Friday and Saturday I ran with Team Velociraptors in the 2010 Ragnar Relay NWP.  “NWP” stands for “Northwest Passage”, and it’s one of a handful of Ragnar events around the country in which teams of twelve runners run continuously for around 30 hours or so, in legs of 3 to 9 miles.

This event started at Blaine, right next to the Peace Arch at the Canadian border, and ended in Langley, on the southern tip of Whidbey Island.  In between we ran through Bellingham, the lovely Skagit Valley, Anacortes, La Conner, across Deception Pass, and up and down the hills of Whidbey Island.

I got hooked up with the team thanks to fellow runner and friend Chris Pothering, who I met on Daily Mile 6-odd months ago.  I signed up for the relay probably 5 months ago.  So of course I did most of my logistical race prep on Thursday.  Hey, there’s nothing like the last minute to get your adrenaline flowing!

Half of our team rode up Thursday night with Paul and Jenny Ingram in their Odyssey and overnighted in Bellingham.  The other half of the team came up early Friday morning.  I was in Van #2, the one that rode up Thursday night, along with Paul, Jenny, Chris, Joel, Leslie, Terry.  I’d previously only met Chris, Joel, and Leslie, but instantly became good friends with Paul and Jenny.  Paul was our driver, navigator, support staff, cheerleader-in-chief, and humorist all rolled into one.  He made the race so much better and saved the runners from having to double duty as drivers in between their legs.

On the way up to Bellingham we stopped for dinner at Claim Jumper and I had a 12-lb chicken fried steak.  More on that later. (ed: foreshadowing? Isn’t that kind of unnecessary in a blog post? Me: no way!)

Friday morning we made our way to the starting line and I was immediately taken with all the wild, creative decorating that some of the teams did to their vans.  Jenny went to work decorating our van and drew a scary dinosaur on our van with some window paint, along with our team name and other fun stuff.  Secondarily, I was blown away by some of the costumes.  One of the teams was “The Petting Zoo”, and they ran in animal costumes.  One guy, the cow, had udders coming out of his stomach area.  There were cavemen, cheerleaders, princesses, wild-haired rockers, whores, and several other themes I can’t remember.  I should have taken more photos.

Brad, from Van #1, started us off in Blaine and then we in Van #2 did the smart thing and went right to a Starbucks for some coffee.  Oh wait, we went to Target first and got a van-top carryall since we packed way too much stuff.  But then to Starbucks.  As we were drinking our coffee we got into a game where we tried to throw a scrunched-up pastry bag into the trash can and I’m proud to say I had the shot of the century – an up-in-the-air, off-the-chair toilet-bowl-flush shot.  Jenny captured it on video.

Then to Exchange 6, where we cheered on Katie and sent off Joel on Leg 7.  We picked up Chris, who had ridden in Van #1 to run Leg #4 since we only had 11 runners.  One of our team had to back out at the last minute so three of our runners – Chris, Leslie, and Katie – each picked up a fourth leg.  Superhuman.

My first leg, #10, was a shortish but hot leg at about 4:00 PM and I of course started out too fast, but realized it early enough to not kill the rest of my relay.  I had predicted 11-minute miles on average across all three legs, but I think I came in under that overall and felt pretty fit.  My main complaint on all three legs was tightness/creakiness in my knees and hamstrings.  And getting out there and running, just running, was freeing and fun and wonderful.  I was nervous going into each leg – what if I’m too slow?  What if I get lost?  What if I trip and injure myself?  – but once I started, all worries went away and I was just, you know, out there, one with nature and the team and the race.

At about 10:00 PM Friday night we got 45 minutes of sleep at Exchange 18, then were off again.  I ran Leg 22 at about 2:30 AM, in beautifully cool weather, under a nearly-full moon, just outside Anacortes.  That was my favorite leg.

