22 January 2006

MICE

(Warning: this is a graphic post, containing excessive violence.)

I discovered a mouse in my apartment last Wednesday. I live in the East Village of NYC, so a mouse is as commonplace as a rich suburban 15-year old posing as a squatter. But me and mice, oh man---

The only other time I'd seen a mouse in my apartment, it was the summer of 2001. I was living in the bucolic armcandy land of Jersey City, New Jersey. It starts harmlessly enough; one mouse rears its misshapen head, and I chase it around for 2 early morning hours with trash cans and spatulas, and call an exterminator in the morning.

In this case, the mouse turned into 15 mice, and stayed all summer. They lived in my walls, my closet, my stove, under the sink, under the couch. 5-10 minutes after the lights went out, they were miniature vultures, eating away at my sleep and sanity.

I saturated the dark corners of my apartment with traps. An exterminator gave us some 'live' traps we couldn't find at our local hardware store; these are traps where the varmint is lured into a comfy haven of peanut butter and darkness and the door closes behind him, and then I carry this shaky Lego contraption to a nearby vacant lot to let him loose. Ironically, our exterminator filled a handful of these traps with poison. That's how they roll in Jersey.


I also lay the glue traps. Glue traps are grisly. Once the mouse steps on it, it tries to use its head and body as leverage to push itself off the trap, and the head and one side of the torso stick. By the time it's found, it's still alive but with but with its legs, forehead and one entire side of their body all attached to this cheap plastic pad.

It's horrifying to catch a mouse with a glue trap. It's awful to see a creature struggle helplessly for its life, and even worse to see it take 15-18 shits in a 4 hour period. Somehow, the first mouse I caught with a glue trap suffered a much, much worse fate...

My ex and I had a small dog. He was nervous with the mice being around, but after the exterminator's visit, it got worse. When mice die of poison, the crawl into the walls and die, and the stink is unbelievable. As constant and unbearable as it was to us, it was a hundred times worse to the dog. He stopped eating, and he stopped sleeping. It got to the point where he curled up in a ball and shuddered nonstop for a few days.

My ex finally took him to her parents. While they were gone, I knew I had to get rid of the smell, but wasn't sure how to get rid of a dead mouse in the walls. And then I stumbled upon a glue trap that I'd forgotten about, hidden underneath a small kitchenette.

In it was a mouse that had been dead for at least 5 days. How did I know? Easy--it was half-eaten by maggots.
*********
Five years later I'm a mouse assassin living a humble life in the East Village. No dog, no wife. I went to great pains to hide my reputation from the rodent community--I buried my copies of 'The Mouse and the Motorcycle' and 'The Secret of NIMH' in the Greenwood Cemetery ages ago.

But the mice came back. And they came back to a fight.

After losing my Wednesday to mouse-chasing, I showed up at the hardware store on Thursday to stock up on traps. Picture me in that 3-minute montage in every A-team episode where BA, Murdoch and Hannibal build some kickass death machine and Face looks on and pretends he knows how to use a screwdriver.

I bought some of the 'live' traps again, for old times sake, plied with sweet chunky peanut butter. But these mice are martyrs and kamikaze pilots--they beg for the glue traps. Once you go glue you never go back.

I discovered that the mice were coming in from the wall underneath my couch, and had been for a while; the collection of droppings looked like a wild rice pilaf. I put some live traps and glue traps underneath the couch and went out. I came back, fell asleep, and woke up to a mess.

The mouse had opted for the glue over the peanut butter. It had pushed itself out into the open, a good *15* feet from where I had lay the trap. and was now underneath my stereo system. I went white.

It took me a couple hours to work up the nerve to collect him. When I did, I found he'd pushed pushed the trap into a small piece of speaker cable that was now stuck in the trap with him. I tried to sweep him into a dustpan with a small broom, and came to the pale realization that the speaker wire was going with the trap unless I found a way to separate the two.

In retrospect, there were probably easier ways to do this, but in the moment, I was freaking and watching a mouse struggle for its life. I came to the irrational conclusion that the only way to make the separation was to put my foot on the trap and yank the speaker cable free. I don't know if my foot was on the edge of the trap or on the mouse itself, and I'll never know, because it went dark for a few seconds.

Somehow I got this mouse into the trash, caught my breath, and tied the bag up. I went underneath my sink for a fresh trash bag, where I keep old grocery bags in a large garbage bag. I opened the cabinet and heard rustling in the plastic--a second mouse had found his way into my collection of garbage bags. I immediately felt relieved; I knew I could simply carry this bag down to the street and let it out alive. After the I put the trash bag in the hall and came back into the apartment to grab my keys.

