Truly, sadly, deeply

If I could figure out how to put this post inside a black border, I would do it, because Alan Rickman has died, and my world truly seems diminished.

I want to say that the first thing you noticed about Rickman was his voice; if ever the use of “velvet” as a descriptor was apt, it was for his voice. Mellow, soft, resonant; you wanted to stroke it. But the velvet covered a core of steel, which came through in a number of ways.

He also had the most expressive face, he  conveyed madness, menace, mystery, disdain, longing, tenderness, brutality—everything came from his voice and his face. He was amazing.

I suspect it’s primarily because of Rickman (not Bruce Willis) that 1988’s Die Hard has become enshrined on a lot of people’s traditional must-watch Christmas movie lists. It was his first Hollywood role (although I recall him six years before as the slimy Obadiah Slope in the mini-series of The Barchester Chronicles). There was such relish in Rickman’s portrayal of villains—Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Slope in Barchester, Marston in Quigley Down Under, the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. They were all borderline OTT (okay, some of them went about 50 miles past the border), but utterly individual. He brought something new to each character.

Which brings me to another point, related to the voice, but much more. Rickman had a unique enunciation (which made him such a good target for the celebrity impersonators) that added layers of depth and deliciousness to the portrayal. I don’t know whether he was given the best lines in his films or he just made them the best, but in movie after movie it’s Rickman’s character who’s quoted over others.

In fact, there’s a cottage industry for celebrities imitating him, viz. my favorite, John Sessions on the panel show QI:

Moreover, he could turn a small or mediocre film into something special. The Costner Robin Hood, for example. It was splashy, but dreadful, except for Rickman’s Sheriff. Bottle Shock was thin, with a plot that drifted all over the place, but watching him made it worthwhile. Same for The January Man—even early in his career, he could add interest to a dog of a movie.

I don’t need to tell you about the Harry Potter movies (but you should read Daniel Radcliffe’s beautiful tribute to Rickman as the actor, the colleague and the human being). It was like the guy invented evil. But I loved him in the smaller productions: Truly, Madly, Deeply is one of my all-time favorite love stories, and Rickman as the dead cellist whose spirit returns to help his lover over her grief is just stunning.

And then there’s Dogma, a quirky, profane essay into religion, morality, gynecology, the destruction of the universe, and Rufus, the 13^th apostle. Rickman played Metatron, the Voice of God. Here he is, in a completely different version of the Annunciation.

He held his own in an all-star production like Love Actually, and (in my opinion) totally owned Sense and Sensibility.

And if you haven’t noticed from this very short list, his range was enormous, and I’ve not even got to his stage work. Or his personal integrity, generosity and kindness (which Radcliffe and others who knew him well have discussed).

At 69, Rickman’s loss is huge; he should have had at least a couple more decades to give us. It seems completely inadequate to say that I’m deeply saddened by his death, but that’s all I got. To quote his android in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “I told you this would all end in tears.”

Men behaving badly

So. The St. Louis (né Cleveland) Rams are moving to Los Angeles. Again.

Evidently St. Louis didn’t pony up enough to keep the NFL team there, and the city’s been dumped like a busted-up wide receiver with irreparable ACL tears. Or possibly like your second-choice date for the prom when the first choice unaccountably accepts.

As I understand it, the Rams told St. Louis, “It’s not us, it’s you.”

This is their second marriage to LA—they were the pro-football team in residence for all the time I lived there. Well, “in-residence” meaning they played in the LA Coliseum and then moved to Anaheim, which offered them more than LA for the privilege of allowing grown men to pad up more than the Michelin Man to butt heads, scratch their crotches and act like WWF performers on national television. In total, they were the “Los Angeles Rams” from 1946 to 1994.

Now, after 22 years of pledging troth to the Midwest, they’re basically saying they’re just not that into St. Louis after all, and they're ready to return to their former love.

By making this move, they’ve pre-empted the Oakland Raiders, who also played in LA the last time they got into a snit with the City Across the Bay over the notion of what they were entitled to from their community and fan base. They practiced at El Segundo High School in the early part of that relationship, which lasted from 1982 to 1994.

