Moses Mendoza's Open Salon Blog

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined: A New Mendoza Column

Fri, 1 Oct 2010 11:10:08 -0400

Oh the frustrations! A tongue-tied kid, wanting badly for wit, timing, and bravado, I never could say the right things to the girls, the toughs, the parents, nobody. Yet as I mature, one by one the missed zingers crystallize. Great spaghetti monster, grant me the power to go back! Permit my return to the most frustrated and botched of childhood conflicts, and I will emerge the imaginary verbal victor.

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After 3 Semesters at Reed College:

Clean Your Room!

Dad: Clean your room!

Me: Later. I’m doing something.

Dad: Yes, you are doing something and it’s called cleaning your room.

Me: Cleaning this room? Given the regressive gender roles in this house, I assumed that Mom would just add my room and laundry to the cleaning she does for you.

Dad: Watch it. She’s busy preparing dinner; the Robinsons will be here within the hour.

Me: House guest, in an hour? Will she have time to iron her most festive Burqa?

Dad: You’re the one who ought to hide his little face in shame. Your mother is worried sick Gene Robinson will see this sty of a room and have the house condemned. He works for the city.

Me: Really? Your guest plans to tour my room? Why? So he can report back to the council that we’re in compliance with the regime?

Dad: Save the theatrics – showing guests around one’s home is a normal, polite social convention. Which is more than I can say about the smell in here, what is that?

Me: Mussolini couldn’t have said it better himself. Maybe Mom should iron one of your brown shirts while she’s at it.

Dad: …it’s like cheese, but I definitely don’t want to eat it – is it coming from your feet?

Me: So you’re sure he’s coming up here? Does that not strike you as sick? You offer this Gene Robinson a scotch, only to have him decline until after he’s done perusing my underwear drawer?

Dad: What’s sick is living in this filth.

Me: Does he plan to go through Sheila’s hamper, too? Jesus, where do you meet these fascists?

Dad: You’ve got a pretty smart mouth for someone eliminated in the first round of the spelling bee.

Me: How dare you! That spelling bee was a sham.

Dad: The only sham is that hippie school. Four grand a semester and they can’t teach an eleven year-old to spell the word night.

Me: I can and did spell it: N-I-T-E.

Dad: Incorrect son.

Me: So now you’re a prescriptivist too? That judge was a linguistic Nazi. Countless English speakers acknowledge that N-I-T-E is a perfectly acceptable variant, but he felt entitled to pack them off…

Dad: I’m about to prescribe a size eleven steel-toed suppository. Clean this room. Not tomorrow, T-O-N-I-T-E.

Me: Like mop it?

Dad: Yes genius. Take a mop to the carpet. No, do not mop your room. Just deal with this mess.

Me: Oh so you mean re-order my room?

Dad: I mean for you to return this room to the way it smelled when I bought the house, which makes the room not technically yours, since last time I checked I own still own the place.

Me: Ah, property rights. I suspect you do hold the title to the house, although if you’re going to get all capitalist I think you probably owe Mom big time for unpaid housework.

Dad: I’m going to owe you an unpaid beating if you don’t clean this room.

Me: Clean it with a mop? Or re-order it?

Dad: At least three opened bags of Doritos sit in your sock drawer, but the whereabouts of your socks remains a mystery. And your bed is covered with some sort of magazine clippings. Are you scrap-booking? Or making a collage? Re-order it before I re-order your calendar to permanently grounded.

Me: Well that’s just it Dad. It’s one thing to make a legal claim on this property and ask me to clean it, although why I should be cleaning your property is a whole separate question, but we’ve established that you’re asking me to re-order my living space. As in, make choices about where certain items go in accordance to your preferences.

Dad: You prefer trash on the bed and cheese-like smell?

Me: Yes! You’re asking that I move certain highly-valued artifacts, such as these liner notes on my bed or the panoply of flavored corn chips I’m sampling as part of an experiment, and place them in a location of lower prominence. To reconstruct my most immediate reality so it complies with your perspective. In short, you’re not just asking me to re-order this room, which may be yours, but to alter my very innermost values. Surely that’s going too far?

Dad: Christ on a candy cane. You sound like a Gilmore Girl.

Me: Paris or Rory…wait, how did you? Have you been going through my things? I’ve just been watching those to critique the socio-cultural implications of new family…

Dad: You’ve just been hiding the tapes under your mattress since Season Two. Your poor mother has deluded herself into thinking it’s smut just so she can sleep at night.