Well, something odd happened. In the few seconds I was back in my apartment, door standing wide, I heard the trash bag in the hall tip over. I ran back out and sure enough, the bag was on its side. Two seconds later, I saw the mouse emerge from the trash bag, and it was wild-eyed. It looked right at me, then made a break back through the open door of my apartment. I panicked and made a kick at it.

It froze, and fell over, and started squirming. It writhed for 10-15 seconds. In a moment of panic, I slid it out further into the hallway, still convinced it was coming back for my apartment, but it had stopped moving. Then I looked down at the mat outside my apartment door and saw a what looked like a small bloodstain. The lighting in my hallway is dim, so I walked up to the mouse and put my face as close as I could bear so I could see what had happened.

I had kicked the mouse in the face and brained him. Blood dotted his lower jaw and formed a ruby-red smile on its tiny face that looked like wax lips, like Jack Nicholson from Batmouse.

A horrifying experience.

EDIT: But the photo's back up.










16 January 2006

GLOBES

"In times of struggle, a nation turns to its celebrities for guidance." - Winston Churchill

(Ok, Churchill never said that, I say that. I say it often; it's partially for Sean Penn so he falls off his high horse and remembers he's famous for simultaneously learning about Cuba and having some food, the entertainment equivalent of the head pat/belly rub.)

I always watch the Golden Globes because I admittedly dig checking out the celebrities, especially when they're allowed to get trashed. Unfortunately, we are living in the Dark Ages; in the time of the Plague of the Publicist, no one's allowed to act out in front of the camera. Only true visionaries like Russell Crowe have the courage to assault the great unwashed with telephones and threatening accents.

99% of the whole thing is crap, of course. I root for train wrecks and this year disappointed. I do enjoy the nightmare shakes I get from seeing John Travolta, though. Scientologists are hatched from pods, suck blood from babies when no one's looking, and make me wish I'd never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Tarantino got it right in Pulp Fiction: Travolta needs to be shot.

Also recoiled in horror at the Fat Roll call that was the Mariah Carey; I had to close my windows to protect my neighbors from the thundering onslaught of her entrance. The castrated vanilla MC announced that she's nominated for 8 Grammys this year. Really? I hope those things don't turn orange in the Pigpenesque Cheetos dust cloud that encircles her.

(Ladies and gentlemen, I tell fat jokes. Try the veal.)

Oddly enough I also watch in the hopes that one creatively-fueled person will say something earnest about how fun and great it is to make stuff. This year I got my juice from Ang Lee who won for directing Brokeback Mountain, which I saw yesterday and loved. Like every winner, he said he'd forget to thank people, but acknowledged it was okay because that was what his movie was about. That struck me: I like that he carried that weight up on stage; he's been lugging his movie around for awhile, I'm guessing.

It does matter to me that people who make stuff feel the heft of what they've done and shoulder it. there's an agony that comes with pushing shit off from shore. it can eat away at people, and maybe that's why I watch these things: to watch people get eaten.

(although maybe it's Mariah doin' the noshin'! Huzzah! Rimshotcrashburp!)

11 January 2006

QUOTE

"Is it gonna be about food?"

Kurt Cobain to "Weird Al" Yankovic, when Al called and asked for permission to record 'Smells Like Nirvana'.

This is old news, by the way. Move along.

WOO-HOO

I just signed my 'Stipulation of Settlement'! My divorce is still proceeding! I have no idea where I am in the process, but I'm happy.

06 January 2006

50 WESTERNS

So here's how it went down.

Right now I'm listening to Calexico's 'The Black Light'. Short of Ennio Morricone, this is the best music I've heard that evokes the big red deep blue West. Wait...

Right now I'm listening to Ennio Morricone.

This idea was launched in December of 2004 when I saw John Ford's The Searchers, which remains one of the greatest 200-3000 movies ever made. I had recently signed up for membership at Film Forum, who had sent me a glossy mailing that the Mother-of-all Western retrospectives was coming in March. I went to the theater for 12 movies that month, and my mouth went dry.

How'd I make my list? After seeing what I could at Film Forum, I consulted the imdb Top 50 Westerns and this pretty handy article. I also saw a handful that came on Turner Classic Movies that seemed to rate pretty well.

I originally went to these movies because they feature our country at its prettiest as backdrop, some great acting, some delicious quotes...but I vividly remember walking home from Film Forum with shotgun pregnancies of whiskey women and cigarette kids. Brain killers and smoke, these killer movies. 80,000 cigarettes and cigars, and the 250-odd bottles o' whiskey--this is chainsmoking, vice-forging cinema.