(That was obviously an apocalyptic year if you were an Angeleno and you gave a toss about pro football.)

As I was leaving the Valley They Call Silicon last month, the local news was pretty well wound up over the Raiders kicking their toes against the baseboards and whining that they don’t have a proper multi-billion-dollar playing field like all the other NFL teams, so they’re going to see what LA has to offer. After all, they already know the route to get there.

And as if that’s not enough steroid-infused moaning, the San Diego Chargers have suddenly also decided that nothing but Los Angeles is good enough for them. As I understand it, the Chargers get first refusal of sharing space with the Rams and the Raiders have to wait their turn. And maybe lose out.

Now, I don’t know spit about professional sports except what I can pick up from the media about the latest felony charges filed against one or more of their star players. But I do know a lot about sociopaths and dysfunctional relationships, and NFL teams, their players and their owners exhibit all the signs of both of these.

What I also don’t know is how fans allow themselves to be snookered by these teams, especially after they repeatedly demonstrate their contempt for everyone around them, especially their greatest admirers.

 

If these guys were blondes, they’d be called gold-diggers. They’re the very definition of greedy, self-serving welfare queens with no sense of loyalty to their market base—the people who pay stupid money to watch them play a game, follow their antics as though they were paradigms of Wildean wit and wear ridiculously overpriced kit simply because it’s associated with the team.

They arrive at a city like they’re at the head of an Imperial Triumph and strut about as though the entire metropolis is theirs to use as they will. But when the glitter starts flaking off, out come the demands for more. And then the whining.

They clearly view their communities and their fans as both interchangeable and disposable. “I love LA!” We’re not there this season? Oops—my bad! “St. Louis is the place.” Or Oakland. Or San Diego.

Or not.

Engaging in speculation

Well, I’ll be blowed: Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch, 84, and erstwhile super-model Jerry Hall, 59, have announced their engagement. Rather quaintly, they placed a notification in the births, marriages and deaths section of one of Murdoch’s flagship publications, the London Times.

As you might imagine, there’s considerable comment flying around the ether about the romance, and possible incentives for Hall’s involvement with Murdoch. No one seems to question his motivation. A lot is being made of the age difference, and Murdoch’s, uh, physical attraction(s).

So let me just point out a couple of things. Murdoch married his last wife, Wendi Deng, at age 66, when she was 29; a 37-year delta. So 25 years is a twelve-year improvement in that regard.

Second, having spent a couple of decades with Mick Jagger, and bearing four of his children, it’s not like Hall isn’t used to waking up in the morning and looking into the face of a corpse. (Not that I’m inquiring in any respect into the sleeping arrangements of any of these people.)

If you’ve not spent time in the UK, you might not have seen this commercial that Hall did for Strongbow Cider. I always thought it pretty amusing, although it never inspired me to actually, you know, drink the stuff.

But the thought occurs to me: Woman’s going to need a barrel full of cider to get through the next few months. Not to mention living with this particular cadaver.

Horsing around

I’m not sure why this meme came through on social media recently. I mean, any more than any of the “do you remember princess phones/poodle skirts/roller skate keys” memes.

If you don’t recognize it, it’s a vaulting horse, used for gymnastics. (In the Olympics, women use the horse to vault (think: Kerri Strug); men use it for upper body routines.) I recognize it, but not because I’ve ever seen it in use, much less used it myself.

When I was around junior high age, I picked up a paperback copy of The Wooden Horse, by Eric Williams, at a used bookshop on East Colorado Boulevard. That was in the days when E. Colorado was seedy and you had to be willing to push past the winos to get to the used book stores. I was.

(These days it’s Old Town Pasadena, and you have to pay big bucks to valet park your car while you eat at the trendy bistrot-du-jour. If there’s a book store of any stripe there, it’s got expensively distressed plank floors, exposed brick (possibly faux) walls and free-trade organically-grown hand-roasted coffee served in an eclectic array of porcelain-like cups. And nothing in the store costs less than $10.95, including the coffee.)

