SOME FLY SHOES

When my sister's daughter was four or five she proudly showed me her new shoes and said, "Them kill bugs."

It made me smile, partly at the Okie in her — she is half Okie and half white — and partly because I recognized a kindred spirit: a girl who loves practical shoes. Not ones that you have to strap on or climb into or wedge between your toes. But ones that are comfy, ones that kill bugs.

Not that you couldn't waste a spider with a frou-frou shoe, but honestly, if you have your choice of weapons, are you going to go for the pink satin slingback or the Milano Birkenstock?

Alas, my niece was not a true fellow traveler. Her fascination with practical shoes lasted about as long as my fascination with heterosexuality. I asked her recently whether she remembered showing me her tiny shoes and she said, "Not really," which, coincidentally, is the same answer she gave when I asked whether she remembered her Uncle Steve.

Anyway, I love practical shoes. And these shoes I bought Tuesday are the ultimate in practical. Not only are they extremely comfy, with "Jeep engineered traction," but they come equipped with maps on the soles. At first I thought they were world maps, but they're actually a split map of the Berkshires, which are some so-called "mountains" in Massachusetts. I'm going to the Bay State in October, so these shoes will be extra practical should I get lost.

These shoes came with four shoelaces: two baby-blue ones and two navy ones. I think that was just for show and not for reasons of practicality, so I took two of them out.

Today I put on these shoes and walked all the way to the City Code Inspection Office (I'm putting a deck on my house), then to the bookstore (where I was looking for "Sense and Sensibility" and found "Jane Austen for Dummies") and then to the bank (I need a loan for the deck), and I didn't get a single blister, not even a tiny bump. These shoes were made for walkin'.

They are the Cadillac of footwear.

Then I came home and put them in my closet and proudly surveyed my little collection. I have seven pairs of shoes now, all practical. All black or brown or blue, except for a pair of gray Arizona Birkenstocks that I purchased during a zany, devil-may-care period.

One time I sent Erin and Ben a picture of myself in a pumpkin patch with the late Moses, and Ben told me that Erin cropped out my "big lesbian shoes." Those were her exact words, because she's a model of political correctness. Still, I took offense. My shoes are not big. In fact, they are rather small — size 5s or so — except for these new ones, which I bought a size too large so I could wear big lesbian socks with them while strolling down the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires.

Anyway, these shoes are so fabulous, and I'm sure all my friends will agree. When I send them pictures from my vacation, they'll probably just crop out the big lesbian — and leave the awesome shoes.

DOPPELGANGERS

Isn't it awesome when you encounter some everyday gal who reminds you of a famous gal?

Then every time you look at the everyday gal — at the office, say — you think of the famous gal, and it adds a touch of glamour to your workday.

And it also reinforces the notion that there are only a few types of people in the world, which is a very comforting, if really untrue, thought.

Like there’s this gal at work who is just like Sarah Silverman, or, as she’s known in the business, Big S.

I admit I didn’t know who Sarah Silverman was until a week ago. I had read an article about her in the New Yorker last year or something, but I didn’t have a face or anything to put with the name, so she didn’t stick.

Then I saw her comedy show on cable TV: “Jesus is Magic.” It’s very smart and edgy. And after I saw it I felt very smart and edgy — just for having seen it. I felt like I had discovered something. You know how that goes.

But then when I asked Boy George about her, I found out that instead of being on the leading edge of the pop culture curve I was way behind it.

I said to Boy, as we were driving to Olathe Saturday (we go to Olathe all the time now), “Have you ever heard of Sarah Silverberg?”

And he said, “You mean Sarah Silverman?” And then he rattled off a bunch of movies and TV shows she’s been in, and he noted that she did some voices on “Crank Yankers” (She was the blind stripper with the seeing eye dog, he said, and she was also some lady who was pissed because her aromatherapy candle smelled like doody).

And, feeling trumped, I said, “Yeah, but ‘Jesus is Magic’ is really her chef-d’oeuvre, wouldn’t you agree?”