Summer's not a good time to see movies, though, and before I knew it I had almost half the list to go and November 1st was upon me. I pulled it out with 8 in November and 15 of the damn things in December, including 5 between christmas and new years. I took 'Pursued' starring Robert Mitchum to Baltimore and forced my family to watch it on Christmas night.

THE ACTORS:

9 of my 50 Westerns went to John Wayne. The guy is an awful legend, but no one looms larger over 'larger than life' than John Wayne. It's pretty difficult watching the guy deliver monologues or kiss the girl, but for the spiritual hatred and beauty that possessed the lion's share of my viewing, John Wayne is your guy. His image is softened up in the DVD commentary to Repo Man, where director Alex Cox insists that this exchange from the movie--

Miller: John Wayne was a fag.
All: The hell he was.
Miller: He was, too, you boys. I installed two-way mirrors in his pad in Brentwood, and he come to the door in a dress.

--is 100% true in real life.

I did a little counting, and three other guys made it into 7 of the movies I chose: Jimmy Stewart, Walter Brennan and Clint Eastwood. Jimmy Stewart rules the Western--he made 5 with Anthony Mann (i saw 4) that are taut, dark and entertaining. In general, I was more impressed by the the Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart movies than most anything I saw. Walter Brennan is a famous mushmouth character actor--he steals every scene he's in, if you can understand what the hell he's saying. Great characters too. In Red River, he loses his teeth playing poker, than later cracks a whip on a guy for stealing sugar.

I was most ambivalent about Clint Eastwood. As The Man With No Name in Sergio Leone's trilogy, he rules the school and makes cigars tasty and essential survival tools, like they're chocolate oxygen tubes he needs to be able to breathe in the windswept sand. In his own movies, though, he self-parodies (High Plains Drifter, which I still liked) or he proselytizes about the war with jaw-breaking metaphors that a 7-year old would groan at (The Outlaw Josey Wales, in this case, but see any '70s movie I guess.) I also didn't think much of Unforgiven, but I saw it on a plane with a cold and no sleep.

My top 5 actors who had no business being in a Western:

(5) Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. He creeps me out in general. Although you could scarcely call this buddy pic a Western, I insist that you do. Really.

(4) Hugh Beaumont in Night Passage. He was a scarier bad guy in "Leave it to Beaver".

(3) Yul Brynner - The Magnificent Seven. Not much of a cowpuncher growing up in Vladivostok, from what I understand.

(2) Robert Preston - Junior Bonner. sandwiched between 'The Music Man' and 'Victor/Victoria' in his flamboyant career, I was a little unconvinced.

(1) Jack Lemmon - Cowboy. Just plain wrong. In my mind, Jack Lemmon has become 100% synonymous with the annoying Shelley in Glengarry Glen Ross. I want him out of my movie.


DIRECTORS:

Many artsy-fartsy European directors have pointed to the Westerns made in the '40s and '50s as influences, and it has a lot to do with the guys making them. John Ford is the Papa Homer of the Western, and in addition to last year's Searchers, I saw 6 more of his this year. Closely on his heels is the aforementioned Anthony Mann (5), the first of which (Winchester '73) is credited for revitalizing the genre in the mid to late '50s. (I have no sources). And with great effect too - from that point on, it was no longer cowboys vs. Injuns or sheriffs against outlaws, it was bad guys against bad guys against themselves. In Anthony Mann's style, the West is highlighted not as a land of opportunity or a place to seek revenge, but as a place to escape mistakes, secrets, and painful memories.

I ate up the four famous Sergio Leones I saw--Spaghetti oh, those were delicious. Howard Hawks, who has directed some of the funniest comedies ever made and the original Scarface, made my list 4 times too. Also saw a three Clints, three Peckinpahs, three from John Sturges, and in the final week, because they're gracefully all under 80 minutes long, a trio of brazen Budd Boetticher movies starring the kickass Randolph Scott. These are highly recommended.

*************
So what did I take from all this? I had a blast -- so many movies made by great directors where the plots and storylines are all predetermined and limited to a few classic storylines. I loved the mythologizing and hero-making foisted upon me; it made for riotously entertaining viewing, and in some cases high unintentional comedy (especially 'Shane').

At the same time, those limitations and conventions force the good directors to tell stories that expose the underbelly of our unshaven, unshowered species. What's left is an inherent ugliness which is all too recognizable in the world I live in.

Vonnegut once told a guy (or maybe it was me in a book) that he could say whatever he wanted without as long as he put it in a sci-fi story--the genre would guarantee it wouldn't get taken seriously. That's more or less what happened with the cowboys--by throwing them in spurs and holsters and putting them on horses, you can make hateful but true things come out of their mouth without upsetting anyone.

