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10:22 PM - Spiderman 2 Quite possibly this is the best comic-based action film ever, which I suppose is not entirely surprising since its predecessor was undoubtedly such. At this point it is merely a question of which of the two movies holds the title, and whether the Spiderman trilogy can accomplish a feat rarely seen in action movies, that is, a process of continuous improvement upon the original. Of course, the real strengths of the Spiderman franchise to date is not the action sequences and concomitant special effects (which are strong enough on their own) but the strikingly believable characters and compelling human drama which one has no right to expect from people dressed up in spandex costumes. In this respect, these movies have only one serious competitor, that is, another set of Marvel comics currently being transformed into cinema – the X-men series. (There are those who might try to claim that the Hulk and Daredevil comics were equally amenable to presentation upon the silver screen; however, I doubt that non-fans would find the character development in these movies even in the same league as that found in the Spiderman series.) In the original movie, we find ourselves sympathizing with the leading man as he is gradually transformed from geeky nobody to anonymous superhero. In the second film, we find him struggling with the paradoxical dual burden of anonymity and heroism, in a situation where he is neither recognized nor rewarded for his tireless efforts to protect the innocents of his city. Eventually, this begins to wear at him, as he wearies of the constant conflicts between his daily life and his nightly life-and-death battles. This dynamic tension between desires and duties provides the underlying motif of this film – choice. As in the original, so too in the sequel, the hero must decide for himself to be the hero, to take seriously the notion that “with great power comes great responsibility.” Unlike the original film, however, the sequel present the anti-hero with the very same choice. When all is said and done, it is not the powers they wield but the choices they make which determine the outcome. (
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June 28, 2004
07:30 AM - Back to the grindstone. Pfeh. (
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June 27, 2004
10:22 PM - 17th annual OKC GLBT pride parade Unlike anything I've ever seen. Most of the floats were as flamboyant as the crowd, but a few civil rights groups were there to make a serious point about liberty and justice for all regardless of their choice of consensual pursuits. (
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June 26, 2004
11:59 PM - 10th annual Warped Tour Holy shit! What a day. Chas & I arrived at the Smirnoff Music Centre in Dallas just as the gates opened at 11am, but this did not mean we got to just waltz right in. Oh no…we had to first walk to the end of the line which was at least ½ mile in length. I shit you not. The line moved quickly enough, though, thanks to the UPC bar coding system developed jointly by Logicon and Satan and deployed nationwide during the year of my birth. Throughout our time in the queue, I danced about impatiently on account of a full bladder and an unsubstantiated belief that my favorite punk band would be playing around noon. Once we got inside, it started raining – hard. At first this made me unhappy, but soon I recalled my Buddhist training and realized that the real problem was not with the rain but with my desire to stay dry. Once I gave up any hope of this I made my peace with the rain, removed some unnecessary clothing, and spent the remainder of the day soaking wet and laughing inwardly at the poor blighters cowering under tents and other fixtures trying to keep out of the weather. Many of these folks were trying to keep their hair dry, having spent the better part of the morning prepping it for the event with spikes and temporary hair colour and whatnot. By the end of the day, the poor posers were wearing their hair colour all over their faces and sporting severely wilted mohawks. It is hard to tell in retrospect whether they were more pathetically comical, or comically pathetic. What with not being even part poser, Chas did not have to concern himself with hairstyle, and what with not having any hair to speak of, I was equally unconcerned. We did not revel in the rain so much as to lie down in the gutters and feign swimming or lie down in the mud and create mud angels, but it did feel pretty damn good to simply stand in the midst of a torrential downpour defying the gods of rain to do their very worst. Soon after we parted with our traditional notions of dryness, we realized that band for which we had come would not be playing until every other band had done their bit (this makes perfect sense in retrospect since they are the biggest name on the tour) so we set to wandering about aimlessly for the next six hours or so. We idled around alternately visiting the two main stages (each of which was split into left and right halves so that each band could start playing immediately after the previous one had finished) and two or three smallish trailer-based stages scattered throughout the park. Probably, the highlight of this nomadic period was coming upon the Guttermouth set, during which the band incessantly harassed, belittled, and insulted their fans and the entire audience. Not since Bad Religion has a band ever so thoroughly lived up to their name. The God Awfuls, by contrast, completely failed to live up to their name, putting in a downright decent performance; however, I was curiously unmotivated to hop into the throng. I suppose my reluctance was primarily due to my ignorance of the most of the band’s repertoire, but the fact that the audience was tightly pressed into a rather smallish space between the seats and the stage did not help either. Evidently the Smirnoff Music Center amphitheater was not designed with mosh pits in mind. Go figure. Flogging Molly’s set was unlike anything I’d ever heard, but if you can wrap