a trough of water (the first two rows of the house got splashed); dancing on sound triggers, one trigger per dancer so that the group of them can approximate the sound of a kit drummer; and dancing with dribbled basketballs providing the base beat. I don't usually like this sort of show, but was pleased to see the company (one of them perhaps a brother of choreographer Dein Perry) was taking their business very seriously.
    
    It interests me that Bob Dylan (www.bobdylan.com/) can draw thousands in Salina. Now the Bicentennial Center was nowhere near full, but there was a substantial crowd, and he had played Salina, Manhattan, Topeka, and Kansas City in the last three or four years. The two good guitar players are gone from the band and the replacement, a lanky fellow who liked to play on his knees, turned ninety degrees from the audience, didn't seem to have figured out what all he was going to do. He was better late. Besides the half dozen songs a Dylan crowd must hear, the old fellow was doing mostly new album stuff, which is not what he has been playing the last few concerts I heard. His rhythm section is dandy. The shows are always quick and professional. And it is surprising how much personal magnetism the old boy still has, God love him.
    
    I really liked the K-State production of Stephen Adly Guirgis's The Last Days of Judas Iscariot (www.imdb.com/name/nm0012289/). I just didn't like the play. The briskly-played version still had me stuck in The Purple Masque for three hours. And I was constantly conscious that many of the brief scenes--monologues, most of them--didn't really have anything to do with the issue of the trial. But, then, I was never sure what the issue of the trial was, either. The lawyers, one of them stuck with a load of Uriah Heep groveling that figured as the play's primary "humor," called witnesses that didn't seem to figure and then cross-examined them. Finally the story seemed to resolve itself in turning the disagreement between Jesus and Judas on its head. But then the playwright introduced a character who offered a decoder metaphor which only worked if one went back to assuming Jesus was angry with Judas. The big cast, many of them doubling, kept the show alive, much to their credit. I sat next to Charles Davis, by the way. He reports he's fine and busy. 
    
    The Stepfather is a thriller set almost entirely in one Craftsman house. It follows events when a seventeen-year-old boy returns from a year at military school to discover his mother has invited her new fiancee into the family home. The guy is a serial stepfather who goes from town to town moving in with widows and grass widows with kids. Then--I'm guessing a little here--every new family does something to disappoint him and he kills them off before disappearing. In this case the ex-husband catches the fiancee in a lie, and this sets off events that lead to the climax. The movie has some suspense, but one doesn't understand the scheme exactly and doesn't feel tremendously warm about the characters.
    
    I don't know what to make of Astro Boy, another post-apocalyptic cartoon that takes elements from Pinocchio (the robot, powered by blue magic, is like a real boy to his maker) and from Oliver Twist (escaping from mistreatment, the robot joins a young gang of retrievers working for a cynical adult) and from the Obama election (so that the villainous president campaigns with the motto "Not Time for Change Yet"). It looks o.k. and has pace. I didn't care anything at all about it.
    
    The Vampire's Assistant is just a little silly. Compared to the romance-drenched Twilight movie, this new blood sucker story for young men seemed light of tone--not so much comic as frivolous. It has a good cast, including John Reilly, Salma Hayek, Orlando Jones, and so on. And the screenplay was co-written by Helgeland, who can turn out good scripts--Mystic River, The Knight's Tale, and so on. But here's another story about a war between groups of supernatural creatures, and as with the Underworld series, it isn't very interesting. It also, and this may be more to the point, isn't very sexy. What's the use of making a movie about vampires if you don't want any of that erotic
    tmosphere?
    
    I finally broke down and sat through a showing of Paranormal Activity, the Blair Witch Project (www.blairwitch.com/) of the year. Actually this is a little more fun that was that hand-held camera fiasco. PA follows a young San Diego couple from the time he buys a digital movie camera to record her haunting to the end of his investigation. Usually the camera just sits looking over their bedroom, the time code clicking away in the lower right hand of its picture. It records booms, lights coming on, shadows being thrown, talc being disturbed, and finally covers billowing and increasingly eerie behavior by the woman. It is mildly scary. I am not complaining about it. But I'm not praising it, either.
    
    And I'm not talking about politics this week, either. To heck with it. Let the beans rot in the field. Let Roper win at golf. Let the fuel pump in the Sebring fail. Let us go a full year without a new Don Delillo novel. Who cares so long as it is KU, then MU, then Nebraska in Lincoln? Get your values straight.
    
    I'll be back in a couple of weeks to report what's been going on here, three blocks west of Aggieville. I wonder if there will be any celebrations? Does Varneys (www.aggievillelive.com/) still have the Moro cam up?

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• Hamburger Holidays Hamburger Holidays

  • From: Michael_Hadley
  • Description:

    Another "hamburger holiday" is fast approaching.  I know this from the grocery ads.  You always know what holiday you are dealing with by the featured foods.  Easter...for some reason...is a "ham holiday".  St Pats is a corned beef and cabbage day.  Thanksgiving and Christmas are "turkey holidays"  As far as I can tell, Valentine's Day has no particular food.  Like Halloween, it is a candy consumption event.

    All the rest of the holidays are hamburger holidays....Labor Day, Memorial Day, Veterans Day, July 4th ....these all celebrate the hamburger.  Columbus Day....a questionable holiday anyway...has no particular food sponsor.

    So, get together with your friends on this upcoming holiday and celebrate the true meaning of the grilled burger....after all...it is on sale.......

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• G.W. Clift and entertainments G.W. Clift and entertainments not for him

  • From: gwclift
  • Description:

    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written October 23,  2009

    I was reading a review in Times Literary Supplement last night when I had a realization. I don't want to read any more reviews of books about The Spanish Civil War. I certainly don't want to read any books about it. I don't know that I've had enough about The Spanish Civil War, the way I have about Bleeding Kansas (one more word about which and I'll stand up and shout out my boredom and pain). I just don't feel the need to know any more about it. Or about the 1960s Civil Rights movement--so I guess I won't be watching anymore PBS.
    
    Speaking of which, I don't want to watch Irish Step Dancing or to hear programs of different versions of "Amazing Grace." Enough. I'm not the audience for this sort of stuff. New novels which introduce historical personages into fictional events--I'm not reading them. In fact, I'm apparently not reading any newish fiction, as it all seems directed at socially-conscious women who don't favor narrative resolution. If there's a resolution, that must mean there was a problem, and we can't have that, can we?
    
    I don't often go to church these days, and I think the reason is that the sermons seem to start in the middle of philosophic conversations I've not been a party to. I've got my worries and faults, but the preacher seems to be talking to someone else about theirs. Rap music seems silly to me. I've read Lyn Lifshin (www.lynlifshin.com/). Bad poetry about guys shooting each other really isn't intended to entertain me. I'd rather watch people play board games than watch reality t.v. shows. When somebody mentions Streisand, I turn off the t.v.
    