Me: Hey, I think someone’s at the door. I’ll get it.

Dad: No, I’ll get it. Clean your room now.

Me: Later.

Dad: Where you lead, I will follow … Anywhere (Anywhere) that you tell me to

Me: Ok, ok: right now. Keep your voice down.

Dad: Clean.

On the next installment of Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined:

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After a Summer Backpacking Europe:Finish Your Dinner!

Mom: Finish your dinner!

Me: Finish this dinner?

Mom: No, the salad bar at the Golden Corral. Yes, the plate in front of you. Those peas are getting cold.

Me: Ach, the peas. My blunder! I assumed you’d plated these in the Andalusian tradition, as a small dish to share. I hadn’t wanted to seem greedy.

Also coming soon:

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After Reading the Complete Works of Thomas Wolfe:Lost in the Richland Mall.

And:

Childhood Conflicts Re-imagined After a Two-Week Voluntour of Nicaragua:Your Poor Mother!

Moses Mendoza guest stars on I Only Like Their Old Stuff

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:10:58 -0400

Despite a hiatus in his writing work, Moses gets an invitation to serve as a guest host on the popular pop culture podcast. Topics include hip hop theory, reviews of new movies, technology culture, etc...

If you've never heard, have a listen for the sake of hearing its two remarkable hosts, Jigga and Groove.

http://www.ionlyliketheiroldstuff.com/

Also available on ITunes, and yes, one day I'll be smart enough to embed in it in this post.

-MM

Skinheads: The Obama/Hitler thing is really confusing

Tue, 1 Sep 2009 09:09:58 -0400

Warsaw, Indiana - Several members of the local chapter of White Aryan Resistance (WAR) expressed extreme confusion last week regarding the emerging trend of right wing protesters depicting Barack Obama as Adolf Hitler, and likening recent White House efforts to reform health care to Nazism. According to one young Aryan Brotherhood member, Rory Laforte, disarray first erupted when a group of skinheads crashed a recent town hall meeting hosted by 3rd District Representative Mark Souder (R-IN).

"We were all set up to wave our swastikas and scream 'We need the white ideas' when we thought we saw a gang of likeminded protesters holding up a picture of our beloved Fuhrer", said a shaken Laforte. "But when we got closer, I saw that darling Adolf's face had been discolored, darkened to a mongrel brown."

Brandon Andrews, one of Laforte's white Christian brothers, quickly realized something was awry and tried to reposition their group to stand in solidarity with the opposing protesters.

"I grabbed Rory and Fat Henry by their Iron Cross choke chains and dragged them across the grass (lawn at Warsaw Junior High School)", said Andrews. "But when we got to the other side, it was nothing but a bunch of Jew-loving integrationists hollering about a public option."

Said fellow skinhead (Fat) Henry Johnstone: "We publicly opted to leave."

White Aryan Resistance (WAR) leader Tom Metzger has called for the removal of Obama/Hitler posters from all right-wing protests, and sought clarification and reconciliation among like-minded bigots.

"While I am in favor of Universal Health Care for pure White Christians, such as that instituted by Otto van Bismark's Health Insurance Act of 1883", said Metzger, "the current plan is nothing but an undercover leftist plot to plant ham radios controlled by Fidel Castro into every white man's kidneys."

Metzger went on to caution many right-wing militant enthusiasts, concerned that they might be dissapointed by the hype.

"Glenn Beck's on TV telling everyone that Obama's gonna enroll your kids in the Hitler Youth," cautioned Metzger. "But so far the numbers for our Young Aryan Alliance haven't changed much since the election."

Still, many Neo-Nazis have had their fundamental belief structure shaken by the Obama/Hitler likeness. Rory Laforte recently volunteered to phone bank 30 hours for Massachusets Congressman (D) Barney Frank.

"Even though I used to think Obama was a hideous evil robot that some Israelis put together using pig organs and Honda Motorcycle parts, that Hitler likeness made me take another look", Laforte confessed. "The man is actually kind of sexy, in a lets-take-over-Europe-and-then-eat-eachother's-snitchzels kind of way."

As for Fat Henry Johnstone, he's recently come out in support of the public option.

"I'm still for White Power," said Johnstone, "but last week I think I sprained something fighting a gang of Salvadoreans at the Big Lots and my part time job folding pamphlets for Father Tom (Metzger) over at WAR doesn't provide benefits."

