The filmmakers: Andrew Austin and Adam Ward (sporting the Power Glove)
Several years ago, my son Ned, then a graduate student, brought home to Folly Beach a friend, Andrew Austin, who was studying film-making at Wake Forest. A native of Lake Charles, Louisiana, Andrew is an interesting, quirky cat (as we old beatniks say).[1] For example, he always sports red socks (in honor of his grandfather), has mastered the art of rolling coins across his knuckles, and juggles so well you might guess he spent his childhood on the vaudeville circuit.
Here he is in 2011 performing in our living room to the dulcet sounds of fellow Louisianan Dr. John.
I caught up with Andrew last week when he crashed at my place in between film festivals where his first feature (co-created with Adam Ward) A The Power of Glove is making the rounds.
I got a chance to view the film, and if you ever get the chance, jump at it.
It’s a tribute to the documentary that I found it completely engaging even though it concerns the realm of video gaming, a pastime that interests me about as much as the private lives of minor league baseball umpires.
The movie chronicles the rise and fall and semi-resurrection of the Power Glove, a 1980s contraption that was supposed to revolutionize video gaming but ended up being a colossal critical and commercial failure. Nevertheless, the glove has managed to enthrall certain gamers and has over the years provided hackers with hardware that they have readapted to interface with whatever their obsession might be — electronic music or virtual reality, for example.
Take a peek at the trailer.
The scope of the research is beyond impressive. The Austin and Ward assembled a wide range of people associated with the glove — its inventors, marketing executives, engineers, aficionados, musicians, artists, and a “virtual reality evangelist – to name a few. From the coloring to the graphics to the soundtrack, the film has a real 80s feel.
I certainly hope whoever picks up its distribution will do the film justice.
Andrew and I-and-I at Chico Feo
[1] Is there any such thing as a young beatnik, a twenty-year-old-bongo-playing-beret-wearing-goatee-sporting-Ginsberg-reciting hep-cat?
Although I’m old enough to qualify for Medicare A, I don’t think of myself as “a senior citizen.” Nevertheless, manufacturers of walk-in tubs, wheel-equipped walkers, and adult-diapers have increasingly targeted me as a potential consumer.
It’s time I faced it: I am a senior citizen, a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, a demographic corpse-a-coming whose limbo-winning-contest days are way, way over. Now, catching a wave is a major accomplishment; riding my skateboard sends my heart rate into machine-gun blast parameters. Although I’d like to think my sons don’t “curse the gout, serpigo, and the rheum, /For ending [me] no sooner,” [1] it’s obvious we’re in the last ten minutes of the feature film of my life.
However, the “senior dating sites” haven’t written me off as semi-incapacitated yet. They’ve discovered I’m a widower and think I’d probably prefer to avoid a desolate, lonely, sciatica-ridden senescence sitting in my drafty garret filling in crossword puzzle books, compulsively checking my dwindling net worth, trying in vain to decipher the misshapen letters/symbols/numbers of passwords in my late wife’s address book that look as if they may have been scrawled by Woody Guthrie in the last stages of Huntington’s.
Just yesterday, SeniorMatch came on to me, in hopes whupping up some post-menopausal passion between me and a soon-to-be-discovered other, seductively pumping me with compliments, assuring me I’m “experienced” and that I “know what I like.”
We’ll have fun fun fun until the offspring take the car keys away.
Well, they’ve already gotten something wrong: I’m not experienced. Until this year, I hadn’t had a date since 1976, and on that one, she, my late wife, did the asking under the pretense I would be dining with her and her roommate, a fellow bartender. Before then, I was a serial monogamist. I think I’ve only asked someone I didn’t know well out twice.
And until this year, I didn’t realize that certain times a day held certain implications for singles meeting for a drink, that 4 pm meant something different from 7.
I do, however, know what I like: the sound of my own voice.
And what I don’t like: most people.
