Photo by sparktography.
...is planning her wedding.
I view large, elaborate weddings with a touch of amusement. It's gone too far (as it usually seems to do) when the bride spends the weeks before the wedding stressed out over dresses and menus, rather than in pleasant anticipation and having fun with her fiance. And it's interesting how the groom plays merely a (minor) supporting role in the wedding planning.
It's been some years since the term "Bridezilla" entered the language. Thing is, the bride is encouraged by everyone around her to think of the wedding as her day (again, the groom is an afterthought). Everyone else steps back and the bride is bound by nothing but her own self-restraint. Surely this is revealing, to see where she goes when driven purely by her own impulses. See this article which mentions a bride who expected her bridesmaids to have breast-enhancement surgery. Not every bride does this--that's the point. It's a test.
One could imagine a whole new branch of psychoanalysis, which analyzes women's psyches by their wedding arrangements.
And, of course, there is a corresponding occasion for men, which reveals the core of their character. I just haven't figured out what it is yet.
Update: For example. Not that examples are hard to find.
1. Go to a car dealer and tell them you're shopping for a new car. Tell them you want to take a test drive. The smaller and lighter the model of car, the better.
2. Once in the car, out on the open road, with the salesman seated next to you, start making some idle chit-chat.
3. Segue into the Christopher Walken speech from Annie Hall. If you don't recall, it goes something (very loosely) like this: "Sometimes when I see a big truck coming I get this sudden urge to swerve into its path. I imagine the purifying flames coursing through my body...." It helps if you let your eyes glaze over and speak in trancelike tones.
4. For bonus points, wait until you see a truck coming and make the slightest of feints toward the left with the steering wheel.
One of the stories I was forced to read in middle school has stuck with me: "Bargain" by A. B. Guthrie. A recent train of thought motivated me to track the story down and buy a used edition of the Guthrie anthology containing it. (Warning: spoilers ahead--my search started with just the clues "wood alcohol" and "story" on Google.) The story takes place in a small town in the old West. The two main characters are a somewhat bookish shopkeeper and a big, drunken,illiterate (both important plot points) town bully who, among other obnoxious behaviors, refuses to pay his bills. Over such a dispute the bully crushes the shopkeeper's hand beneath his boot. Thereafter, the shopkeeper gives up on collecting his bill and even gives the bully a job as a deliveryman. At the end of the story the bully is found out in the winter wilderness, dead, along with some barrels of wood alcohol (clearly labeled "POISON", but... aha! you see?) which he had been transporting for the shopkeeper.
Perhaps no masterpiece, but it is a nicely plotted little story, and I think it relates to an underappreciated theme, which is the unending struggle between two elements of humanity which we currently call the jocks and the nerds. Although both these terms are of relatively recent coinage, I suspect the distinction is psychologically innate--at least for men--I'm not sure about women. The jock-versus-nerd struggle provides a subtext for a lot of other things going on, like certain disagreements I witness at the office, or Republicans versus Democrats (surely you can see which is which), or the relationship (if one may call it that) between the Sam and Norman characters in Psycho.
And then there is this... consider the relationship between the Greeks and Romans during the Roman empire. The Romans kept Greeks as slaves. Greek slaves made excellent tutors for one's children. Greek academic achievements were highly respected, to the point where they were practically regarded as the source of all higher knowledge. Nonetheless they were slaves; they can't have been completely respected.
(By the way, there is a remarkable contrast, which I don't fully understand, between the Roman and American attitudes toward slavery. Romans were happy to educate some slaves and arm others [the gladiators]. American slaveowners considered that their survival depended on keeping their slaves ignorant and unarmed.)
My layman's reading of the situation: the Romans respected the Greeks for their knowledge and at the same time looked down on them for having been conquered by force of arms (although the Greeks had been empire builders in their own day). I therefore view Greeks as the original nerds, Romans as the original jocks.
Here's a short list of hobbies--activities that are fun, interesting, and potentially challenging with the potential for personal development--which require little or nothing in the way of resources and money. DISCLAIMER: Some of the activities described herein carry risk of harm, ranging from a cut finger to paralysis and death. All are reasonably safe if practiced with prudent caution. Become informed, and take responsibility for your actions. If your head gets cut off don't come crying to me!
1. Budget backpacking. The secret appeal of backpacking is that once you've mastered it, theoretically you can go anywhere on Planet Earth--roads no longer necessary. As a hobby, it can eat up as much money as you want to pour into it, but it doesn't have to. Every Appalachian trail hiker knows the story of Grandma Gatewood, who hiked all 2,168 miles of the trail three times, at ages ranging from 67 to 75, equipped with little more than sneakers, an old Army blanket, and an old shower curtain.
You can spend hundreds of dollars on a backpacking tent, or you can sleep under a sheet of plastic costing at most a few dollars (that's mine pictured above). The latter will give you more space, and--if you know what you're doing--may well keep you drier. You can make your own backpack out of a mesh laundry bag and a old book bag for another handful of dollars (check out the "Sgt. Rock Rucksack". You can make your own alcohol stove out of three empty soda cans, eat cup noodles, carry (and refill) a store-bought liter of water rather than a canteen, and so on. At online forums, others are more than happy to help you get started.
