Quiz Kid Donnie Smith's Open Salon Blog

Everything is Wrong

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 12:03:11 -0400

For many years, I was one of the biggest fans Moby had. Everything is Wrong was one of my favorite albums. I listened to it on a never-ending loop, and ,then, I stopped.

One day I stopped listening to all of his albums. I didn't suddenly dislike him. I just stopped listening. That is a shame becasue apparently all of the fervor I had dissapated. It faded and floated away.

I discovered this when I putEverything Is Wrong on again last week. I expected to be caught up in the beauty that I remembered,but I was stunned to discover that I found the music trite and naive. I found it hollow like the poetry I wrote in ninth grade.

You can go home again. You'll just hate the wallpaper.

Certain Concessions Must Be Made

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 13:02:29 -0500

When I signed my first teaching contract back in 1997, I noticed a little something called "Other Duties as Assigned". I didn't really think much of it because I was going to be making an incredible $23,000 a year. You don't ask questions. I was too busy spending all my money in my head. The cars. The women. The pencils. The pencil sharpeners. The Easy Cheese. It would all be mine. I was rich.

However, the reality is that on a teacher's contract those little words mean "You Will BE Doing Many Fun and Exciting Things Like Cafeteria Duty, and Bus Duty, and Wanding for Weapons, and Catching Smokers, and Chasing Down Truants, and Investigating Mysteriously Rocking Vans in the Student Parking Lot, and Most Joyously of All You Will Be Working in Our Concession Stand During Basketball Season." The only part of that litany of school day routine that I actually hated was the last one. The concession stand worker's lot in life might even be worse than some Republicans right now. I have seen workers cursed and insulted over a change making mistake. I have personally been showered in orange drink and ultimately I spent the rest of the evening looking like a bespectacled Chee-to. I have even seen a man argue with a woman over the size of the wiener he was giving her. The concession stand is a hotbed of human misery.

This week I am working the concession stand for the Regional basket ball tournament, and, as much as I hate it, I decided to stay in there for four soul crushing days out of respect for my boss who I respect. He needed steady reliable help, and I guess I am both steady and reliable. I just look the horde in the eye and dare them to cross me.

Concession stand customers come in many stripes. There are the Conspicuous Consumers. These are the type that make at least two trips per game to the stand. There are six games a night. The CC's don't just get a coke or a Ring Pop or even Funyuns. They get Frito pies, hot dogs with melted NOT-cho CHEESE, chicken strips, and hamburgers. They pay for crap food what I pay for water every month. I wonder if it's just the basket ball tourney atmosphere or, if that's really how they eat everyday. Sometimes they just seem bored; sometimes they just seem lonely. I've had several conversations this week about the merits of various flavors of Rico's NOT-cho CHEESE.

The opposite of the CC's are the BIRD PEOPLE. These people only get water and popcorn. They stand in front of the stand nibbling at the popcorn like picky pigeons if something is off about the popcorn in their eyes they will demand their money back. They will demand that you refund fifty cents for their half eaten bag of popcorn. There is also a subspecies known as the BIRD PEOPLE of DASANI. These people will only buy water if it is Dasani. These people have a difficult time pronouncing Dasani.

You also have various and sundry children who have never been disciplined. The GOURMETS who have mistaken your concession stand for a cutting edge restaurant and are appalled at your bastardized menu. How can people eat Frito Chili Pies at a basketball game? The very idea.

I work and smile because I am a professional. I am a professional because I do what has to be done when it has to be done. I remember as I am harassed by Toothless Jo Jackson about the weakness of the coffee that I am here for the kids. I am here for the kids. I am here for the kids.

No, I'm sorry we don't have any Bacardi for your cherry Slush Puppy.