And he admitted he had never seen it. Ha!

So then we agreed to watch it that night. But in the meantime I spoiled a few of her jokes for him.

Such as:

“When God gives you AIDS, make lemonaids.”

And: “After 30 there are a lot of risks associated with pregnancy; really, the best time to get pregnant is when you’re a black teenager.”

Funny.

She also has some jokes about Sept. 11 and the "alleged" Holocaust. And those are even funnier, if you can imagine.

I didn’t spoil those for Boy, but I did further intrigue him by telling him that Big S reminds me of this gal at work, whom I’ll call Big L.

I used to call Big L “LG,” which stood for Loud Girl, because when I first knew her she was only a voice across the room, and it was loud and it was a girl’s.

I mean, I could more aptly call her BLJG — Big Loud Jewish Girl — but BLJG sounds more like a sexual orientation than a cable news broadcaster, which is what Big L is.

It took me awhile to see that Big L was also funny, in addition to being loud and a girl.

The first few things I heard her say were not obviously humorous.

Like: “What is the difference between a car and a vehicle?”

And: "Have you ever heard of a damn-o-clean sword?"

And: “But that’s not, you know, ethically right. Know what I’m saying?”

These aren’t, you know, jokes. This is just her worldview. This is the type of thing she says.

Eventually I noticed that she ended every other sentence with the independent clause “know what I’m saying?” and began every other sentence with the dependent clause “When I was in rehab.”

Which, if you think about it, is a natural comedic template: "When I was in rehab, (fill in humorous anecdote). Know what I'm saying?"

One time Big S got in trouble for saying “chink” on network TV. And that’s the sort of thing that you could imagine happening to Big L. Not that either one is racist. They're not. But that’s what edgy means — that you’re on the edge of what is considered proper, and sometimes you slip over the edge, and sometimes you pole-vault over it.

So Big L is funny like Big S, even though she doesn't mean to be, and they're both Jewish and look alike and project the same attitude. And this makes work more fun.

And if that weren't enough: Another co-worker, a broadcaster gal, looks remarkably like Tina Fey:

BACK-TO-SCHOOL DUDS

Has the flared jeans/flip-flop look finally reached its twilight?

Is it going gently — arm in arm with the hip-hugger/lower-back tattoo look — into that good night?

I could have sworn I saw a marked decline today in the number of college kids shuffling around campus in cheap-plastic-thongs-made-in-Malaysia (an old-school word for flip-flops), flared, low-riding jeans and tight, worn-looking $40 T-shirts.

Go figure. Just as I was about to adopt that look it goes out of style. But at least I realized it in time. Not like when I got that bowl cut and started wearing stirrup pants — just as that under-appreciated aesthetic was singing its own swan song.

I wrote a post in April about uber-trendy kids. I was on the verge of adopting the faux-messy look then, and recently I read a phrase in a novel that really sold me on the idea: Looking bad is the new looking good.

Being a philosophy major, I need a theory, or at least a snappy epigram, to go with my praxis. Praxis is an ancient Greek word for practice, for those of you who majored in something more practical than philosophy (God, I miss that old gang of bullshitting megalomaniacs who couldn't content themselves with the million or so words in the English language). Anyway, theory and praxis. I can't just do something for the sake of doing it or because 85.3 percent of all other human beings are doing it. I need some intellectual puffery to persuade me.

Looking bad is the new looking good.

I like that (I'd like it even better if it were written in a dead language). But alas, it's no longer true, if I can judge from the fashion I saw today.

Or maybe the kids who are the chief ambassadors of the flared/flip look were simply too hip to show up for the first day of school. Maybe they won't make an appearance until the third or fourth week. And then everything will be back to normal.

