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Author Archives: Dustin
Piles of Literature Widely Enjoyed by People, Bugs
As study-dwellers, we spend a lot of time in spaces surrounded by paper. Our desktops, shelves, armrests, and pretty much every vertical surface is piled high with magazines, stacks of ungraded student papers, books, lists, diagrams . . . and that’s okay. We’re comfortable here.
But so are bugs. Thus, there are really only two kinds of study-dweller: those who have lifted a pile of paper to reveal a hairy spider the size of a work glove crouching underneath, and those who will. That’s why I recommend the Backyard Safari Bug Vacuum, a fierce green pistol that can suck all but the most enormous spiders right off the rug, and can also, I discovered, suck a bee right out of the air.
I know it can do these things because I took this baby out looking for bugs. That’s the kind of fearlessness the bug vac bestows. Maybe that courage derives from its pistol shape, which should give anti-gun activists every cause for alarm. One moment, I am terrified of stinging insects to the point of fleeing a room a wasp has entered; the next, with a finger on the smooth, plastic trigger, I am taking it to their turf, gunning for them.
When pulled, the trigger activates the surprisingly strong vacuum. Bugs unlucky enough to find themselves staring down the barrel with their multiple eyes are vacuumed into a detachable examination capsule that can be sealed with a knob on the side, allowing for catch-and-release bug removal. This is actually what I like most about the bug vac. I don’t like bugs, and don’t altogether mind killing them, but it’s gross when the wall where a bug once scurried looks like someone lobbed a used soup ladle at it. Plus, I’m soft enough that I would take a merciful option if one presented itself, which it did, at Christmas, in bug vacuum form. (Thanks, Mom)
A few tips before you set out on your office bug safari:
Replace the batteries. The Backyard Safari Bug Vacuum, found in the toy department at Wal-Mart, comes in a package labeled “try me,” with an arrow that points to the exposed trigger. At least open it up and test the batteries. You do not want to face off with a silverfish on half-juice, my friend.
The bug vac comes with a choice of two barrels to use — one with a narrow end and one with a round end. I pack the round-ended one, but that’s just how I roll.
It is wise to put the examination capsule in the icebox for a few minutes before releasing the bug into the wild or the toilet. The cold will immobilize the bug and eliminate the chance it will seek vengeance on you as you dispose of it.
The sole bad reviews I found for the bug vac when I researched it last fall were from parents whose children used it to amass captive insect stockpiles that they could release at once into their siblings’ rooms. Although this may sound like an awesome prank, or, if you’re Bill Gates, a forceful way to punctuate a statement about malaria prevention, it’s kind of a jerk move. It might get you grounded.
Steve Martin Play Shouldn't Be Banned, Says Guy Who Was Just in That Play
Bad news this week for Steve Martin, whose play, Picasso at the Lapin Agile, was banned from being performed at an Oregon high school because some parents complained about its content. Martin, various news agencies report, has offered to pay for the play to be produced off-campus. I recommend reading the actual letter he sent to the editor of the La Grande Observer, because it is about as hilarious as a letter to the editor can be.
That Steve Martin! He’s . . . well, you know what kind of guy he is.
It just so happens that on Sunday, my supremely talented community theater castmates and I finished a four-show run of — you guessed it — Picasso at the Lapin Agile. Since I played the title character — Picasso — I feel highly qualified to chime in on this matter. Please imagine that everything from this point on is spoken with an accent that’s one-third Antonio Banderas, two-thirds . . . something else. Accents are hard.
First of all, I can report that there is a moment in the play, just after he shows up, when Picasso announces he’s “been thinking about sex all day,” and that shortly thereafter he drops the play’s sole F-bomb. However, I suspect that if La Grande High (Go Tigers!) has gym classes, study halls, passing periods, or lunch, Picasso’s entrance is probably already echoed at least once a day.
Per student.
Second, it’s true about the presence of adult themes in the play, such as kissing. Picasso kisses girls, and I don’t have to mention what a slippery slope that can be. Let me just pass on, though, for the benefit of the students and their parents, a little tip I picked up during rehearsal. Actor kisses are totally different than regular kisses: no tongue.
Very important to always remember.
And yes, to some degree the play glorifies hanging out in a bar and having affairs and drinking lots of alcohol, but to a greater degree it glorifies being inventive and articulate and prolific. Privilege is placed on the performance of thoughtful comparison and the construction of well-reasoned argument.
