Nice Work

A lot of movies to not see this weekend. Me, I’m not going to see 10,000 B.C., or Forgetting Sarah Marshall, or Baby Mama, or Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, or Iron Man, or Made of Honor, or The Forbidden Kingdom, or Son of Rambow, or Speed Racer, or What Happens in Vegas. In fact, I’m going to let both Iron Man and Speed Racer pass by unseen twice.

That makes roughly 24 hours of extra life to enjoy. An entire day! What a wonderful gift! I shall spend it plotting mischief…

Many of you have inquired, “What do you look like?” A not unreasonable question, at least not when posed by readers of this blog, but disconcerting when asked in person. I don’t know how to answer people who ask me that when standing right in front of me, but for you, my faithful readers, I found a nice portrait.

I admit it’s not a recent picture, but what writer — actual or bloggual — ever has a current photo by his name? Allow me this innocent vanity and I won’t comment on your age-inappropriate t-shirts and baseball caps. You’re looking at a detail of a lively picture by Benjamin West dramatizing General Wolfe Dying on the Plains of Abraham at the Battle of Québec in 1759. The inexperienced surgeon (in black) is futilely attempting to save the boneless General by using a pillow case to staunch a through-and-through cannonball wound the size of a Crenshaw melon. You see me on the right with my comrade-in-arms, Snacker — I’m the one in front with the flowing hair. We look distressed because we are too late. We have brought, in our cupped hands, Wonderful Healing Frogs that abound along the St. Lawrence River. They might well have revived General Wolfe if the bungling ministrations of that young medic had not already settled his hash. I’ve put on a bit of weight since posing for the tableau, and I’ve switched sides in the conflict, but the likeness is still pretty good, so if you meet me on the street, in a cavern, or outside the ruins of an ancient temple, you need only glance at a printout of the picture to know who it is who glares at you.

We’re making the shareholders of Container Store a tad happier this quarter: It’s cardboard box time again. I don’t mind buying and folding and taping all these boxes. No, it’s selecting which items to put in those boxes that makes me feel as if time itself were something else to pack.

But this painful triage of property evokes a pleasant memory: Years ago, sitting with Mary on Oak Street Beach early one summer morning reading aloud from Basho’s Back Roads to Far Towns (aka The Narrow Road to Oku, or Narrow Roads to the Deep North). I’ve never forgotten Basho’s rueful comment on the burden of gifts. Here are four different translations. Plus a song lyric. Plus a scribble.

We barely managed to reach Soka Post Station that night. My greatest trial was the pack I bore on my thin, bony shoulders. I had planned to set out with no baggage at all, but had ended up taking along a paper coat for cold nights, a cotton bath garment, rain gear, and ink and brushes, as well as certain farewell presents, impossible to discard, which simply had to be accepted as burdens on the way. (Translated by Helen Craig McCullough)

The pack of things on my bony, thin shoulders was giving me pain. Setting out with nothing but what I could bear myself, I carried a stout paper raincoat to keep out the chill at night, a cotton kimono, raingear, something in the way of ink and brush - and various things given me as farewell presents and therefore difficult to dispose of. It was the traveler’s dilemma, knowing them a hindrance and unable to throw them away. (Translated by Earl Miner)

What I find most trying is carrying my belongings on my thin, bony shoulders. I set out thinking to travel light, in only what I was clad, but I needed a durable paper coat to keep out the cold at night, a cotton kimono, rainwear, and such things as ink and brushes. Then there were various farewell gifts I could not refuse and cannot very well throw away, so these are burdens I shall have to bear. (Translated by Dorothy Britton)

Thin shoulders feeling packs drag. Body enough, but burdened with a set of kamiko (extra protection at night), yukata, raincoat, ink-stick, brushes as well as unavoidable hanamuke, etc., somehow hard to let go of, part of the trouble in travelling inevitably. (Translated by Cid Corman — this is the one I read on Oak Street Beach. People in the know say it’s a lousy translation, but I’m not in the know, so I like it the best.)