However, if I were to sign up, this would be my profile picture:
I grew up down the street from a pathological liar. He was a year or two younger, friends with my brother. To give you an example, one time he told me that outside his house he had thrown his baseball glove through his bedroom’s second story window, and the glove landed in his toy chest, which I guess is possible, but then he said he tossed a baseball into the air and swatted it with a bat and the ball arced through the same window and landed in the glove in the toy box.
In those days the word “bullshit” was not in my vocabulary – I was eight or nine — and in fact, I didn’t call him out on his lies because I didn’t want to embarrass him. However, his lying made me want to avoid him because not calling him out made me feel as if I were complicit, a liar by proxy. At that age, I didn’t contemplate what compelled him to construct such outrageous tales. Now it seems obvious that he found something lacking in himself and needed to compensate.
However, don’t we all sometimes “stretch the truth” to make our experiences seem, well, more notable?
Richard Wilbur assures us that
To claim, at a dead party, to have spotted a grackle,
When in fact you haven’t of late, can do no harm.
Your reputation for saying things of interest
Will not be marred, if you hasten to other topics,
Nor will the delicate web of human trust
Be ruptured by that airy fabrication.
However, he implies that embroidering reality shouldn’t be necessary, given the wonders surrounding us:
In the strict sense, of course,
We invent nothing, merely bearing witness
To what each morning brings again to light:
Gold crosses, cornices, astonishment
Of panes, the turbine-vent which natural law
Spins on the grill-end of the diner’s roof,
Then grass and grackles or, at the end of town
In sheen-swept pastureland, the horse’s neck
Clothed with its usual thunder, and the stones
Beginning now to tug their shadows in
And track the air with glitter. All these things
Are there before us; there before we look
Or fail to look.
But we do fail to look. And our memories can be faulty: there may or may not been tiny swastikas tattooed between each finger of the man I worked with in 1974, but details enhance verisimilitude, and I can see those jailhouse tats as I’m retelling the story. I could pass a polygraph I’m so sure he had a tiny little swastika between each finger.
* * *
In Heart of Darkness, Charlie Marlow confesses, “You know I hate, detest, and can’t bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appalls me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies – which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do.”
Marlow does, however, end his narrative with a whooper-and-a-half when he tells Kurtz’s fiancée that his last words were her name.
Let’s have Brando playing Kurtz deliver his actual dying words.
As the Kurtz’s “Intended” collapses into tears, Marlow gets the hell out of that house with its grand piano and its ivory keys:
It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head. But nothing happened. The heavens do not fall for such a trifle. Would they have fallen, I wonder, if I had rendered Kurtz that justice which was his due? Hadn’t he said he wanted only justice? But I couldn’t. I could not tell her. It would have been too dark—too dark altogether….”
Of course, we forgive Marlow that lie. Not lying in that situation would be like Stephen Dedalus’ not praying for his mother when she asked on his deathbed.
In that case, to hell with integrity!
* * *
That leaves us with two more categories, the lie to try to get out of trouble (been there, done that) and the despicable lie, for example, impugning someone’s integrity for spite.
Our president is, of course, guilty of this type of lie mongering when he calls Comey “a liar” and “sleezeball,” words of projection I think. Trump’s a terrible role model for sure, what Marlow would call “a papier-mâché Mephistopheles,” hollow to the core.
Does this sound like someone we know:
He had no genius for organizing, for initiative, or for order even. [. . .] He had no learning, and no intelligence [. . .] He originated nothing, he could keep the routine going – that’s all [. . .] Perhaps there was nothing within him.
Like the boy with the magic baseball glove and ball, it seems obvious that Trump finds something lacking in himself and needs to compensate.
Don’t be in a hurry. Who cares if you’re late? Well, a few might: your employer might, your date might. The judge at your preliminary hearing.
On the other hand, oblivion is fine with it.
Norman Rockwell
Learn how to hold a fork. Note the difference between how Nick and Nora Charles deftly handle silverware as opposed to how prisoners in Russian movies fist wooden spoons as they slurp their swill. You don’t want to be eating like that in a cafeteria. Or maybe you do. Maybe you’re antisocial. If so, at least in the privacy of your lonely kitchen, mind your manners.