We got about 3 more hours of sleep at Exchange 30 in Coupeville, in a gym at the Coupeville Middle School.  For some odd reason the fire alarm went off a couple times, but I slept like a rock, even on the hard gym floor.

By the time I got started on Leg 34, near Langley, I was feeling damned good (mentally) and not nearly as bad as I had feared (physically).  My legs were tired, but I knew I could finish.  Even a brutal hill in the middle of the leg didn’t diminish my confidence, and I notched up a few “kills” (where you pass another runner) on that hill.  Speaking of kills, I was negative for the race, due to some speedy jackrabbits in later-starting teams, but I passed enough people that I was only mildly negative.

Funniest moment?  For me, there were a few.  One was when we watched this video of the “full on double rainbow” guy.  Another was before Leg 33.  We had dropped off Terry and went to a little store for coffee.  I had filled up four large coffee cups with drip and cream before Paul realized there was espresso further back in the store.  I went ahead and bought the coffee anyway, since I’d sort of committed myself.  Then at the Leg 33 parking area, the van in front of us looked at my coffee cup and said “Oh my god, that looks so good” and I took the opportunity to give away the extra hot coffee.  Good karma and all that.  Then I went to the port-a-potty and spent a few choice minutes getting reacquainted with my chicken fried steak, so to say.  Feeling a few pounds lighter, I made my way to the handoff area and this exchange took place:

Jenny: So, you got rid of it.

Me: Yeah!

Jenny: The coffee.

Me: (confused) No, the chicken fried steak.

Jenny: (confused)

Me: (confused)

Then I doubled up with laughter.  She was referring to me giving away the extra coffee, but I was referring to, well, something else. Too funny.

A few other things that were memorable: holding flowers out for the runners as they came up for water.  Learning how to best support runners by leapfrogging in the van and being ready with water or Gatorade.  Tapping the one-mile-out markers as I ran by them, for good luck.  Not stopping to walk, even on hills.  Getting caught with my pants down as I was changing out of my sweaty running clothes at the start of Leg 24, when the van parked behind us turned on the lights.  Oops!

Most of all, I just loved the team, the camaraderie, the together-ness of it all, and the pure joyous act of running.  Many or most of us are at least interested in doing it again next year, and I know for sure I’m going to be in Blaine next July.

This past Friday I attended the avant-garde play Les Chanterelles, held at Le Magisterieux, in Rouen.  This was day one-hundred twelve of the production; a lifetime in theater terms.  This longevity speaks not only to the essential quality of the play, about which I’ll speak more later, but also about the uneasy, complex, and at times contentious relationship between regional French theaters and the capital city of Paris, which captures almost all artistic attention in France (and indeed, Europe). Rouen, in fact, is among the smallest of the regional theaters; the city’s population barely surpasses six figures, and yet is home to a vibrant artistic scene.

When assessing the reasons for this, Paris, of course, figures large: without Paris as counterpoint, the regional directors and playwrights would likely lose some of the combative motivation that results in output like Les Chanterelles.  Paris is the sun, the center, the gravity well, capturing light and heat.   To make a name for themselves, regional centers must needs abandon tried-and-true formulations, me-too second runs, and produce an essentially new creative spark.

The playwright and directeur of Les Chanterelles, one M. Toilé, has done just that, with a baffling, epic production.  At 8:10 PM I filed in to Le Magisterieux with about 250 others – locals, mostly, but, owing to the growing reputation of the play and the director, also many out-of-town critics from places like Berlin and New York and St. Petersburg.  I was warned beforehand by the proprietress of the hotel I was staying at that black tie was absolutely the fashion, and I was glad, for the rule was ostentatiously followed.  Again with an eye to the larger sister to the southeast, the crowd was formal, aggrandized, overflowingly so to my Seattle eye.  Like many American theater crowds with which I am familiar, among the audience there was much craning of necks and wide-eyed, unsubtle analysis of each other prior to the curtain – a shared transatlantic preoccupation, a bourgeois comparison.  Whispers are exchanged, low and urgent; one never knows what anyone else is thinking, but a gestalt emerges, that of an audience overly concerned with self-image and style.