    NBA basketball? Detective stories with recipes in them? Acrobats? Sports with judges? These are not intended to entertain me. Lots of things aren't. I do end up trying to experience some stuff directed at audiences that don't include yours truly--Martin Amis's novels (www.martinamisweb.com/) and Brazilian guitar duos at McCain and chick flics, for example. Sometimes I find something to like in these kinds of entertainments. But generally speaking I like stories with plots, football and college basketball, music that isn't "fusion" jazz, and decent dialog. Other guys are welcome to the other stuff. And to political discussions.
    
    I can, though, read that most political of playwrights, G.B. Shaw (www.kirjasto.sci.fi/gbshaw.htm). Like most of us in the department at the time, I bought a few books from Prof. Brewster Rogerson's sale shortly before he sold his University Park house and moved to the west coast. One of those books is Shaw's Plays Unpleasant, which contains Widower's Houses, The Philanderer, and Mrs. Warren's Profession. Last week I read The Philanderer (which was first performed in 1905) for the first time. It doesn't seem to have enough of his best wit to carry its story, which really isn't very interesting. The odd concept in it is of an "Ibsen Club," essentially a social and dining club for men and women attached to the ideas put forward in the Norwegian playwright's work, especially his feminist ideas. Imagine a club of Fabians depending on servants to bring them tea.
    
    I don't know how I came by the paperback copy of The Doll Maker by somebody or somebodies called "Sarban" (freepages.pavilion.net/tartarus/wall.html). The scene is an isolated girl's public school where one young woman, who is studying for university admissions exams, meets the young man from the country house down the road. He makes marionettes from his estate's experimental trees. In the town nearby, young women die from a mysterious ailment. Like all full-length spooky stories, this one is too talky.
    
    Not so The Unfeigned Word: Fifteen Years of New England Review. This 1993 anthology collects stuff by big names of the early academic creative writing movement, stories, poems, and essays they originally contributed to NER (cat.middlebury.edu/~nereview/). Though the magazine was founded and originally edited by the likable Sydney Lea, the collection was put together by Terry Hummer and Devon Jersild, who took over from Lea.
    
    I was surprised that the contributions (by Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Joyce Carol Oates, Borges, Goldbarth, Heaney, Hugo, Pinsky, Simic, and so on--all recognizable names) still seem so accomplished. The fiction is heavy with the habits of its period--working class characters and shallow narrative arcs. The poetry is difficult more than it is memorable--even Dave Smith's "Crab." And the essays show us again that guys who can write don't always find anything new to write about. The two best things in the book are essays. One is Jonathan Holden's delightful and lucid "Post Modern Poetic Form: A Theory," which argues that new good poetry finds its conventions in the form or ordinary discourse it is analogous to--so letter poems have the conventions of real letters. The other exciting entry is Samuel F. Pickering's "Taking the Night Plane to Tulsa," and explanation for what goes wrong with the arts when we let our governments take over the management of our lives.

    "Have you ever heard of a town without a used car lot? Hanover, New Hampshire, is such a town. Used car lots are the signs of dreams. A man sees a rainbow, hurries to the used car lot , buys a chariot of hope and wheels over the hills and far away. In Hanover the rainbow, like the Dodo, is extinct..."

    The third paragraph begins with this deathless observation: "New England would bore the ass off an elephant." Say on, brother.
    
    Finally I read a crime novel, The Arena, by William Haggard (www.xs4all.nl/~embden11/Engels/haggard.htm). There is just enough dramatization in this 1961 novel about London commercial banking to keep one reading. The story concerns a declining institution which loaned a couple of hundred thousand pounds to an engineering firm which has just come up with a new kind of radar. An evil foreigner wants to take possession of the bank to get his hands on the radar process, and he has his own "merchant bank," run by a bitter parvenu, trying to arrange a merger. But his bank (Baker and Loos--"Bakerloo") isn't quite genteel, so the villain tries to figure out a way to kill the newly diabetic bank board member who won't vote for the merger. The British government decides it is interested in all of this, and an agent of theirs fends off one attack. When the climax comes, it seems out of keeping with the largely interior nature of the rest of the book, which is interesting because it is cryptic about the nature of the board member's marriage.
    
    I've seen a play and a staged impersonation since I last wrote here. The play is Speech and Debate, which the K-State students are doing in Nichols Theater, directed by Dwight Tolar. The story is very much like the 90s movie Election, except that sex is the puzzle the high school students and teachers have to work over instead of politics. Individual scenes are each introduced with its own reference to a forensic event--Lincoln Douglas Debate and Group Interpretation and so on. The K-State program benefited from the confidence and energy of its small cast. I'm not sure the text was all that much help to them.
    
    Then in McCain I saw a touring Beatles tribute band called Rain (www.raintribute.com/). They did exactly the show you would expect, starting with Ed Sullivan and hurrying on to the fruity costumes and pop songs of Sgt. Peppers and the White Album. They looked and sounded like the Beatles. But, for example, one of them had been doing this show since 1998. They didn't have the intensity of the original group, as if anybody would have expected them to. By the way, the large McCain crowd seemed to enjoy itself thoroughly. I had a fair time, but couldn't get anybody to go with me.
    
    We got a couple of "Art House" movies last weekend. In the Loop, a BBC film, is one of the ensemble bits that seem nearly improvised. The characters are employees of our State Department or Pentagon or of British government agencies, all of them looking to associate themselves with "The Committee on Future Planning." This cabal may have something to do with deciding whether or not the two countries invade "The Middle East." Probably the backers thought the movie showed how the incompetent Bush administration got bad and edited "intelligence" from public relations boys in Tony Blair's government. What the movie will tell anyone fair minded who watches it is that government can't help individuals and that it is bloated to the point that everybody it employs is always running around looking for a way to seem to be doing something. Anything. The film itself is sometimes funny and sometimes only humorous, as you'd expect.
    
    Adam, with tearful Rose Byrne, is about a NYC electrical engineer with Asperger's Syndrome (www.aspergers.com/). This means he is tactless and stiff in social situations. The movie wants to work by offering us parallels--her mother's marriage is like Beth's romance and job hunting is like being tried in court, for example. But I'm not sure the analogies tell us much. The movie-opening voice-over seems to be disproven by the action. And there are too many passages of pop music in the movie for my taste. Vaguely interesting. Quiet.
    