Nick and Nora Charles in After the Thin Man.
Don’t leave your Bo Diddley Beach Party LP (recorded live at Myrtle Beach) unsheathed, naked on your dormitory floor. Crunch.[1]
If you’re going to purchase Costa sunglasses, be mindful. Don’t perch them on the top of your head on the roller coaster ride. Buy cheap shades instead. Only the most shallow of consumers, like me, pay attention to the quality of your eyewear.
***
Never wash your hands more than four times a day – and that seems excessive to me. Cultivate immunity. Make friends with Mr. and Mrs. Germ.
Pilate Washing his Hands 1663 by Mattia Preti
When you read, slow down. Pay attention to the sound of of words.
***
Try not to lie unless you’re in dutch deep. Say vague things like you can’t come after all because “something’s come up.” If there’s a follow up question or remark, like, “I hope everything’s all right,” say, “Well, not really, but I’ll be okay.”
***
Floss your teeth before you go to bed. Then brush them again, this time with Listerine. Those receding gums will make you look creepy, predatory, Nosferatu-ish.
Don’t engage in political arguments on social media. Don’t post what you eat on social media. Don’t smugly say not a bad seat when you’re sitting at ringside.
***
Avoid advice dispensing know-it-alls.
[1] Thornwell Tenement, University of South Carolina, 1972.
Is it merely my morbid imagination, or has this been a dreary spring weatherwise?
Today, for example, like yesterday and the day before, a leaden sky darkens the land, muting nature’s first green. And, since nothing gold can stay, it also follows that neither can gray, that the leaden sky and dank, chilly air won’t stay around forever. Obviously, weather is constantly moving from west to east as the earth spins, so we can look forward to bright days ahead, and dark days, sickness and health, until death slams the door and the picture making machine shuts off, which doesn’t faze me one iota. As the poet sez, “I don’t remember any problems I had before I was born.”
I do remember, however, it was a bright sunny but below-freezing day when I repeated after the pastor those words “in sickness and in health” and that Judy’s, my bride’s, expression seemed beyond earnest as she stared me in the eye, looking beyond sincere, and her ardor sort of surprised me, and I felt sort of guilty, abstracted there at the altar, thinking not about the vows but about how she looked and wondering what my expression looked like. In other words, I was distracted, out of time.
The good news is that we got to enjoy thirty-nine-and-a-half earth revolutions before death did us part, and it’s almost been a year since then, eleventh-twelfths of a revolution, a quick year, eventful, often lonely but not always.
I’m sitting here at school between conferences with someone else’s advisees (their advisor’s on maternity leave), and it’s the last time I’ll ever do so (mine or all seniors, and I won’t be assigned any new ones). Even though I’m not at all adept at negotiating the byzantine grids of requirement, I am good at engaging parents in small talk, playing the Yeatsian role of sixty-year-old smiling public man (what he calls “a comfortable kind of old scarecrow”). Nevertheless, I won’t miss having advisees next year, the way I might miss teaching “Among School Children.” Will I even come to school on conference day or instead practice at being retired by riding my bike to the Lost Dog for a croissant?
I find myself less and less in a hurry nowadays, and when I eventually do retire, I hope to never be in a hurry ever again. Old age can have its compensations, educated offspring, paid mortgages, free time.
So c’mon, sun, break through; match my mood. I’m done with school for today. I get to hang out with Walker Percy for the rest of the early afternoon and then look forward to whatever.
I guess from now on, I’ll always associate spring with death, Mother’s Day especially, the day my sons’ mother passed, a word I don’t use in this context. It’s probably such a popular euphemism because it suggests travelling, passing through death’s dark door into another realm, the undiscovered country, Hamlet calls it.