Apparently the norm in Rouen is for men of a certain age to leave their wives at home, all fleshy arms and sagging bosoms, and bring mistresses twenty years their junior, bedecked in resplendent gowns, sparkling jewels, pale swanlike necks standing out in sharp contrast to the jowly countenances of the bankers and opticians that make up the merchant class in town.  I am not sure what to make of this other than as yet another attempt at visible ostentation.

The lights dim, once, twice; the curtain is drawn.  Immediately one is confronted with a Fauvist explosion; elephants, oxen, great swaddling pelicans on pink leashes parade across the stage, keepers swathed all in black, deprecating, imploring the animals to not trample each other, the backdrop, or (god forbid) the audience.  Girls dance and twirl about, throwing bright ribbons high in the air; from the pit comes a clash of trumpets and great booming drums.  Spotlights swirl and weave menacingly.  All is confusion for ten minutes.  Not once did I (knowingly) see the same animal being led.  Where do they stable these beasts?  What sort of municipal negotiations must have taken place to allow this amazing display to take place.

Then, silence; dark.  A more sedate scene follows, in which lovelies of various heights and stage of dress take places on stage right and alternately beckon and vamp to the audience, or standoffishly look off into the distance, pointedly distracted by their hair or nails or the straps on their extravagant footwear.  From left, accompanied by yet more drums, come a shambles of hirsute, older men, forties or fifties perhaps, carrying hammers or pickaxes or large plumbing wrenches, some rolling large stone wheels, others carrying furniture.  Motorcycles and televisions in various states of disrepair are set about in random patterns. Shirtless and sweating, they make a show of workmanlike obsession over their various implements, casting longing looks leftward at the now incautiously interested actresses, some of whom perform complex intertwined arabesques, orbiting closer and closer to the men.   An odd sort of sexual tension begins to develop as these young women pose and gesture and lean over suggestively as they approach nearer and nearer to the men, whose interests are obviously heightened.  One can almost smell the mixture of male sweat and female perfume from the middle rows.   There is a coquettish aura, and one wonders at the seriousness of the ladies, but the interactions become more and more physical, always – always! – directed by the women.  Crude attentions grow more and more pronounced, in the form of pawing and groping.

And then, all of a sudden, the interest wanes.  The women retreat to the right; the men, making a show of confusion and hurt, return to hammering and manual labor for a minute or two, then wander off, eyes occasionally cast back over hairy shoulders to reassess whether anything,can be made of the attentions formerly paid to them.  Nothing is forthcoming.  One marvels at the change, the interruptus, as it were. As soon as the last bureau is carried off stage left, the women spring to life, in an audience-participation mode, and engage the first several rows in leering displays of physicality – daring displays of thigh and breast and shoulder; opened mouths showing glistening white teeth; tongues and eyelashes and fingernails all using every flirtatious trick to get the viewers to reciprocate.  And they do.  Women lean forward and expose décolletage; men leer, gape-mouthed, and roar and growl and paw the air.  The cacophony swells to the very rear of the house, a frenzy of invitation and bluntly suggested carnality.  And then, abruptly – darkness again.  The Grand Tease, as this scene is known to the critics, shuts off.

(I am told that the male roles are mostly drawn from the ranks of itinerant laborers or out-of-work tradesmen.  Despite the meager pay (twelve euros per evening), and the built-in embarrassment of appearing shirtless, hairy, and emasculated evening after evening, the line to audition stretches around the block on Tuesday mornings.)