    Jon Faveau and Vince Vaughn, long-time collaborators, co-wrote and starred in Couples Retreat. The central idea was that four thirty-something married couples would go to a sort of Polynesian Club Med resort. Most of them assume they are just going for fun. Turns out they must go through marriage counseling sessions if they are to be allowed to remain on the island for a week. The therapy sessions are as ridiculous as psychological therapy sessions always are in the movies and probably always are in real life. Otherwise the story is utterly predictable.
    
    It does have one noteworthy feature. There's a guy in it playing a French yoga instructor, and he has essentially lifted his part from Hank Azaria's (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000279/) character in Along Came Polly. The borrowing is so close that it surprised me. Not that I blame the guy in Couples Retreat for borrowing the character. It is a good one. And that character is probably the best thing in each of the movies in which he appears.
    
    Drew Barrymore has directed a movie with the Rocky plot. Whip It follows Ellen Page, the girl from Juno, who is now a small town Texan who becomes a roller derby star. DB has recruited a number of good actors, and her pacing is all right. But Rocky plot movies have been so common the last twenty years that every conventional plot turn in a new one makes the audience cringe. Or at least I cringe.
    
    It was the dialog that made me cringe when I watched Law Abiding Citizen. Poor Viola Davis, who you may remember was the mother in last year's Doubt, has to say "I'm not having this conversation," and to do so with a straight face. Otherwise the movie is interesting mostly because it is a lot like Death Wish in a time when we no longer feel the authorities are giving criminals too much latitude. A back-yard fist fight between two middle-class, middle-aged men actually went to criminal court in Manhattan this year. Doesn't this suggest we have way too much law enforcement these days?.
    
    So Where the Wild Things Are was easily the best movie I saw the last fortnight. Spike Jonze has extended the brief Maurice Sendak (www.imdb.com/name/nm0784124/) book to about a hundred screen minutes without really changing what the story means. And the movie looks just like the book. The wild thing characters are represented by oversized costumes rather than by computer-generated animation, and the effect is wonderful. James Gandolfini is the voice of Carol, the upright bison with the striped shirt who has young Max's tendency to go blind crazy. The story is sad and scary, and parents will wonder if they did right to bring young children with them to see the film. But little kids know better, I expect. They'll enjoy the action and will understand the message.
    
    Its a message I need to hear, as I sometimes lose my temper, still. The other films weren't directed at me, I didn't think. Luckily I could leave them and go home to watch football most nights of the week just now. Football seems to have been intended to amuse me.
    
    More in two weeks.

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• Sage: Happy Happy People! Sage: Happy Happy People!

  • From: TheFabSage
  • Description:

    Back from my annual sabbatical in Aggieville, I've decided to sue my therapist. I was hoping he'd help me find true happiness -- how to do that, surely, is life's ultimate question -- and it backfired. The sadist got me to quit drinking and face reality, so I now see all too clearly that reality is unchangeable crap, and it's driving me nuts.

     

    In this most workaholic of nations, how many of those who learn how to make a living ever learn how to live? I'd guess no more than 1 percent. In a culture so saturated, indeed defined, by consumerism, let's hope money can buy happiness.

     

    By happiness we can mean either (1) the state that we can't not seek, strange as our forms of seeking may strike others, or (2) the state that, in the hedonist view, we should seek above all others -- above, say, moral exaltation, humanitarian commitment, devotion to political or religious dogma.

     

    What (2) amounts to in practice is almost always a version of the "wine, women, and song" Playboy philosophy. (Hugh Hefner is much more than that, but that's another subject.) In this view, there are certain things that almost everyone views as pleasurable, and we are happy to the extent that we experience them. If it feels good do it. Otherwise "Life's a bitch, then ya die."

     

    Smith may prefer Gallo, rap, and blondes while Jones prefers Margaux, Brahms, and esmeraldan enchantresses, but such taste differences don't alter the pleasure principle. Each to his pleasures, and, life being short, the point is to indulge them as much as possible. Saints and geniuses may live for love, beauty, and truth, but maybe the other 99.99 . . . percent of us should realize our limitations and pursue mere pleasure. "Ought implies can" (one of many things I learned from courses taught by the brilliant philosopher Dr. Charles Reagan of KSU), so, as much as I'd like to cure cancer or write symphonies, maybe wine connoisseurship should be the zenith of my aspirations. 

     

    What if Smith finds his happiness in giving others pain? That's why we have a legal system. If his like were allowed to run unrestrained every society would soon resemble Afghanistan or the dynasty of Puritan cruelty, punitiveness, corruption and greed that the United States has become. Most can't find happiness in such hells. But that, too, changes nothing, for Smith may be an exception, and he may not give a damn what brings happiness to anyone but himself.

     

    That leaves us with the first sense of happiness: what we can't not pursue. The monk and Hefnerian pursue different pleasures, but both pursue a form of pleasure itself, with the monk finding "pleasure in taking pains" in the belief that he'll ultimately find no less than bliss eternal. Even the suicidal are no different here, since lessening or ending pain is just the flip side of the pleasure principle.

     

    If I'm right (and I'm told I was once wrong sometime back in the '80s or '90s) what are the implications?

     

    It removes the matter from the realm of morality, so there can be no rational basis for either guilt or pride, powerful as such forces can be. Since we can't help but pursue happiness, it makes no sense to say we should or shouldn't pursue it.

     

    The deeper question is whether it makes sense to say anyone should do anything. None could choose his genes or the most formative environmental influences. We blithely attribute behavior to choice and free will and allocate rewards and punishments accordingly, yet rarely consider what such concepts actually mean or if they have any scientific validity at all.

     

    The behaviorist B.F. Skinner thought they had none, hence the title of his most famous book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity. Like other bases for determinism, Skinner’s implies that Hitler shouldn't be blamed nor Albert Schweitzer praised. Criminals must be sequestered and rehabilitated if possible, but there can be no rational grounds for punishing them beyond that, since, given the same genes and environmental influences, no one could have done anything but what they did. (Nietzsche meant something more complex with his "beyond good and evil," but it's in sync with that.)

     

    What if any difference should the above, if true, make in how we live? The most important is that it should increase compassion -- there but for genes and conditioning go all -- and diminish the lust to punish, which in the last generation has flared wholly out of control in the United States, which jails by far a greater number and percentage of citizens than any other nation. To know all is not to love all but should be to forgive all. It should lead to more Christian charity in this most "Christian" and least charitable of nations.

     

    The imperative remains what it has always been: to avoid the snares and delusions that divert us from genuine happiness – Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness is insightful on that -- and tap the genuine sources of it, ideally before we're “too soon old, too late smart,” as I am. But if my words can help steer a young person in the right direction. . . . Who'm I kidding? Whenever I see young people succeed, a little something in me dies.