What I saw today — and this may be skewed by an influx of fashion-ingenue freshmen from the far reaches of our state — was a lot more crisp. A lot of squeaky-clean white tennis shoes, freshly pressed shirts, vivid colors. One kid in my class had a bright orange, well-laundered polo shirt and pristine white tennis shoes with orange stripes to match his shirt. I can't wait to see whether he'll have other shirt/shoe combos. He looked clean. And his shoelaces reminded me a tad of the new red-striped ones Benjie was wearing the other day. I consider Benjie to be at the forefront of fashion, as evidenced by the bold statement he recently made by wearing a "Newton, KS" T-shirt in Newton, KS. Can fashion get more daring? Another guy in my class had on a bright, brand-new pink polo with combed hair. Several of them smelled nice. The girls, if I'm not mistaken, were wearing their pants higher on their hips — not above their navel with pleated fronts and severely tapered legs, which is the look I really prefer, but close; they'll be there soon.

Anyway, if any of you have any insights into whether the marvels I saw today are just anomalies or actual harbingers of a new direction in fashion, please share your thoughts. It won't be easy, but I'll hold off on changing my look until we've reached a consensus.

On a semi-related note, I asked my students to jot down all their usual personal-info crap on an index card. One dude is from Hamburg, Germany, a city that's important to European history buffs because it's maybe where the hamburger came from. He's the only kid in the class who, on the General Knowledge portion of the quiz, knew that Angela Merkel was the chancellor of Germany. Everyone else, not living in a country where a gal might actually be in charge, thought she was an actress or "a lady golfer."

The last thing they had to write on the index cards was hobbies/interests. Here are the winners: shopping, myspace, facebook, napping, sleeping, eBay, socializing, going out with friends, scrapbooking, watching TV.

Some wrote: reading, history, journalism, music, but — just between you and me — I don't expect much from those two.

AFFINITY

I tried to watch the film "Beg" on my day off, but it was too weird. I needed Rick to help me see what was so great about it. It had won some indie film awards. Rick's like a weird-film aficionado. Weird as in strikingly odd, strange, bizarre, fantastic, to the point of annoying others. I was annoyed by "Beg" because I didn't get it. It's like Abstract Expressionism; I need someone to explain to me why it's so awesome, and when they do, I usually agree that it is indeed awesome.

One thing that tickles me about Rick is how seriously he takes film. He treats it like the art form it is. I can't walk into a movie even 30 seconds late because I feel like I will miss something crucial. Everything is crucial. It'd be like going to a museum to see a Picasso and having part of it hidden behind a curtain. Rick appreciates that quirk of mine because he shares it.

He wrote the guest post below about his favorite films. Many of them — "Blue," "Dead Man," "The Unbelievable Truth" — are my favorite films, too, and they were even before we met and/or talked about them as such. This makes me feel a special kinship with him. Other movies on his list I have never seen, but I plan to because I know they will be worth my time — and because then I won't feel so left out of his and George's new life together.

••••••••••••

The Web site "Filmaffinity" has been mentioned on this blog a few times now, and for those who don't know, it is a site where you rate a bunch of movies and then, by some obscure algorithm, you are matched up with 20 “soul mates” who share (in varying degrees) your tastes in film. The site has some good extras, like a parallel to the set of soul mates composed of your friends and the option to create sundry lists of movies for others to see. So far, most of the people on the site seem to be Spanish, but I'm doing my part to plug it in North America.

As expected, the site has led me to some interesting movies I might never have seen otherwise. And of course I get the smug satisfaction of knowing that my ever-brilliant soul mates despise most of the same all-salt, all-fat, all-sugar, no-spice, no-bitterness, baby-food-textured Hollywood fast-food product that I despise. (OK, I can see why people might like having sycophants.) Besides these goodies, there have also been some effects that I didn’t expect. I want to talk about one of those here. And it starts with the idea of rating movies.

People like lists of the best things. Or at least they like to argue over such lists. I can remember — sort of remember — many an undergrad bull session where there were beer-fueled arguments over “the greatest _____.” Always included were the greatest bands, the greatest songs, the greatest guitarists, and maybe a few other music lists. If the group was mostly or entirely guys, then the lists might soon veer off into the greatest quarterbacks, or the hottest actresses or supermodels. But if there were some women present, we had a better chance of getting to the greatest movies. I wish I could report what the contenders were. But at this remove of time and space, I can do no more than assure you that the proposals were at least as dismal as you would expect from a noisy crowd of drunken 20-year-olds.

