How the Olympics Should Have Opened

The scene is the opening ceremony of the Olympics in London.

Ian McKellen: Rather than presenting a tedious narrative about the history of England, we’re going to celebrate our country’s most popular export: Music. So we’ve invited every living British performer on stage tonight. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, the Who, Adele, Cliff Richard, the surviving members of Queen, Ringo Starr, Duran Duran, Sting, Pet Shop Boys, Eurythmics, Arctic Monkeys, Robbie Williams, Depeche Mode, George Michael, New Order, Leona Lewis, Lily Allen, three-fifths of Fleetwood Mac, Blur, Phil Collins, Erasure, Take That, Oasis, Rick Astley, Kylie Minogue, Lulu, the Spice Girls, One Direction, an Amy Winehouse impersonator, Bananarama …

The lengthy list goes on. Bored beyond reason, the Queen abdicates so she can go home and go to bed. Charles is crowned King.

McKellen: … Pulp, Kajagoogoo, Petula Clark, Rod Stewart, Lisa Stansfield, Eric Clapton, Def Leppard, the Sugababes, the Cure, Elton John, ABC, the Thompson Twins, Kim Wilde, John Waite, Shirley Bassey, Will Young, Meat Beat Manifesto, Paul Young, Bucks Fizz, Peter Gabriel, Iron Maiden, Catatonia, Robert Plant, Adam Ant, John Lydon, Chemical Brothers, Massive Attack, Bloc Party, Jive Bunny, the Kinks, Dexy's Midnight Runners, Boy George, Kate Bush, Coldplay, the Orb, Dire Straits, Goldfrapp, the Fixx, Franz Ferdinand, the Gorillaz, T'Pau, Billy Idol, the Human League, Keane, Muse, Mika, Sade, Julie Andrews, Radiohead, Morrissey, Tears for Fears, Sandie Shaw, the Moody Blues, the Belle Stars, Cutting Crew, EMF, Gay Dad, A Flock of Seagulls …

The Olympic flame sputters out and must be relit.

McKellen: … Jet, the Kaiser Chiefs, Katrina and the Waves, Marc Almond, Bronski Beat, Siouxsie Sioux, Allison Moyet, XTC, the Verve, the Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Sheena Easton, Joe Cocker, Bonnie Tyler, Steve Winwood, Girls Aloud, Angela Lansbury, Pepsi and Shirlie, the Saturdays, Jason Donovan, Simple Minds, the Boomtown Rats, the Jam, Shakin Stevens, JLS, Pixie Lott, Olly Murs, Jessie J, Cheryl Cole, Florence + the Machine, Joe McElderry, Alexandra Burke, Dizzee Rascal, La Roux, Tom Jones, Calvin Harris, Garbage, Estelle, Duffy, McFly, Razorlight, Eric Prydz, the Streets, Ozzy Osbourne, Sarah Brightman and Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

All the artists appear on stage and sing “Can We Fix It?” from the TV show Bob the Builder. Liam Gallagher, Noel Gallagher, Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn start spitting at each other. Then a haggard, snaggletoothed waitress grabs the microphone.

Waitress: Freshen ya drink, guv’nah?

Summer Begins After Labor Day

This year my summer will not really begin until after Labor Day. It’s a strange feeling knowing that I have over a month to go until any real action happens.

It’s because we’re making the annual trek to Seatowne 14 the second week of September. It’s partially to save some money. I am hoping we luck out as far as weather this year and have an Indian summer. With my luck, this summer’s constant heat will decide to break the night before we leave and everyone up here will be thrilled and I’ll be spitting nails while sitting on the deck in jeans and a sweatshirt.

This better not happen. I refuse to wear anything but shorts in that house.

There are a few advantages to going to the shore after Labor Day. That holiday won’t be as depressing as it normally is for me because there will still be some summer afterward for me. The water will be at its warmest (although it has been in the 70ºs already) and there will be a little less traffic and fewer people on the beach. Plus, it’s not like it will be snowing on Sept. 8. We’re bound to have some good days.

