Cheap Cheese

Pickin' Up Things at the 99-Cent Store


Sorry! I have NOT blogged for about ten days now, but I'm not really embarrassed. I have been searching for that elusive 9-5 job; all my energies have been focused on that. I have had a few minutes here and there to read and to watch a bit o' the tube, but that's it, other than, of course, playing hearts on-line. I am SO addicted. Hunt for a job at one site, play a game of cards, apply for another job, play another game of cards. That's my life.

Oh, by the way, the cheaper the kind of cheese you buy the more resistant to heat it is. The cheese we have now been relegated to eating does not melt one bit. You know how hot, melty cheese will stick to the roof of your mouth and burn the fee-yuck out of you. Well, go cheap, my friend, and your mouth-roof-burns will be a thing of the past.

Also, the 99-cent store is kinda' cool; they sell all sorts of interesting things, things you'd never imagine buying for, you guessed it, 99 CENTS.

Well, it's official--279 films were released last year and are eligible for the 2002 Best Picture Oscar. At this point, as you might imagine from the above, I have not seen many of them, only 35 (plus 3 not eligible but released last year) so far. There are 44 films I'd like to see, any one of which I'd pay to see if there were a spare 130 nickels lying around; but, my friend, not even one, so my to-see list has more movies this year than my have-seen list. Happily, there are only eight movies from my have-seen list that I dearly wish were on my glad-I-didn't-waste-my-time list, which stands at eighteen. I'll fill you in on my movie goss as soon as I get a chance.

I had a first interview today, a working interview at the same place tomorrow--a nursery for kids in crisis, unhealthy family situations, kids from six weeks to six years old. Also, tomorrow, I have an interview for a social-studies-teaching position at a charter school, mostly for girls with nowhere else to turn (but also welcoming to the local teens as well). EEK!, I hear you screaming, "But, Mike, you're ostensibly an English teacher." I know; get over it; read back above to that whole spare-nickel passage.

I haven't had much time to study THE SEVEN SAMURAI, but I have put a bit of thought into my story inspired by it. I have been enjoying a book, from the early 70s, of Tolkien criticism, one essay written by my favorite author from when I was younger, Marion Zimmer Bradley. Most of the essays thus far have spent too much time simply defending the fantasy genre as real literature. They're kinda' dated that way but also very interesting thematically, when they finally get to it. I'm really, really, really looking forward to the third film now, THE RETURN OF THE KING, and would dearly love to see the second one, THE TWO TOWERS, a second time. Oh, well, maybe soon.....

So, soon, I'll try to get a Mike-movie-year-2002 thingy out to you and more on the job front and more about the fiction. Patience, patience.

(This web-log entry is COPYRIGHT 2003 Michael S. Adams.)

Killing Time

I NEED A JOB!


Hmmm! It’s Friday afternoon here in Phoenix on the third day of 2003. Lots to catch up on, so I’m gonna’ try my best to keep my comments relatively short on each subject. Just please recall, I did just say “relatively.”

I finished Jamake Highwater’s book THE MYTHOLOGY OF TRANSGRESSION (HOMOSEXUALITY AS METAPHOR). The beginning was quite captivating. His personal life and experience led me to believe he could really attack this subject of “how people [who]… stand outside of society—by dint of their sexual orientation, physical appearance, ideas, artistic inclinations, or ethnic heritage—often achieve lasting, even profound influence upon the culture at large.” He speculates upon social “abnormality” and alienation, all the while wondering how Western society can at once think of outsiders as wise and sinful and why transgressors are “ostracized, while in our most durable folklore and religious legends, heroes must break the rules to achieve greatness.” The personal anecdotes were moving—he is a gay man, an artist, and an orphaned Native American. The middle of the book got bogged down by a lot of scientific lingo and repetition, but the ending was as good as the beginning. He insists that homosexuals have not only been a part of modern society, they have largely created it. However, he notes that as homosexual ghettoes begin to flourish, the most important aspect that allowed that modern societal creation I mentioned, that of the outsider, the transgressor, is being lost and turned into a victimization scenario.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t brave enough to mark the library book’s nice passages, and I now realize I’m summarizing terribly.

I did find this one passage, “Victimization [is] a political mannerism—a divisive activity that allows a person (submerged in the ‘group’) to escape the challenge of becoming an individual.” I like that. One is so busy being a victim that he or she forgets to be himself or herself.

The last three or four pages of the book were beautiful. It’s really good stuff, a nice ending to a decent book. We are stardust, Highwater says. Each one of us is made of the same atoms that exploded out of some ancient star. When we look at each other, we shouldn’t “be distracted by the wall of opinions, concepts, and dogma that always stands between us, forcing us to see something alien—when what we should be seeing is stardust.”

Highwater says “the mythology that created our repressed society has long outlived the society it created.” Until we change it, he says, we can’t change our lives.

He acknowledges that desire makes beasts of us all and that fear of desire is something that we will not ever be able to escape, for all of our stories make us feel that way. However, he does say we should take our cue from the heroes of those very stories, those that braved the outside, alone, who became individuals to continue.