In his 2007 memoir Born Standing Up, Martin only mentions Picasso at the Lapin Agile once — he’s got a pretty full life, after all, with all the stand-up gigging, the SNL appearances, the movie career, the banjo playing — but he writes that the play was one of the only things he ever did that won the approval of his late father, who said it should have gotten the Nobel Prize.
It doesn’t deserve the Nobel Prize, nor does it deserve to be banned.
However, at least having a work banned would put Martin in the company of a certain other sharp-witted, white-haired American humorist, who also criss-crossed the country and liked to perform in an all-white suit: “Censorship,” quoth Mark Twain, “is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.”
Maybe, with regard to doing Picasso at the Lapin Agile in a high school, Martin is a little ahead of his time, not unlike the enigmatic messenger who appears close to the end of the play.
It’s good that Martin is prepared to fund the production at its new location, anyway. That way, like that aforementioned messenger, he’ll be ready to deliver his funny, insightful message to those who’re open to receive it.
On a side note, while there’s sadly no video of our performance other than a scene we did for the morning show, to which I linked above, curious fans will be happy to learn that several members of our the cast — and our amazing director — have been admitted into TMR‘s bank of voice actors. Listen for them in upcoming TMR audio issues.
True/False Favorites List
It was downright nippy last weekend here in Columbia, Missouri, but that didn’t keep my fiancee Neesha, her parents, and me away from the True/False Film Festival. Turns out, nothing gets a family talking like a solid piece of nonfiction filmmaking. We saw a whole bunch of films. Here’s the roundup on our favorites.
Loot
Remember how Bill Murray acts in Caddyshack? That’s how this Lance guy just kind of . . . is. Father of four, he drops everything to scamper off to Austria and the Philippines to hunt treasure on sketchy information gathered from WWII vets. Allegory for documentary filmmaking as a whole: Could be something there to dig up, but it’s far from a sure thing.
Waltz with Bashir
Academy Award-nominated, Golden Globe-winning, I liked it because it’s clever and skillfully animated. Neesha liked it because of the scene where the filmmaker, an ex-Israeli soldier who is trying to uncover a buried memory from the Lebanese war, asks one of the interview subjects if he can sketch him and his son. The guy agrees.
“Sketch anything you like,” he says, “but no filming.”
As we were all leaving the theater, Neesha asked me what I make of that.
I don’t know what I make of that.
We Live in Public
Josh Harris seems like a total d-bag in the film — moreso in the post-film Q&A — and none of us had even heard of any of the “pioneering” web projects he helmed (Pseudo?). His doom and gloom prophecies about diminishing human interaction and privacy did make us all want to deactivate our Facebook and Myspace pages, though.
Rough Aunties
Follows Bobbi Bear staff through multiple attrocities in South Africa. We cried. My soon-to-be mother-in-law sums it up best: “The subjects were the least self-serving and the most self-sacrificing, all for the sake of women and children.”
Sounds Like Teen Spirit
Speaking of children . . .
This was unanimously adored in our party, maybe because it was the last film we saw, and by then, we were all desperationed-out and ready to surrender to the joyfulness of children competing in the Junior Eurovision Song Contest.
I think all the films we saw had lessons for nonfiction writing as a genre, but especially this one, which is about kids following their dreams. For some of us, writing is our childhood dream. We ought to love it like children, I think, or we ought to look for something else to do. That’s the lesson I got. That and the value of a little levity.
These were some of our favorites from True/False. If you got to go, what were yours?
Unlikely Collisions Threaten Sense of Sublime
Bad news this week for people awed by the final frontier and the second-to-final frontier, which are apparently getting a tad crowded. The much-discussed collision of two satellites in low Earth orbit and the just-disclosed deep sea nuclear submarine fender-bender in the Atlantic Ocean indicate that it might be a good time to turn the music down and do a hand check, because whoa, people, everybody’s getting awfully close.
Look for that call for a hand check to ring loudest from groups like the Solent Coalition Against Nuclear Ships (SCANS) who already had a bone to pick with the nuclear submarine as an appropriate aquatic vehicle. Every time a lonely nuclear sub leaks a few tons of deadly radiation into the world’s oceans, or breaks mid-trip and dooms a bunch of Russian sailors to an unspeakable and heartbreaking underwater fate, SCANS is up-periscope with two hands on the ideological torpedo key. Imagine what those guys are going to say about this — two nuke subs, one incident, and an accidental one, at that. Right now, inside the SCANS office in Southampton, smart, civically engaged people are hunched in front of laptops trying to figure out the most articulate way to express, “Oh, for cryin’ out . . . c’mon!”