"Plus," fellow health reform enthusiast/skinhead Charles (Chainsaw) Wilton added, "'Death Panels' sound frickin' badass."

Gorilla Heart

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 10:08:35 -0400

I had a backward vision of heaven.

Everyone else aspired; lived righteously, prayed nightly, confessed monthly, flossed weekly in hopes of one day attaining paradise. They hoped for a future rise towards a celestial kingdom of happiness populated by all their loved ones who’d passed. But our heaven was gone, it was the place we’d started and to which we could never return.

Both my maternal and paternal grandparents were wealthy young parents living in the upscale Havana suburb of Varadero when Fidel Castro's guerilla troops overthrew the right wing Batista government in 1959. Believing Cuba to be unsafe for citizens of their social class in the wake of the revolution, the two families fled to the United States in 1960 with very few of their personal assets. Neither set thought the situation would last more than a year, and planned to return to Havana once things settled down politically. My maternal great grandparents spent six months and most of their available savings staying at an expensive Manhattan hotel before they realized that it would be wise to start making some more reasonable long term expectations.

I begged to hear about the old days almost every night, as my father tucked me into bed.

Tell me about Cuba, about when you were a boy…

The bedtime stories were plotless and repetitive. Everyone lived together on an island: my father and uncles, our cousins, my grandparents, Nana and Lito, and my great-grandparents Tuto and Bici. They all lived within walking distance, in mansions, and there were docks close by where my great-grandfather had a boat, a big boat. And all these dear relatives, now cruelly separated by space and time and death, used to gather almost daily at the dock to embark on terrific voyages together on Tuto’s boat, to sit atop the deck and share mouthfuls of bocadillos de lechon and lemonade, to fish and swim and surf the boat’s giant wake.

And then this paradise, which I was meant to inherit, burned and crumbled without warning, the yachts and mansions looted by a cruel dictator, his name synonymous with pure evil. Castro: the devil incarnate, Hitler with a full beard. And this Devil’s particular brand of Satanism was communism, a cruel plot to take everybody’s everything and give it to the government. My family barely escaped this heaven to hell transformation, handing over the houses and boats and jewelry in exchange for a ticket on the last flight to purgatory.

I was a product of this purgatory, an American. I knew no warmer reality. Gone were the days of the big boat. My beloved Bici and Tuto buried, and the rest of the family flung outward, diluted into the American landscape as if no city had the pork producing capacity to handle more than a couple Cubans at a time. Family became something that happened a few times a year, at holidays, or when someone died. My big boat was a station wagon that patiently navigated the Eisenhower Highway system to the coast on special occasions, my food the tasteless, processed white bread yankee sandwiches. Even my Spanish flirted dangerously with the flat unaccented speech of the gringos, the efficient but soulless rulers of purgatory.

To this end I switched schools in the third grade. My parents pulled me from my regular elementary school and sent me to a special program for language learning. At the time we lived at the little yellow house in Coral Oaks, only a few blocks from the regular elementary school. In a confusing turn, I started third grade not by walking the four blocks to school with my older brother, but to waiting at the bus stop down the street for a big yellow boat to take me into the city. At this new school we took half our instruction in Spanish, and worked from textbooks shipped from Spain.

The transition was traumatic. Although I’d been gung-ho about the idea at first, I quickly lost my nerve. For the first year or two I purposely fumbled around in the morning, hoping to miss the bus and have an extra hour in the car with mom or dad. In class I feigned stomachaches to earn reprieves to the boy’s bathroom, where I’d take up residence in a toilet stall and sob, pining for the good old days with all my friends at the old school. I made few new friends. Afternoons I would come home angry and demand to know why I needed to be sent off to some special school. At night I would mellow from emotional exhaustion and beg my father to put me to sleep with stories of the good old days, when everyone was together and happy.

But after a while something within me began to change. The long bus rides and longer school days caused me to miss meals and time with the family. In time, my homesickness grew into a sort of lonely independence, a feeling of separateness from the family. I engaged with the city around me and the world of academics as a private citizen, instead of someone’s kid. Suddenly school engrossed me, especially the words found within my Spanish textbooks, in them I found knowledge suddenly necessary for my new independent life.