Perhaps also created for purposes of argument, various movie critics, magazines, and organizations have put out “the 100 best movies” list. I think there is some sort of union rule requiring the list to be 100 titles long. (I’ll look into that). But I don’t care for these lists. Is “Citizen Kane” really the greatest movie ever made? Well now, thanks to Benjamin Schwarz of The Atlantic Monthly, I have a good answer to that question. No, the greatest movie ever made is Orson Welles’ next movie, “The Magnificent Ambersons.” However, before Welles finished the post-production, he traipsed off to Rio for a war propaganda gig — during Carnival — leaving this best-ever film in the hands of a resentful studio. So Welles’ “Ambersons” piled up on the cutting-room floor, and we now have only RKO’s hack job to hint at what the-world’s-most-talented-boy was up to. How romantic. I’ve not seen “Ambersons” and have no plan to. That is part of the romance.

OK, now that we are done with that best-ever nonsense, let’s go back to Filmaffinity and favorite films. Over the last year I’ve rated 1,172 movies on the site. They have many more than that, of course, and they are sadly missing some very good, if obscure, ones. But they have a big chunk of the movies you have a hope of finding. This site has been yet another case of the Internet showing me something I didn't know before, but this time it is about myself. Before last year, if you had asked me what my favorite movies were, I’d have given you a few titles that would vary depending on my mood and recollection of the moment. But now I have something approaching a systematic answer to the question. I’ve tried to be very stingy with the highest rating, so out of 1,172 movies, 27 got a “10,” which is just over 2 percent.

Armed with such an objective list, do I now know anything about what it takes to become one of my favorite movies? Maybe not. The list is kind of odd, even to my eyes. Is that a good thing? Should I proudly be an iconoclast? Even for that my credentials look weak. There are, for instance, a few of the perennials that grow very high on the 100 greatest lists. “The Godfather” seems to make almost everyone’s list, and “Sunset Boulevard” is almost as common. (George gives both of these a “10” as well). I also have films that are found at lower elevations on those lists but always seem to be there. Some of these are classic icons that seem as necessary as bits of geography. How could we live in a world that didn't have “The Seventh Seal”? Might as well imagine that we didn’t have Sweden at all.

Looking at my films, some might say I'm into minimalism. And, in a way, that might be true. One of my movies is “Pickpocket” by the French New Wave filmmaker Robert Bresson. He is often considered a minimalist because he used non-actors and refused to let them do things that we often consider to be acting. He required them to keep their hands at their sides, to give their lines in an inflection more like reading than speaking, and to look down at the floor and then back at the camera so as to disrupt their facial expressions. He might also be considered minimalist because the plot could, and sometimes was, summarized in the title of a film: “A Man, Condemned to Death, Escapes.” But Bresson’s films are actually very dense and pack a lot into a short running time. The difference is that he leaves out the usual fare so as to not crush his delicate finery. Two American filmmakers with movies on my list are influenced by Bresson: Hal Hartley and Jim Jarmusch. The influence is more obvious in the case of Hartley. He also uses a formal style that eliminates much of traditional acting. To this he adds a distinctive and offbeat comedic sensibility that creates weird films that don’t go anywhere near slapstick, even if they have a guy bumming around with a grenade in his hand or a cop wrestling with a nun. His “Unbelievable Truth” is on my list, but “Trust” and “Simple Men” could almost be as well. Bresson’s influence on Jarmusch is less straightforward. Of his two on my list, you can perhaps see it most in the early black-and-white film “Stranger than Paradise,” which is wonderful to watch even as very little happens. My other Jarmusch is a return to black and white after he did a few in color. It at least has the Bresson touch of being summed up in the title: “Dead Man.”