Swiss Rolls and Shame

Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:02:58 -0500

My Addiction

When I was in high school, I had one goal. It wasn’t a lofty goal, but it was one that I spent my ever y waking moment preparing and training for it. I wanted to play college football. I wanted to pay for school, not with my mind but with my body. This seemed like an impossible goal where I came from. We weren’t known for our athletes and we weren’t known for having good football teams. In fact, my cumulative record as a high school player was 10-22. That is not earth shattering. I had a work ethic though. I spent my free time running, lifting and stretching. It was all so I could be the first guy in high school’s history to play four years on scholarship. Since I did not think that I was a great athlete I knew it had to come from my ethic.

I succeeded.

Then, the real work began. I played nosegurard, and I was strong and quick, but I was also lean. There wasn’t an ounce of body fat on me, and there wouldn’t be until my junior year when all of the supplements and seconds in the cafeteria meshed with my lifting to truly bulk me up. My fear of being fat kept me running and lifting even after I graduated, but sometime in 20000 my teaching schedule and commute caught up with me. More to the point my fixation on unhealthy foods caught up with me.

You see, dear, dear friend, I have always had a weakness for “crap food”. Little Debbie’s... Gas Station burritos. Copious amounts of pizza. I have been eating too much of those things for at least ten years. My increasingly sedentary lifestyle led me to stop burning the calories that I needed to in order to eat crap and still function. I know this.

I know that my weight issue right now is my own damn fault. I know that diabetes runs in my family. I know I am ashamed every time I finish a box of Swiss Rolls on my own and feel like a selfish waste of skin.

I know how to eat; I know how to exercise. I even know how to work out a bit in my ridiculously busy schedule, but here is some part of me that resists. It resists, and then, I find some measure of relief and oblivion in every sugar crusted bite of garbage. Even my musings on Langston Hughes do not escape this fixation. When I think of “A Dream Deferred”, I don’t think of the usual images or thoughts. I think of the “Sugared treat”. I wonder what kind it is, and I transpose his fantastic work in to an image from some low rent grocery store in which I feed that something that needs satiating in side of me. I just taught the story “Hunters in the Snow” by Tobias Wolff, and while my class discussed the merits of the story and the characters, I thought about the character of Tub. Tub is the overweight one who never is full. In one scene he eats three plates of pancakes and licks the syrup off of the plates. I realized that I am probably not that far from that sort of debauch. I am not that far from losing my sense of worth in a last bite of an Oatmeal Pie.

Ultimately I realize exactly the steps that I must take, but that doesn’t erase the shame and fear regarding it. My reaction when I take that first bite of crap food is probably just like some one jonesing for something else. I feel relieved. I feel saved. I feel safe. Then, I go further and further and before I know it, I am lost.

I hate my body right now. It’s not the one I designed and created through hours of labor. It’s the one I destroyed through poor upkeep and lackadaisical diet. It deserves better. My family deserves better. Maybe I don’t believe that. Maybe the me that I want is not the me that I deserve. I know that I’ll have resolve after I type these last few words, and that I’ll swear that I’m through with crap and junk and feeling like shit. However, I also know that I’ll stop and get gas, and walk by the honey buns ,and it’ll remind me of a busy school morning with nor time for breakfast and the safety of riding to school I my brother’s truck while eating one. I’ll weaken and hate myself and continue until. I just give up. Or not.

Crap-ola #1: Halloween (2007)

Tue, 24 Feb 2009 18:02:38 -0500

I want to be frank about something, and you can be whomever you choose to be. John Carpenter made a pretty solid little movie when he cranked out Halloween. However, I do not consider it to be his best movie. That honor is shared by The Thing, Escape from New York ,Big Trouble in Little China and They Live. I keep hoping he'll make another great genre film, but I understand that maybe time has passed him by. After all, it seems like people just want him to keep rehashing the details on a very well made slasher film. Yes, Carpenter made a superior film in a pretty sketchy sub-genre. The fact that it has acheived such recognition as a great movie is really amazing. However, it is also insidious because his boogeyman, Michael Meyers, has become an ICON of HORRRRORRRRRRR. He adorns t-shirts and there are action figures of this killer. He is bandied about along with Pinhead, jason Voorhees, and Leatherface as the avatar of TRUE HORROR by people whose senese of true horror has been nueterd by too many Hot Pockets and too much Mountain Dew. There are films in all of the above mentioned characters series that I really like , if not out right love, but I also recognize that they constructs of what one person thought was the face of terror or more to the point what a guy who wanted to make money thought was horror. After all, buckets of moolah are the reasons these characters lived beyond one film. The increasingly bizarre machinations that are used with each sequel to bring back a killer wh0 was clearly dead at he end of the previous installment have become just as much a part of the filmic lore as the deeds of these manaics. Michael is the knife wielding Lazarus of the day though.