A sixth grade social studies lesson proved crucial. We’d been studying European history, first medieval, then Renaissance, finally Enlightenment, the French Revolution. I’d been disgusted reading though dark ages, of cruel kings who ordered others around through the arbitrary power of their lineage. Perhaps anti-monarchism was the product of my growing Americanism, or my anger at having been bused off to a strange school. But the French Revolution hit me on a deeper level. Synapses began firing, concrete historical facts and political ideas connecting to deeply buried emotions and still developing preferences. The pages of Boveda, my Spanish Social Studies book, grew heavy under the weight of certain terms. Equality, Fraternity, Revolution. I felt swollen with revolutionary zeal, brimming with ideas that finally resounded with the longings of a long unsatisfied inner self. I wanted to storm the Bastille.

And then I flipped forward and saw the subheading, a page or two ahead of current lesson. Communism. I wondered what the great evil was doing on the page. Communism: Fidel’s National Socialism that ruined our Isle of Eden, the evil fueling the ever-present threat of an annihilating Russian attack, that sinister force which my G.I. Joe action figures fought tirelessly against. What did it have to do with my beloved Jacobins? I got worried. I skipped forward to the explanatory text box, double checked my findings in the glossary, waited for the bell and bombarded my teacher with questions.

I mulled it over on the long ride home, looking out of the rectangular bus window at the city streets of Miami. We dropped the poorest kids off first, the black kids who lived in concrete projects with the beige paint peeling and the laundry flapping in the front lawn. I wondered what was so wrong about striving towards the elimination of social classes, about common ownership and everyone being in it together. I thought class and color and money seemed as arbitrary a source of power as being born a Hapsburg or Bourbon. Why had my family fled from this? Wasn’t that togetherness, that collective experience what had made our heaven heaven?

Over the next few weeks I exhausted my reference resources. I quickly burned through our Brittanica, gobbling up the volumes that included Lenin or Marx, Socialism, Anarchy, etc, always keeping a finger bookmarking a benign entry on Luxembourg or Marsupials in case a family member inquired about my research. I read books in the school library about Bolshevism and the Spanish Civil War. I learned Hemingway had written about the Republican effort in Spain, but a brief survey of The Old Man and the Sea proved fruitless.

I assembled a list of good guys and bad guys. The good guys toiled, sweat, and bled on land owned by some rich dandies who didn’t care what came up from the soil as long as it was worth money. The good guys rounded up all the other factory workers to bargain collectively for their share; the bad guys hired goons to come in with clubs and rocks and break it up. As my list grew, I suddenly realized that I’d been lied to all these years. Sure, some of the bad guys were the ones I’d been taught about: Adolph, Benito, Pol Pot, Ivan the Terrible. And some of the old good ones could stay: Ghandi, Lincoln, Dr. King. But some other names started to come up bad; suddenly Christopher Columbus didn’t seem like such a prince, along with the rest of the conquistodores. And two names, etched on my evil list so firmly for so long, begged for a second look.

Fidel y Che.

I outed myself on a family Sunday dinner. Tradition dictated that Nana and Lito came over around five every Sunday and stayed through the end my grandfather’s post meal cigar. It started innocently enough, with a perfunctory question about what I was studying. The conversation moved from France to Spain. Generalissimo Franco’s name came up. Lito called him a hero. I pushed back. I asked about all the people he’d killed. I said he’d betrayed the people’s right to govern themselves. My father said that those people were a bunch of communists. And I blurted it out:

“I don’t think communism is so bad. Rich people were just exploiting peasants in Spain like in Cuba. Something had to be done.”

Forks fell on the floor. My brother looked amazed. Nana cried. Lito leaned over and slapped me, the first time I’d ever been hit by anyone besides my older brother. I felt a surge of some previously unknown mix of neurotransmitters run through my nervous system. My blood tingled.

I was sent to my room, the rest of my pork and potatoes confiscated. Not that I could have eaten. I tried to listen to their conversation through my closed door. Now they seemed to be arguing with each other, mostly my mother and Lito. I paced around the room, fuming.

I thought I was hearty enough for round two. I was a glutton for punishment. When the glass door slid shut behind the kitchen and the matches struck after the meal was over, it usually meant keep out. Father and grandfather would sit in the dark, silent behind the glass, bright orange circles waving slowly in the air as if they talked with their cigars instead of their voices. Usually I studied in my room or helped with dishes and on their way out Nana and Lito crept into my room for a quick despedida. This time, I started towards my door twice and caught myself. I sat agitated on the bed, kicked at the shaggy blue carpet. This was my Bastille, my Moncada Barracks.