The book is a fictionalized account of a real escape by RAF officer Williams and two fellow POWs from Stalag Luft III (yes, the camp of The Great Escape, although a different compound). The schtick was that the vaulting horse would be carried out to an open field in the camp, with a man and a shovel hidden inside. The horse would be set down in the same place every day, the man would dig a tunnel under it, and each afternoon, men would carry the horse, the man and dug-up dirt back to the barracks, where the dirt would be distributed. (They covered over the opening to the hole, but I disremember exactly how that was done.)

So—a bunch of guys would carry the horse (which had to be not a trivial weight), with one or two men inside, out every day. Then a larger bunch of guys would vault over it throughout the day with enough verisimilitude that the German guards never questioned what it was there for. Then they carried horse, men and dirt back. Remarkably, to my mind, in light of the fact that they all knew that they weren’t going to benefit directly from this repeated exercise.

Eventually the horse hid two diggers, and at the time of escape (October, 1943), three men. All of them made their way to Sweden and back to the UK.

Now here’s my conundrum, as a junior high schooler, reading about a World War II POW camp populated mostly by RAF officers—a world thrice-removed from my life, with respect to the horse—I had no earthly notion of what the man was talking about. I knew what a vaulting horse was—it looked like this:

I knew it looked like that because that’s what we had in our school gym. How the hell could you conceal anything, much less three men in that contraption?

The paperback book had no illustrations, and there was no handy-dandy Internet then to come to my rescue. I went through the entire escape narrative without being able to clearly visualize how Williams and his mates did it. It wasn’t until some years later, when I found another edition of the book, that it became apparent. (I never saw the 1950 film based on the book, but here’s a still from it.)

So, when this meme made its way to my feed, what I first thought of was not gym class, or how old I may or may not be, it was of the ingenuity, perseverance and teamwork of comrades to support a crack-brained escape scheme over a period of months, back in the days before princess phones, poodle skirts and roller skates were even a thing.

Gratitude Monday: Street legal

As you may know, I’m a fourth-generation Californian. From Los Angeles. Which means that my car is very important to me.

I knew when planning my relocation to the District They Call Columbia that it would take some time to ship my car from California. When I moved from Virginia to Seattle, it was two weeks, but my employer paid for a rental car during that between-time. Not happening this time, so I was expecting to be reliant on public transportation for at least another week.

Imagine my surprise, then, to get an email on Tuesday announcing that the dispatcher for the shipping company was trying to reach me; the driver was scheduled to deliver my car the following morning.

Well, it was a bit of a scramble, but I managed to find an address near the Reston Metro station where I thought there’d be room to offload a vehicle from one of those auto-transport trailers, and I hauled out there to meet the driver’s schedule (which was obviously much more important than mine).

Imagine my surprise (again) to see the rig with my car parked in front of it on the off-ramp to the Dulles Toll Road (not the address I’d given) as the train was pulling into the station. Well, whatever, I hotfooted it over there, signed for it and prepared to drive away.

It was covered by a film of filth—the kind of thing you see on abandoned cars and vehicles in junk yards. I don’t know what the hell that rig drove through on the way from Burlingame, but it was mighty dirty. The windshield wipers in the front and rear wiper in the back scraped some of it off, but the side windows and mirrors were practically opaque.

Still—I congratulated myself on having had the foresight to bring both my sat-nav unit and the Capitol Hill parking pass with me, and made my way back to the District. Not only that, but I found a parking spot only a couple of blocks from my residence. (This is truly a miracle, because I’m very close to the working guts of congressional offices. Daytime parking spots are basically in the hen’s teeth category.)

As I backed and filled, a Prius hovered nearby, obviously in hopes that I was trying to leave and not get in. But as it drove away in disappointment, I waxed anxious over which way I should leave the permit on my dash—QR code toward the engine or the interior? I figure that if the parking enforcement personnel don’t find it in exactly the configuration they’re expecting, they’ll cite your ass and move on.

Friday I picked up my E-ZPass transponder at the downtown AAA office, and that afternoon I registered it (not online, as their site didn’t work, but some nice young woman from somewhere way south of the Mason-Dixon Line got the job done on the phone).

BTW—when I left the area eight years ago, the toll between Reston and I-66 totaled $0.75. It’s now $3.50. They start you out with $35 on your account. You’d blow through that in your first week of commuting.