I’ve two other films with a different kind of minimalism: “Blue” by Krzysztof Kieslowski and “In the Mood for Love” by Wong Kar-Wai. In neither of these films is there too much said or too much done. But they are both amazingly visually rich and both very effective in their use of sound to explore mood. Perhaps I like them both for these similar elements.

But not all my films are quiet. There is a movie that makes George’s list, which, if I see it again, might very well make mine. It is a maximally unquiet movie: Emir Kusturica's “The Underground.” The first Kusturica that I saw was “Black Cat, White Cat.” This was a very fun film, and very frantic (and noisy). I thought at the time that this is what Shakespeare would make if he were alive today. Who could doubt he would be making movies, and I’m sure his comedies would be like “Black Cat.” With this Shakespeare idea in mind, I saw “The Underground.” It is even louder and more frantic than “Black Cat.” It is like no other movie ever made. Some people might say that it is surreal, but they are wrong. It is very weird, sure, but not in any of the ways we are used to from surrealism, or even from Dada or Absurdism. It has this magic whereby it makes a lot more sense than it seems to have any right to — not absurd at all. No, I think it best to not try to say what it is like since it isn’t. If Shakespeare saw this one, he would say, no, I wouldn’t make a film like that; I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

Lest you think that only artsy think-pieces are on my list, I’ll leave you with the two musicals that make it: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Hedwig and the Angry Inch.”

SHELTER

I drove for two and a half hours in the rain tonight, through a thunderstorm on the Kansas prairie. Rain poured down in a torrent, then a trickle, then a torrent. Lightning flashed all over the horizon, King Lear-like. And I was cocooned in my car, a tiny portable shelter moving across the dark land, with the tail-light of a semitrailer as my lighthouse — my Pharos of Alexandria that kept going at Emporia while I turned left.

Violent weather has a visceral appeal. It makes a mockery of our doings. It keeps things in perspective. I love in the movie "Magnolia" when it starts raining frogs. Amphibians just start falling out of the sky. No explanation. And every bit of drama up to that point is rendered trivial, nonexistent. It seems like Hollywood fantasy — frogs falling from the firmament — but it's really just emotional realism. Our private storms do not compare.

And violent weather challenges us, as in: Live through this.

Children love to build shelters. All kinds: treehouses, wooden forts, tents, refrigerator-box complexes. Give them a sheet and an ottoman and you'll get a Turkish palace. But this instinct for shelter making, it is not just playing house. It is primeval. It is Prometheus stealing fire. It is saying to Nature: You can't touch me.

Tonight, after the rain grew more steady and hypnotic, after I noticed my thoughts running in a sad, unproductive loop, I remembered my little shelter had another bulwark against Nature: a car stereo. I put in a CD, one I bought because of Beth, who pulled me out of our shared home one night to see Neko Case.

It smells a lot like engine oil
And tastes like being poor and small
And popsicles in summer

Beth wrote a poem about childhood once, how it feels when no one likes you, just before and just after that realization, the moment in time when your self-image — You are an invincible pirate swashbuckling through the South Seas — meets the image others have of you — You are a disgusting tomboy whom everyone hates. There is that heavy, new awareness — that words like crestfallen were invented for — and the accompanying shame. You can't even tell your mom because you somehow know that, secretly, in her heart, she will love you less for being unloved.

I think of that story a lot, especially on nights like this, when I feel poor and small and Beth is out of reach. About her being abandoned by her playmates and the brave face she put on for her not-so-adoring parent. I'll build a shelter against this, Mom.

She will laugh at me for saying this, but Beth is the bravest person I have ever known. And here's something brave she wrote — a compliment she will likewise dismiss.

I wish instead of ill-fated adult partners we could have been childhood friends, lopping off the heads of Barbies and sneaking cigarettes behind the garage and building shelters against the storm.

I had a Naomi too.

I'm with you in Rockland, Billy.
In my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on
the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night.