I stormed, out of my room and through the sliding glass door to the patio. I yelled something about free speech, about my right to my own views. Lito lunged out of his chair towards me, but he tripped and knocked over the table with the ashtray. My dad stood up and grabbed me by the collar, silent. The air was thick with ash; I felt it collecting in my eyes and hoped it would catch the tears before they ran down. My grandmother stepped into the open door space, called me every word for ungrateful in Spanish and English. I wrestled myself out from my father’s grip and ran back into my room.

I was alone now but still refused to cry. I ground the ash into my eyes with dusty fingers. I was right. I was brave. They didn’t respect me enough to listen. I was alone, but proud. My heart threatened to bounce clear out of my chest. I pounded my chest with both fists to better contain it. My gorilla heart, my guerilla heart. I was alone and proud and right and brave. History would absolve me, too. Me, Moses. Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses Moses M…

All the "Funny People" (Movie Review)

Thu, 6 Aug 2009 09:08:37 -0400

The latest shot out of Judd Apatow's golden cannon, Funny People, opened in American theaters last weekend. The film follows famous but forlon comedian George Simmons (played by and based on the comedy, but not life of, Adam Sandler) through a near death crisis, which he weathers by hiring aspiring stand-up comedian Ira Knight (Seth Rogen) to be his assistant/joke writer/mentee/best friend.

The film is funny and touching, and takes two or three twists beyond the formulaic comedies for which Sandler and Apatow are so famous. While there are plenty of dick and fart jokes, Funny People is more than a crude comedy; it conjures the sort of emotional honesty that captures both men at their best. Think Freaks & Geeks or the better parts of Knocked Up meet Punch Drunk Love. An added bonus is the cadre of comedians who cameo, whether as full fledged parts, playing themselves, in a stand-up act, or in some of the smaller roles.

A quick review of some of the Funny People:

Adam Sandler: Sandler goes beyond his Happy/Billy Madisonesque mugging and antics, delivering an honest performance. Perhaps only because we're so used to seeing him play the clown, when he gets serious Sandler seems extra earnest- and it works here. Of note is the juxtaposition of the more serious Sandler with fake footage of George Simmons' film career, especially when he plays a giant baby with a man face.
Seth Rogen: Rogen looks like he's lost 20 lbs and 10 years, he almost looks like he's back on Undeclared. He's likable as Ira Knight and believable as an aspiring stand-up; his pre show butterflies feel real and eventual successes feel worthy of celebration. I know some people don't care for Rogen; but if you're tired of his deadpan and sarcasm, in Funny People he plays it a little straighter.
Eric Bana: Hilarious as the Australian husband who gets cuckolded by Simmons. I'm unfamiliar with Bana, but I thought he was great. He plays meathead really well, and the Aussie flourishes will make you shit your panties, mate.
Leslie Mann: Mann delivers a solid dramatic performance, I guess less funny than touching. There are some scenes that linger forever on her face while Simmons tells her he's dying and she pulls it off. Unfortunately, she's less successful trying to be funny later in the film.
Jonah Hill: Hill does his usual Jonah Hill thing, playing the touchyfat kid. It works, but not as well as it did in Superbad.
Jason Schwartzman: Schwartzman (sp?) is great in this, playing a not unfamiliar character- a shallow premadonna who's found C level success on a ridiculous teen show called "Yo, Teach". The scenes from the faux sitcom are hilarious, his best contribution to the film.
Aziz Ansari: Recognizable from his role as the racist fruit peddler in Flight of the Concords, Ansari delivers my favorite bits of stand-up included in the film.
The RZA: Ok, so the illustrious Bobby Digital only has a small role as Ira's coworker at Otto's Deli. But still, having the RZA in your movie is awesome.
Sarah Silverman: Silverman steals a particularly star-studded scene in the film where she explains to Simmons why he would do better to never sleep with her, contorting her face into sloppy mock growler.
Eminem: Slim Shady gets a little weird in a quick scene where he suggests Simmons kill himself to escape life's meaninglessness. Not really that funny.
Aubrey Plaza: Plaza plays Ira's love interest who sleeps with his roommates, and has a couple funny moments at the mic. Noteworthy is her rant about the slut double standard after Ira calls her out for cheating on him before they start dating.
Andy Dick: Shows up for a minute and gets made fun of for being gay.
Dave Attell: Makes a dick joke.

I could go on and on recalling the funny bit parts and cameos, but I'll stop there. Chances are if you like stand-up comedy, you're bound to spot someone you know in Funny People. Also promising are the gems sure to arise upon a second or third viewing. It's worth it with this one...