Michael was one of the first of the unkilalble killers and I have no doubt that in October of 1978, more than a few patrons of the moving pictures quickened their pace as autumn leaves twirled and the calendar inched closer to the night He came home. In fact, I'm jealous of people who saw it before the hype, and before its plot became the holy text that spawned hundreds of syncophantic copycats. However, I grew up knowing the rules of slasher films and expecting only the worst from films with the title Halloweeen in the title. The series should have stayed at one or the powers that be should have followed Carpenter's idea to make the Halloween series an anthology film series that offered up a different Hallowwen-centerd horror tale every year. That would have been fantastic, but it never came to pass. Instead, Michael became a Druid hobgoblin with a GPS that knew where to find Laurie Strode and anyone hwo might possibly be related to him. When Michael faced Busta Thymes, I thought that it couldn't get any more desperate. I suppose like Snoop Dog he could have become a mmeber of Master P's then popular No Limit Soldiers, but that would have been entertaining in some way. Instead, he teamed up with Rob Zombie.

I have nothing, but respect for a certain type of filmmaker who truly loves the genre he works in and finds a way t omake it new. HOwever, Zombie isn't that guy. He is a self-professed horror fan who seems to miss the fu nthat is inherent in horror movies. He has now directed three films that wear their Grindhouse -influences on their sleeves, but unlike the true Grindhouse films of youre, they miss the special ingredient that cause many people to regard those morally questionable, and cash strapped films as pictures worth remmebering, and even revisiting. That ingredient is fun. Sleazy as some of them were , at least they were fun.

In the case of Rob Zombie's Halloween, Zombie seems to be dead set on proving that he is edgy and that a movie of this type should really have something to say about the human condition and naked girls. Well, I say, "To hell with you, sir."

Let's start with the set up. Michale's family is an unintentional comic goldmine of the most shallow and obnoxious cliches regarding members of the white trash tribe. The Great William Forsythe is a bastard step-daddy who is reduced to screaming lines at the beautiful Sheri Moon -Zombie. Everyone screams. The baby cries. Stuff is broken. Spousal abuse is threatened. Micheal kills a small animal. This is literally the scope of the first twenty minutes or so. The familial scenes and the pshychological insight is fine if it leads us anywhere. It doesn't. Michael Meyers has issues, you say? I say prove it Mr. Zombie, I say prove it by spending half the movie illustrating what Msssr. Carpenter did in ten minutes. Hey, let's have a sad scene of Michale, who has already killed a classmate, sitting on a curb with his Halloween candy as his maw strips. That'll prove to me that Michale is a sad little boy who just wants his Maw's love, and doesn't want to kill. However, you just showed him beating a kid to death with a tree limb. Hey, use the light touch here, kid. Play "Love Hurts" as Maw Meyers does her stripper thing.

You know what? To hell with you. To hell with yo uand everyone else who claims they love the aesthetic of 70's horror. You love the hard edge. Mr. Zombie? Then, why is you Michael despite being huge and powerful such a non-threat. He shares scenes with an kills characters played by Danny Trejo and Ken Foree, and , you know what, they would both mop the floor with him. Also, you made Dr. Loomis into a pompous glory hound. That's not the true unhinged Loomis. That's a stale cliche. In fact, I know you would defend yourself, and others would as well, by saying that you were making your version. How about this? Create your own damn killer ,and make an original movie. For all of your flourishes, this was nothing but a cash grab. There isn't one bit of heart in the whole thing, and, ultimately, that's why this falls flat. if you know the steps to a dance, but you don't perform it with heart, it's an empty exercise. That is exactly what this film is an empty, soulless exercise.