    
    

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• G.W. Clift and Public Affairs G.W. Clift and Public Affairs

  • From: gwclift
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    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written October 9, 2009
    
    Getting older, at least in my case, means recognizing how little direct control one has over the nonsense of contemporary life. I used to get angry about things I couldn't control and even about things I shouldn't care about. What the heck is the City of Manhattan doing in its negotiations with the real estate developer who has torn out all of Third and half of Fourth Streets?
    
    This sort of thing used to make my blood boil. What do you mean, the giant health care payment revision plan in Congress only insures one percent more of the American public? The NCAA can take away a player's eligibility for having not told them the truth about having a meal with Deon Sanders? Basketball tickets are how much? They're putting a roundabout where?
    
    These are issues about which my son will get and in some cases has gotten upset. Perhaps his energy will help him to move a consensus in what would seem to be the right direction in each of these cases. But I no longer have that sort of energy. Or maybe my past experience has suggested to me that everybody knowledgeable will simply find another way to get to Walmart, avoiding the huge traffic circle that will soon stand in Manhattan's way. I don't think I've given up the good fight in favor of intellectual retirement. My eighty-seven year-old father hasn't resigned his constant inquiry, and I expect I've got several decades left to live in the Kansas big agencies leave unspoiled. Maybe I just don't think government and its surrogates are powerful enough to do real and final damage of the sort I'd be required to struggle against.
    
    They may be trying to make me read by flouescents, but there are still good things out there to read. There's Robert Louis Stevenson, for example. He knew how to tell a story. Imagine a better yarn than Treasure Island if you can. I dare you. Well, his New Arabian Nights (robert-louis-stevenson.classic-literature.co.uk/new-arabian-nights/) isn't that good. But it is loaded with good story elements--I mean, it leads off with "The Suicide Club." The book is really a collection of three or four story series. The early passages all involve heroic Prince Florizel of Bohemia, who is in London and Paris for a series of adventures in which he confronts villains who are operating complicated schemes. Probably those are the most successful of the stories. The book is worth reading, but isn't any more a "must know" than is, say The Master of Ballantrae.
    
    Even less serious were the selections from the old Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine collected in the 1963 16 Skeletons From My Closet. AHMM ran for a lot time. It was one of the last pulp magazines. Book-length collections like Skeletons were regularly issued, and they included some sort of brief introduction by (or "by") the film director (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000033) as well as brief notes introducing each story. The stories, by guys like Lawrence Treat and Robert Bloch, were short enough that they couldn't do much but dramatize one scene and provide, usually, a reverse or surprise ending. Sometimes there is an element that might be supernatural and might be a mistake in the perception of a slightly mad point of view character. The stories are readable. They aren't particularly memorable.
    
    My McCain Auditorium season began with a company called L.A. Theater Works, seven actors doing well-rehearsed "reader's theater" versions of The War of the Worlds and The Lost World. The former was the famous Mercury Theater (www.mercurytheatre.info/history) radio play version. Having heard the technically superior LATW production of this, I can't imagine anyone being fooled by the 1938 broadcast. Though the script does move its point of view fairly frequently, it has too much summary and not enough dramatization, though this may be a problem inherent to the radio play form. The Conan Doyle story got a better, more fully developed treatment. The company played the story about the expedition to the Amazon in search of dinosaurs and ape-men as a joke, the same way college companies used to play Victorian melodrama. Generally speaking, I wasn't all that interested in seeing radio plays produced. But this outfit did a pretty good job of what they had to do.
    
    K-State's live theater season began last weekend with a production of Douglas Carter Beane's As Bees in Honey Drown (www.answers.com/topic/as-bees-in-honey-drown). They do mostly directing M.A. projects over in the haunted Purple Masque Theater this time of year, and this must have been Mary Deaver's. She had a good cast, the technical concerns were handled as well as they are routinely these days--much better than before the department's new emphasis on theater tech, and the play itself is fairly entertaining. I believe Beane teaches at a college in New York City, and the play is set there and is about young people coming to town to seek fame. If they achieve a certain opening limit of it, they are approached by an effusive exotic named Alexa Vere de Vere who cons them into supporting her lifestyle until their credit runs out. The first act is full of moments when the audience recognizes familiar characteristics in Alexa. The second act has some laughs in it and a final turn that resolves the conflict pretty neatly, but not before we get all the routine references to homosexuality and financial selfishness.
    
    There have been a couple of new science fiction movies the last couple of weeks. Of the two of them, I think I liked Pandorum better. The story is ticking clock suspense. An engineer on a massive spaceship awakens from hypersleep and immediately has to set off to find the reactor and reset it before the ship's computer system shuts everything down permanently. This would be easy enough, but the dark corridors have become the hunting grounds of odd monsters and the surviving crew members are isolated, afraid, and skilled at killing those who intrude into their tiny fiefs. Fairly effective.
    
    But then so was Surrogate, a movie with Bruce Willis (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000246/) playing an FBI agent in a future world where almost no one appears on the streets. Instead they send surrogate robots out to live their lives. Some one has invented a gun that not only kills the robot but also the person running it. Willis has to stop this kind of remote murder. With Ving Rhames and James Cromwell.
    
    I didn't much enjoy the screen version of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. The story in many ways seems intended to entertain young men, as it is about a bachelor party trip to a strip joint and as it is constantly profane and referring to casual sex with multiple partners. But it doesn't show much sex, or even much nudity. And in some ways the scheme is like one for a chick flic--it is about the run up to a big wedding which occurs at its climax, when some of the characters have found love and the lead has discovered something that will change him permanently. No wit. Not a lot of scope.
    
    Ricky Gervais (www.imdb.com/name/nm0315041/) has had such a good career run recently that he was probably due a toe stubbing. And as star, co-director, and co-writer of The Invention of Lying, he gets that, certainly. The movie isn't very funny. It tries to be about children's notions of heaven, but doesn't get much done there. The cameos don't much help it, though Jeffrey Tambor is funny as the soft hearted boss who has to fire Gervais. The film's concept of "lying" includes tact and figurative language along with out and out mis-statements of facts. I'd have rather watched Gervais in last year's Ghost Town again.
    
    Zombieland was less of a disappointment. This American Shaun of the Dead, most of it operated as a road picture, features old and arriving Hollywood stars--Woody Harrelson and Bill Murray meet Emma Stone (www.emma-stone.info/), Abigail Breslin, and Jesse Eisenberg. This last-named actor, who may be imitating the young Woody Allen more here than he is Michael Cena, seems only to appear in movies with "-land" in their titles. Adventureland was his last general release film. Zombieland is likable enough, but it isn't a treasure trove of originality. Its best stuff comes when, post zombie apocalypse, the four fellow travelers break into Bill Murray's L.A. mansion only to discover the star is hiding out there. But he looks like a zombie. And even that passage has editing mistakes in it. Not a must see movie.
    