Loudon Wainwright III — Cardboard Boxes

I’m gonna go to the supermarket,
I’m gonna go to the liquor store,
I’m gonna get me some cardboard boxes,
You know what them boxes are for,

We’re gonna move,
We’re gonna move

Give it to the Salvation Army or the Goodwill,
We got so much junk it’s a joke
Wrap a knickknack in some old newspaper
I know it was a present, but the damn thing broke

I’m having so much giddy fun dispensing wisdom, critically examining movies and inserting disinformation into the group mind, that I’ve clean forgotten the original purpose of this blog: the display of my portfolio. (See Inaugural Post)

So, enough tomfoolery. Time to get about our business, and, look: As if on cue, at once appears an example of that business…

I drew this all by myself with my very own hands for none other than the au-GUST Library Journal. Um, can’t recall when I drew it. 2002…? 2003…? Nope, can’t fetch the memory. Must be stored in that hard-to-reach sector of the brain set aside for items that aren’t recent enough for short-term memory but too recent for long-term. In other words: almost everything.

What I do recall is that it was for an article all about how libraries should include “webcasts” in their ever-expanding menu of services. Evidently, after babysitting the community’s two-year-olds and providing shelter for the “transitional housing” crowd, librarians find themselves with time on their hands.

My dear readers, the Nice Work Mailbag is stuffed to overflowing with your questions, comments and gnomic utterances. I read every word — though not in order — and love to hear from you, but time constraints make it impossible to live much beyond the national average life expectancy of 77.1 to 80 years. So I’ve turned over the task of answering your many queries to my good friend and colleague, Dominico Bartelomeno.

Dominico Bartelomeno Answers Your Queries

Dear Nice Work,
Are there monkeys in Hawaii? I ask because I am going to Hawaii and I fear monkeys.
Signed,
Poteet Canyon

Dear Nice Work,
While I was undergoing kidney dialysis last Presidents Day, I saw a terrific movie on the monitor they provide to make the dull hour pass more quickly. I can’t remember anything about the movie except there was a circus performer with no arms who threw knives at his wife with his feet. Can you identify this fine film for me?
J. Tupper

Rented another movie from iTunes. American Gangster. Too bad Apple didn’t let me know in advance of yoinking my money out of my hand that the movie lacked subtitles — I guess you have to trust to luck on getting captions from iTune rentals. Without them I was lost: I neither speak nor understand English. I could tell that the story takes place in America because it wasn’t titled Scandinavian Gangster, but beyond that it’s all guesswork.

Okay. Let’s just do our best. In this genial remake of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Guys and Dolls, Denzel Washington plays Frank, who, in one of the best scenes in the movie, puffs on a cigar in Vietnam. He’s a-travellin’ to the poppy fields of Cambodia.

As so often happens to people when smoking a fine cigar, Frank has a money-making brainstorm: Why not get dead GI’s to smuggle heroin for him? This cuts out the middleman, since the middleman is not alive. In no time Frank becomes very rich indeed. But his life is not all peaches and cream: he has to deal with hotheads likes Cuba Gooding who, in one of the best scenes in the movie, angrily smashes a glass.

Frank’s nemesis is Richie Rich, played with pep by Russell Crowe. In one of the best scenes in the movie, Richie makes a sandwich with tuna straight from the can, dill pickles, mayo and potato chips, all crushed together:

Richie is a Federal Drug Finder hot on the trail of Frank. Here he enjoys a peaceful moment heating up some soup while Henry Kissinger talks on the TV in the background… Oh! I forgot to tell you: All this adventure takes place in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. Everyone smokes and smokes and smokes and smokes.

I must warn you about American Gangster: it’s not all cigars and tuna. There is a great deal of hurting and bruising. For example, in one of the best scenes in the movie a strapping fellow tumbles over a houseplant:

I don’t want to give away the ending where Richie captures Frank and Frank goes to prison for fifteen years, but he becomes friends with Richie anyhow and helps him end police corruption and heroin traffic in New York. I’ll just show you one of the best scenes in the film where Richie and Frank, in 1991, enjoy a couple of Starbucks lattes while strolling through a peaceful, cleaned-up Harlem.

