Sedona: A Photo Essay

K wrangled some free-ish accommodations from her good friend, so we set out last Thursday, inappropriately early, for the eight-hour drive to Sedona, to celebrate my 40th birthday and to be in a place where our lives would improve radically for the next few days, only to backslide to normalcy upon returning.

Lunch in Kingman was mediocre, but the Roadrunner cafe was greasy enough to satisfy. "What a cute tiny desert community," we thought, then went over the hill to see Kingman proper, which felt a lot like Barstow.

We missed the cutoff to Sedona, but Karen found something called Schnebly Road, which would shuttle us straight across. A local road, fifteen minutes max, right? Then the pavement went away, replaced with rocks and cattle guards, and pink jeeps with tourists taking pictures. Twenty minutes later trees opened up and a canyon advanced quickly and I got a crazy feeling of vertigo as the universe opened up before us.

Then we got out and took pictures.

After a few minutes of this I captained my Soobie down the increasingly rugged Schnebly Hil, which took another 40 minutes or so, averaging speeds of 5 mph or so. Damn you, Schnebly!

Sedona is an amazing place, no doubt.

There is plenty of strange foliage, and many strange people too.

There are UFOs and places for these spacecraft to land on.

The best thing is: Sedona makes you feel really small. This is a good thing, because as a human I am fairly huge. K calls me a lummox from time to time, but that is another story. Still, it is hard not to contemplate the universe when you are reduced to antlike status by your environment, especially by something or someone other than your wife.

Then there are the energy vortexes (vortices, dammit), which may or may not exist. The theory is that this energy causes the trees to spiral all crazy. I started out as a Vortex Skeptic, but then converted to belief when an argument seemed imminent. And it did give me a lot of positive energy to not bicker about vortices, so there must be something to it.

Even Sleepy-E had to contemplate the universe when the sun went down and everybody went back to their resorts. He made a promise to have more quiet in his life instead of constantly filling it with podcasts and DVD bonus features and even music. He also committed to start writing about himself in the third person when things got too personal.

This is what happens when you put your inexpensive point-and-shoot camera into one of those coin-operated set of binoculars up at the airport. It is hard to prevent the round vignette from making you think about action/adventure films, or the lackluster Shelly Long comedy, Outrageous Fortune.

After three nights of rejuvenation and hiking and lounging, K wanted to stop in Flagstaff on the way back. What could possibly be in Flagstaff ?

Only the cutest little downtown and a spectacular breakfast at a new place called El Criollo. Or is it just Criollo? I had blue corn blueberry pancakes and Amazing Bacon (my caps). Karen had something called the Haitian; I cannot remember what it was, but it was sublime.

I actually think that Flagstaff wins in many ways over Sedona: it's a college town, with a functioning downtown, and better food too, perhaps, and cheaper too. Maybe it just reminded me of college, I don't know. The landscape of Sedona is unparalleled, but Flagstaff is cute too.

After breakfast we drove home. The Soobie was punished but she performed well on the hostile backroads of northern Arizona. My car has been vindicated and now I feel like a million dollars.

Now I can go back to my humdrum existence! An article in the Boston Globe a while back argued that more short, intense vacations produce more overall happiness than fewer longer vacations. A three-week vacation doesn't provide a proportional increase of happiness over a one-week vacation. You are better off taking short and intense vacations, and more of them.

So that is what we will do.

Halftime (Long)

I turned forty last week. It feels like halftime. A brief reprieve before the stressful grind of the third quarter commences, when we try to chip away—Seattle Supersonics style—at the lousy deficit earned during the first two poorly played quarters. And so far it does feel a lot like halftime—I can ratchet up that false optimism, and listen to motivational speakers (Coach), have a loungy rest, joke with friends, and have a drink or two (if I’m Ron Artest).

I actually enjoyed turning thirty, and was confronted by none of the aging angst I had expected for that milestone. All of that returned during my thirty-first year, when it became clear that nothing was different, I wasn’t older and wiser (just older), and that my thirties were just an extended version of my lackluster twenties, without the sheen and polish—a new time when I would start to buy Glucosamine for creaky joints and when bran intake would become a legitimate topic of conversation. This third and fourth quarter, however, will not stretch into infinity with time-outs and TV breaks and attempts to ice the shooter. It will be played with a running clock, and when it is over, it is over.

