Eccentric Flower:200906/22 Pulls

I dislike "West Side Story" intensely - possibly more than any other musical. I think that the dialogue is horrible, the situations are trite (I'd rather just see "Romeo and Juliet" and have done), and the music - surprisingly - is uninspiring. But if it's racist, I'm a pink monkey.

I agree with a protester (that is, he's protesting the decision to censor the play) quoted in the story: If this keeps up, there will be nothing left.

But that doesn't mean overcompensating in the opposite direction either. If we ban "South Park" and "The Man Show" - as non-funny a pair of grotesques as I have ever seen - can we possibly arrange to keep "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Kiss Me Kate"?

The interesting thing about this film [Dogma], given the controversy - if you can believe this - is how religious it is. Sure, it questions just about every tenet of the Catholic faith, but it does so in a way that is affirming to faith, oddly enough. It's as if the film is saying, "Let's cut through some of this silliness that has grown around religion so we can get back to what's important - believing in something." At no time does the film question the existence of God, or the importance of God. Bethany - as the film's representative of humanity - ends the film with her faith reaffirmed.

It makes you wish that some of the Catholics who have been protesting this film would sit down and actually see the movie. Of course, I critique movies I haven't seen, on occasion, so I guess I can't cast stones.

The restaurant is called Truc, which Nonelvis tells me means "thingamajig" or "whatsit" in colloquial French. (She handles the French; I handle the German. Between us we can take apart a wine list in three-point-five seconds, unless it's an Italian restaurant, in which case we just order the second-cheapest Chianti.)

The problem - and this is generalized to all my Allegory of the Cave problems - is this: I don't believe I'm erudite. (I can never pronounce that word correctly, for one thing.) I feel that I have only a rudimentary smattering of information, and most of it's wasted on words like "rudimentary" and "smattering."

Besides, this femmy-glam-rock thing I've discovered suits me ... it'll be really hard to maintain that once I pass A Certain Age. A thirty-year-old male who dresses somewhat eccentrically is just barely tolerable. A forty-year-old male who ditto is unacceptable to society, and a fifty-year-old male ditto is obviously deranged. Once you pass your mid-sixties, you have a certain amount of freedom to do whatever you damn well please (assuming you don't mind people thinking you've gone senile), but by then the look you wanted has become completely ridiculous for your body.

The only man who got away with dressing outrageously in his seventies was Quentin Crisp, rest his soul, and even his style was more fop than glam. Frankly, fop doesn't suit me because I don't like people thinking I'm a flaming queen - it's not that it bothers me, but I hate to shatter their illusions when they learn I'm not nearly that much fun to be around.

Let me try it again, then, more judiciously: I think that most reasonably aware people do know, in the back of their heads if nowhere else, that the millennium actually starts in 2001. Okay? Your message-unit has been successfully conveyed to the masses.

Now hush up.

As I said way back when, despite when the millennium actually begins, the obvious time to have a party is when the first digit in the odometer rolls over - and that's the way it's going to be. Just sit back and calm down.

Bet you didn't predict where this entry was going to end up, did you? Nor, frankly, did I. I don't plan these things before I write them.

Chaplin had a gift for putting one idea atop another in a perfectly reasonable manner, and ending up with the kind of situation you can't describe to someone who hasn't seen it ... because the person you're telling about it is just giving you this look and saying "Okay, now explain to me again why he was pouring soup through the chicken?"

And all you can do is shrug and say "It made sense at the time."

This is all about control, you know. Peter Zale has a habit of putting little comments about his strips. Particularly in the older ones, he's quite harsh on his own work, always wanting to rewrite a punchline or bit of dialogue he felt wasn't quite good enough.

I was going to write him and tell him that the strip is wonderful as is and he should stop slapping himself in the face. Then I saw a strip where one of the characters - also a cartoonist - says something like, "I don't want it to be good enough! I want it to be perfect! Perfect perfect perfect!" (while jumping up and down in a fit).

At that point I realized I didn't have to tell Zale anything. He already knows.

Archibald, you see, learned and mastered the mating dance of the whooping crane. He used this skill on a female crane named Tex, who had developed an unhealthy attachment to humans rather than males of her own species, having been raised by people.

For three springs, Archibald danced this dance with Tex, jumping up and down and bending at the knees, holding his arms outstretched like wings, picking up grass and tossing it into the air - and each time Tex responded, and was artificially inseminated by assistants as soon as she lifted her tail at the (pardon the phrase) climax of the dance.

Unfortunately (and as is sadly typical), though Tex produced an egg each of those years, none of the three eggs was viable, for various reasons. The fourth year, Archibald was unavailable to do the dance ... and that is when Tex's keepers learned that she would not dance with anyone else but him.

Whooping cranes mate for life.

I like Christmas lights and Christmas trees and I even like a certain - limited - amount of Christmas tackiness. (Or Chanukah tackiness - my aunt sent Nonelvis a trivet which says "Shalom, Y'all". Nonelvis stared at it, speechless, for two minutes. I laughed my head off.)

I think, in short, that while I basically like Christmas, my tolerance for it is very limited. And that's the fundamental problem, because these days Christmas seems to start in mid-November, and by December 1 I'm already ready to chuck the whole thing.

Of the three possibilities, the last one is the most farfetched, making the highest demands on the cat's intelligence. Unfortunately, based on my association with this cat, I am not prepared to rule it out.

He's not the most intelligent cat in the world - I think I owned that one, several years back - but he generally finds ways to tell us what he wants ... which, when you think about it, is a domesticated cat's primary survival skill.

Nonelvis: What is she doing?

Me: She's licking the floor.

Nonelvis: Inu, why are you licking the floor?

Me: Maybe she thinks Fritos have been there.

