The Super Bowl makes me remember Harry Chapin

Okay, time to start doing this again.

I felt the rumbling of Harry Chapin spinning in his grave as I viewed that Super Bowl ad using his most well-known song, Cat's In the Cradle. I hate that song. But I loved Harry Chapin.

In junior high and high school I had a good friend, Pat, who, like me, had some peculiar and beyond-our-years taste in artists and celebrities. At 13 or 14 she was really into Rod Stewart and Anthony Hopkins. We also, weirdly, had a shared appreciation of Harry Chapin. Harry played the old Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh every year, and we went to see him without fail.

Call his music cheesy, call it schmaltzy -- I won't argue with you in hindsight. But his storytelling was so engaging, and his band was cool and super tight, and he sure knew how to work his audience. And the man did have a gift for poetry when he relaxed and wasn't trying too hard. Those concerts had the happy feel of a family reunion.

His dedication to eradicating hunger is well-known and was honored both in his lifetime and posthumously. His regard for his fans may be less well-known but it touched so many people. After every show, Harry hung around to sign autographs and take photos, but also to liberally share handshakes, hugs, kisses, and conversations.

For an anxious, outsider kid who loved SO MUCH MUSIC SO MUCH and just wanted a peek through a tiny crack in a window into that world, this was -- oh Jebus this was salvation, plain and simple. This was the lightbulb that these stars I heard on the radio, whose records I bought, were actual mammals like me, sometimes sticky and sleepy and burpy, sometimes inspired and superhuman and plugged into the cosmos. A few years later, when I found myself actually working with musicians and singers who I admired/adored/lusted after/revered, or those who I found irritating beyond words and wanted to throttle, it was memories of shaking hands with Harry Chapin -- who always remembered me and Pat, year after year -- that grounded me.

In which stuff gets built

Since today was looking like it may well be the final really nice day of the year, and since I'd had the foresight to take the day off, I hitched up my tool belt, threw the extension cords over my shoulder, set up shop in the back yard and got to work on my raised garden beds and compost bin. Which I've been planning for many months, but am only getting around to at the last possible moment.

I've done a bit of container gardening on the porch since moving here, and wanted to take advantage of this nice-sized, level yard to go larger scale. But the soil here is pretty much awful for anything that's not the Lovecraftian Wisteria of Unending Torment and, knowing my energy level and limited capacity for follow-through (not to mention gradually increasing creakiness and general decrepitude), doing the whole roto-tiller thing and planting right in the ground was not an appealing option.

So instead, the plan is to compost over the winter, and to build up lasagna-gardening style beds. By spring, if all goes well, I'll have a lovely layer of humus all ready to nurture little seedlings.

I once had a girlfriend who pronounced hummus as humus, which still confuses me.

And then there was the middle eastern grocery in the Strip, called Labad's, that had a sign in the window that read LABAD KING OF HOMOS. It's okay, we knew what he meant.

Anyway. The main idea was to do all of this on the cheap. Lucky for me, my father left behind buckets full of odd hardware bits, and my Uncle Rich seems to have never thrown out a piece of scrap lumber larger than a playing card. I snagged some decent shipping pallets from the beer distributor (thanks, Ron!), garbage-picked a few things, and got some odd-sized planks at Construction Junction. A few minutes with the tape measure and jigsaw to trim things up, and all the puzzle pieces were ready to fit together.

First up, I repurposed some IKEA IVAR shelves that I've been carting around for 15 years, from two apartments ago. I knew there'd be a use for them someday.

(Upper left is the canoe from under which I had to temporarily evict the friendly family of skunks who've been squatting there for several years.)

I just connected each corner with a couple of heavy-duty cable ties, and used some L-brackets to secure the top and bottom edges. Hey, it's mostly square.

The compost bin idea I found via a web video. Three 36" pallets, on end. Sturdy, well-ventilated, large but manageable capacity.

Again, no drilling or nailing, just those big-ass cable ties. Easy-peasy. Thank you, Verizon installer!

 

Some boards from another pallet and a few odd IVAR pieces make up the gate panel. I added a couple of super-cheap cabinet handles.

 

The sophistimacated latch system.

I am well aware that this is a futile gesture, and that it's not going to keep out any determined raccoon, clever possum, or escaped zoo monkey. If it just keeps out the lazy, unmotivated, and stupid ones, I'll be happy.

Big sheet of plywood someone put out at the curb, which I cut to fit. Mostly.

Another handle. I hope the vandals don't take it.

The hinges were the tricky part. (Aren't they always?) This is where a ratcheting screwdriver really saved my knuckles. Thank you, inventor of ratcheting things!

I definitely wanted a catch so the lid wouldn't go snapping off the first time I flung it open. That's baling twine for now; I'll replace it with picture wire or jack chain.