Meanwhile, at the UN, the orbital collision is being debated by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UNCPUOC).
(For any acronymologists just tuning in, it’s SCANS one, UNCPUOC zero)
It’s looking like there may be some legal fallout regarding the spacecraft smash-up since one of the satellites belonged to the Russian military and the other belonged to a private company in the U.S., but more pressing is the issue of whether the debris from the crash will harm other satellites.
For both of these cases, it’s important to understand the size of the objects relative to the environment. For instance, I always assumed the average run-of-the-mill satellite was about the size of a beach ball, but it turns out that’s way low in terms of scale. The two satellites that became one above Siberia last week were more like Ford F-150s, each weighing about a ton, and yikes! they were moving! How fast? According to Hampden-Sydney College’s physics and astronomy web site, this fast:
I know, right? Crazy fast. It would take me close to half an hour to race the distance one of those satellites travels in one second. Granted, I would lose little momentum at the water station, but still! And not only are the busted, F-150-sized junkers still going this fast, but so are all the pieces that flew off in all directions.
Experts who’ve been interviewed for both incidents have remarked about the unlikelihood of these events in the first place. Both events have to do with collisions between sophisticated, highly specialized objects that normally function in total solitude. In other words, they each describe a pair of graduate students knocking together at a vast mixer, one resulting in a sudden, alarming — frankly disturbing — bump that is destined to be referenced vaguely in some future poem; the other a spectacular spill that sends cabernet sauvignon and cheese cubes on toothpicks flying around the planet at close to five kilometers per second.
All I’m saying is, this could be coincidence, but it could also be a sign of the times. When country crooner Lee Ann Womack sings that she hopes we still feel small when we stand beside the ocean, she isn’t messing around. But how large can the ocean be when nuclear submarines are dinging each other’s doors? How spacious is space any more? NASA’s chief orbital debris scientist just announced that there are 19,000 satellites up there, pretty much for good, and we’re just getting started.
Out-of-commission this week: two nuclear submarines, two communications satellites, one TMR blogger’s sense of the sublime.
More Specific Definition Found for New Term "Opposite Marriage"
Good news this week for the English language, which welcomes into usage the term opposite marriage, courtesy of Miss California 2009, Carrie Prejean.
Political affiliation and current events knowledge aside, Prejean should be commended for having achieved accidentally through some miracle of ineloquence what many of us strive to do each waking hour: invent and advance a new term. Let’s face it. That’s no easy feat.
No? Go ahead, then. Come up with something and get it to catch on. I dare you.
While the embattled former Miss USA contestant has drawn criticism for her opinions on gay marriage, I, for one, welcome opposite marriage into the lexicon. This could be because I’m alarmed at the number of English words and phrases that are falling out of use — more, it seems, than are entering — and, at this point, I’ll take what I can get.
It could also be that I admire the unintentionally subversive element in the term opposite marriage. It defines itself (or tries to define itself, as best it can, with the awkward omission of the word sex) through opposition to the term same-sex marriage, which has had to define itself in relation to the term marriage. So Prejean used opposite marriage to mean marriage, and in doing so privileged the term gay marriage, and marginalized marriage by presenting it as a term that requires definition through that which it is not.
As a nonfiction writer, I’m all for getting a rhetorical piece of that linguistical action. The day is nigh, my friends, when we will wander our local bookstores in search of some inspiring new poetry, nonfiction, or opposite nonfiction.
I will remember you on that proud day, Miss California ’09.
What I like most about opposite marriage is that the term seems to skip over any meaningful commentary on gender, sexual preference, or state law to precisely describe a much more mysterious social phenomenon:
the pairing of one person, who is attractive, smart, graceful, charming, and dazzling in every possible way, with another person, who is really just some big, stumbling goob. Consider this recent engagement photograph. Note how my fiancée remains poised and elegant even while beach wrangling what looks to be a pigmy tyrannosaur that just ransacked a Banana Republic.
Opposite marriage, ladies and gentlemen. It may not mean what Prejean would have liked for it to mean, but it’ll come in handy, nonetheless. My only regret is that the Miss America Pageant at which it was uttered was held after we had the wedding invitations printed up. Imagine: “Please join us in celebrating the beginning of our life together in opposite marriage.”
Has a nice ring to it, right?