It can be hard to wait, though, especially since it’s been a brutally hot summer and I’d love to spend these 90º days on the beach. Last night as the derecho moved in I was on the deck looking up at the clouds and they looked like the waves, the way they tumbled and ebbed and flowed. I was thinking how awesome it would have been to see that big storm from the deck at the beach house. This is one of my favorite pastimes as the deck is screened in so we don’t have to go in when it rains, like I do at home.

I’ve been biding my time by taking the occasional day trip to Rehoboth but for now, the summer seems sort of long and quiet. It’s like I’m just hanging out and waiting. It’s not so bad because this makes the summer seem longer, like July has been one endless stretch of undisturbed beach that you can get lost in.

This year we will be the only people who get excited by the end of summer at Labor Day because we’ll just be getting started. I have always been who, metaphorically and literally, sits out on the deck until I’m shivering and the leaves turn, because I’m that reluctant to see the season end.

Never Again (and again and again and ...)

In the wake of the Dark Knight Rises theater massacre, the people who are calling for sane gun laws have really missed the boat. Surely they must know how we already started to implement such laws following the Columbine High School shooting.

Following that unspeakable tragedy in 1999, Americans put aside their differences to come together and pass laws that made it more difficult for, say, some crazy asshole to shoot up a movie theater. The sensible reforms included enforcing a ban on assault weapons and making it more difficult for people to arm themselves to the teeth.

The most heartening is that we reacted quickly as a society to find a solution to violence that respected Second Amendment rights while decreasing the senseless gun violence in our country. Citizens, corporations and politicians put aside their own interests back then to solve a problem that could have become much worse.

Then, when subsequent mass murders occurred, we took further action to prevent future tragedies. When a gunman killed children at an Amish schoolhouse in 2006, we implemented further measures to close any “loopholes” in our previous laws. After the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, the worst mass shooting in American history, lawmakers and regular people took a hard look at our society to diagnose the problem of random violence in America and take concrete steps to address it in extralegal means. So by the time another isolated incident occurred such as the Fort Hood massacre, we were able to deal with it with common sense and without hysteria, scapegoating and grandstanding.

So people who call for sane gun laws and preventive strategies today must have been living under a rock because we already did all that. It is heartening to know that after a tragedy, we only needed to say “Never again” once.  

Section B Book Reviews

I’ve been on a bit of a political kick lately with my books. Right now I’m reading All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. The book is a good blend of hard reporting and colorful details on Watergate. I think Richard Milhous Nixon is the most fascinating character in the history of American politics so it’s about time I read this and I hope the book delivers scenes of Nixon flipping out and cursing and being Machiavellian. My one qualm is that I skipped ahead and (spoiler alert!) the book stops before Watergate hearings and Nixon’s resignation, which I would like to have read more about. But I’m sure I can find other material on that subject.

All the President’s Men had been sitting in my basement for years since I bought it at a book sale so I have no idea of the age of the note I found inside. It says, “This book is biased and definitely unsuitable for impressionable minds, i.e. liberals.” I can’t make out the signature but in my fantasy, Nixon wrote it to an autograph seeker in a fit of pique.

As I am a sucker for alternate histories, I very much enjoyed Stephen King’s 11/22/63. It is not a well-written book as King’s style includes heavy-handed lessons on the less rosy side of the past and he tries to force Jake’s life with Sadie to take on too much of a mythically perfect quality. However, the concept is fascinating: A man travels through a wormhole back to 1958 to prevent the Kennedy assassination. Predictably, the time travel creates a future that is even worse. I was riveted by the glimpses King provided of how U.S. history altered after Kennedy’s escape from death.

For a more down to earth take on an alternate history, I loved Then Everything Changed. Jeff Greenfield hypothesizes how history would have changed if chance had altered three key events in politics: If John Kennedy had been assassinated between his election and the meeting of the Electoral College, if Robert Kennedy had survived his assassination attempt, and if Gerald Ford had not made the debate gaffe that there was “no Soviet domination in Eastern Europe” and won the 1976 election. Greenfield presents a thoughtful, plausible and intriguing picture of how one change in the chain of events changes the tug of war between factions in politics and could have remade the country. Greenfield writes the alternate histories as straight history. It’s a strange feeling, racing through a textbook as if it were a thriller, eagerly getting details about history that every school child in this alternate America would have known.