The finished project. I plan to secure it to the ground with some stakes to keep it from being knocked over by critters or sailing into Westmoreland County in the next windstorm. I don't think the neighbors have anything to complain about.

The big raised bed project. Boards joined with scrap lumber pieces. This was therapeutic. I got to channel my anger into imagining the faces of my enemies on the head of each nail as I pounded and pounded...

Corner brackets are our friends. Angle your pilot holes towards the edge of the board for a secure grip.

And there you have it! 8' x 4', about 22" high. Not too wobbly.

So now everything is ready for heaping helpings of leaves, grass, corks, biodegradable packing peanuts (thanks, MoMA!), coffee grounds, egg shells, fruit and vegetable peels and end-bits that the dog won't eat, pine cones, shredded documents, whatever.

After getting the compost bin started with all the goodies I've been saving in the freezer, I baptized it with a nearly-fossilized can of Old Milwaukee (thanks, Barb!) that a friend left behind at a party many moons ago and has been gathering dust in Barb's basement since. This is the only purpose for which Old Milwaukee is suitable.

In which - Oh sweet Jebus not more roofing!

I am the only person on my block not having a new roof put on in the wake of the July 4 hail storm. This neighborhood is without question the insurance fraud capital of the USA this summer. So far the annoyances have been minor, but today – I happened to be home, taking a sick day – things took a screeching bootlegger turn for the surreal.

7:15 am    A crew of roofers arrives at the house across the street at #95 – the residence of my nemesis, the lawnorexic, NRA For Life teabagger, who had a new roof put on not seven years ago but is having a wonderful time burning through her mother's life insurance money this summer. They park 2 pickups and a beater on the opposite side of the street, where the Lawn Nazi's SUV is also parked.

7:30 am    Dumpster is delivered to the driveway of #95 w/o incident. Lawn Nazi leaves for the day. The roofing crew – six close relatives of Cletus the Slack-jawed Yokel – get down to something passing for work. Radio on the roof is tuned to dinosaur rock station, volume at 9.

9:00 am    All of the Cleti are singing along lustily to The Who's “Behind Blue Eyes”, which I find ridiculously charming. Their apprentice peon is wandering around on the roof aimlessly.

9:45 am    An argument over the number of sodas in the cooler has broken out. Peon is made to walk to the store for provisions.

12 noon    Radio volume goes to 16. Luckily, I'm in the mood for vintage U2 and Tom Petty.

1:00 pm    The non-Cletus crew who played an awful 80s-90s radio station while they put a new roof on #96 next door in one day returns to clean up the yard. They park a pickup in the driveway, and a box truck and another pickup on this side of the street.

2:00 pm    The real fun begins. A big flatbed with 2 pallets of shingles arrives and parks on the street behind the non-Cletus pickup, blocking my driveway. Between the flatbed and the Cletus pickup on the opposite side, there is barely one car width for a car to squeeze diagonally. 6 – 8 cars back up on the street trying to get through.

2:05 pm    Flatbed realizes he's on the wrong side of the street.

2:06 om    The most slack-jawed of the Cleti gets in the Cletus pickup to move it backwards up the street. He spends two full minutes searching for the parking brake release. He finds it, hits the gas. He has the truck in drive instead of reverse, jams on the brakes and stops about a foot short of flattening another Cletus. He backs up, parks in front of #93 – the mystery house where an unknown number of people live and are constantly moving four vehicles in and out of the driveway and on and off of the street like one of those sliding tile puzzles where you try to get the map of the USA all in place, at all hours of the day and night.

2:08 pm    Flatbed backs up and cuts his wheels, and knocks over the last 3 feet of my retaining wall. He parks on the opposite side, blocking the driveway of #93. Now cars can still only squeeze through diagonally but in the other direction. 6 – 8 cars are backed up.

2:10 pm    Flatbed driver stands in the street scratching his head, then his butt, then his head and his butt at the same time. The garbage truck comes up the street, blocking everything.

2:15 pm    UPS truck squeaks through between the flatbed and my redbud tree. Every single dog on the block – 9 total – is barking.

2:17 pm    Flatbed driver puts cones around his truck, blocking ¾ of the street. Now cars have to drive up on the grass of my yard and #92 next door. The non-Cletus crew at #96 have finished cleaning up, and are now sitting and watching the Cleti.

2:20 pm    Flatbed driver unfolds the spiffy crane on the truck. It's RC, operated by a neat little box slung over his shoulder, but this seems to be the first time he's ever operated it. The robot arm swings back in jerky fits and starts, picks up the first pallet, jerks around perpendicular to the front bumper. In the amount of time that has elapsed since he started up the crane arm, the non-Cletus crew had off-loaded two pallets of shingles from the back of a pickup truck by hand. All 9 dogs are still barking/baying/yipping/howling.