This back-and-forth, hot-and-cold is intentional.  M. Toilé has stated as much.  In an interview with Le Monde, he was quoted:

Unpredictability is the key to Les Chanterelles.  With unpredictability comes power.  As in Nature, which is subject to the laws of entropy, in which all falls apart, devolves, decomposes, we establish an anti-order in our production, and the audience is compelled to give their allegiance, as it were, to the mirror we hold up.  The unpredictable – the chaotic – cannot be controlled, guided, or influenced; it is arbitrary, capricious and in a way mirrors our conception of God, the god of shifting moods, of terrible vengeances intermingled with great kindnesses.  It is for this reason that I think we have had unrivalled success thus far.

To serve the purposes of unpredictability, on certain alternate nights the play’s format shifts.  On the evening I attended, the focus was on the ensemble, but other evenings the female presence is personified by a single individual. Sometimes she is a dark, venomous character, sliding balefully in and among her male counterparts, blackly condescending to expose herself physically and coarsely; on other nights she arrives as a sylvan maiden, trailing fairy dust, with a retinue of dwarves representing frogs and butterflies and other peaceful forest-creatures.  Children stand with arms clasped high overhead, index fingers pointed heavenward, waving slightly to and fro (they are lilies).  Pale skin plays off the dark backgrounds.  On these nights, the female lead still engages the audience, and the effort required for a single person, no matter how sexually endowed, to engage an entire theater in a a gasping, panting furor is such that the female leads require one week’s rest for each night they perform.  M. Toilé must have secured the services of every beauty in northern France to pull off such a stunt for so many months running.

What to make of the production?  It is a spectacle, to be sure.  Repetitions of the basic plot – crude and clueless male attention, calculated female unpredictability – repeats itself across two acts, in varying ways and intensities.   Clothing and skin are more or less interchangeable, most nights.  The play is suffused with sadness – real feelings, individual feelings, are submerged to the needs of the collective, the body, the symbolism.  However, I am heartened that an attempt so unusual – let’s face it, so abnormal – has garnered the attention and success it has, in a provincial outpost like Rouen.

It is curious that a playwright like M. Toilé, raised in the divertissement school of French theater, should have created a play so unamusing, so lacking in frivolity.  Even the nominally absurdist elements, like the parade of animals, evoke not smiles, but a wary concern.

Next for M. Toilé?  Uncertain prospects.  To say that Montmartre has yet to come calling is an understatement; in fact, the cold reception to Les Chanterelles in the mainstream Paris press is pointed and unflinching.  There are rumors of a production in the making in Lyon, or perhaps it is Marseilles.  It is certain that the trendy and fickle American audiences in New York or (especially) Los Angeles, with its Francophile-worship, would welcome M. Toilé with something more than a warm embrace, should he decide to make the trip; but he seems serious about conquering his home nation first, evening by evening.

White Noise won the National Book Award in 1985.  That fact alone encapsulates my brooding ambivalence over the novel – in some cases, the winner has been spectacular (“Gravity’s Rainbow”, 1974, “Mating”, 1992), and in other cases, yawn-inducing (“The Corrections”, 2001).

This novel scratches at me, claws at me, preening, posing, looking at itself in the mirror, saying “aren’t I the bees knees?” and I want to answer yes, yes, you are, and pick it up, pet it, re-read it, gush about it to friends and – and yet.  I can’t, not yet.  Why not?

Let’s start with what works.  The prose – the craft – is amazing and sharp and clever and demonstrates that DeLillo is a master, a composer, a five-tool player.  I especially enjoyed the artful way he used repetition to set the mood.  For some reason Steffie’s burnt toast sticks out in my mind as an exemplar.  Murray’s riffs on our supermarket culture, Babette’s forgetfulness, and Jack’s German lessons all come to mind.

That reminds me of another thing I liked about this book, and about DeLillo in general – he does not back down from an uncomfortable moment.  Did you also squirm a bit when he described Howard Dunlop actually reaching into Jack’s mouth and adjusting his tongue?  Or Murray’s negotiations with the car of prostitutes during the Airborne Toxic Event? Elsewhere in the book he describes how Steffie can not bear to watch uncomfortable or embarrassing scenes on the television, and has to leave the room and get a recap from another family member.  Shades and mirrors.  DeLillo’s scenes aren’t pornographic, or gratuitous, or titillating, or off-key, but they are unflinching, unwavering, and powerful.

