TwentySomething
Just a touch of existential malaise
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For Russell EdsonIf not for flesh’s pretty paint, we’re just a bunch of skeletons, working hard to deny the fact of bones. Teeth remind me that we die. That’s why I never smile, except when looking at a picture of a ghost, captured by a camera lens, in a book about the paranormal. When someone takes a picture of a spirit, it gives me hope. I admire the ones who refuse to go away. Lovers scorned and criminals burned. I love the dead little girl who plays in her yard, a spectral game of hide and seek. It’s the fact they don’t know they’re dead that appeals to me most. Like a man once said to me, Do you ever feel like you’re a ghost? Sure, I answered, every day. He laughed at that and disappeared. All I could think was he beat me to it.
—Christopher Kennedy
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To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?” To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.The inimitable David Sedaris on undecided voters.
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In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
—James Wright -
- BODETT: I think it's just payback for the Obama birth certificate thing. Let's just make some wild claim about the other side and then say, well, why aren't you producing it, why aren't you proving it? I mean, they could have said Romney has no middle toes. And he says, "I do too have middle toes!" Well, prove it. We've never seen your toes. He won't show us his toes.
- DICKINSON: Coward. Such a shoe-wearing coward, really.
- BODETT: I mean what kind of American doesn't have middle toes, I ask you? I think the American voters have a right to know.
- JR: The American people. You know, he may have fungus. Have you ever seen those really awful toes?
- BODETT: Well, that explains why he's always wearing shoes at all of his appearances.
- DICKINSON: He does tend to wear them, yeah.
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The Dandy Warhols cover Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.” Porchside beer-swigging tunes for Tom Hamilton’s commercial breaks.
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Christmas was looking pretty ugly for Hollywood this year. Following 2010, which soared to a finish with jaw-droppers like “The King’s Speech,” “True Grit” and “Black Swan,” 2011 dribbled away with mediocre showings for “We Bought a Zoo” and “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” not to mention yet another insipid goddamn Chipmunks movie. Box-office sales sank ten percent.
We won’t say this often (or ever again), but thank God for Tom Cruise.
Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible flick is a sleek, bulletproof specimen that resurrects all the infectious pacing and brazen improbabilities of the well-trod, but still not tired, franchise. The movie opens on a caffeinated high note, with Cruise breaking out of prison to the tune of Dean Martin’s “Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.” Once out, he joins forces with team members Simon Pegg and Paula Patton and the trio heads to Moscow, where they plan to infiltrate the high-security Kremlin. The film earns major points with a clever espionage scheme involving a projector and a screen, punctuated by Pegg’s well-placed comic relief.
When the Kremlin is bombed, the mission falls apart and the group, deprived of agency support, decides to go rogue.
In true M: I style, the plot gets nearly impossible to follow from there, with director Brad Bird expertly steering the cast to breathtaking setpieces in India and Dubai. Fortunately, the stunning visuals are as simple as the plot is convoluted. Bird navigates scene after palm-sweating scene with relentless aplomb, and Cruise’s blithe arrogance is the perfect foil to the nervy, vengeful Patton and Pegg’s twitchy humor.
The clean, wrenching finale — and the poster’s photo op — comes at the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the world’stallest building. As Cruise clings to the dizzyingly high glass exterior with failing equipment, a billowing sandstorm looms in the distance. Say what you will about Tom Cruise (and we will), but the stunts — he did them on site, himself — and the visceral, spine-tingling tension is worth every penny.
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“What is all this shit about angels? Have you heard this? Three out of four people now believe in angels. What’re you, fuckin’ stupid? Has everybody lost their fuckin’ minds in this country? Angels, shit. You know what I think it is? I think it’s a massive collective psychotic chemical flashback of all the drugs—all the drugs—smoked, swallowed, snorted, shot, and absorbed rectally by all Americans from 1960 to 1990. Thirty years of adulterated street drugs’ll get you some fuckin’ angels, my friend.”
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Gin and guns—either one is bad enough, but together they get you in a dickens of a mess, don’t they.