2:25 pm    Flatbed guy is still jerking the crane arm around, despite the fact that the pallet is a foot in front of him, two feet off the ground, and six idle Cleti are sitting on the roof watching. Also, every few minutes for some reason the truck's horn gets set off for 8 – 10 honks. More dog cacophony, joined by the parrot at #93.

2:35 pm    While flatbed guy continues to wiggle the robot arm back and forth for no apparent reason, all four vehicles belonging to the approximately 19 people living at #93 arrive, as well as a FedEx truck and the 50-year-old virgin next door to me. One of the knocked-over stones from my driveway wall topples further into the street. 13 vehicles are now blocked, about half of which are driving up into our yards to get through. 50-year-old-virgin – who can barely back out of her driveway on a good day – appears catatonic behind the wheel, not moving. Horns are honking.

2:40 pm    The stack of shingles on the pallet dangling from the robot arm is now spinning – just like somewhere Ellen Ripley is spinning in her space grave. All of the dogs have gotten tired of barking. The parrot is still squawking.

2:42 pm    Deciding that getting 65-80% of the shingles onto the property is good enough, not-Ripley at last drops the stack, with one corner sticking about a foot and a half out into the street.

2:43 pm    And then – dear gods – he swivels the arm back around to pick up the second stack, and it starts all over again, with less parrot, a few dogs, more horns, the flatbed truck horn, and the screeching of the branches of my redbud against the 50-year-old virgin's Buick. The second pallet eventually also lands with the corner sticking out into the street.

2:50 pm    When flatbed guy finally gets his super cool but truly unnecessary machine all tucked back away, he gets in the cab (forgetting all about the cones), starts it up, and drives right into the protruding corners of the stacks of shingles. He doesn't stop, just skids down the hill to the stop sign and drives away.

3:30 pm    The Cleti call it a day. My wall is still knocked over. The vehicles of #93 are parked willy-nilly all over their yard. The 50-year-old virgin is trying to scrape grass back into the tire tracks in her yard, and Colleen Clark is up in a tree trying to get down a SpongeBob SquarePants beach ball with a hockey stick.

Okay, maybe not that last one.

8:40 pm    As the sun sinks behind the spruce trees, I take my dog Desmond out for his postprandial walk. He's on the long leash. We get to the end of my sidewalk and he trots across the street, and pees on the shingles.

He's getting bacon tonight.

Anticipatory schadenfreude!

Over at Slate's Movie Club, Dana Stevens gets off the best shot by far in all of the year-end retrospectives. This is delicious.

I'll...confess that the fact Kathryn Bigelow, Cameron's ex-wife and the director of The Hurt Locker, has a good shot at beating him for both the best director and best picture Oscars this year gives me a sense of anticipatory schadenfreude like you would not believe. For all I know, James and Kathryn speak on the phone every day and wish each other's movies nothing but good fortune, but anyone who's ever watched as a smug ex goes on to enormous success has to place him- or herself squarely in Bigelow's camp. It's almost a good-vs.-evil thing. (Not to mention that Hurt Locker is by far the better movie, but these are the Oscars we're talking about. Score-settling is at least as valid a criterion as quality.)

Thw Twilight Zone in 6

I love The Twilight Zone, I really do. Seen every episode, can probably recite many of them from memory, and my personal best sustained viewing time for a holiday Sci-Fi network marathon is 43 hours.

That said, I'm the first to recognize the show's flaws, from its uncanny ability to find the absolute worst child actors ever (The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street), to some truly craptastic special effects (almost any episode involving an airplane), not to mention the adorably quaint belief that in the future spray-painted vintage football helmets and stretchy jumpsuits would provide suitable protection for interplanetary travel.

But one thing you begin to notice when you've spent a certain amount of time watching TTZ is that over its five seasons, there was a rather significant amount of repitition of themes, premises, and formats. And so, as a service to those of you who may be wishing to brush up on your cocktail-party TZZ-related banter ability, or need a term paper topic for your pop culture class, I've compiled the following extremely condensed guide to approximately 133 of the original 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Here ya go:

Be careful what you wish for.

The enemy is just like us/is us!

Conformity bad, individuality good.

It's a cookbook!/She's a robot!/The other planet is Earth!

You can't change the past. And even if you could, you really, really wouldn't want to.

We're dead/in the future/in the past/post-apocalyptic/the creatures in the zoo/very small/very large, and don't know it!

There you are.

In which I reach the end of my fucking working class tether

Something I've been wondering about/seething over for quite some time now: when politicians and the media talk about the "middle class," who exactly do they mean?

Because, frankly, I don't give a fuck about the middle class as I understand the term: households with a steady income that enables them to keep their heads above water, have at least one functioning car in the driveway, are able to shop for groceries with coupons and an eye on the sale flyer but without having to calculate a running total down to the pennies in their head, who can spend $30 or $40 or $80 on lunch or shoes or xmas decorations and not break a sweat, who pay someone $20 a week to mow their environmentally disastrous lawn.