Speaking of uncomfortable, now is the part where I tell what I didn’t care for, what kept the book from being one of the Best Ever, limited to the bookshelf of the Merely Good.  First, I felt like the three parts of the book didn’t cohere.  That would be the banal look at the modern American family; the Airborne Toxic Event and its aftermath, and the quest for the Dylar and the absurdist proto-murder scene in the motel in Iron City.  I know that DeLillo intended for the underlying theme to be the fear of the death, the massive denial and incompetence we (Americans?) display in the face of the inevitable; to indicate, somehow, that we are all already complicit in our  own deaths without even realizing it.  Death permeates the novel, in plot and themes and connotations: The Airborne Toxic Event.  Babette’s and Jack’s obsessions. Dylar, the medicine that gives us victory over the fear of death. Jack’s career as chair of the Hitler Studies department. Heinrich’s chess-by-mail match with convicted murderer Tommy Roy Foster; the disappearance of Old Man Treadwell and his wife for four days (ironically trapped in that ultimate modern death-totem, the shopping mall).  The SIMUVAC team and the pretend-dead, including Steffie, in the middle of the street.

It’s a great idea, but falls short.

I want it to work.  Like any serious appreciator of the language and form, I want this  book to be the best ever.  It has its moments.  But even among National Book Award winners, the two I’ve previously mentioned outpace it.  Perhaps the disjointedness of the foreground plot is the only thing that is lacking, but even so, it’s a breach, a small one, in the greatness of the novel.

I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on White Noise. What worked for you?  What didn’t?  Would you place it among the short list of Greatest Modern American Novels?

Just finished watching 2009’s Paper Heart, the first movie from the young comedian/musician/performer Charlyne Yi.  It’s a “hybrid documentary” – part documentary, part augmented creative output, part too-clever-by-half self-referential Sundance-y journey of self-discovery minus the little yellow bus.  The film chronicles her attempt to find out about love, what creates it, sustains it, and makes it known; and specifically about herself.  Charlyne – “Chuck” – has never been in love; she feels deficient, defective; wonders if she’s missing key chemicals; wonders if she’ll ever love or be loved.  It’s sad.

She and director Nicholas Jasenovec, played by Jake Johnson, travel around the country asking people things like “how do you know you’re in love"?”.  Interspersed with the interviews are puppet-show sequences that nominally describe stories from the interviewees.  I’m guessing Seattle Weekly editors rolled their eyes when they watched the movie, but I thought they were creative.

That’s the structure.  The key drama begins to take shape when she meets fellow quirky young thing Michael Cera at a party; the film shifts gears to document their growing (actual) courtship.  They’re cute and awkward; they do and say mad stupid things to each other that I can only imagine people in L.A. doing or saying; they move from tight, uncomfortable silences to hammy home-video montage, they eat pizza; they kiss.

It’s sincerely derivative.  Yet, at the same time, Charlyne is such an enigma that one can’t help but wonder:  Is she really this awkward in real life?  I found myself thinking about her creative output, the shows she presents, and wondering if there isn’t some vast reservoir of creative genius that lurks behind the monotonicity of her interactions.  A few times, when she’s laughing, authentically laughing, I “got” the attraction.

Best part for me: right near the end of the film, Charlyne puts on a melodramatic puppet show, and in the voiceover, she says:

Life is too short to be wondering “what if?”. Sometimes you just gotta live and see what happens, even if you get hurt. Sometimes you can only feel something if you take a risk.

This is not Charlyne speaking, not the Charlyne of the first 88 minutes of the film, anyway.  Could it be who she really is, beneath the careful exterior management? Fascinating.