I was so glad to discover that Friday night’s rain was sufficient to clear enough of the film on my windows so I didn’t have to take it to a car wash. And, as I was driving out to Reston for breakfast on Saturday, the transponder worked. And on my return to the Hill of the Capitol, I found street parking right across the street from my flat.

Honestly, it just don’t get better than that, vehicularly speaking. And this Californian is really grateful for all of it.

To xfinity and hell

Monday’s for gratitude, so today I’m going to gripe about having to fight with Comcast. Again. Still.

Why is it that invariably whatever their agents on the phone tell you turns out to be at odds with what their billing department does? Since they charge you for your service in advance, and I ended service (for want of a better term) two weeks ago, imagine my surprise when my bill came for an entire month’s amount.

Or, roughly, ten times what their phone rep told me it would be (after trying to persuade me not to end service, just transfer it, no matter where I was moving).

Honestly, I could do without the tsuris.

Yahrzeit

We’re a year on from the barbaric terror attack on Charlie Hebdo, and it doesn’t look to me like we’ve progressed in any respect during that time.

On 7 January 2015, masked gunmen (why the hell are they always masked, if they think they’re doing holy work?) broke into the offices of the Paris-based satirical weekly magazine. Shouting “Allahu Akbar!” they methodically went through the building, killing 11 and wounding another 11. On their way out, they murdered a policeman (a Muslim, as it happens)—a crime captured on video.

Later on, their comrades attacked a kosher grocery store, killing four more people. Eventually the two alleged perps, French-born brothers of Algerian parents, were hunted down and died in a gunfight with massive numbers of police.

There was a global response of revulsion and outcry against the attacks, but not much else, really. Not that I can see.

Except, of course, the scaled-up killing spree of November across Paris, using both bombs and automatic assault rifles to murder 130 people who were watching a football match, having a drink or a meal, listening to a rock concert, or just walking down the streets (And plenty of other attacks in various places.)

In the wake of those events, most of the civilized world backed off of end-of-year holiday celebrations and laid on heavy paramilitary actions because they were so unprepared for something on the scale of Paris. We’re talking the kinds of armed troops patrolling Paris and Brussels that you used to see in Ulster or Beirut.

There was a lot of high-level blah-blah in January and February of last year about doing something, but clearly those who push jihad didn’t get copied on the memo. Yeah, I get it—Overtaken By Events; the West is preoccupied by the whole ISIL thing, and the masses alternatively referred to as migrants, refugees and I don’t know what-all. And those are not trivial issues.

But I’m deeply disappointed that in the 21^st Century, with all our investment in intelligence technology and military systems, we still seem to lack the cojones to deal with this brand of thuggery that wants to drag us all back to the 7^th Century. And I’m disgusted that we’re marking the Charlie Hebdo anniversary with nothing perceptible to show for the 365 days that have passed.

  

Apparently nous ne sommes pas Charlie.

Cold snap

My, my, my; weather here in the District They Call Columbia has turned nippy. Quite the shock for someone who’s been living in the paradise of the Bay Area. The instant you walk out the door you know you’re not going to be able to scrump oranges and lemons off trees along your walking route.

In fact, it’s so cold your eyes tear up and you start worrying about your mascara running.

Back when I first lived in this area (back in the last century), it took me years to take precautions against the cold. I’d hare out of the house and be halfway down the block before I’d realize how bleedin’ cold it was, especially for ungloved hands. But by that, time, of course, I was half a block away and shivering.

Repeated frozen digits didn’t seem to make any kind of dent in my SoCal sensibilities, however, so I solved the problem by stuffing gloves in the pockets of every coat and jacket I owned. And although I only have two coats with me at the moment, fortunately they both have gloves in the pockets.

Yes, I did walk out of a coffee shop yesterday leaving one of the gloves on the counter, but I assure you that I almost immediately realized the error and fetched it back.

Turns out that, because I almost never needed a coat in the Valley They Call Silicon, I’ve never thought to pull the gloves out of the pockets. Thank God.