Awww, no Steeler tickets this year -- so sad!

Basically, people who might have to give some thought to a major outlay of cash, but whose income still keeps up with their {cough cough} lifestyle. The definition of economic hardship for them, as I understand it based on the media and my experience of coworkers, supervisors, and neighbors, is visiting Olive Garden without a coupon.

Fuck them. They can afford to sweat a little. A lot. To death, really.

And fuck the politicians who keep invoking them as some kind of paragon of American values, and fuck the media for doing the same.

Can we please shift this national conversation to the working class? To the folks who may have health insurance but have to borrow the $10 copay for a doctor visit from a friend, and probably won't be able to pay it back. To the people who walk a mile in the mornings and evenings to keep their bus ride inside the zone and save .50 each way. To the women and men heralded in Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed?

Perhaps in decades past the line was drawn between "middle class" and "upper class." And then it was recalibrated to divide "midle class" from "upper middle class." I think there was a brief period when the term "lower middle class" was in vogue, but the members of that imagined group still had a second car and often a boat in the driveway, and shopped at Macy's rather than KMart for bath towels and toasters.

I don't begrudge those folks who are fortunate enough to have snagged a bigger paycheck any of their little luxuries or indulgences. Hey, if it reinforces your illusions of security or meaningfulness, go for it.

But is anyone other than Michael Moore and Ms. Ehrenreich talking about people who actually have to juggle the math to get all their utility bills paid? Who is addressing the needs of the family whose daycare expenses mean they can't insulate the attic, who have the family cat or dog put to sleep because they can't afford treatment for a treatable condition?

How can a news anchor or congressional representative making six figures possibly understand what $100 actually means to a household that's already buying generic dog food, not replacing a burnt out light bulb in the hallway, having to suddenly shell out cash for a broken tail light or a plumber?

The entire national debate could be shifted with the simple substitution of this one word.

It won't happen. We haven't yet been able to shift the lie of "pro-life" to the truthful "anti-choice."

When you hear these terms, middle-class, working-class, think about what they mean, about what the media wants you to think they mean. Think about who you know. And please, start demanding that your representatives and your local media accurately represent the people they are reporting about.

P.S. Has anyone noticed that the person in the group dining out who makes the least money is likely to be the biggest contributor to the tip? Think about it, please.

In which I'm surprised by my capacity to be surprised

When Catherine Hardwicke’s “The Nativity Story” was initially released my interest was mildly piqued. Keisha Castle-Hughes was the unforgettable lead in one of my very favorite movies, “The Whale Rider,” and the incomparable Shohreh Aghdashloo (I always have to check to make sure I have enough H’s in there) was cast as Elizabeth.

I never got around to seeing it. But it was on TNT tonight, and since I was pinned in place by a large and contented cat, I decided to watch. My gamble paid off in unexpected ways. Seems I'm not as hopelessly jaded as I thought -- a realization which I find quite embarassing.

The production design is gorgeous. There is a very gritty, textured feel to it, fitting the film’s focus on the human, the quotidian. This Mary, while she may soon be the mother of god, still has to sow seed in the fields and draw water from the well. She has actual conversations with her mother, and her father has a place in the community. (Give yourself a cookie if you immediately remembered that their names were Anne and Joachim. You paid attention in religion class!) We see the structure of their houses, the shape of their pottery, the details of their clothing and their tools. It really is marvelous to look at.

It is this focus on the human and the historical, rather than the mystical or mythological, that makes “The Nativity Story” worth watching. It hews to the conventional tale of the Annunciation and the Nativity in form (gauzy angel, gentle cows, a manger), but those are background details. The real narrative interest in Hardwicke’s take is in the way Mary’s acceptance of her role is shown to be a decision made by a clear-headed young woman who understands the social consequences, and who respects her parents but also expects them to listen to her. And this Joseph is a far cry from the mushy cipher we’ve long been given; here, he is compassionate, aware, pragmatic, and committed to the unconventional parenting arrangement foisted upon him. Oscar Isaac memorably embodies this noble yet very human husband and father, giving him a solidity and individuality we haven't seen before.

The script places all of the familiar events squarely in the context of the political atmosphere of the era, reminding us that these characters live in a time of difficulty and uncertainty. Even the magi are drawn as individual personalities responding to unusual events, and -- upholding one of Roger Ebert's criteria for believable drama -- not acting as though they've already seen the end of the movie.

Unfortunately the score does not serve the film well, especially in the final act when it anachronistically and jarringly deteriorates into a fitting background for a Hallmark TV special. But that is a minimal complaint when stacked up against the film's success in turning a time-worn tale into a fine character study and engrossing historical drama.

Also, the donkey gives an excellent performance, and is adorable as heck.