Action-Time Movie Reviews!

On the morning of the 4th of July, Ed and I celebrated our freedom by going to see Transformers and The Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. There were a surprising number of people at the theater considering we got there around 9 a.m. I thought I would review these movies for you, but I really don't have much to say about them.
The Fantastic Four movie was fine. There were enough neat effects and strange action scenes to make up for the fact that Dr. Doom is boring and the Invisible Woman is kind of annoying. I imagine that like the first Fantastic Four movie I'll have forgotten what happened by the time the next movie rolls around, but it was entertaining while it was happening.
Transformers was better than I expected. I have no real knowledge about the franchise, so it was weird to watch from the outside as other geeks freaked out. Usually I am the one freaking out! I liked that the robots basically all sounded and acted like cartoon characters because it made them seem like they really were from another planet -- a planet where everyone only has one character trait! Despite being a Michael Bay film, it actually managed to have more depth than a Mountain Dew commercial, which was surprising. I still can't believe that this film is supposedly a big deal, though, and the thought of it spinning off inevitable sequels makes me a little nauseous. Surely it is time for Hollywood to invest in some new intellectual property? Please? I feel like it took a lot of people a lot of time, creative energy and focus groups to craft an suitable family film based around on a premise that came about because someone realized that, amazingly, boys like playing with cars AND playing with robots! I think they had to throw everything they had at this one to make it work, and I don't think a second film will fare nearly as well.
But then, who am I to talk? I have been convinced for years that robots and cars will eventually kill us all.

On Suits

I've never been much of a clothes person. I have historically based my fashion choices first on not wanting to look like someone else and secondly not wanting to spend more than 15 seconds thinking about it. So when I lived in Oregon I wore basically nothing but Hawaiian shirts, and then when I moved to California I started wearing sweaters and my dad's old wool jacket.
Now that I work in an office with a dress code, I have to keep up appearances. I keep my hair short, wear a tie and even bought a belt, after not owning one for years. Looking like everyone else is a different sort of thing. It feels very culturaly specific -- the nuances and rituals associated with dressing nice are fascinating, and comforting in a way. Knowing exactly where the end of my tie should fall (the middle of the belt buckle) gives me confidence that even though I tied it while skateboard down the middle of the street on my way to work, I'll look like a respectable part of the office. It's the same thing with changing out of my skate shoes into the work shoes I keep under my desk. In a very small way, looking professional makes me feel more serious about my job, and more ready to be taken seriously.
The fascinating thing is that looking professional varies from place to place and culture to culture. That's probably a little less true now that suits are standard business attire in most of the world, but what was regarded as professional, serious attire in other times and places would be totally unacceptable in my office today. If I came dressed as a samurai or wearing a fez, I would probably not get away with it.
That bit of historical perspective lets me see wearing a suit and tie as a way of respecting and blending into the culture that surrounds me. It feels a little bit like wearing a costume, but for some reason I like knowing that if I were suddenly transplanted in another time or place, I would not look like part of the establishment as I do now -- perhaps in the distant future in a tie-dyed police state run by facsit hippies I would be arrested for having short hair, being clean shaven and wearing a collar. (I would like someone to make that into a movie!)
For those of us who have always resisted looking or acting just like everyone else, it's useful to realize that clothes are just a tool, and you can use them to your advantage just like anything else. After all, even the best-dressed of us all is still naked at the end of the day!

Six- or eight-thousand years ago THEY LAID DOWN THE LAW

This is just a post to publicly declare that I am a fan of the B-52s.
I know this will come as a disappointment to some members of my family, but please understand that it is just very hard for me to not like a band that yells out strings things that don't make sense in strange voices in complete (if synthetic) sincerity, and furthermore, this does not mean that I like Neil Young any less. He is awesome, too. Just look at him!







ROCK OUT, NEIL YOUNG!

I wonder who would win a fight.

On Running

They say that distance running is all mental. It's not true of course. Chess, perhaps, is all mental. Running is physical. It takes takes bone, muscle, joints, lungs ... and when you run you feel them all.
I ran my third 5k of the summer this morning, adding Villa Park alongside Saddleback and Anaheim. It seems that there's something of a 5k circuit out here and you could run a race every weekend if you wanted to. When I first started running someone told me that you get hooked, and I can now verify that it's true. I like getting up early in the morning and doing stretches. I like hearing hundreds of feet thumping the pavement all around me, and I like passing people. I like finishing and getting a medal.
That's not the race, though.
The race is you and your body. The race is that point where your body doesn't want to go further, but you push on; the race is the point where you are on the verge of giving up, but your body keeps going. The mental and the physical merge. There is a point where it hurts. You are lungs, you are legs, you are running. Your brain -- it's a physical thing, too -- pushes past feedback of pain and impulses to quit. But it's not your brain that's running. Something else drives you further along.
You don't have to be running. You could be still in bed, or surfing the Internet. You could be anywhere.
But you're here, you're running. At some point you will stop, but you haven't stopped yet. You're stretching, you're pushing. And if it's true that we each have a soul, then it must be the part that says "YES" when both mind and body shout "no no no." If it's true, then at the toughest parts of the race, when you walk the line between surrender and victory, when you must embody your intention moment to moment, then if it's true that we each have a soul, at that point, you become soul incarnate. You are gasps, you are strides, you are synapses. You are running.
Running, of course, is not the only time this sort of thing happens, but it has a way of abstracting it and making it easier to understand. The exhaustion I feel when I'm running is similar to how I sometimes feel when I'm writing, but it's easier to push onward when it's my whole body in motion rather than a pencil in a notebook. Running helps me to remember to embody my intentions and live them out. The race is seeing how far you can get, in spite of obstacles and your own resistance.
I met my goal of hitting around 21 minutes today. At the first race of the summer I came it at about 25 minutes, so it's a pretty big improvement. I knew I could get there, I just had to remember to push myself further.