by James Brush
Category: Random Stuff
The catch-all category for random things about life in Austin, food & drink, politics, the occasional rant, whatever else.
Last weekend we went to Houston for the Periwinkle Foundation’s fundraising gala. Periwinkle provides a free summer camp for childhood cancer patients and their siblings and is truly instrumental in helping kids survive cancer. I’ve been involved with Periwinkle for seventeen years so we decided to chip in with some friends from camp and purchase a table at the gala. It was also a nice break from editing their video, which I am still working on.
The weekend started on Friday night with a private dinner party at Mark’s American Cuisine. Mark’s is a very nice restaurant and had just been named the best restaurant in Houston by Zagat a few days earlier. It’s one of the places where the executive chef (Mark) is a true artist whose medium is food. He comes to camp every year to work with the kids and teach them a bit about cooking, and he ususally cooks something up for us as well. The Friday party was hosted by the camp director and her husband, a pair of Houston physicians whose generosity knows no bounds.
The meal consisted of four courses of some of the most exquisite and delicious food I’ve ever eaten. Most memorable was the dessert my wife ordered (and kindly shared): a perfectly made frosted cake donut sliced into layers and smothered with fresh berries and whipped cream. It’s like Homer Simpson once said: “Donuts. Is there anything they can’t do?”
I wrote this in 2001 after returning to Rhode Island for the first time in eleven years. It was published by Good Gosh Almighty! back in 2003. – JB
The Bridge
Naragansett. Aquidneck. Conanicut. Sakonnet. Quonsett. Just words, yet loaded with a rhythm and meaning nearly forgotten and replaced by the Spanish proper nouns of central Texas. These words decorate the maps of a sliver of America obscured, like a planet too close to some sun, by Massachusetts and Connecticut. That tiny scrap of land, two-thirds water, is Rhode Island.
Rhode Island is miniscule, especially by Texas standards. Driving into the Ocean State two summers ago, getting off 95 in Usequepaug, I realized how much my map had grown. It once seemed a long drive across the state, but within forty minutes, driving at Rhode Island’s tiny 35mph speed limit we reached the Jamestown Bridge, which spanned the Narragansett Bay from the mainland to Conanicut Island.
The thing that struck me hardest was how foreign it all seemed after thirteen years roasting in the big sky heat of the Texas hill country. Quaint little New England farmhouses looking as if they had been set up to make it look more like New England gave way to small towns with used bookstores and refurbished bed-and-breakfasts. White churches with sharp steeples surrounded by headstones hundreds of years older than anything in Texas beckoned to have their pictures taken. Stone fences constructed from the words of Robert Frost marked off fields and lined the roadways that twisted endlessly through large trees beneath a little sky.
At any given stop we were asked, “all set?” by native employees. I used to say it too in my service sector days in Rhode Island, but it was gone now along with quahog, cabinet, bubbler and lav, replaced by y’all, which in Texas does not refer to a two-masted sailing vessel. Now it all just sounded weird. Those who I once considered my people seemed chilly, distant. Summer was still young and perhaps the guards of winter had not yet retreated from the collective soul. “They don’t seem mean,” Rachel observed, refuting the Texas-bred stereotype of the Yankee. “They just aren’t very friendly.”
Coming back after thirteen years forced me to think hard about my birthplace. For years, in Texas, I referred to Rhode Island (pronounced Rho Die-lan) as home. I yearned for its bitter, harsh winters and rejuvenating spring flowers that exploded in wild release to herald the return of birds. I longed for cool autumn evenings filled with the mystery of early dark and large moons hung low over October trees, the strange whisper of winter coming that blew around in piles of fallen leaves.
I was born there, and I went to high school there. It was my first taste of American life after six years spent on overseas naval bases. Driving through in June 2001, however, it didn’t feel like home anymore. I had become used to those Spanish nouns, the interminable yet oddly cleansing heat, wearing shorts in January, not owning more than one coat. I had become used to the ready smiles and open demeanor of Texans. I realized that I loved the wide sky, the rocky canyons, the cedar breaks of the hill country, and even the sight of limitless desert cleaved by that one thin line of highway racing away to Los Angeles or Louisiana with seemingly nothing in between.