**************

So there are deleterious effects of doing 50 of anything in a year. First of all, I believed the bullshit I just wrote in that last paragraph. I'm destined to walk around in all of 2006 with a faraway, unreachable sense of purpose. I'm 10 days in and have just given myself anxiety attacks. I haven't had a good night of sleep since Custer was killed.

I drank a shitload of Early Times bourbon this year. Aside from the Film Forum marathon in March, I watched most of these at home, and a Western is, at its essence, a drinking game. Early Times is sweet and cheap, and I'm still recovering; I'm showering with chamomile oil and planting rosehips in my windowbox this year.

Finally, I'm convinced that Lee van Cleef is trying to kill me.

******************************

So here are my 10 favorites from this year. (Three I've seen in previous years--The Searchers, The Wild Bunch and McCabe and Mrs. Miller--would figure prominently in this list.)

10 (tie)-Forty Guns, Samuel Fuller/The Far Country, Anthony Mann/Ride Lonesome, Budd Boetticher. I saw these during the sprint to the finish, after Christmas and before New Years. I scarcely remember what happened, but these are grisly and efficient Noir/Westerns . At this point I just wanted to be finished, so the fact that they all exceeded expectations has to mean something.

9 - Bad Day at Black Rock, John Sturges. This was a quiet, noirish Twilight-Zone entry starring Spencer Tracy. The first one I saw this year, and kept with me all year. At Thanksgiving, someone suggested this wasn't a Western, leading to a bloodbath of a fight. I feel safe with my 50, but watched the first two seasons of "Deadwood" this year to compensate. (I highly recommend Deadwood, btw.)

8 - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Sergio Leone. Nothing to be said here - I feel like I'm the last guy who saw this one.

7- The Great Silence, Sergio Corbucci. Unlike anything I've ever seen. The whole thing takes place in piles of snow. Klaus Kinski is awesomely unsettling as the bad guy. And best - 'The Great Silence' is a *guy*. A deaf/mute killer, to be specific.

6- The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Ford. Jimmy Stewart+John Wayne. A near gunfight over meat. Yes! a classic.

5 - The Naked Spur, Anthony Mann. Along with 'The Ox-Bow Incident', this was the darkest and ugliest one I saw. For those who think of 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington' when they think of Jimmy Stewart, you're in for a brutal surprise.

4 - My Darling Clementine, John Ford. The perfect rendering of the famous Wyatt Earp/Doc Holliday/Clantons showdown, starring Henry Fonda.

3 - Stagecoach, John Ford. This probably gets extra points for being the first one I saw in the theater, but this is historically considered the movie that re-launched the Western in the '40s/early '50s. Deeply felt and beautifully shot.

2 - Once Upon a Time in the West, Sergio Leone. Note to Hollywood: Put someone like Charles Bronson in a movie and name him 'Harmonica', and you have my box office. Beyond that this movie is rich and heartless, and features an exceptionally heartless Henry Fonda as evil. About the death of the West, this is the one I should've seen last.

1 - Ride the High Country, Sam Peckinpah. Did I use the word 'resonate' yet? No? okay. Wait...I did just now? Shit. Somehow stood head-and-shoulders over everything else. Everything I enjoyed in one of the other 49, this one somehow had more of that everything. All I can say is, I also should have seen this one last, because when I walked out of the theater, I knew it would be #1.

Here's the rest of the list by director:

Howard Hawks - Rio Bravo, Red River, El Dorado, Sergeant York
John Ford - Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande (The 'Cavalry Trilogy')
Anthony Mann - Winchester '73, Man from Laramie, Man of the West
Clint Eastwood - High Plains Drifter, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven
Sergio Leone - A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More
Sam Peckinpah - Junior Bonner, The Ballad of Cable Hogue
Budd Boetticher - The Tall T, Comanche Station
John Sturges - The Magnificent Seven, Gunfight at the OK Corral
Delmer Daves - 3:10 to Yuma, Cowboy
Fred Zinneman - High Noon
George Stevens - Shane
Raoul Walsh - Pursued
William Wyler - The Westerner
William Wellman - The Ox-bow Incident
Henry King - The Gunfighter
King Vidor - Duel in the Sun
Fritz Lang - Rancho Notorious
Ted Post - Hang 'em High
George Marshall - Destry Rides Again (features an awesome catfight w/ Marlene Dietrich)James Neilson - Night Passage
John Farrow - Hondo
Arthur Penn - Little Big Man
George Roy Hill - Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Mel Brooks - Blazing Saddles



So......what did everyone else do last year?