For me, for now, right now, this passage is advisory, confirming notions rolling around in my head about love, relationships, people.  Don’t be afraid of risk.  Realize that yes, life is very fucking short.  Risk getting hurt.  Be authentic.

I’ll let you know how it goes.  My journey won’t end up in Park City next January, but you may find enough pieces here to construct your own documentary.

The pursuit continues.

This review scares me.  The writing of it.  The thinking through my innumerable complex reactions to an amazing evening this past Friday, when I joined with a few hundred others at Kane Hall to hear readings from selected writers at the concluding event of the 2009-2010 Hugo House Literary Series.

The theme: Laws of Attraction.

The writers: Leslie Fried, Emily Warn, Phillip Lopate, and Marya Sea Kaminski.

My reaction: fucking bloody priceless.

I can’t tell you precisely, not yet, why I was so moved by this event.  I feel stripped clean, naked, exposed, all my sentences already cliché, all my rhetorical gestures previously caught on camera, acted out by other people.  I feel traumatized – my own life reflected back at me with all the ugly details outlined in red wax pencil.  But I am getting ahead of myself.  Let’s start with the readings themselves, and break my generally-held principle of first diving into the meta-explanations.  Sometimes the importance of the thing is the thing itself, no?

The writers were lovely, talented, artists and craftspeople all.  I was immediately taken by Leslie Fried’s poems; unflinchingly real, driven, purposeful, bringing life from the page, out of the microphone, and into our collective conscious. She is, and I was glad to be able to tell her in person at the reception, a worthy winner of the recent New Works Competition. Emily Warn’s poems affected me less deeply; perhaps the subject matter – rural tasks, Jewish mysticism, lesbian marginalia – was less familiar to me.  Phillip Lopate, recognizable from his accent as hailing from some distant New England province, was warm, funny, sincere, successfully mixing historical reflection with swift wit in two essays on affectation and obsession.  I tweeted one of his priceless lines at the time, and am still smiling two days later.

But I reserve – as is my right, being the Sole Blogger Around These Parts – my highest praise for the concluding work, by Marya Sea Kaminski, an actor, writer, and performer, who gave a superb presentation, a pastiche of sorts in three segments: part one, a tongue-in-cheek, slightly cynical recap of the “laws” of attraction; part two, a heartfelt, nakedly honest review of her own struggles with attraction (yes, it can be a struggle, both the seeking AND the finding); and part three, a sepia-toned memoir of her great-aunt and –uncle in 1950’s Philadelphia  and beyond.  Marya (pronounced, as I came to find out, ma-RYE-ah, like Mariah Carey, although I’m guessing that an actor as apparently authentic as Ms. Kaminski would be somewhat offended to be compared, even tangentially, to a Hollywoodized puffery like Ms. Carey) spoke of love, lust, and awkwardness; heartbreak; decisions, mostly bad; danger, self-destruction and damage.  That one can be damaged by attraction is a notion that takes some age and hard-won experience to appreciate fully; the audience, composed equally of young idealists and aged rubricists, were probably split in their interpretation.  Striking the middle ground in age and outlook, and appreciating in real time some of the damage about which Ms. Kaminski spoke so forcefully, I feel like I was perhaps best positioned to appreciate the nuance and subtlety hiding in the background of her lively vocal performance.

I am a fan. Of these excellent writers, of course; of Hugo House, of which I will soon become a subscribing member; of Seattle, which has an energetic artistic community that can support such events, and of myself, for finally taking the plunge and going to a Hugo House event after more than a year of useless dithering.

“I’m Brian Clough.  Brian Howard Clough.”

Given an assignment to talk about ego and talent and soccer in the same sentence, not too many people would wander too far away from the subject of Brian Clough, superbly talented and superbly egotistical manager of Nottingham Forest, who in 1979 and 1980 won back-to-back European Cups, a feat that hasn’t been equaled since, even by my super Liverpool squads of the ‘80s who won in ‘81 and again in ‘84.