We crossed thin Conanicut Island in about five minutes, and coming around the bend, we saw the twin towers of the Newport Bridge. As the bridge came into view, everything changed because on the other side of this graceful suspension lay Aquidneck Island. We paid the two-dollar toll and started onto the bridge, up the slope, peering between the support cables as they raced past us.
Higher we climbed. I held my breath as the rush of familiar sights greeted me. The prim brick Naval War College Buildings of Coaster’s Harbor Island, the white hulls and billowing sails of countless boats dotting the harbors of Jamestown behind us and Newport ahead. Out on the Atlantic, cargo ships drifted ghostlike along the horizon. Dotting the cold blue water of Narragansett Bay far below, we spied boats – hundreds of them – drifting around the lesser islands: Goat, Gould, Prudence, Patience.
Between the spires, on the apex of the arc, we rolled down the windows to drink in the thrilling tang of the cool salt air of summer evening. We listened to the harsh cries of the gulls piercing the drone of our engine and the throbbing sound of the pylons breaking the automobile wind. I wonder if I have ever been so moved by beauty and excitement as when I crossed over the Newport Bridge with my wife next to me and thirteen years of Texas in my soul. I realized I had forgotten much: the tranquil beauty of the bay, the quiet summer nights on Newport’s cobblestone streets, the sound of waves breaking on rocky crags, and the distant buoy bells clanging in the nighttime breeze.
We descended the bridge into Newport, and I realized that this was no ordinary bridge. It was magical, a portal from the rest of the world to the strange sepia-toned photograph reality that goes by one simple word: home.
Texas is where I live, and Austin has a grip on my heart and soul as strong as the ones Newport and Portsmouth once had. I am a Texan and this is home now, but Newport is that special place that answers old yearnings for home, back then, back in the day, old school, hometown, this is where I grew up. I will go back and visit again. Rachel loved Newport at first sight, and I am now reminded of how breathtaking Rhode Island is in all of its tiny grandeur. I do hope, though, that I will always have that same sense of wonder as if seeing Heaven from afar whenever I next cross that bridge from here to a very special there.
© 2001, James Brush
Is it really a roundup if there’s only one movie? Just wondering.
Waiting (Rob McKittrick, 2005)
Shenanigan’s is a restaurant much like Bennigan’s and Waiting is a movie much like Caddyshack.
Waiting is a character driven comedy that recounts one evening shift at a chain restaurant, mostly through the eyes of a new guy being trained by the restaurant’s cool guy waiter. The newcomer is mostly silent and like the audience is a witness to the weirdness of working in the restaurant business.
The funniest aspects of this movie come in the interactions between the different social classes within the restaurant. There is the privileged, yet slacking wait staff, the thugs and psychopaths who work in the kitchen, the wannabe gangsta busboys, the professional manager who obviously settled for less, the seductive high school hostess, and the dishwasher who is a sort of Zen psychotherapist who helps the characters see that their problems tend to lie within. And of course the customers.
It’s funny. Silly. Sometimes disgusting. Frighteningly believable. Three stars.
Democrats accuse Carole Strayhorn of being a Rick-Perry-in-a-skirt conservative. Republicans despise her for being too liberal. It seems to me that if both parties hate her, she may be a good candidate for those of us who want a better Texas, but couldn’t care less about the fortunes of either party.
I think the real reason Strayhorn has earned the ire of the two major parties is the fact that she has, over the course of her career, strayed from both. Quitting both parties is troublesome for partisans when the so-called quitter is one of the most popular politicians in Texas.
I suppose her lack of loyalty to the major parties makes her something of a traitor in their eyes when in actuality having quit both parties is merely a sign that she’s come to her senses.
Strayhorn and fellow independent hopeful Kinky Friedman both need to gather nearly 50,000 signatures to get on the November ballot, and I’ve been going back and forth on whose petition to sign. Here’s the situation:
- Rick Perry (R) must be defeated.