Although I don’t believe in an afterlife, I’m not arrogant enough to think I could not be wrong about my disbelief. Once again, Hamlet, to his pal Horatio, after having conversed with the spirit of his father:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
As it turns out, my younger son Ned has recently conversed with his mother Judy, though in a dream. Aglow, Ned said, with golden light, she told him she was fine, and that things were more important where she was now, that she was busy.
At any rate, any rational person perceives the ubiquity of death — the fallen leaf, roadkill in the medium, swatted mosquito, ill-tended orchid — with a measure of dispassion. The not-so-sad fact is the last thing that dying or grieving makes you is special.
Of course, we’re all destined to die – the blight that man was born for, Hopkins calls it in “Spring and Fall.”
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
On the other hand, more importantly, we’re born to live, and spring, of course, is all about resurrection. Look at Good Friday’s full moon at the top of this page, perched in a tree above the Pour House porch. How beautiful!
Now it’s waning, melting away, obliterating fewer stars as it progressively disappears, and, of course, our favorite star continues to do its thing.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur”
Yesterday, Caroline and I picked up two six-day-old peeps as an Easter present for her daughter. Downstairs in Ned’s vacated room, growing seemingly in time-lapse fashion before our very eyes, downy little dinosaurs pecking away, stretching their tiny embryonic-looking wings, lucky to be alive.
To me, this seems enough: to be able to breathe, to taste, to fall in love again, to read Hopkins out loud backed by wind chimes as the melting moon makes her way towards the horizon to be reborn.
photoshopped from left to right: Donald Trump, Jr., Eric Trump, Betsy Devos, Mitch McConnell,Paul Ryan, and Donald Trump
Most people my age have cleaned out the attic of their overblown aspirations, have gotten rid of the ridiculous notion that they’ll write the great American novel or sell an original screenplay that wins an Oscar (which, in my case, would include getting shitfaced at the Vanity Fair after party and going home with Myrna Loy).
Not me. I still dream of single-handedly overthrowing the US government, declaring myself a Sun God, and initiating a reign of terror to punish those who have offended my delicate sensibilities.
Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with detailed descriptions of the exquisite tortures I have concocted for the likes of Mitch McConnell (staring into a mirror), Paul Ryan (translating Atlas Shrugged into Finnish), or Donald Trump (taking away TV and Internet privileges until he has memorized word-for-word the 1855 edition of Song of Myself).
Once the heavy-duty guillotining was done and the nation had settled down to the thousand years of bliss I had promised, I would issue several proclamations concerning the use of language.
* * *
It would be unlawful to end a declarative sentence with an interrogative lilt. Like, no more, “I have never had a toe amputated?”
Incorrect pronoun cases would be allowed (e.g., me and Timmy went, between you and I); however, not making the distinction between less and fewer would be punishable by having to sing at one sitting “10,000 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”[1]
Except for vacations to all-inclusive Jamaican resorts, there would be no more laying in the sun.
Tattooed proclamations could no longer be rendered in gothic script.
Adolescent boys would be required to dot i-s with hearts.
* * *
Oh, my God. Lord Acton is right about absolute power! Obviously, it’s past time for me to pack up this fantasy and put in on the side of the road to be transported to the dump of broken dreams.
Hey, I got plenty of more productive things to do with my time, like researching Medicare supplemental insurance policies/walk-in tubs.
Go ahead, brothers and sisters, say what you will. Dig on that First Amendment.
Do it!
[1] I was delighted yet dismayed to hear my grief counselor’s 9-year-old tell me that on a recent fieldtrip they sang “100 Bottles” (delighted) but beer had been replaced with milk (dismayed). Yet another example of political correctness run amok.
Here’s what happens when you put a thesaurus in the hands of a sophomore writing an essay on Pride and Prejudice:
As soon as he matriculates into the Bennet’s domicile, Mr. Collins’s lack of social opulence opaquely dissembles in elocutions of grandiosness that triturate on the tender spots of Mr. Bennet and his female offspring’s sense and sensibilities. Mr. Collins’s unenlightenment of social indicators immobilizes his ability to apple polish his way into the family’s entwinements. A disproportionate kow-towing to the strictures of formality manufacture him into an integer of caricature. Whether he’s dogmatizing from the pulpit or twaddling at a shindig, Mr. Collins is sure to faux pas his way into jocosity.