Along the way, Then Everything Changed offers little Easter eggs of familiar characters in history playing different roles, such as the Clintons, Sandra Day O’Connor, John McCain and George H.W. Bush. There’s even a bizarro Watergate-esque scandal involving a Democratic administration. It seems the events of history are destined to play out in one way or another as twisted versions of events we learned about in school. The most bizarre alteration was the series of events that led the Shah of Iran to die in a car accident in a tunnel in Paris that directly echoed the death of Princess Diana.

The book 1Q84 was an alternate history of sorts, Haruki Murakami’s contemplative look at a woman who finds her reality has “jumped the track” to a version of 1984 filled with more magical realism than the one she knew, ultimately finding her long-lost childhood crush in the same strange world. I was riveted to this story for awhile but there wasn’t much of a payoff at the end, like a storm that threatens but ultimately passes over.

I was glad I finally got to read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, which had been on my Amazon wish list for 27 years. It’s an elegiac, moving book; a man’s letter to his young son meditating on the twists and turns of his life. It gets especially emotional at the end as the man confronts his illegitimate son.

Disco Bloodbath was … I guess … fun? It’s James St. James’ account of his friendship with fellow New York club kid Michael Alig, who killed and dismembered drug dealer Angel Melendez, to whom he owed money. The story is also the basis for the awful movie Party Monster. St. James’ narration is appropriately informal and chatty for the subject matter but the stylistic tricks annoyed me after awhile as too much of the book is in italics or boldface or ALL CAPS for emphasis. In addition, all these people come off as horribly unlikeable. They are so shallow that their shallowness forms a Möbius strip that loops around in an endless cycle of shallow. With endless depictions of K-holes, people ripping apart their own apartments in search of forgotten bags of drugs and ending up with track marks and sores, this book confirms once again that I’m never doing drugs.

How about 'Never'

Since Christie sent me the news that ABC Family is developing a TV series of Now and Then, I’m waxing nostalgic about how much I hate that movie.

Now and Then was the most craptacular thing I’ve ever seen in a theater. I don’t remember too much but the floating graves, searching the microfilm to solve some mystery that I found profoundly boring, skinnydipping and Demi Moore wearing black and brooding while smoking her face off (because she was a writer, see?). My most vivid memory is talking through the entire thing because I found it laughable. Even the font for the credits was laughable. I am surprised nobody in the theater asked us to shut up.

What is the point of developing a TV series of a movie from 17 years ago? It got awful reviews so why revisit it? And why now? Why the ‘60s nostalgia through a child’s eyes when we already had The Wonder Years? Actually, maybe this story would work better for kids on ABC Family than it did for adults in the theater.

If they had wanted a tag line for the original movie, they could have said “Four women trying in vain to act their way out of a paper bag.” It’s not catchy but it would be accurate. Three out of the four leads were horrifying; women I just don’t like on screen. (I don’t have a problem with Rita Wilson.)

I’m in a pissy mood today so now I’m going to be excessively catty about these people.

Demi Moore should change her name to Demi Meh because she is the definition of mediocrity. Her entire career summation could read “She was in Ghost” and it wouldn’t leave out anything relevant. I was reading Christopher Ciccone’s book about Madonna and he mentioned how they were always hanging out with Demi and some A-listers and I just thought, “Demi Moore seems like the most uninteresting person in the world and I can’t imagine who would hang out with her.”

I liked Rosie O’Donnell for about three seconds until I realized the only reason I cared about her was because she was friends with Madonna. She didn’t bother me too much until she cut her hair with a tabletop paper cutter and started being hateful to everyone. This is not a smart strategy for someone whose livelihood depends on being an approachable talk show host. She just turned into an asshole.

Melanie Griffith always seemed to me like someone who could barely pronounce her own name because it was such a tongue twister. She seems barely sentient to me. It doesn’t help that she’s had so many rounds of plastic surgery that it looks like she can barely open her jaw or move her eyes to indicate emotion. I cannot stand this woman. I don’t understand how she could have sprung from Tippi Hedren’s womb. I bet Tippi still looks better than her daughter today.