Brian Clough.  Where to start?  The Damned United follows along the lines of the book The Damned Utd, written by David Peace, and revolves around Clough’s ill-fated 44-day reign as manager of league champions Leeds United.  Along the way, it chronicles his rise from obscurity with 2nd Division side Derby County, his rivalry with longtime Leeds boss Don Revie, and most elegantly, his partnership and friendship with Peter Taylor, at whose side he shared his greatest success.

Michael Sheen as Clough is fantastic – cheerfully bombastic and yet at times touchingly insecure.  Timothy Spall does a fine job as Taylor, and Colm Meaney has the thankless role playing Clough’s rival Revie – thankless in that the film does him no favors, either in reputation or presentation.  Jim Broadbent – surely one of the better actors working today – gives a great performance as Derby County chairman Sam Longson, but even he can’t eclipse Sheen in this picture.

One of my favorite moments?  When bollocks-grabbing Leeds captain Billy Bremner asks in a team meeting if perhaps Clough could leave the room, then the players could speak openly, he casually looks back at Clough and gives him a wink – the same wink that Clough had used to charm many a player, journalist, and fan.  Whoever wrote that scene in has genius.

James Cameron’s new movie Avatar is a visual feast, a compelling, glorious bursting-at-the-seams exploration of the boundaries of computer-generated imagery.  It reportedly cost $250 million to make.  One can see why – an entire army of software nerds must have been working full time for a year to create the kind of graphical wizardry that we end up seeing on the screen.

Part of the wonder of the movie – and I only realized it after the movie was over – is the seamless way that real actors intermingled with the CGI actors.  The CGI is so good that there are no moments where you brain switches over and says “hey, that’s fake!”.

I won’t review the plot here – suffice it to say that Smurfahontas is not too far off the mark.  But the movie gets tons of man points for the military / combat scenes, the man-eating wildlife, the adrenaline-rush cinematography, and let’s just say that Sigourney Weaver, reincarnated after a fashion into an alien body, has still got it, 30 years after her performance in Alien made her every geek’s dream girl.

I’ve heard a couple people complain that the movie isn’t as “sharp” in 3-D as it is in 2-D.  And, for my only complaint about the movie: it doesn’t fully leverage the 3-D technology.  Coraline, released earlier this year, was breathtaking in its use of 3-D, and when stuff flew out of the screen, you cringed, because you thought it would poke your eye out.  Same thing with Beowulf, from the year before.  Avatar?  For whatever reason, the 3-D is more subtle. Perhaps that was a directorial decision, to try to prevent the visuals from overtaking the film.  At any rate, I still fell into the story, unquestioningly, and loved the experience.  This is one of the few movies I’ve seen in the last couple years that I would happily see again in the the theater.

Are you stuck?  Stuck as in stymied, can’t move, can’t move forward, can’t move back, trapped in a web of your own making?  Anneli Rufs gives a sort of pop-psych tour through the landscape of stuckness in her recent book “Stuck: Why We Can’t (Or Won’t) Move On”.

It’s a personal journey for Rufs, who sprinkles anecdotes from her own life throughout the text, as well as examples from friends, family, and people she’s interviewed.  This gives the book a sort of emotional relevance – other people are stuck, too – and keeps it from becoming a dry thesis.

I have to admit I found this book wanting on a couple fronts.  First, there is the amount of time that Rufs spends on trauma and what she calls “trauma narratives” – childhood abuse, PTSD, victimhood, and the like.  Perhaps that’s just not where I am, personally, or perhaps I instinctively cringe when people trot out their long suffering at the hands of others (real or imagined), as excuses for where they are today, but those long sections were not particularly helpful or relevant.