2. Paper modeling. Also known as card modeling, or papercraft. Cut paper, glue it together, you get a ship, an airplane, a funny animal, or whatever your passion is. See some examples at the Currell.net Gallery. Basic resources needed: a computer and printer, some heavyweight paper, a hobby knife, some white glue. Difficulty ranges from slightly glorified paper airplanes to complicated patterns with hundreds of parts. Thousands of patterns are available on-line for free, others for sale. You can buy books with preprinted patterns.
Or go hard-core: just you, armed with a knife and glue, versus a blank stack of paper. If you want to go a little deeper you can design your own patterns (and perhaps share them on-line).
3. Parkour. Also known as free-running. If you've never seen this, it is difficult to explain. It's a sport with no rules, a game with no winners or losers. The objective is to get from point A to point B as gracefully and athletically as possible. You can find some in the movies--the big chase seen at the beginning of Casino Royale features parkour practitioner Sébastien Foucan as the bomb-maker. Or check out the following video:
Obviously parkour can be extremely athletic (I've never tried it--as yet), but even these guys had to start small.
4. Chess. Sixty-four squares, sixteen pieces, and after several hundred years the possibilities are still endless. You can score a set for a few dollars (I've picked up some at the dollar store), and there are plenty of resources on-line to teach you how to play and how to play better. If you have no friends, you can download free software to play against (and you may not need a board). You can find an adversary on-line at any time.
5. Dancing. In my misspent youth, I did the standard backpacking trip to Europe, during which a friend and I made a side trip to Morocco. During this time we stayed for three days with a family in Casablanca. This says something about variations in standards of hospitality around the world. We had never met them before but they insisted, notwithstanding there were seven of them living in a (clean and dignified) three-room apartment (and even though, as we later discovered, they had other house guests arriving in the middle of the night).
I mention the size of the apartment to emphasize that these were not people who had extra money to waste on frivolities. One of the neighborhood kids did have a hand-held cassette player, along with two cassettes--I recall one was Simon and Garfunkel and the other was the soundtrack to Grease. Dancing was an everyday activity, taken up at the spur of the moment. They danced with a natural grace that comes with a lot of practice. And they had fun.
Watched "Quantum of Solace" on video this week (after seeing it in the theater, of course). Herewith some random musings:
1. The Bourne movies (particularly the second and third, directed by Paul Greengrass) pushed a style characterized by lots of hand-held cameras and quick cuts. "Quantum" uses a a lot of quick cuts in action sequences, but the intent struck me as different--sort of a cubist ideal of simultaneous representation of all viewpoints of the scene. It seems if you concentrate you can actually get a more concrete view of the action than a static camera would reveal. A nice gimmick was the occasional use of a blur of motion or a spray of foam to smooth over a quick cut.
2. One defining feature of the Bond movies has been the most elaborate and impressive stunt work. Often these have appeared in the pre-title teaser (more often than not involving jumps into empty space, out of airplanes, into airplanes, etc.). In "Quantum" we see, for example, Bond jumping a motorcycle off a pier onto a boat, but it is a throwaway moment, and the action moves on to the next thing without stopping. That's much cooler--the "no big deal" attitude.
3. The variety of style and font in the location title cards was fun. Similarly the different-colored subtitles for Mathis and the Spanish-speaking cab driver (talking simultaneously) were a nice touch.
4. I love how the first time we see the villain, he is not actively working at anything evil, but aimlessly screwing around with an ink pad and stamp.
5. The airline clerk in Bregenz was pretty, but didn't look as if she had popped off the page of a lingerie catalog. Nice touch of realism, that.
6. One of my favorite scenes--a quiet one--is Bond and Mathis on the plane. The sound design contributed a lot to this scene, mostly subliminally.
7. Gemma Arterton, the actress who plays Fields, is certainly attractive and competent enough to suit me--but just too young for the role. This necessitated the most arduous suspension of disbelief since Denise Richards was presented as a nuclear physicist.
8. Camille's reintroduction into the story at Greene's party comes via a very blurry view of her back--but she is still instantly recognizable by the burn scars.
9. Of course the scene where Fields lies on the bed covered in crude oil is an allusion to Goldfinger, but there were others. The scene where Bond and Camille come walking out of the desert in evening dress echoes one in The Spy Who Loved Me. The threats made by Greene to Medrano also reminded me of License to Kill: "You're only President for life."
10. Nice contemporary cynical touch: the world's governments are not blackmailed by the villain but rather eagerly cooperative.
11. The climax with two parallel fistfights--now that was a little contrived.
12. Interesting how crashing a van into the wall of the hotel's garage starts a chain reaction whereby ultimately the whole hotel explodes. Seems like poor design....
13. Some reviewers called this movie all action and no story. They seem to have missed the point. The deeper story is the relationship between Bond and M. The turning point comes when she moves from arresting him to deciding to trust him inside the space of a minute.
14. No gadgets whatsoever, beyond some fancy computer displays.
15. Finally Judi Dench as "M" gets to play "anxious", "shaken"--some emotional note beyond merely "stern." The stories hitherto have not made anywhere near full use of her talent.
16. Similarly, it's nice to see Felix Leiter's job consist of more than just waiting in the car while Bond gets the job done. This hasn't happened since Dr. No.
17. This is the second film in a row which does not end with Bond with a girl in a boat. I hope they retire that ending for good. The new type of ending emphasizes Bond's loner status.
18. A thought for next time: If you want to freshen up the plot, how about a three-way struggle? That hasn't been done since From Russia With Love.
19. I very much like the casting of Daniel Craig as Bond. This gives hope to all homely people everywhere.
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