Being a good Buddhist is just as hard as being a good Christian. You have to love/feel compassion for Donald Trump (or Barack Obama if you’re a Republican) and dedicate your life to dismantling your ego.
By the same token, being a bad Buddhist is just as easy as being a bad Christian; except in Buddhism no crucifixion, no propitiation, in fact, no god can save you from yourself.
The good news is that there’s no smiting in Buddhism, no flagellation.
After death, good Protestants enjoy the luxury of carte blanche expiation – complete and utter forgiveness –a get-out-of-hell-free card redeemable at the very last breath.[1] No matter the depth of depravity, no matter the severity of the sins committed, whether it is talking about your spouse behind her back, cheating on her, or even murdering and dismembering her, one size of forgiveness fits all as long as you accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior.
Then you get to spend the rest of eternity in bliss.
In Buddhism, on the other hand, what you get after death is reincarnation, which in the First World means the messy trauma of childbirth followed by the scrapping of knees, getting bullied/turned down for dates, the prelude to ultimately getting your increasingly not-so-tender heart-broken. So you drop out of college, say, find a job working 40+ hours a week in low-level management. You get married, commit adultery or get cheated on yourself, file for divorce, and suffer the subsequent finger wagging of offspring criticizing you for your blatant hypocrisy.
All the while, you’re undergoing the disheartening recession of your hairline or the accumulation of cellulite on the back of your dented thighs.
If you’re really unlucky and live too long of a life, you end up getting warehoused in some Kafkaesque facility with sadistic healthcare workers until it’s time to die alone in a sterile cubicle stinking of chemicals.
Then you get reincarnated and suffer all of it over again.
Of course, I don’t believe in reincarnation except in the sense that the matter that once constituted your body’s going to get recycled. Otherwise, my reckoning is that when you’re dead, you’re oblivious, i.e., no longer sentient, which, given the above four paragraphs, is fine and dandy by me.
One big advantage a believing Christian has over the Buddhist is the comforting idea of an astral parent who, despite his mysterious ways, supposedly loves you unconditionally (until you’re judged at the End Times and are perhaps cast into sulfurous perdition everlasting). Christians can communicate with God, ask for his guidance. During my wife’s three-years of terminal cancer, I thought more than once how nice it would be to be blessed with faith, but as far as I can tell, you either have it or not, and I don’t, nor did she, a woman whose stoicism might make Marcus Aurelius turn green with envy.
Buddhism does offer, however, a set of mental exercises designed to help you, not only to cope, but also enjoy the time you have by being cognizant of the wonder of it all. Buddhism reminds us that we’re riding on a swirling pebble revolving around a fleck of fire hurtling through a vacuum, but also teaches us how to calmly appreciate the painted bunting bathing in that birdbath on the edge of the marsh, an experience ultimately more meaningful than playing Grand Theft Auto or binge watching Season 2 of The Walking Dead.
Of course, Christians can co-opt these Buddhist exercises and meditate, and that would, it seems to me, to constitute the best of both worlds for those who possess the power to believe.
Although I’m a slackass Buddhist, meditation has helped me to cope calmly with the bad and appreciate the good. When I was young, I was jittery, as if Mexican jumping beans instead of blood pulsed through my veins. I was angry at the world in general and at that asshole talking too loud in line in particular. Now, I’m calmer, essentially anger free, and can stand or sit still. Sometimes I’m even able to free my consciousness from the spinning hamster wheel of daily concerns that tend to consume way too much of my fleeting existence.
If you haven’t tried meditating, you ought to.
[1] I’m not sure if US Catholics still believe in Purgatory, but there you do have to suffer for your misdeeds, “confined to fast in fires” until “the foul crimes done” in your life “are burnt and purged away.”
Myrna Loy
You Do Hoodoo 