    Big operations like movie production companies always make mistakes. Maybe that's why I'm not getting as upset about current events as I used to. Dez Bryan's smart lawyer will probably use the enemy (in Johnny Rotten's words) by requesting a suspension of the NCAA's eligibility suspension until there can be a legal hearing or something. Other, younger guys have the energy to figure out that sort of dodge.
    
    I don't. It takes all the go I have to get me to the movies, to Nichols and McCain and the Masque, and through the books I've got stacked up to read. In two weeks I'll be back here to tell you what the Arts look like from my perch three blocks west of Aggieville. Until then, fight the power for me, will you?

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• G.W. Clift and the distraction G.W. Clift and the distractions of biography

  • From: gwclift
  • Description:

    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written September 25,  2009

    I understand there's a new biography of British twentieth century novelist Muriel Spark just out.  According to the review of it I read, the book was authorized by her, and then she fell out with the writer. Apparently this was her pattern. She fell out with just about everybody, including her son. She suspected her friends more than she did strangers.
    
    Which is sort of interesting. But what has it got to do with her novels? The biography might be interesting to all sorts of readers who wouldn't find her books (which I'm in the process of reading) all that amusing. Does knowing about Milton's blindness change our experience of his poetry, except when that topic is itself introduced? What should I care about Dickens's domestic arrangements? Oddly enough, the well-known politics of certain actors makes me less sympathetic with their characters sometimes. Maybe Chaplin's announced Communism has made him more attractive so some film critics. Do I feel differently about Richard Hugo's poetry (www.poets.org/rhugo/) because I heard him read it on a couple of occasions?
    
    Well, I re-read Hugo's 1980 poetry collection, The Right Madness on Skye, and in doing so I confronted an earlier version of myself. The copy I have, if one can tell from the inscription, seems to have been intended for a fellow K-State English graduate student from a professor whose classes we both took. But we were probably all buying copies of that book that year. A couple of car-loads of us went down to the Associate Writing Programs convention in San Antonio where Hugo was a presenter. He argued that M.F.A. students should be expected to take a healthy number of literature classes, and this was an unpopular idea with the majority of those attending (though most of the K-Staters through the idea self-evident). When he finished that pitch, he was asked to read a poem, and from memory he did "Glen Uig" from this book.
    
    He did that poem and a bunch of others, sweating and weaving, in an over-heated room in Denison Hall then, the following summer. This was a memorable reading. A large crowd showed up, including perhaps half the department's professors. The room was very hot. And Hugo's poems, conversational and romantic, were appealing to those of us who were young then. Young G.W. hadn't tired yet of the cult of victimhood (the book contains poems about the dispossession of crofters) and he was willing to over-look the everyman claims of this poet who spent a year in Scotland on a Guggenheim grant.
    
    This time through the older G.W. wasn't as much pleased. There are passages when Hugo catches fire and the sound of the language rolls. But generally speaking this is when things get away from the story-teller. Is Right Madness still a good book? Sure. But old, wizened G.W. didn't get the same rush from reading it in 2009 that he got when reading it in 1980.
    
    I have no idea how I came into possession of a paperback copy of Nicholas Blake's End of Chapter, a mystery story set in the world of London publishing and featuring detective Nigel Strangeways. He's a little Alleyn (his artist girlfriend has a studio he sometimes visits) and the story is a little Dorothy Parker (Murder Must Advertise), but I read the story with some interest. So the prose is all right. And the characters and settings are kind of interesting. The mystery itself, on the other hand, seems to have to be force to a climax, and there are a whole lot of coincidences, usually ones occurring years before the book's action, for my liking.
    
    I had a little more fun reading the famous The Riddle of the Sands by Erskine Childers (awww.britannica.com/EBchecked/.../Robert-Erskine-Childers--Member of Parliament and Distinguished Service Order winner who went on to join the IRA and was eventually shot, as if that has anything to do with how you read this novel). Published in 1903, it is the record of two British civilians--yachting gentlemen--to chart the waters of the German and Dutch North Sea coasts. They are partly motivated by a sense of duty (they foresee a possible war with the Kaiser), partly by a desire for adventure, partly by love (oddly), and partly through sheer cussedness as they want to get back at a German agent who seems to have tried to see that their ship wrecked. Many of the scenes are interesting, and the characters are all right. But I found the text to be a little prolix and--here comes the old problem--without enough complication to draw the reader forward.
    
    This last was even more the case with another famous first person narrative, Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It (www.press.uchicago.edu/books/maclean/). I simply didn't find enough story to make me keep turning the lovely pages of the Chicago University Press edition. The novella has no chapter divisions, but this isn't what bothered me. I simply didn't have the feeling that I was making progress toward any particular end.
    
    It's fine to blame this flat line all on Chekov, but Childers may not have had time to be influenced by the great purveyor of epiphany endings. I prefer to think that before the First World War, plots without arcs are mistakes. Afterwards they are part of the movements we think of as Relativism or Existentialism, notions as dead as Socialism and Freudianism--the two big concepts we wasted the twentieth century trying out. Personally I'd rather read Robert Louis Stevenson fictions, which may not mean anything but which do tell stories, than I would celebrated novels which can't make their central complications clear, no matter how rich they are in character, tone, significance, or what have you. Let the murder be committed on the first page and the murderer named on the last. Don't give me crap about two brother's who get competitive about fly fishing and take page after page to reach a river. 
    
    Recent movies have been sort of fun. Kate Beckinsale (www.kbeckinsale.net/) is in the entertaining Whiteout, about a series of violent murders in Antarctica during the run up to the end of her cop character's tour of duty. The movie is an action picture, a thriller, and a mystery featuring a decent story, good acting, a surprising number of harrowing settings, and brisk direction from Dominic Sena, who also gave us Swordfish. Whiteout is a very entertaining movie.
    
    Less fun, but still oddly amusing was Sorority Row, a formula mad slasher movie about how somebody kills off those who know about the death of a Theta Pi. With her sorority sisters, she was playing a prank on her beau. They said she was dead, perhaps killed by a roofie he'd given her. So they all took the body out to a deserted well and made as if they were getting ready to cut up the body for secret disposal. Well, beau got ahead of the game, killing the girl with the first thrust of a cross-shaped tire tool. So they really did have to throw the body down the well. The main events take place at the end of the school year when someone in a hooded black robe begins a run of murders using a refined version of the tire tool. Even the toplessness is formulaic, but we like horror movies because they are exactly what we expect, don't we?
    