your mind around the phrase "traditional Irish punk rock," then you’ll have an idea of what they sound like. I hope to pirate their music soon enough. A full half-hour before Bad Religion was scheduled to start playing their bit, the crowd starting jockeying for position close to the stage. Once they reached a sort of positional stasis, people grew bored, and rather than striking up friendly conversations with new and interesting folks, a few particularly uncreative and juvenile folks took to throwing shit around. At first, it was merely balloons and empty water bottles, fairly harmless stuff. Eventually, though, it escalated to half-full water bottles, shoes, and other assorted refuse. By the time the band prepared to play, I’d taken a bottle to the head, another to the lip, and a nasty-ass mud-soaked discarded t-shirt to the face, and I was getting ready to pounce on a mentally-challenged little Mexican punk who was largely responsible for causing the ruckus. (Un)fortunately, though, the band geared up right about then and Dallas was spared yet another instance of Hispanic-on-Hispanic violence. When the band lead off with "Sinister Rouge" it became clear that it would be a damn good set. It was every bit as intense as one would expect, and the crowd ate it up, surging forward in a mass rush toward the stage. For the first couple minutes it was all one could do just to keep from getting crushed in the press of bodies, or (worse yet) accidentally impregnating one or more of the scantily clad punker chicks who seemed to utterly lack fear, modesty, and a proper sense of sexual ethics. Eventually, though, the body press subsided a bit and the crowd got down to the business of moshing it up, tossing themselves and one another hither and thither and generally having a bang-up time of it all. I do not remember too clearly much of what happened after this point, but I have a few otherwise inexplicable bruises and friction burns to show for it. I do recall that the band seemed as passionate as the crowd, which is a feat since they have been at it for nearly ¼ century now. I also recall having a damn good time, which is a feat in and of itself since I am over thirty. (
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June 25, 2004
04:16 PM - Change of plans Since the ski trip was called off, I bought tickets online to see the opening day of the Warped tour in Dallas tomorrow. Punk bands galore, and only a few of them are pansies about it. Must find shoelaces for my boots. (
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June 24, 2004
04:16 PM - Norfork Lake trip - nixed! Found out that the trip is off on account of a broken ski boat. Damn damn damn. (
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June 23, 2004
11:23 PM - Norfork Lake trip! Made reservations for our annual getaway to Norfork Lake. We are downright stoked to get the chance to go skiing, and hopefully this year we can put Laura in a tube. (
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June 22, 2004
10:22 PM - Back in the cube at last It ought not be a relief to be back at work after a long weekend off, and I am nearly embarrassed to feel relieved to be here. Hope my wife is not reading this. ;) (
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June 21, 2004
09:21 PM - Whenever it rains, I hate my life ...and it rained all damn night last night and tonight. I've no clue how my wife can sleep through this shit. Happy &*$^ing b-day, eh? (
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June 20, 2004
08:20 PM - Last call for twenty-somethings Went to church this morning. Got the chance to chat with more of our old friends from what now seems like a whole other life. As always, I found the entire experience a bit disturbing. Birthday party this evening. I tried to avoid having my parents interact too much (or too candidly) with my friends and my in-laws. "Oil & water" is not quite an apt metaphor here, though "H2O + Na" might well do. Thankfully, my relatives and friends carefully avoided discussing anything of substance throughout the party. (
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June 19, 2004
07:19 PM - Mandy got married It was beautiful. There is something about young lovers starting a family that gets me all twitterpated. After a relatively brief but remarkably pious service performed by the same kindly old fellow who performed our ceremony, the wife and I got the chance to socialize with loads of old friends from church. As usual, I have difficulty understanding how such thoughtful and intelligent people could cling so tightly to bronze-age ethics, but there it is. (
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June 18, 2004
04:16 PM - Healing well Already my wife’s uncorrected eyesight is better than my own. Ah, the miracles of modern science, unfettered by the restraints of medieval priestcraft. Thank heavens enlightenment thinkers prevailed over the conservatives of their age. (
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June 17, 2004
05:17 PM - Eyeballs (snap!) Today, my wife was strapped down and thoroughly immobilized before having her eyes carved up by lasers. While this reads a bit like the script of a hokey sci-fi/horror flick from the era of wide-ties and hideous plaids, it was actually a procedure for which she volunteered and for which my parents paid most handsomely. (
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June 16, 2004
04:16 PM - Lunch at the 501 Had lunch with my mother today. She seemed to want me to hang out with my father and his ultraconservative buddies at their luncheon, but I decided that it would be more fun to have my wisdom teeth yanked out without the benefit of modern dentistry. After a pleasant dining experience during which Cael was reasonably well-behaved, we hung out at Stevenson park for a bit, where I watched my mother play the role of overprotective grandma whenever her grandson attempted something dangerous, which was about half of the time. It was particularly humorous watching her chase him all the way to the top of the rocket structure. (