A great man once told me that turning forty was the best thing that ever happened to him. I am paraphrasing here, but basically he said that turning forty causes you to come to terms with yourself. All of that STRIVING and VAGUE DISSATISFACTION kind of fades away—if you aren’t a millionaire and a CEO yet, you probably aren’t going to be—and that’s okay, a good thing maybe. Come to grips with it! Turning forty makes you ask yourself: “Now what?” For him, the answer was: “Okay, now I can start having fun.” I suppose this is what a mid-life crisis is, but I don’t think he was out buying convertibles and leisure suits and trying desperately to turn back the clock with material goods and rowdy behavior. That sounds a bit dramatic. For my father, he was able to make peace with his job, that this was what it was, and that the most important thing was to be a good father and to enjoy life every day.

I will say this: The past few years it has become clear that time is not infinite, and that I’ll probably never learn Sanskrit, and if I do it’ll be at an extremely high cost. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to a dozen other things, and turning forty is just another blunt reminder that you can’t say yes to everything (although my lengthening to-do list seems to be in total denial about this). Do I want to work on a novel for two years or do something more productive with my time? Or twenty smaller things? Much of my thirties was spent making a certain documentary, and now that it is over it has been so pleasurable—delicious, really—to just focus on little non-artistic domestic tasks—doing chores around the house, cooking more and more, starting a garden on the balcony, etc. I’d still like to work on a book; I just feel like I need to decide that spending this time in this way is important, and correct, and then stick with this decision. Of course, this RAISING OF THE STAKES contributes to total artistic paralysis—if every creative endeavor has to be sanctioned by the time-management committee in your head. But that is a topic for a future blog post!

From Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky : “We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless."

It is worth asking again: Now what?

Rochester is Too Young

And too handsome. And too groomed.

They say you can divide the world into two camps: an Austen camp and a Bronte camp. Having never read Austen, believe it or not, and having come late in life to Jane Eyre, I tentatively put myself in the Bronte camp of brooding romantic gothicity, although I don't claim to be an expert.

So I wouldn't say that I'm attached to Jane Eyre in the same way I might have been had I read it in high school or college. But that doesn't prevent me from criticizing this new filmed adaptation, by Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), and starring two hot young actors in roles for the plain and the ugly. I suppose the studio would never have allowed otherwise.

I've heard there is a 1996 version with William Hurt and Charlotte Gainsbourg, which, even if terrible, probably gets the age difference closer to the novel. Orson Welles seems like a better fit too, he's certainly big and boisterous and brooding, yes, and not so attractive in his later years, no. I will have to see Orson's scene-chewing performance in that earlier version. Welles liked his ham and he liked it big and that sort of thing would have breathed some much-needed life into this movie.

Micheal Fassbender makes googly-eyes at Mia Wasikowska,pretty much from the get-go, and the acting is fine and and the cinematography is handsome, sure, but the music is overwrought and the screenplay is questionable and the director Fukunaga doesn't get to the guts of the story in the way he should, merely fulfilling his duties as the person who films the scenes as written (or adapted).

Remains of the Day gets this notion of repressed, forbidden love way way better. Even Age of Innocence ratchets up this tension masterfully compared to this clunky mess. Near the end, after Jane returns to Rochester's burned-down mansion, she seems more like a young waif with a crush than the radical, noble individualist (and now a woman of means, with property) who's deciding her own fate and who's willing to accept a broken-down Rochester for what he is.

Indeed, this radical notion of individualism and a young female protagonist who speaks her mind and determines her own fate, with or without men involved, seems to be lost in this film. She seems passive, actually, even though she's given her requisite lines of saucy, impertinent dialogue. And when she's out flopping around on the moors, crying, it's a little hard for me to get behind it. Maybe if she were pining for Orson Welles! Or Al Pacino!

Finally, the house isn't scary enough, the crazy wife in the attic seems like an undeveloped afterthought, and the bizarre fortune teller scene (Rochester in drag!) has been cut to speed the story along.

Too bad, it could have been great!

The Problem of Man Night

Over the past few months I've been organizing some "Man Nights," which started out as an excuse to get a few of the guys together to watch movies... but is evolving into some kind of curious, themed dinner party followed by an appropriate double-feature of male action or horror. Indeed, this could be one of the only contexts in which a man-centric dinner party would be possible without comment. Kind of a lowbrow version of Middlebrow's Beer and a Book group.

The first Man Night happened because we were all excited to see Werner Herzog's remake/homage/sequel Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, which was as deliciously awful as predicted. The second started out with Evil Dead 2 and then fizzled out with the director's cut of Aliens. The last Man Night was supposed to be a Korean double-feature of Oldboy and The Host, preceded by Korean BBQ and soju consumption. A couple of my friends had seen Oldboy recently, however, so in the spirit of trying to watch something new, we viewed instead the first installment of Park Chan-wook's Vengeance trilogy, Sympathy Mr. Vengeance, followed by the relentless (yet still boring somehow) Thai actioner Ong-bak 2.