- Chris Bell (D) will lose.
- Friedman will shoot himself in the foot, probably after draining Bell’s support.
- Strayhorn can beat Perry.
In addition to her potential as a candidate, Strayhorn is genuinely interested in doing right by Texas schools and Texas taxpayers. I finally signed Strayhorn’s petition. I still have a lot to learn about Bell, so I don’t know if she’ll get my vote in November, but I’m convinced she deserves a spot on the ballot.
Perhaps in the coming weeks I’ll explore each candidate’s positions in more depth.
Only two this week…
11:14 (Greg Marks, 2003)
At 11:14 pm a car accident takes place near an overpass. It all happens very quickly, and it takes a little while to get into the groove of this fast-paced thriller, which is as much a dark comedy as a meditation on the seemingly random nature of connected events. Director Marks presents a sequence of events out of sequence so that the puzzle for the audience becomes finding the connections in this mystery rather than figuring out whodunit.
It reminded me of several other films such as Outside Ozona, Memento, and Three Days in the Valley that play with the flow of time and seeming random characters as fate veers towards some connecting calamity, but this film keeps within its limits and pushes those tenuous connections to the forefront. Worth watching, but will probably be forgotten in a few months. Three stars.
Good Night, and Good Luck (George Clooney, 2005)
I meant to see Good Night, and Good Luck when it came out, but then it’s one that I figured would play just as well at home. I was right, and that’s no slam on the movie; besides, it seemed especially appropriate to see Good Night, and Good Luck on a television since the film so eloquently takes us back to a time in which television was new and seemed to hold so much promise for those who believed in its power.
Clooney does a masterful job capturing a specific moment in history, that moment when the media still did its job. Shot in black-and-white and set to a bluesy/jazz soundtrack the film immediately evokes the 1950s as I imagine that time to have been. The photography is beautiful (of course there’s nothing cooler looking than people smoking in a well-lit black-and-white movie) and makes this film as enjoyable for its aesthetic value as for its content.
The content, of course, is what makes this movie so important. The viewer must have at least a basic knowledge of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s attacks on America and an awareness of who Edward R Murrow was because it jumps in at the moment when Murrow decides to go after McCarthy at great professional risk to himself and the entire CBS network.
Anyone aware of US history knows how this ends, but it’s interesting to see the role the media played in exposing McCarthy’s corruption and anti-American agenda. Mostly, though, Good Night, and Good Luck is saddening because at its heart is the implicit reminder that the media that once kept a watch on government is gone, now having been replaced by a media establishment whose idea of reporting is nothing more than ‘He said’-‘She said’ without analysis, without questioning, and without seriously taking to task those in power.
Good Night, and Good Luck attempts to remind us that part of the price of freedom is to vigorously question those in power, and that that is why we have a free press.
The saddest truth, though, is that the media gives us exactly what we want. Four and a half stars.
Alas, spring break is over. This year’s spring break was a busy one for me. For the past seventeen years, I’ve been involved with Camp Periwinkle at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. It’s a camp for childhood cancer patients and their siblings. It lasts a week and no expense is spared to create the ultimate camp for these kids who want nothing more than to feel normal and do normal things despite being fragile, bald and swollen with chemo drugs. It doesn’t cost a dime for the kids to go and we roll out the red carpet. My main duty at camp is to do the video production work. This includes training videos, cabin skit videos, some promo work, but mainly a yearbook video. So most of spring break was spent editing our footage from last year’s camp. Usually I’m finished by now so spring breaks are typically spent cycling and goofing off, but a catastrophic hard drive failure on the video editing system left me starting over again about a month ago. So I spent spring break mainly watching kids have fun last summer. It’s cool to see those smiling faces having a rare good time. I laugh with them and the editing goes more quickly and I don’t mind not being outside on gorgeous days. I’m reminded that I can reasonably expect many more. Suddenly spring break ends, and I’m back at work. This year it was different than in previous years. I was actually happy to be back, although I really could use another week to edit.