Through the academic looking glass

You will no doubt have noticed that the world of academia has pretty much gone down the rabbit hole and is currently producing wonder after wonder of weirdness. But something I find interesting is basically a tale of two famed institutions right here in California, and I can’t believe that I appear to be the first person to notice this particular disconnect.

In November, the California State Polytechnic University at Pomona (Cal Poly) revoked an honorary Doctor of Letters degree it had conferred on Bill Cosby back in 1992. The reason given was that the multiple allegations of sexual harassment brought against him are “contrary to the values” of the state university system.

The Cal State University system comprises 23 campuses up and down the state and has always been the working-class cousin to the University of California system. Cal State used to be where you’d go if you couldn’t afford UC, but that delta has blurred in recent times. The two Polytechnic schools (at Pomona and San Luís Obispo) are kind of the aggie-engineering arms of the system; my mom used to take us to the horse shows at Pomona, which were student-run.

Well, hard luck for Cosby that the university discovers it has values, and you can actually run afoul of them. Turns out that other academic institutions have snatched back honorary degrees from him, too.

But then, only the month before, famed UC Berkeley astronomy professor Geoffrey Marcy found his career blowing up in his face over not dissimilar charges of decades of sexually harassing students and colleagues. Marcy was outed by BuzzFeed, more than a year after complaints filed against him to the university’s Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination were buried by officials. At first, he looked like he was going to get away with nothing more than a reprimand in his dossier, but eventually the storm rose to the point where he had to resign, still insisting that he hadn’t meant any harm by all those years of fondling and suggestive remarks.

Here’s the thing: before Marcy moved to Cal in 1999, he spent 15 years at San Francisco State—part of the system that yanked Cosby’s honorary degree—where he was also accused of inappropriate behavior.

So the Board of Trustees of the California State University system revokes Cosby’s imaginary doctorate for, basically, conduct unbecoming, but makes Marcy a Distinguished University Professor despite very similar behavior. Honestly—can they just show a little consistency?

Gratitude Monday: A year of New

The past month has been pretty stressful for me, what with starting a new job, closing out my life in the Valley They Call Silicon and moving across country. I confess that by the time I got on the plane to Washington last Wednesday, I was as sharp as a meatball, and it hasn’t got any better since then.

I can remember only once in my life where I felt as attenuated and completely stupid, and being unable to process what was happening around me whether it was a waitress wanting my breakfast order or dealing with a contractor who screws up. And that was not at all a good time.

So today, the first Gratitude Monday of the year, I am thankful that I somehow managed to get to my hotel those first couple of nights—and that it was a very good experience (as opposed to Dollar Rent A Car at Dulles, a company I’m never going to use again, even though the branch at National Airport was fine).

And that friends shared their New Year’s Eve with me, Chinese food and board games—exactly what I needed.

(I hope they’ll let me try Scrabble again, despite my abysmal performance.)

And that my first breakfast of the year was shared with one of my oldest friends, echoing a couple of hundred breakfasts we’ve had over the years. I have that tradition to look forward to again, thank God.

And that I found my new digs on Capitol Hill, and—even better (well, you know what I mean)—I found a parking spot, so I could unload my kit. And that I remembered the instructions on how to use the keypad to get into the place.

And that it’s exactly what I need for right now—cozy, comfortable and close to work.

And that, before I turned in my rental, I made a run to Wegmans and Trader Joe’s to stock up on provisions, since I’ll be without a car for probably two weeks. It’s a bit strange doing the grocery shopping for all the basics, when you haven’t had to do that in more than five years. I forgot the plain yoghurt and French onion soup at TJs, but I expect I’ll manage.

And that yesterday when I used my Metro card to visit Arlington National Cemetery, I realized (as I did once when sitting in Shakespeare’s garden in Stratford-upon-Avon), I’m not a tourist; I live here. And that, dear readers, was huge.

So here I am, a (temporary) resident of the District They Call Columbia, starting out the new year with a new job and a lot of new possibilities. I may not be the brightest bulb on the tree, and I do have to find a physical therapist/chiropractor pretty damned quick. But I am truly grateful for having made it across the abyss to all the new-and-possibles.