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June 15, 2004
10:22 PM - Sneaking about Mostly I ducked my parents today, sneaking off in the evening to hang out with a few of my godless liberal buddies over some damnably sinful pizza. My Dad was hankering for an invite but he backed off when I mentioned the flamboyant gaiety of a certain couple of fellows. I did not even need to mention planning for the pride parade. (
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June 14, 2004
10:22 PM - Parents in town Stimulating as ever. My father takes every opportunity to comment on the decayed and degraded state of our modern society, just as apocalyptic Christians have done for well-nigh two millennia. After awhile, it grows tiresome hearing about how gawd-awful things really are – and to think people call me cynical. (
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June 13, 2004
10:22 PM - House cleaning Spent the day cleaning house; more precisely, trying to prevent the boy from preventing the wife from doing so. Tough job, though perhaps not as tough as house cleaning. At least our new vaccuum really sucks. (
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June 12, 2004
11:55 PM - Hanging w/ the Boo This evening, Laura attended a wedding in Tulsa while I stayed home and wondered at how easy it is to entertain one's child once one despairs of having any time to oneself. I find it odd that we are already fighting over the Xbox - he is only three years old, for the love of Garp. (
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June 11, 2004
04:16 PM - OUTED! Evidently an incriminating (albeit doctored) photo on a certain .org site which I visit on occasion has had the effect of unintentionally outing an in-law of mine relative to certain in-laws of his. This is a problem for me and mine as well and all involved, but I stand by my insistence that intolerant kinfolk are those who must learn to adapt. I refuse to be shamed by their shameful insistence on conformity of thought and action. (
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June 10, 2004
10:22 PM - Forum on public policy and religion Attended a forum on the role of religion in public policy this evening, featuring Steve Galpin (Chair, Libertarian Party of Oklahoma), Jay Parmley (Chair, Democratic Party of Oklahoma), State Senator Angela Monson (D-Oklahoma City), and State Representative Bill Case (R-Midwest City). The Chair of the Republican Party of Oklahoma has indicated that he would attend; however, despite the GOP’s alleged emphasis on character and integrity, he cancelled on us at the last minute without so much as arranging for a proxy. Imagine that, blatant hypocrisy from an avowed theocrat. Shocking! After each speaker gave a brief spiel about how they viewed the relationship between religion and governance, the audience was given the opportunity to ask a few questions. Dr. John George of UCO asked Rep. Case whether he could recite the Ten Commandments, which he (as the lone Republican on the panel) had asserted were the basis of American law. Naturally, Mr. Case was completely at a loss, and Dr. George took the opportunity to point out that none of the commandments were in any sense enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Probably, this needed to be said. (
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June 09, 2004
10:22 PM - Deluge Rained all day and all night. The roof is leaking in half a dozen places and I curse the name of him who sold me this house. After waiting for three hours this morning for network connectivity to return to our portion of the building, I gave up in frustration and went home, where my network connectivity was more than ample. Bought myself a bargain-basement mp3 player today for just about what it would have cost to buy myself yet another hundred-disc spool of CDR’s. For the perspective of a naďve rough order of magnitude cost/benefit analysis (my favorite kind of cost analysis) I need to listen to around 8,000 minutes of material in order to break even. I have just over three hours of material in the machine right now, so once I’m done with that I only have 130 hours to go. It should take only about ˝ year at my current rate of audio consumption, after which point I will have accrued the educational equivalent of roughly three credit hours. Thanks be unto The Teaching Company for making top notch professors readily available to those of us not currently enrolled in Ivy League colleges. (
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June 08, 2004
10:08 PM - Nothing happened today The entire day was a waiting game. At work I waited to leave, at home I waited to go to bed. Probably I ought not to have left it in the first place. (
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June 07, 2004
10:22 PM - Melanoma We found out today that my wife’s brother’s wife has had a decent sized lump of cancerous tissue removed. We hope that medical science has advanced enough to cure her completely of this condition, and indeed that it has already done so. (
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June 06, 2004
04:16 PM - Pool party II Laura and I hosted our own party today, and I found it far more enjoyable than the one we had attended the day before. Invited over a bunch of friends from our local congregation, and we had a simply splendid time. Amazingly enough, the woman in the bikini took this photo, as did I. (
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June 05, 2004
10:22 PM - Pool party I There is nothing quite like attending a child’s birthday party at your spouse’s in-laws’ place. Once again, I got the chance to play the role of oddball husband of the sister of the husband of the daughter of the host. Feigned incuriousness on every side, so long as you do not turn about too quickly. I quickly gave up on socializing in favor of frolicking with the young children, an approach also taken by my wife’s brother’s wife’s brother, whom I would have thought more comfortable around his own immediate family. The children seemed blissfully unaware of the awkwardness with which their adult kinfolk interact one with other. Evidently the pseudo-social interaction of in-laws exists at a level just sufficiently over their heads (in both senses) to prevent them from gaining any insight into the emotional subtext behind our more or less meaningless banter. Probably, this is a good thing. (