Instead of Now and Then, I know what we can call the TV series to allude to the frequency at which I will watch it: Never.

The Trouble With Drag Queens

I’ve never been a fan of drag. It’s something you accept when you go to a gay nightspot but I’ve never been interested in it. Until recently, I was never sure exactly why but I think I’ve put my finger on some reasons.

I can’t always handle people who are always “on” and overwhelmingly in your face. It’s exhausting to an introvert like me. This is like the drag queen we saw at a show on Memorial Day weekend. She was the biggest person I’ve ever seen. She wasn’t fat but just had a huge build and extended that build with an exoskeleton of a massive wig and dress. This combined with the fact that I was right in front of the speaker and she was unbelievably loud made me leave the bar. Sometimes I don’t need to be psychotically overstimulated.

Drag queens are basically people who need a shit-ton of extra attention and I just may not be in the mood to give it to them that day. It’s one thing to give drag queens attention if you’re at a show because you’re on their turf and they’re performing.

But it’s another thing if some drag queen just walks into the bar making a massive spectacle of herself and looking around the room to see who’s looking at her. This behavior would annoy me if non-drag queens did it so why should I be any more receptive to that behavior if some guy who tucks in his penis does it? When I’m out for the evening, I just want a few drinks and some music and conversation, not to bask in your glow. I guess I’ve just seen enough drag (mostly unwillingly) that some loud, sassy woman in a wig does not impress me. I’ve seen it a staggering number of times. It’s not special.

Drag queens are just narcissists and I’m not going to feed into these people’s narcissism. When you walk into a bar in a beehive and sequins, you’re fishing for compliments and I’m not going to masturbate your ego. Again, if a man wearing men’s clothing walked into a bar and put on a big show and expected applause, you’d call him a douchebag so it’s the same for men in women’s clothes.

I’m not talking about transgendered people here because to my mind, they have gender identity issues that I don’t quite understand but do respect. Transgendered people also don’t walk into a room and draw attention to themselves. If a man goes through the process of becoming a woman, she won’t start wearing a campy ball gown and Tammy Faye makeup; she’ll just wear what women wear and go about her business like a normal person. So I’m fine with the T in GLBTBLTQwhatever.

I guess I just don’t care for people who walk into a room and suck all the air out of it, leaving just enough oxygen so we can all compliment them. Drag shows are fine because they’re performing but if you just show up in a dress, the fuck do you want from me, a shower of confetti? Some behavior is just fucking obnoxious, no matter how you’re dressed.

LOL Rape

The controversy after Daniel Tosh joked about rape in his stand-up act has made me think several things about comedy and art.

Of course I don’t think rape is funny and I don’t think a lot of tragic things are funny but we do joke about them. But I think the essence of black comedy is distancing ourselves from the subject. You could make a tasteless joke about the concept of rape or the rape of a faceless person.

However, I think it crosses more of a line when you joke about a specific person getting raped. So I think it was awful when Tosh pointed out a specific woman in the audience, heckler or not, and said it would be funny if she got raped. Correction: Gang raped. Because it would be funny if like five guys raped her. LOL.

If I’d been at the club, even if I’d left my sense of taste behind and laughed at rape jokes, I think it would shut me up to hear Tosh tell a real live woman it would be funny if she got raped. I don’t think it’s funny to link an awful crime to a specific person standing in front of you. For stand-up comedians, heckling is a cardinal sin but isn’t there a better way to deal with it than saying, “Your rape would amuse me”?

I try making an equivalence between rape jokes and jokes about other awful things. Tosh signed one of his tweets with “dead baby jokes.” If a heckler called him out on a dead baby joke, would anyone find it acceptable if Tosh pointed out a baby in the audience and said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that baby died?” If a heckler objected to a joke about cancer, would anyone find it acceptable if Tosh told the heckler, “Wouldn’t it be funny if you got cancer?”

Is heckling so beyond a pale that it merits the most awful of insults, the modern equivalents to “a pox on your house”?

I understand that audience member should know the style of the comedian they see and in Tosh’s case, the humor can push the line. But accepting any tasteless thing with “That’s just Tosh” can be like the old Onion headline, “Lighten Up, I’m Just Being a Total Asshole.”