By sheer force of happenstance (okay, that’s probably not really a force and if it is it’s certainly one of the weaker interactions) our movies for the past week related the stories of screwed up kids, misfits trying to find their way through this mystery called life…
The Goonies (Richard Donner, 1985)
This was actually the first time I’d ever seen The Goonies. I think that if I’d seen it when it came out (and if it had come out a few years earlier) I would have loved it. A group of misfit kids, led by the shy Mikey Walsh search for pirate treasure so they can help their parents buy their homes, which are about to be demolished to make room for a golf course. It’s a sweet, mostly innocent tale of kids caught up in a caper being run by bumbling adult criminals. The kids aren’t too screwed up in this one, but they don’t really fit in either. Finding buried treasure makes up for a lot, though. Three stars.
Thumbsucker (Mike Mills, 2005)
Thumbsucker is so named because Justin sucks his thumb, which is a problem when you’re seventeen. This makes him a screwed-up kid. Justin is smart, but lacks confidence and over the course of this bizarre comedy/drama he tries several solutions including spiritual ones under the guidance of a weird zen dentist dude played by Keanu Reeves. He experiments with ADHD meds and self-medication, trying out different personas on his journey to discover who he is. Justin’s battle to stand free of his thumb is an interesting, at times funny, sometimes flat movie that seemed longer than it was, but ultimately worth the watch. Three and a half stars.
Back to the Future III (Robert Zemeckis, 1990)
Last week we saw Back to the Future II, so this week we had to wrap it up. Back to the Future III is the least interesting of the trilogy, probably because it doesn’t really explore the time travel paradoxes that make the first two so much fun. It’s mainly a western, and in this one Marty finally gets his life in order. Nothing special, but a fun diversion and a fair ending to the series. Two and a half.
Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (George Lucas, 2002)
Now if ever there was a screwed up kid, it’s Anakin Skywalker. This punk gives in to hate, seeks revenge, loses control of his feelings, helps brutal Sith lords, defies his Jedi master, shows off and acts arrogant at every turn. He even slaughters a whole village of Tuskin Raiders. Is it any wonder he grew up to be the most evil man in that distant galaxy?
I loved Star Wars when I was a kid, but I wasn’t as disappointed with these new installments as everyone else I know. For one thing, I didn’t expect much and for another I probably would have skipped the original trilogy if I was the age I am now back in 1977. Unless I had kids, of course. So no, Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones isn’t great, but it’s fun and it works if you’re not looking for more than that. Three stars.
The United States of Leland (Matthew Ryan Hoge, 2003)
The United States of Leland is about a teacher named Pearl Madison (Don Cheadle) who works in a correctional facility. There are plenty of screwed up kids in a place like that and one of them, Leland Fitzgerald (played by Ryan Gosling), is there for murdering a retarded boy. Pearl is an aspiring writer in search of a novel and as he gets to know Leland he thinks he may have it. Following the conversations between Pearl and Leland, the film focuses on the effects of the killing on both the family of the killer and that of his victim.
Sometimes it’s hard to enjoy a movie that mirrors one’s own circumstances (I’m a teacher/writer working in a correctional facility) because it’s so easy to get lost in the that’s-not-really-how-it-is details. This movie gets it right, and with excellent performances by Gosling and Cheadle, as well as Kevin Spacey who plays Leland’s out-of touch novelist father, it’s definitely worth seeing. Four stars.
Jarhead (Sam Mendes, 2005)
Dark, sarcastic military movies almost always go over well with me, and Jarhead is no exception. It follows the basic trajectory of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket from basic training to meaningless war, but where that film lacks a real third act and is overly bitter, Jarhead feels like a complete movie that actually engenders sympathy for its characters as it follows them through 1991’s Operation Desert Shield and into Desert Storm. At times the film is downright funny and other times it’s scary and often sad.