    Tyler Perry's new cinematic Victorian melodrama may be his best movie. But that still doesn't mean it is any good. I finally got to talk with a young woman who was willing to defend I Can Do Bad All by Myself and his earlier pictures. But then I discovered she was from Georgia (Perry's movies are usually set in Atlanta). Besides, her defense was that the films teach a good lesson. Probably they do. To people so unsophisticated they need to learn that self-control, honesty, and clean living cut a lot of the unhappy drama out of a person's life. Ironically, I'd say the Perry defender already knew all those things. Otherwise how would she know the message was a sound one?
    
    Steven Soderbergh's The Informant! (www.imdb.com/name/nm0001752/) almost seems to have been made when a group of business-haters optioned a book about the ADM trial of a few years ago without reading the text first. When they began trying to make the book into a screenplay they discovered that the government informant who collected all the evidence (and most of the legal punishment) was not only guilty of most of the corporation's crimes but also of bilking ADM for millions and millions of dollars. Matt Damon plays the title character with about the right air. Ironically it is Marvin Hamlish's music which keys almost all the film's few and shallow laughs. Wry, but too complicated to chart.
    
    The film version of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is colorful and crammed full of  event. A kid inventor nearly destroys his Atlantic island hometown by making a machine which will produce prepared food out of the moisture in clouds. There is a romance and regular repeating sentimentality about his relationship with his father, and there are lots of interesting minor characters. I borrowed a couple of young neighbors for the showing, and they seemed to have a good time. But this is Digital 3D, so be prepared to spend an extra $3 a ticket to get in.
    
    Our twelve-plex belongs to the Carmike chain out of Georgia. So we see some of the movies made in the peach state, most of them not very good. I suppose Lynch Mob, which is two, two, two movie genres in one (mobsters meet cursed, invulnerable cannibals) was a little more interesting than the plot of, say, a Tyler Perry movie. Lots of gore. A nymphomaniac. Civil War flashbacks. If these are the features you're looking for, Lynch Mob may be the movie for you.
    
    Probably the best, or at least the most diverting movie I saw the last two weeks was Jennifer's Body. This is the story of how an indy band working with a curse they got from the internet makes a boy-devouring monster out of the most popular girl in a small town Minnesota high school. Witty, well-cast (with Amanda Seyfried--www.imdb.com/name/nm1086543/--who was the bride in Mama Mia and whose breasts could forecast the weather in Mean Girls), and full of good, big images, Jennifer's Body is about the most female dominated movie I've seen in years--even its director is a woman. But it was the internet jokes I liked best. Referring to a detail about a local, fatal fire, one school girl says, "It must be true; it was on the Wikopedia." There's life in the new century for you.
    
    Which takes us to Love Happens, the new Jennifer Aniston movie. I didn't think it much fun to watch. Certainly it is more predictable, and in fact the story moves along toward a resolution we know must be out there only because we've seen this sort of film before and not because the conflict ever gets dramatized for viewers to identify. My favorite line in the lumbering screenplay was this explanation for sexual infidelity: "She's got ties to Sony." As the final credits roll, there's an EMO version of a Buddy Holly song playing. That's kind of funny.
    
    But do I dislike the movie because I'm tired of the modestly talented Aniston getting roles actresses who aren't on the cover of People magazine don't get? Her celebrity makes her movies attractive to some people. Do I actually begin with unwarranted assumptions about how bad the movies are going to be because I know why she gets star billing? I don't know. But I am sure our knowledge of the life of artists influences our appreciation of what they've written or acted or played. So Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison will always be equated because they all died at about the same time. That may not be good.
    
    I won't be thinking much about the biography of Bill Snider as I sit in KSU Stadium tomorrow to watch the Tennessee Tech game, I can guarantee you that. Maybe I'll tell you about that in a fortnight when I again write something about what's happening here, three blocks west of Aggieville.

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• Whose Property Will be Taken N Whose Property Will be Taken Next?

  • From: KathyD
  • Description:

    Whose property will be taken next, who is making the recommendation to acquire property, and how will the property be paid for?  Those are the questions I would like answered by the USD 383 Board of Education.

     

     

    The school board is in the process of acquiring property near Ogden Elementary and near the MHS West Campus.  Both acquisitions involve the school board using its power of eminent domain to take the property, and both decisions were made before there were any completed design plans that could justify the need for the property as part of the school improvement bond approved by voters.  Two of the architects working on the MHS project have said that they can envision expanding the building without needing additional property and with losing only a small amount of existing parking.  Who has recommended to the school board that property needs to be acquired for the MHS project?  

     

     

    Dr. Bob Seymour, Associate Superintendent, said in a recent "I Wonder" column that the acquired property near MHS might be used as a staging area for construction and would likely become parking once construction is completed.  The four properties near MHS are valued at around a half million dollars, which seems like a high price to pay for the purposes of construction staging and parking.

     

     

    The voter-approved bond does not include land acquisition, which means the land will be paid for from the capital outlay budget.  The 2009-10 capital outlay budget has a line item for land acquisition of $200,000.  How will a half million dollars of property near MHS be paid for, in addition to the property in Ogden?  Will the process take so long that the property will be paid for from a future year's budget?  Will the mill levy be raised?  Taxes for the school district will be going up to support the voter-approved bond, and I think taxpayers would be interested in knowing if their taxes will be going up even more to pay for land acquisition.

     

     

    The "I Wonder" column also mentioned that the MHS West Campus is landlocked because it borders Sunset Zoo and Sunset Cemetery.  MHS East Campus is also landlocked, and yet, it was just a few years ago that the school board sold the property it owned directly to the east of East Campus when the district was strapped for cash.  The school board’s switch from selling land to buying land near landlocked schools in the span of only a few years makes both actions come across as hasty and not carefully considered.

     

     

    Land acquisition is discussed in executive session, which means behind closed doors.  The item will be listed on the agenda, but the agenda won't say what property or what exactly is being discussed.  The public finds out what the board is thinking when it's ready to vote and take action.  Since land acquisition isn't in the bond, the public can't look at the improvements planned for a given school and see that "land acquisition" is on the list.  Whose property will be taken next and how is the public supposed to know?  I guess the answer is we're not supposed to know, and we're just supposed to provide the money because the school board has a feeling that the property will be needed, even though there aren't any design plans and even though the board sold property only a few years back.

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• G.W. Clift and a Dylan g.p.s. G.W. Clift and a Dylan g.p.s.

  • From: gwclift
  • Description:

    G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written September 11, 2009
    
    Two ideas immediately came to mind when we heard that some manufacturer was making a "Bob Dylan g.p.s." 
    