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June 04, 2004
10:22 PM - Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban I ordered tickets online this morning and waiting eagerly for my chance to use them. After a workday which seemed to stretch out like an unjustly sentenced term in Azkaban prison, I finally drove back across the OKC metro to my mother-in-law’s place, where I picked up my wife and dropped off my child. Off to the movies! I rarely ever get the chance to go out to the movies anymore, and I even more rarely get the chance to see a particularly good book translated into film, so I was filled with anticipation and Diet Vanilla Coke by the time that we took our seats in the theater that I was jittering about like a three-year-old on meth. With such high expectations, I ought not to have been surprised at my overall disappointment with the movie. The performances were no more nor less compelling than that we have come to expect from this particular lot of young actors, the plot was for the most part unretouched (save the necessary abridgement) from the basic outline in the novel, but the direction itself was merely adequate at best, and downright sub par at key moments in the film. Most avid readers of Rowling would agree that the dramatic climax of the story is not the moment where Harry saves himself and Sirius Black from an onrushing swarm of dementors, but rather the moment when Black and Lupin confront Pettigrew in the shrieking shack. This entire scene was botched, with far too much scurrying around to convey the gravitas which was palpable in the original text - the weightiness of Pettigrew’s impending death at the hands of those he betrayed. Similarly, the above-mentioned scene in which Harry nearly dies at the lakeside fails to capture the urgency in the book, in which most of the lead characters are rendered unconscious by the dementor attack and Harry himself is on the verge of having the life sucked out of him. I can tolerate when a scene is changed significantly from the novel for the sake of adding more drama, indeed, this is to be expected. But when an entire cast of characters fails to even approach the intensity of drama brought to the novel by Jim Dale’s unabridged oral performance of the original text, well, one must wonder why they bothered to make a movie at all. (
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June 03, 2004
10:22 PM - Busted! While returning home with my family from a (mercifully brief) visit to our country kinfolk, westbound on 36th street at around 45-50 mph, I noticed two things almost simultaneously. The first was an eastbound black-and-white Caprice and the second was a black-and-white sign posting a 35 mph limit. Resignation set in almost at once, so I was completely unsurprised by the U-turn that I witnessed in my rear-view mirror shortly thereafter. [One of the benefits of my nearly perpetual pessimism is the inability to be surprised by bad news, at least garden-variety bad news. On the other hand, only the truly deranged can live from day to day with the expectation of apocalyptic tragedy, hence the expression “Hey, it’s not the end of the world.”] I mentioned casually (and with only a modicum of vulgarity) that we were busted and signaled my intention to pull off of the main road. With characteristic optimism, my wife said that surely we were not busted, and with almost perfect comic timing the cop chose that moment to flip on his dazzling array of lights and sirens, just as we turned onto a side road and parked the car. At this point, my little-brother-in-law helpfully informed me that we were not yet within Oklahoma City limits, but rather in a relatively tiny community called Forest Park, one which straddles a speed zone between Choctaw and the city. The policeman who approached our vehicle was more-or-less a perfect caricature of a small town cop, right down to the unfortunate combination of bad teeth and creepy mustache. At this point, I thanked my lucky stars (and most propitious fortune cookies) that I was wearing my best and only cowboy-style hat, and I thanked my lovingly nagging wife for disallowing me the use of a few of my more overtly offensive bumper magnets whenever she is in the car. I handed the all-too-archetypical rural policeman my driver’s license and reached over to plumb the depths of my glove box. It did not occur to me as I fumbled about for my registration that I was still waiting on the tag agency to send us our new form in the mail, just as it did not occur to my wife (sitting prettily in the passenger seat) to mention that it came in the mail earlier today. In the end, though, the kindly fellow let me off with a verbal warning before I even had the chance to figure out that my vehicle registration was sitting at home along with my proof of insurance. What is the lesson learned here? If you are going to spend some time in the country, wear a cowboy hat. (
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June 02, 2004
12:57 PM - Law school I just found out today that I have been accepted to Concord Law School and will be starting classes in the fall. This is fairly exciting news, since my career has thus far prevented me from pursuing a degree in law. (
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June 01, 2004
10:10 AM - Eight years ago It was exactly eight years ago last Friday that I graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy. I would have forgotten entirely to mark this occasion but for the fact that Teresa, my friend and fellow 1996 graduate, pinned on the rank of Major that day. I missed the ceremony because I was busy haggling with the IT folks over a laptop, but hey, I was never really one for pomp and circumstance anyway. |
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