In a nutshell: Good eatin’, good drinkin’, expensive cigars… and dangerous houseplants! Rated R for noodity and profanity and a bloody, bitten hand. I give American Gangster two stars. One star for Ruby Dee as Frank’s Mom, and one star for Josh Brolin’s mustache (it makes him look like Burt Reynolds).

I’d toss in another star if only Denzel had worn an honest-to-gosh sixties ‘fro, but, well, who durst blame the man?

My vow of silence which I observe every First Friday does not allow me to write today. The only way I can get even so much written as this short post is by miming the letters under an optical character reader, and let me tell you: it’s exhausting. So I offer you this hastily scribbled cartoon instead.

The drawing boldly addresses the controversial theme broached yesterday just to show you that I’m not going to let this blog devolve entirely into silliness and self-promotion. Nice Work is not afraid to be frank, candid, irreverent, unabashed, unflinching, unfettered, outspoken and whatever other euphemisms book reviewers use to mean “obnoxious and dismaying.” Yes, we’re going to take up — unflinchingly, I might add — the topic of FERNS.

And now I’ve really got to stop writing. I’m so tired that all the letters are becoming italicized…

Here’s another drawing I’d forgotten about, but found in that fabled cache of Zip disks.

This one was for Workboat back in 2002. Looks like those savvy editors were way ahead of the curve on the no-corn-for-fuel news story that has recently so excercised everyone from Orville Redenbacher to Tony Tiger. There’d be no problem if the environmentalists would just let us grow corn in ANWR.

Dear Reader, I must share my joy with you. A couple of months ago a deep-fried motherboard forced me to purchase a new Mac. Yes, it was a happy day, because, golly, this new Mac is a pip; but it was also a melancholy day, because Jobs’ grinning minions made me cough up American Dollars for it. And wonderful and capacious as this new Mac may be, unlike its late predecessor it does not have a built-in Zip drive, an omission that left me with all my many wonderful drawings from the past decade stored on dozens of parti-colored zip disks, but with no way of accessing them that did not involve releasing American Dollars back into circulation.

Here’s where my joy comes in. While sullenly filling up boxes in preparation for our Big Move (about which more later), I unearthed an ancient 250Mb Zip drive! “How now?” I gasped, then recalled: My Mac previous to the one recently perished was as Zip-free as my present apparatus. It required an external drive, the very one I found yesterday abandoned in a corner of a dusty cabinet among the retorts, skulls, and vials of quicksilver. Be still my beating heart! (And you, kidneys, filter more quietly!) Not only do I get to keep a fistful of American Dollars, and not only am I spared the descent into Geek Hell (i.e., Fry’s et. al.), but now, popping a disk into the wheezing, chattering old mechanism, I get to gaze with wonder at cheerful drawings of mine I had forgotten as completely as that horse-drawn Mac Quadra.

Here is one such archaeological treasure:

Tap it to see it larger. This was for Detroit Metroparent back in 2002.

And now I return to packing boxes…

Did… did you… did you know…?

• Wealthy British entertainer David Bowie, whose birth name was Thomas Major and who grew up in poverty as the son of a coal miner in Newcastle, now owns an island in the Canary Archipelago where he keeps the world’s largest private aviary exclusively dedicated to… canaries!
• Although the longest novel in English, Marienbad My Love, by Texas writer Mark Leach contains over 2.5 million words, it does not include the word “ut.”



• Cats and dogs, widely believed to be “color-blind,” actually can see colors above and below the spectrum visible to humans, which is the reason paranormal emanations sensed only as a galvanic skin response by people are visually detected by their terrified pets.
• Since records started being kept in 1792, the piranha, the most dreaded of the Amazon River’s thirty-five species of man-eating fish, has been gowing in length (average adult) at the rate of one millimeter every ten years!
• Baseball champion George Herman Ruth (1895-1948) — better known as “Babe” Ruth — derived his nickname from his favorite candy bar “Baby Ruth” (a paper sack of which was never far from his hand) — and not the other way around as is popularly believed.
• Actor Fred Gwynn could barely endure the six hour make-up sessions needed to prepare for his part as Herman Munster of the long-running TV sitcom, The Munsters, and so he elected to remain in make-up for the entire five day filming of each episode, returning to his “Fred” face only on weekends!