Both were awful; never again will we take a chance on films nobody has seen. From now on it's strictly revival screenings at Sleepy-E's place.

Anyway, we're looking for other appropriate pairings for upcoming Man Nights. I was considering Italian food and the Godfather. Or Shepherd's Pie for a Get Carter/Quadrophenia double? Any ideas?

Golly!

Wait, and California's high-speed rail is getting the kibosh too?

The Financial Lives of the Poets

National Book Award nominee Jess Walter's latest effort, The Financial Lives of the Poets, is the funniest thing I've read in a couple of years. The book kicks off with the hapless protagonist, Matt Prior, leaving his comfortable job right before the 2008 financial meltdown to start an online financial magazine written in verse, Poetfolio.com. Needless to say, Poetfolio is a bust and soon Matt faces imminent foreclosure on his house unless he can come up with his $30k balloon payment in a couple of weeks. But that is only one of his problems. His alienated wife is cheating on him with a former high school boyfriend who works at the hardware store. His senile father has moved into the living room. His kids demand electronics and their private school tuition. So Matt does what any sensible midlife person might do: He resorts to selling drugs.

Part Rabbit Redux (there's even a drug-fueled character named Skeet), part hapless Lucky Jim (to which all comic novels must be compared), with a dash of Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist thrown in. There's even a little Elmore Leonard in here in the group of stoner white punks he encounters at the 7-11 one night and in the two local good-cop/bad-cop policemen who entrap Matt but who may not be what they claim to be. This book has been compared to Weeds, but I can't vouch for that having never seen the program...

Fabulous, hilarious, dark, and moving. I'd quote the text more but I loaned my copy to a friend some time ago...

Werner Doesn't Like the Jungle

The Two Escobars

ESPN Strikes Again. ESPN Scores With the Two Escobars. Filmmakers have a ball with Narco-soccer Doc. The Two Escobars is Right on Target. Gooooooooolllll!

It's hard not to succumb to bad soccer headline writing, but ESPN has acquired another masterful documentary, the Zimbalists' The Two Escobars, which follows around notoriously ruthless drug kingpin Pablo Escobar and the straightedge captain of the Colombian national soccer team, Andres Escobar. They were from the same town, Medellin, and their lives ran in strange parallel, but they were not related.

The film details Pablo Escobar's increasing involvement in Colombian soccer, as he bought club teams and paid local players big salaries to remain in Colombia, so they would not be lured away to European club teams. He built soccer fields in the barrio and housing for the poor. Everybody knew he was a drug lord, but he took care of his people... and because of this infusion of money, Colombian soccer developed rapidly, and the film climaxes at the World Cup in the US in 1994, after a historic 5-0 drubbing of Argentina in the qualifying rounds.

What's remarkable is that young Jeff and Michael Zimbalist (Favela Rising), sibling directors in their early 30s, got so much access and so much incredible footage from the 80s and 90s, in and out of Pablo Escobar's compound. I've read that the family of Andres Escobar rejects the movie and feels betrayed by the filmmakers, but I think the film speaks for itself. I got a lot of grief from people in my documentary who claimed that I deceived them as well, but the director's job is tell the truth, not make a glossy puff piece glorifying a sportsman. The film is a masterpiece.

Anyway, check it out. It may actually be better than the OJ Simpson documentary I lauded a month back, June 17, 1994... Actually, the climax of the film takes place on virtually the same day as OJ's fateful drive down the 405--how weird is that? The Two Escobars is a feature-length documentary--unlike June 17, 1994's truncated one-hour running time--and it uses this extra time to maximize tension, and emotion, and passion, right up to its heartbreaking, shocking conclusion.

The Two Escobars makes me want to make films again, and that is no small feat.

Polyphasic 2011

Some of you might remember my polyphasic sleep experiments from a few years back (5 years, back, believe it or not, back when I was single or just courting the K). Historically I went for a core sleep of 4.5 hours nightly and 3 20 minute naps per day. This seemed to work for about a week after which my body couldn't take it anymore. I never was able to convince my body that this was a better mode of living than the old system, and invariably I'd lay down for a 20-minute nap and then sleep through my alarm and wake up about 9 hours later.

Then I'd really be screwed.

Well, the K left for Texas, I've got a few days off, and a long list of chores needed to accomplish -- a perfect opportunity to restart the polyphasic insanity.

I'm very excited about this, actually, and I will file a full report on my productivity in the coming week!

Another great (and healthful, actually) bonus about polyphasic sleep wackiness is that my caffeine intake will diminish close to zero (hopefully). It is IMPOSSIBLE to do this while jacked up on caffeine. I might drink some tea when waking up but coffee is out of the question.

Out of the question!