A RIDE ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS-YOURSELF

I haven't been blogging lately because I've been entertaining. First the McDaniel duo, then Boy Wonder.

This is that magical time of year, between semesters, when I have only one job, when I can really enjoy my time off, when a day stretches out before me rife with fun possibilities instead of dull obligations.

Five and a half days of eating and talking and lying around and going out and watching movies and doing whatever. Exactly what I needed.

One of the things Boy George and I did, besides smoke cigars and learn Spanish and revisit my hometown (where everything and nothing had changed in 15 years), was make sushi.

Boy got me hooked on sushi. I had eaten it only a couple of times before. Once in college, when my roommate’s boyfriend, a half-Korean Army brat, in a fit of nostalgia, rolled up some plain rice in a sheet of seaweed. It was nothing special. It reminded me of my own desperate attempts, in France, to cure a bout of homesickness by improvising something peculiarly American, like ketchup. The result — a bowl of tomato paste and vinegar — usually just intensified the longing.

The second time I ate sushi was at a restaurant in Tulsa’s Brookside area. I went with some co-workers. I didn’t know what to order. Fearing the fish, I stuck with the vegetarian menu. The thing I remember most about it was that it was very expensive and I felt extremely awkward using chopsticks. One co-worker spent $30 on lunch.

Either the sushi there was unremarkable or its time hadn’t come for me, but I simply didn’t see what all the fuss was about.

Then came George. And his Grand Passion. And a local sushi bar.

There is nothing so contagious as a grand passion, especially one for food.

The first time I ate sushi with George was a revelation. I kept thinking about that poem in Edgar Lee Masters’ “Spoon River Anthology” about the guy — I think it was a priest — who brought back some sand from Egypt to the folks in his small town.

You were like a traveler who brings a little box of sand
from the wastes about the pyramids
And makes them real and Egypt real

Eating sushi with George was like that — like something had been made real.

George’s mom is Vietnamese, and he spent a good deal of his formative years in the Orient. I think Orient is not politically correct anymore, but it’s such a damn romantic word I can’t help using it. It makes me think of Great Walls and Spice Roads and silk clothes and ancient codes of etiquette.

George has made this real for me by demystifying it — by making me also think of South Korean youth gangs, punk fashion, seedy military complexes, state-of-the-art gadgetry and animated porn.

He also suggested that we make our own sushi — can we mere, mostly Caucasian mortals do such a thing? — and he showed up at my house with a book about sushi, a rice maker from Japan (a gadget, not a person), a sushi tray with chopsticks and some seaweed and rice vinegar. The rest we bought at the Asian Mart and Hy-Vee.

Then, with a nod to 2,500 years of Japanese artistry, we rolled our own.

We gathered and chopped all the ingredients, below, an assortment of salmon and tuna and shrimp, plus a few veggies, some mango and a squeeze-tube of wasabi:



Then we tried to figure out how to arrange them on the seaweed so that they looked pretty and would roll up nicely. Being journalists, not mathematicians, we needed some extra help with this, so we read in the book about where to place things and how to leave an inch of seaweed uncovered at the end so the roll could be sealed.



Then Georgey-san figured out, with just a tiny bit of trial and error, how to use the sushi mat to roll up the damn thing. We thought our rolls could be tighter and prettier — what couldn’t be at my age? — but we were basically pleased with our first effort. Sushi chefs, after all, train for years and years, and they are all men, so any deficiencies in our rolls were mostly attributable to my being a woman. Wouldn’t you agree, Boy Sensei?

So here’s what our rolls looked like uncut:




Even though I'm a girl, I got the honor of slicing them into beautiful, bite-size morsels. Unfortunately, my kitchen is not equipped with a razor-sharp blade — Explain to me, someone, why I spent $3,000 on the countertops but am too cheap to pony up $150 for a nice knife — so I ended up using a bread knife to do the honors. You can see the result at the top of this page.

Sushi, our book said, was the world’s first fast food. And Boy and I, ever mindful of tradition, gobbled up this meal as fast as we could.