Just One OF My Favorites #1: Miller's Crossing

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 13:02:11 -0500

This Open Call was made for me. However, I'm going to cheat because I can't choose a favorite. Instead, I'm going to highlight the movies that mean the most to me. There will be very few Oscar weiners here, and there will be some disreputable types, but judge not lest ye turn out to be a big fat jerk.

In the early 90's there seemd to be a mini-Renaissance of the mob film. Of course ,films about mobsters and crime had never died, but they seemd to have fallen out of favor with the vast majority of the film going public. When I refer to mob films, I mean movies that deal with themes of loyalty and "Family" using the milieu of organized crime. Most films used the mob as target practice and lacked the respect usually afforded these characters. For proof of this you need look no further than the Patrick Swayze time waster Next of Kin, which featured Ben Stiller as one of the least plausible thugs ever.

By 1990, though, the mob was back in business. Scorsese and Coppola both had serious films out about the families. One is a classic and one hurt. You decide which is which. The real news however was that others were getting into the act, and they were bringing fresh perspectives to it, as well as fresh filmmaking tricks. Two of these films The Krays and Miller's Crossing centered on off-kilter elements that hearkened back to an era before even the Corleone family set up shop. The former had echoes of White Heat with its inclusion of twisted mother love, and the latter was actually arather loose remake of a semi-obscure noir film entitled The Glass Key. The Krays was well made and featured interesting perfromances ,bu the mob movie chapeen of this period goes to Miller's Crossing .

Fro mthe opening monologue delivered by Jonny Caspar to the "Should-have been" iconic image of the black hat being tossed about by thewind in a lonely wood this film has style, charisma, and moxie to spare.

In nutshell, it's about a mob war between the Irish and Italian gangsters in

Prohibition era Chicago. There are tried and true tropes here, but what makes the film work is the way they are played. To use a sports analogy anyone run a hundred meters, but someone like Hussein Bolt can make it look special. That's what the Coen brothers do here. They take wha tcould have been a programmer and give it soul and wit. They make it about something and not just about busting heads or Machivellian machinations.

That something is the cost of having ethics in a world where it's just a word that people use to prop themselves up. Johnny Caspar's opening monologue, in which he decries Bernie Bernbaum's lack of ethics as a reason for top dog Leo to allow him to bump off the bookie, is a masrter piece of irony delivered with relish b ythe excellent Jon Polito. The only character i nthe entire film with any ethics is Tom (Gabriel Byrne), who sticks by his ethics and his code while everyone turns their back on him. He is the whore with a heart of gold that keeps that golden secret. Tom is a ethical because he makes choices that are his own and not dictated by business or greed. He sees his plans throuhg because they are his plans and no man is going to queer the deal he sets into motion.

The film is also one of the most gorgeous of crime films. It's warm hues counteract the heartless behavior of most of the characters. It also a offers a backdrop for some of the most wonderful well seasoned tough guy palaver ever filmed. Any exchange between Eddie Dane and Tom is pure gold.

Speaking of the Dane, the Coens go a step further and offer insight into the lives of these characters by giving them all lives outside of crime. Johnny Caspar is a family man. Leo (Albert Finney) is in love with a conniving moll named Verna (Marcia Gay Harden), who is also sleeping with Tom. Eddie Dane ( amenacing and never better J.E. Freeman) hasa nervous lover named Mink (Steve Buscemi), who is also mixing it up with John Turturro's Bernie Benrbaum. That is what makes the flm fascinating. It acknowledges that these characters have desires outside of their lives of crime.

Ultimately, all of the philosophical blather is just hat unless the movie engages, and this one does. It is one of theimmensely quotable films ever made ,and the action is brutal and beautiful. A shoot out set to the song "Danny Boy" ranks as one of the greatest sequences in film. I stand by that statement.

Check it out, homies.