    One of us thought the idea was to have Dylan always guiding us, his rising inflections calling out: "Take a right on Highway 61" as we reached the on ramp. The late 1960s Dylan voice is a recognizable voice. One can make many songs that are not ordinarily associated with him funny by using it: "Wake up Maggie I think I've got something to say to you" or "Pardon me boy. Is that the Chattanooga Choo-choo?" for example. 
    
    If the poet of the generation was available, we could do worse than routinely take our directions from him, though he has in the past usually tried to avoid giving specific marching orders. 
    
    But the other possibility was even odder. A recent news story told how the singer had been detained by New Jersey police for a few minutes. They seem to have been worried that he might be a simple-minded or deluded vagrant, just because he looked the way he does and because he was hanging around playing skee ball and giving the tickets away to local kids. He tried to identify himself, which seems to have confused things further. The cop thought he could be one of those mental cases who thinks he is Bob Dylan (www.bobdylan.com/).
    
    Remembering this, one of us thought a Bob Dylan g.p.s. would be constantly tracking Bob Dylan. We could check in every couple of hours over the internet just to see that he was still alive and where he was. It would be a way of keeping track of something of our aging selves.
    
    I've reached the age when it is sort of funny to watch young people waxing nostalgic about their pop culture. Imagine the Army-supported show in McCain, last Friday night, with Everclear (www.everclearonline.com) and Bowling for Soup (www.bowlingforsoup.com). Ah for the good old days of 1995, right? The audience knew all the words and sang along with every song. I was impressed with Everclear's brisk and professional manner. Ironically, the best songs the two bands played were probably they covers of Van Morrison's "Brown-Eyed Girl," Cheap Trick's "Surrender," and that one song the girl sings while wearing the Catholic school uniform with each chorus ending "Hit me baby one more time." This was an amusing show, but it would have been better if I had been paying attention to pop music last decade.
    
    Though I thought the Frank Lentricchia's prose lucid, I found I really didn't want to read his After the New Criticism. I did pick up one important, though perhaps obvious idea in the portion of the book I sampled. That is that the News were followed by a series of critics before the GI Bill professors began to retire and their young successors thoughtlessly devoted themselves to Derrida and the many-named "Post Structural" and "Deconstructive" criticisms of the late 70s, the "New Western Histories" and "Chaos Theories" of university English departments. There's a chapter about Northrop Frye, one about Paul de Man, and one about Harold Bloom, and I'm sure all of them are as clear as they can be. But academic criticism is more a philosophical exercise than a way discuss and understand literature, or so I've come to believe. And so I didn't finish reading this decent book.
    
    Instead I spent hours reveling in a detective story, and one I already knew. It was Edmund Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding, a story set post W.W.II in an English public school. Two school masters are found shot to death and a girl from the nearby town's "high school" disappears just as Oxford don Gervase Fen arrives to give the prizes at Speech Day. Crispin is funny. Crispin is smart. In this case Crispin has a dandy mystery plot. This is a book I can recommend to anybody who reads all the words.
    
    The Final Destination is actually Final Destination 4. It is presented in digital 3D, which means one pays $3 extra dollars to get in, one has to wear darkening glasses to see the film, and early on  in its running one notices a couple of things popping out at you from the screen. This series entry isn't particularly scary, and I wasn't sure if any of its accidental Rube Goldberg killing machines actually caused a death or if they were all only in the visions the lead character has, visions which make it possible for him to temporarily interrupt the deaths of the fated accident victims. The earlier movies in the series were better. This one isn't bad. It just isn't anything much.
    
    Actually Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween II is laudable (www.robzombie.com). It has gore, pace, some later visual effects, bare female breasts, and an endless t.v. loop of the mark 2 Moody Blues performing "Knights in White Satin" on hospital t.v.s. But it is a remake of a movie in a long series of formulaic mad slasher films. How can it be anything more than ritual?
    
    Then there was Ang Lee's (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000487/bio) film version of the novel Taking Woodstock, starring a little comedian who was here year before last for Will Ferrell's comedy concert. Basically it is a coming of age story about a New York kid whose demanding, miserly Jewish mother has kept him from going off and enjoying his own life. Old stuff. What's new? Well, it happens just down the road from where the Woodstock music festival is taking place. Are the two related? Not very explicitly. So is the movie much fun? Vaguely. I'd have rather seen Michael Wadleigh's great split-screen movie of the concert instead.
    
    I'm not convinced that Gerald Butler, the star of the visually-altered 300, has it in him to be a star. He's been in chick flics now and other kinds of movies. But Gamer, the Neveldine/Taylor version of Death Race 2000, didn't intrigue me. The video game Butler's character appears in, a sort of Army Grand Theft Auto, didn't seem as interesting to me as did the Sim City (simcity.ea.com) sort of disco-going game that Amber Valleta's character appeared in. Maybe I just like sex more than violence. But I never feel I'm rooting for Butler's characters. 
    
    Usually I do root for Sandra Bullock's. Her new comedy All About Steve, though, also failed to interest me. There were plenty of opportunities for jokes at Marx Brothers rates, what with her trying to see her boyfriend, a cameraman working for a CNN sort of cable news channel, as he covered protests outside a hospital. Inside a separated couple were arguing over whether or not their little girl's third leg should be amputated.. Imagine the graphic "crawl" text on the CNN screen. Imagine the "how does it feel?" interviews? And that's before we get around to the personalities involved. But the comedic ideas are few and far between. "Little Peggy in three-legged race with destiny" was about all they got out of the set-up. Too bad. Is Bullock done? opportunities for jokes at Marx Brothers rates, what with her trying to see her boyfriend, a cameraman working for a CNN sort of cable news channel, as he covered protests outside a hospital. Inside a separated couple were arguing over whether or not their little girl's third leg should be amputated.. Imagine the graphic "crawl" text on the CNN screen. Imagine the "how does it feel?" interviews? And that's before we get around to the personalities involved. But the comedic ideas are few and far between. "Little Peggy in three-legged race with destiny" was about all they got out of the set-up. Too bad. Is Bullock done?
    
    Younger friends--probably one's who would have recognized all of Bowling for Soup's hits--dragged me along to see a first day showing of an animated fantasy movie called 9. Tim Burton (www.imdb.com/name/nm0000318) was one of the producers, but the post-apocalyptic story about dolls animated by the last remaining human spiritual vitality didn't have Burton's sort of quirkiness. The short movie moved along pretty well, but narrative entertainments that depend on a minimum of dialog don't do it for me, to be frank. I wasn't interested enough to be paying attention at the climax.
    
    But this isn't a mark of age. In part because of his reliance on language, I always manage to pay attention to every song every time I see Dylan play. Every time he has found all new ways to put over songs associated with each of the last five decades. Now I just hope nothing happens to him. He's getting old enough he might be fragile. If there was a program for keeping track of where he is all the time, I'd subscribe.
    