Nonelvis (to Inu): There are no Fritos on the floor. Believe me, if there were, I'd have found them.

Nonelvis really likes Fritos.

In the case of the recent World Trade Organization business, I have had all sorts of material sent to me to convince me that I spoke hastily, that some of my facts were incorrect, and that I am - in short - wrong. Well, I agree that I spoke hastily (I should have given the material the space it deserved, instead of squeezing it in with other topics), and that some of my facts were incorrect (but they weren't any of the important ones).

I'm not wrong.

That's a very brassy statement for me, one I wouldn't ordinarily make. Here, where I am opposing some of my heroes/heroines by saying it, it's even more obnoxious. And I'm sorry. I don't mean to sound smug, but for once I feel that my convictions are on solid ground.

You know, I didn't get to know any Northern women until I was at least in my twenties. When I first met a Northern woman in the South, her heritage was pretty obvious. She wore pants. She wore functional coats (when she needed a coat). She wore practical shoes. She favored dark colors - forest green, navy, black - or earth tones. She was never seen in hot colors or wearing white. She never wore makeup. She kept her hair short and maintenance-free.

In short, everyone assumed she was a lesbian. This annoyed the hell out of her. When I got up to the North, I realized why. Up here all the women are like that.

And Beth is not the only one who thinks Willow and her new friend look like they're getting together for more than just moving Coke machines around. Of course, I want Allyson Hannigan for myself, so I'll be jealous no matter who her love interest is.

As I was walking down the upstairs hall, I ran into Z, who was dashing up the stairs (Z only has one movement speed - a dead run). Z watched me put the shirt on and button one button, studying me up and down the whole time. Z reached a conclusion. Z said to me:

"You dress like a girl."

And I looked down at Z and said, matter-of-factly:

"You're right."

What happened next was beautiful to behold. I could see the synapses popping in Z's head, one by one - trying to think of some place to file that concept, something to say back, and coming up blank.

Later, I was telling this story and Z's father was in the room, which made me a little nervous but he didn't seem to have a problem with it. When I finished, he nodded his head slowly and said, "Z needs more experiences like that."

I don't like to be around smart, temperamental people who don't bother to conceal either their intelligence or their reluctance to suffer fools. They make me nervous. I used to think they made me nervous because I wasn't going to measure up to their standards and so I'd have to deal with their scorn. I hate being scorned. And I still believe this explanation is partially right - I maintain that among the "regular party guests" I refer to, I'm one of the dumbest people in the room.

But I cannot dismiss that I am also describing myself in the quote.

I saw in Consumer Reports today that one of the reasons that women's clothing sizes don't actually fit very many women well is that clothing makers are working with bad data, and they know it. Their "standard measurements" for the human body are based on surveys done sixty years ago as a WPA project - mostly of young Caucasian women. Today the population is older, more diverse, and, yes, heavier, but no one has stepped forward to perform the grueling work of taking complete body measurements on a wide sampling of people - until now. A project called CAESAR (please don't make me go look up the acronym, it's contrived anyway) expects to have a new set of more accurate measurements by 2001.

The instigator in this project? The Air Force, which is tired of getting uniforms that don't fit.

This was not my first time to have eaten pheasant. But the last time I had it, it had been prepared by the person who shot and killed it. Most of my exposure to game has been from the people who hunted it - and somehow it's not pretentious when it's being prepared in someone's kitchen by a man with leather-hard skin and powder burns on his hands. It is pretentious, to me, when it's being prepared by a chef at a restaurant - a status food, if you will. Mind you, the chef and the hunter may be of equal skill, in their specialties - I have seen some good ol' boys with hands the size of baseball mitts make a sauce or chop a carrot with more grace than I would have believed them capable of. The surroundings make all the difference.

Clio feels this is a useful concept. I do too. Of course, Clio remembers the Celts and others who believed in a period of several days to a week which belonged to neither the old year or the new, a time which was essentially in limbo and therefore not subject to normal behavior. This is not a new idea.

Kroc spent the middle years of McDonald's history - the portion after the initial rapid expansion - finding ways to rein in his franchisees. Some of them had been given contracts which couldn't be rescinded except via gross negligence. On the other hand, when the franchise had a good idea, like the Big Mac or the Filet O'Fish, the Egg McMuffin or (sigh) even Ronald McDonald, who disgusts me but has undeniably become a commercial icon, Kroc was smart enough to accept it and use it. (He had to. All the new products he himself proposed were horrendous failures, and the McDonald's main office didn't have a much better track record. It's telling that ever since the crackdown on franchisees, the company has had trouble coming up with new products that succeed. Aside from the Quarter Pounder in 1972, the only other real winner among the new ideas has been Chicken McNuggets.)

Here's the root problem: In America we like our heroes unblemished and our past decisions unclouded. We like the past to be sparkling clean, free of regret and error.

The problem is, that's nonsense, and even little kids in school know it. When students are presented with a picture of, say, Jefferson or Washington that paints these great men as saints, they know enough not to believe it, but they don't know enough to root out the whole story. So they just discard the lot.

You see, I believe that once a book has been published in the English language, the time for style edits is past. There should be no such thing as an "American edition" or "UK edition" - only an English-language edition, and if that edition happens to contain idiom of the writer's home nation, tough luck.

Put another way, Shmuel: Suppose I wrote a book with heavy Cajun Louisiana idiom and it was published by a small press in that state. Later a major U.S. publisher decides to pick the book up and distribute it nationally - "but these half-French phrases have got to come out," the editor says, "no one in New England will understand them." I'd be raw-ther peeved. Wouldn't you in the same situation? Can you imagine any of the excellent writers who use Yiddish idiom heavily being forced to curb their tongue for the benefit of the goyim?