He doesn’t idealize alienation but does remind us that only by being pushed from the nest do we discover the possibility of flight. “My purpose is to propose that, as a response to sexual bigotry, there have been a great many brilliant achievements made by gay men, lesbians, and by all others. Undoubtedly not all outcasts are mythic heroes, but the heroism of the mythic journey has always been one of the most exceptional adventures of Homo sapiens.”

On the last two pages, he goes on to say, “‘Homosexuality’ is an invention intended to silence and diminish us, to extinguish the fire that allows us to know one another. Western religion and science have conspired to isolate and denigrate us. Heterosexuality is a concept that attempts to denounce possibilities that it cannot and will not imagine. The categorization of ‘homosexuality’ is supposed to deprive us of our humanness. It is a Machiavellian devise [sic?] that attempts to send us into hiding. Instead, remarkably, it has sent us on a journey we might never have dared. It forced us to be different so we could learn the unimaginable lessons of difference. Jean Cocteau, that mannered little Frenchman with dainty hands and an effeminate voice, perfectly understood the lessons we learn as aliens. And so he said: ‘What other people reproach you for—cultivate. It is yourself.’

“Perhaps that is also the lesson of the stardust that glistens at the core of our existence. Out of the death of a star we have the opportunity to invent ourselves without timidity or apology. Because of a cataclysmic cosmic disaster, we have this one chance to imagine at least the possibility of being whatever it is we mean when we use that most mysterious of all words… myself.”

“Amen!” as I learned to say in the Southern Baptist South, where I grew up left-handed, curly-headed, blue-eyed, and gay. Nothing can stop me from being myself. I don’t care what kinda’ stories anybody else grew up on, those people and those strories are NOT going to stop me from being me.

Gonna’ keep right on writing at this point.

I also recently watched the Japanese film SHICHI NIN NO SAMURAI (THE SEVEN SAMURAI) (1954) and its offspring, the American Western film, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (umm, SUBARASHII NO SHICHI NIN, not sure of the grammar there) (1960). (Actually, the original, SHICHI NIN NO SAMURAI, was sometimes also called, in English, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.) The Japanese film was long and wonderful. I’m sure you know the story. A town is besieged by forty bandits so its people seek out the help of a few warriors, six and a tagalong. The seven train the passive townspeople, who fear the warriors almost as much as they fear the bandits, to defend themselves; then there is a wonderful, wonderful battle. The Akira Kurosawa directed and co-written film is inspiring, beginning the whole gather-the-team-for-the-mission genre, including such flicks as THE DIRTY DOZEN, THE GUNS OF NAVARONE, and A BUG’S LIFE as well as, of course, the previously mentioned THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN.

The very next day I watched the hour-shorter THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. It was cool to see the similarities and parallels as well as the differences. Each had seven warriors, but the Western combined the Japanese newbie and the Japanese mad outsider warrior into one character, the newbie, outsider, deluded wannabe (and HOT) Chico (played by the HOT Horst Buchholz). The Japanese leader, Shimada, who had to shave his head at the beginning of SHICHI NIN to pretend to be a priest becomes the bald, strutting magnificently Chris Adams (Yul Brynner), a black-clad enigmatic loner, in MAG 7. Both had old man patriarchs of the town. Both had enigmatic bits of dialogue (7 SAM—“It is the lone fish who grows big,” or some such thing. MAG 7—“Between my elbow and the rock is the heat,” or some such thing. WHAT?) However, the Western focuses the audience on the bandits by creating a leader, Calvera, a villain to hiss at, whereas the Japanese film kept the bandits nameless and mostly faceless. The Western’s music, by Elmer Bernstein, is instantly recognizable and quite powerful.

Both films had nice themes about outsiders, honorable-warrior codes, outlaws vs. drifters, male bonding, and alienation, much of which I had just read about in THE MYTHOLOGY OF TRANSGRESSION.

Anyway, it was fun to watch them back to back. The fun actually inspired me to finally rent the Kurosawa film THE HIDDEN FORTRESS, which inspired STAR WARS in the same way THE SEVEN SAMURAI inspired THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN. I can’t wait to get into the deposed princess with her commoner helpers escaping the hidden fortress to safety. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

I’ve also checked out the screenplay for THE SEVEN SAMURAI. I want to read it carefully, closely. I think it’s speaking to me and, strangely enough, mixing around in my head with some Shakespeare and some DC Comics (the Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman universe). We’ll see what in the world comes out, which will, of course, be COPYRIGHT Michael S. Adams.

Ugh! The job hunt continues. Hopefully, some good news from that war-torn front soon.

Los and I went walking in our neighborhood a couple days ago, walking for hours, downtown Phoenix always dominating the near horizon. We walked around a relatively quiet neighborhood and looked at some houses that were on the market. It was fun to get out and walk around my new city, far away from that gay ghetto I was living in in San Diego. Phoenix is cool that way, the gay stuff is just scattered around and not all gathered in one ghetto. I miss some aspects of the ghetto, a huge comfort zone; but I’m liking this new place, too. I feel more me here.

I’m certainly a lot chattier with the writing, and that feels good. I hope it’s not too painful from where you are.

(This web-log entry is COPYRIGHT 2003 Michael S. Adams.)