    You keep track of me, will you? I'll be back in two weeks with more about what I saw and heard here, three blocks west of Aggieville.

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  • 5 months ago
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• TGIF and Friday Fun TGIF and Friday Fun

  • From: janwesner
  • Description:

     

    TGIF.

    It's been a long week, people.

    I was felled by a wicked cold, then my beloved Apple MacBook crashed.

    I'm drugged up on Motrin and Nyquil, and the computer has revived itself. But the temporary setback meant I had to delay few planned posts until next week.

    For now, here's some ideas of fun stuff to do this weekend:        

    - Spin City skating rink in Junction City hosts an all-night skate for kids ages 6- 12 on the first Friday of every month. Cost is $15 per child. Call 762-7746 for more information.

    - K-State football kicks off its season at 6:10 p.m. Saturday with a home game against. Massachusetts. Discount military tickets available. Click on kstatesports.com for more information

    - The Friends of Milford, Milford Nature Center, and Milford State Park's Annual Buffalo BBQ and Membership Drive is from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Sunday. Vittles will include Buffalo Burgers, polish sausages and hot dogs, baked beans, potato salad, chips, homemade desserts and soda. There's also door prizes, a raffle and entertainment. All proceeds will be dedicated to playground projects at the Nature Center and State Park.  Cost is $5 for adults and $3 for kids age three to 12. Call 238-3014 or 238-5323.

    - The city of Chapman's annual Labor Day Festival on Sept. 7 includes a kids' tractor pull, toy show, car show, craft and food vendors and a parade. Click on cityofchapman.org for details.

     --- Posted by Jan Wesner at 9:45 a.m. on Sept. 4, 2009.

     

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• Take off to Colorado Take off to Colorado

  • From: janwesner
  • Description:

     

    Thinking about a fun family vacation within driving distance?

    Check out Colorado.

    My husband and I have taken our kids - ages 5 and 7 - three different times, twice to ski and once in the summer.

    The trips have provided some of our best memories, and the best part is the places we visited are only a day's drive from here.

    Here's the lowdown from our experiences:

    Copper Mountain, January 2008

    Highlights: We stayed in a great three-bedroom condo within walking distance of the kids ski school, which was awesome. Like most of the big ski resorts, Copper Mountain also has childcare for preschoolers. There's an onsite indoor pool and a playground, although when we were there it was covered with snow.

    Downside: Copper Mountain is a resort village and not within walking distance of any towns or restaurants outside the village. So, unless you want to drive, dining options are limited to the rather pricey "village" restaurants. Not much else to do besides ski.

    Don't miss: Tubing, which is on a separate smaller hill on the mountainside but within walking distance. Tube included in cost.

    Breckenridge, February 2009

    Highlights: Breckenridge is a town, albeit a touristy one, with tons of restaurants and shops within walking distance of most hotels and condos. We stayed at the Beaver Run Resort hotel, which has an indoor pool, heated outdoor pool, game room and Starbucks. Both the kids and adult ski schools and the childcare center were literally right downstairs from our room.

    Downside: Crowded during peak times.

    Don't miss: Sledding in Carter Park.

    Breckenridge, August 2009

    Highlights: I was leery of going to Breckenridge in the summer, when the slopes are closed. I wondered what we'd do to stay busy for three days. Boy, was I wrong. We spent most of one day on an area called Peak 9, which in the summer is a mini-amusement park for kids with miniature golf, bungee trampolines, a human maze and bouncy house. There's also an alpine slide that goes down the mountainside. We also took a day trip to nearby Kremmling for a rafting trip on the Colorado River.

    Downside: Can be chilly even at this time of year.

    Don't miss: The Breckenridge Rec Center offers climbing classes for kids ages 6 and up. Cost is only $10 for a half hour.

    Some resources to help plan your trip:

    breckenridge.snow.com is the official website for Breckenridge.

    coppercolorado.com is Copper Mountain's website.

    vrbo.com offers condo listings by owner. We've used this for many destinations, and often you can bargain with the owner if it's a slow time of year.

    skicountry.com is a one-stop reservations service for Breckenridge and surrounding areas.

    summitactivities.com has a listing of whitewater rafting companies.

    --- Posted by Jan Wesner Sept. 2, 2009, at 3:05 p.m.

     

     

     

     

     

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  • 5 months ago
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• Snyder Fan Since '79 Snyder Fan Since '79

  • From: KathyD
  • Description:

    I admit that I'm a fan of Coach Snyder.  Growing up in Iowa and being socialized to love all things Hawkeye, as well as graduating from the University of Iowa in '87, I can't help but be excited that Coach Snyder returns this weekend. For anyone who may not know everything about Snyder's career and is puzzled as to why a Hawkeye is interested in Snyder, Snyder was the offensive coordinator at the University of Iowa under Head Coach Hayden Fry during the years 1979-88 just prior to coming to K-State.

    When Fry was hired by the Hawkeyes in 1979 back when I was a teenager, the team stank almost as much as the Wildcats did when Snyder came to Manhattan.  The Hawkeyes had experienced seventeen consecutive years of losing seasons (the losing streak started before I was born), and the team was the doormat of the Big Ten.  Conversations in my house and elsewhere in Iowa went along the lines of, "Did the Hawkeyes lose again this week?  Yes?  Well, that's not a surprise."  Or, "Do you think there's any chance the Hawkeyes might beat the Cyclones this year?" and the answer would always be "no."

    The first two seasons were struggles for Fry and his coaching staff, but in the third season, the team achieved success and played in the Rose Bowl on New Year’s Day for the first time in 23 years.  A few years later, the team was ranked number one in the nation for several weeks, a player (Chuck Long) was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy, the team won the conference title and played again in the Rose Bowl.  The doormat team at the University of Iowa had been transformed into a powerhouse, not unlike the transformation experienced by the Wildcats.

    During Snyder's 10 seasons at Iowa, the team achieved more regular season victories than any Iowa football team had since 1903, the Hawkeyes snapped decades-long losing streaks against rival Big 10 teams, and the Hawkeyes made seven straight bowl appearances, including the two aforementioned trips to the Rose Bowl.  These accomplishments, at least in part, must be attributed to Snyder. 

    I moved to Manhattan in 1988, so it wasn't long before I was watching a football team transform once again at the hands of Snyder.  After that, my story of being a fan of Snyder's becomes the same as any other Wildcat fan who watched the seasons unfold over the years.  Wildcat fans will fill Bill Snyder Family Stadium on Saturday, and this house-divided Hawykeye-Wildcat fan will be there, maybe wearing my 1982 Rose Bowl button in Snyder's honor.

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  • 6 months ago
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