Fun Times in Taiwan

On Learning Mandarin in Taiwan

Lately I've been thinking about Middlebrow and his comments on the difficulties of the Cyrillic alphabet -- made as he was preparing for his trip to Russia a while back. It seems there are three basic types of letters: letters which look and sound like Roman letters, letters which look like Roman letters and sound like something different, and letters which look and sound like nothing you've seen or heard before. I'm sure I am simplifying and getting it wrong, but that was the crux of it. One would think that learning the third category of unfamiliars would be the most difficult, but it is actually the second category which presents all of the problems. Something that looks like an "N" but sounds like a "P", for example... These are what throw all of your learning out of whack, because the first category is telling you that you have a head start (that A really does sound like an A!). But you'd be better off to learn and entire language of the third category, a language of sounds and letters that are all unfamiliar, with no head starts.

I've decided to dive into learning Mandarin, for the first time really since I traveled to China in 1997. In the meantime, I learned some Japanese, which gives me a head start on many of the characters. And since Taiwan uses traditional Chinese characters, they are closer to what I already learned studying Japanese (but not exactly, of course, why would it be so easy?). However, most Chinese study materials use the characters that mainland China uses, simplified characters, which I have no real desire to learn yet, since they are like the category two above (familiar but different, and just plain lousy to look at) and because K's family is all in Taiwan.

So that is one issue. But the main thing I seem to be wrestling with in Chinese language acquisition is the tonal component of Mandarin. The ideal way to learn it would be VERBALLY only from a very young age, but as a foreign adult I have a hard time retaining this info without a written, visual reference. Learning the vocab and even learning the characters and learning grammar isn't so hard, it's the retention of the tonal component of the word/syllable that gives me fits. The problem is that pinyin (Romanized pronunciation of Chinese with a tonal marking (or diacritical mark)) is often used to give foreigners a chance... but because pinyin is in Roman letters it is impossible for me to create a permanent link between the sound of the word and and the tone it's supposed to carry... The word for big ("DA") is said with a fourth tone, but if I see the word "da" in pinyin (English) with a number four diacritical mark, it doesn't sink in because the letters D and A are seen all over the place in my life, in that order, and everywhere, and there are other words containing "da" that use different tones.... so a "da" will not always have the same tone inflection so how in the hell do I know which "da" I am looking at if I'm in the world of Pinyin? Using romanized pinyin as a bridge to reading comprehension is actually obfuscating the connection between the word and its tonal meaning. You're back in Middlebrow's second category (things that look familiar, but sound and mean something different), and maybe it's easier in the long run to go to the third category instead...

So I think it will actually be easier to NOT use pinyin once the word and its meaning have been apprehended, but instead to get it out of English as soon as possible, hand off the visual association to a character, and attach a one-to-one relationship between a traditional Chinese ideogram and its tone. "This character here is always a three-tone", etc. And in some ways this is easier than Japanese because each character as one syllable, always, as opposed to Japanese, in which kanji can have many different readings of varying syllables (often a Chinese variant and a Japanese multi-syllabic variant). There are a zillion 2-syllable compound words in Chinese, however, that are slammed together much differently than Japanese...but hey...

K thinks I'm crazy, though, because written Chinese is a huge barrier to 99.999% of all foreigners (and to some locals too, I'm sure), not a LIBERATING device with which to learn a language. This is why simplified Chinese was invented, of course, to improve literacy, because the language is impossible!

One doesn't learn Chinese through the writing. Writing comes after speaking, much after... But I'm going to go the other way, dammit, just watch!

I Married an Artist

Don't know where I found this gem.

Ancient History

I was listening to some podcast the other day and they were talking about Germany in the 70s and how it was still living then in the shadow of WW2 and how that reactively shaped policy... and I was very struck by this because I was born in 1971 and WW2 always seemed like ancient history, not close at all to the 70s...

But in reality there was only 26 years between the end of WW2 and my birth. Not a long time, really. Not at all.

For kids born in 2011, tracking back 26 years gets you to 1985, the summer of Back to the Future, Rambo, and Cocoon. Astonishing. 1971 is to Nazi Germany as 2011 is to Back to the Future.

And tracking back 26 years beyond that gets you to 1959, or pre-production on Psycho!!! I remember watching Psycho in 1985 at a friend's house... It seemed ancient... black and white, with strange wardrobes, and odd filmmaking technique and pacing. A curiosity. A relic from another time. The limitless sprawl of ancient history that unspooled before my birth.

Is this how my nephew will view Top Gun?

And then there's the two lifetimes between today and the Civil War. It's nothing, really. My grandfather's grandfather was probably in his 20s during this war...

We are such a young country.