The cinematography in Jarhead is stunning. The empty deserts of Saudi Arabia become a spooky wilderness in which everything including hope seems only a mirage. The most amazing scenes, though, come after the oil fields are set afire providing hellish lighting for the battlefield scenes in which no battles occur. Jarhead is a sort of Apocalypse Now for a new generation and includes several references to that film, most amusingly when a Marine hears The Doors and complains, “that’s Vietnam music, man” and then wonders why they can’t have their own.
At one point, Swofford (Jake Gyllenhaal), the film’s narrator states “all wars are different, all wars are the same,” and so it is with war movies. This one is particularly good though and a powerful reminder of what happens when we send our kids, screwed up and otherwise, off to war. It’s based on Swoford’s memoir of the same name, which I suspect is probably also worth checking out. Four and a half stars.
We spent some time catching up on the Netflix and DVR backlog. Here’s what we saw.
Along Came a Spider (2001, Lee Tamahori)
Along Came a Spider was a pretty cool little detective thriller. Morgan Freeman plays an expert profiler who gets pulled into a case involving a teacher who kidnaps one of his students from an elite Washington, DC school for the children of politicians and diplomats. The movie has some nice twists and clever turns. It’s pretty enjoyable, though I’d almost forgotten it by Sunday evening. Three stars.
Open Water (2003, Chris Kentis)
Yikes. I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie this terrifying. It’s an incredibly tight film based on the true story of a vacationing couple who go SCUBA diving only to come up after their boat has headed home leaving them alone on the open ocean. They float in shark-infested waters for most of the film, clinging to one another while writer/director Chris Kentis expertly builds a palpable feeling of isolation. The film is beautiful to watch and yet the events so hopeless and terrifying that you can’t help but feel that you’re floating there with the two lost divers. Four stars.
Walk the Line (2005, James Mangold)
I’ve always liked Johnny Cash, but knew very little about his life. Walk the Line is a very well done biopic that captures the excitement and fun of Cash’s early career as it quickly degrades into a hell of drug addiction, self-loathing and betrayal. The movie focuses on the romance between Cash and June Carter and his struggle to win her heart. Cash’s music sounds as good as ever and the film does a nice job probing behind the music and into those wells of darkness that Cash drew upon to bring that grim and yet somehow hopeful feel to his music. Four stars.
Coffee and Cigarettes (2003, Jim Jarmusch)
We tried. Coffee and Cigarettes appears to be a series of vignettes in which witty verbose people sit in coffee shops, drinking coffee and yes smoking cigarettes while having tedious conversations. It seems to be slices of life, but not the choice cuts as it were. It’s just the sort of movie everyone back in film school might have been into, talking it up in class and then going back to apartments and dorm rooms to watch Raiders of the Lost Ark. Stopped after ten minutes. Couldn’t take it.
Buffalo 66 (1998, Vincent Gallo)
This one has to grow on you, but unlike Coffee and Cigarettes it does. The film is about Billy Brown (played by Vincent Gallo who also wrote and directed the film) who upon getting out of jail decides to visit his parents. He told them he’s been working for the government and living a successful life so he kidnaps a girl and forces her to pretend to be his wife in order to complete the illusion for his bizarre parents.
The dialogue can be annoyingly repetitive at times, but eventually I stopped noticing and began to enjoy the quirky storyline. I can even forgive the gigantic plot hole, namely the fact that the kidnapped girl, played by Christina Ricci, never once tries to escape despite the fact that she has plenty of opportunities (and reasons) to do so. I guess her curiosity and pity keep her there. Despite all that, it’s an interesting and well made little indy that has fun with the conventions of film, demostrates a wickedly dark sense of humor and yet manages to bring it all together in a very human and satisfying – if not believable – story without ever once coming off as pretentious. Three and a half stars.
Back to the Future 2 (1989, Robert Zemeckis)
I love Back to the Future. It’s one of those franchises they try to get you to hate when you’re in film school, but they’re fun, amusing movies that no amount of academic arm twisting could make me hate. I mean how can you beat Christopher Lloyd, time travel paradoxes, and mean old Biff tearing up the scenery in his bumbling efforts to tear up Marty McFly? Good Stuff. Three stars.