Second, towards the end of the book Rufs flips us around and asks us to consider whether we think we’re stuck when, in fact, we may not be.  Is society telling us we’re stuck when in reality, absent any external measures, we could be happy, fulfilled, and content?  To my way of thinking, this is a sort of authorial double-cross.  It reduces the volume of the wake-up call just as the alarm is about to ring.  It waffles when it should be direct, blunt, and clear-eyed.  Sure, you’re stuck.  We all are, to some extent and about some topics.  Let’s not equivocate and leave the reader wondering if all of this angst – this why am I here, and what do I do next? self-questioning – go wanting in the face of uncertainty about its reality.  If you feel stuck, are you deluding yourself?  Or is it more likely that you ARE stuck?

I suppose in the end, this is not exactly the book I was looking for.  I wanted the book that’s subtitled “How To Get Unstuck.”  Instead, this is an explanatory treatise on why we get stuck in the first place.

So my personal lessons on getting unstuck remain my guide: Make a clear goal.  Commit yourself to it.  Then do it.

I’ll leave you with a wonderful quote I read this morning:

“Only a fool gets what he wants, because only the foolish keep on trying.”

David Denby, perhaps the preeminent film critic of our time (although I love Anthony Lane also), reviewed the Coen brothers’ new film A Serious Man in a recent New Yorker and wrote:

The Coen brothers in the black, bleak, belittling mode, and, except for a few moments, it’s hell to sit through […] As a work of film craftsmanship, the movie is fascinating; in every other way it’s insufferable.

I wish I’d read his review before I shelled out the $10 to see the movie, because my review was right in line with his. On the other hand, a night out at the movies is a treat no matter what the outcome.

Whip It is the story of a seventeen-year old girl, a square peg in a round hole, who is stuck in small-town Texas and longs for escape.  So many movies, especially those made by Fox Searchlight Pictures, could start out that way.  The girl, Bliss (played by Ellen Page, in a role that seemed written especially for her) finds her particular outlet in the high-velocity world of women’s roller derby.  While working at the Oink Joint BBQ restaurant and finishing out high school, she spends her evenings with her skates laced up, and the movie revolves around her efforts to find her dreams in the face of parental disapproval and small-town peer pressure.

I won’t give away any plot details that might ruin the movie, but instead I’ll talk about what I liked.  First of all, it’s got a true-to-life, indie feel to it – no big-budget Hollywood over-exuberance here.  Second, just like a few other sleeper indie films over the past few years (Little Miss Sunshine, Napoleon Dynamite, and Juno, which also starred Ms. Page), the movie is charming, disarming, and ultimately uplifting.  There are no huge surprises here – it’s not a whodunit – but part of the allure of this genre of film is being able to root for the hero, the misunderstood rebel, and cheer as things turn their way.

The actors – especially the ladies of the roller derby teams – were chosen well.  Drew Barrymore, the director, also makes a supporting appearance as Smashley Simpson, a girl with anger management issues who just wants to have fun.  Juliette Lewis, at least the 90 pounds of her that are left to ogle, plays the bitchy Iron Maven, the antihero, and she swaggers and hisses and purrs wonderfully.  I LOVED Andrew Wilson’s turn as the coach of the Hurl Scouts.  “Run the plays, people!” lol.

My biggest acting surprise was Daniel Stern, who plays Bliss’s Longhorn-loving father.  After years of watching Stern play the lanky goofball in films like Home Alone and City Slickers, it was a surprise to see him in a more weighty role, emotionally speaking.  I think he did very well.

There’s a very cool make-out scene underwater in a pool that brought to mind the same scene in Children of a Lesser God, although this one had much less va-va-voom going on.  The song they played during that scene has stuck in my head – must find it on iTunes.

The highlight of the film?  The roller-derby scenes were trés über, but the best part for me was watching Bliss realize over time that she could do what was best for her and still be OK.  We’re all bound up in convention, expectation, inertia, habit, and rules – but those bonds can be unwound, and new paths cleared as we move on with our lives.  That really spoke to me.