I'm So Sick I Got Ambulances Pulling Me Over and Shit.

One summer in the late 1990s it was really hot. Any time I walked around my neighborhood and passed a car with the windows down and the sound system up, I could hear Eminem: la bête blanche, the rapping white guy, the infuriator of the right, left, and center. The music was ubiquitous enough that you couldn't help hearing it and in my case, liking it. I was a sucker for his sick humor that sent mucus spraying over whatever was around when I finally got the joke, the agonized howls of the narcissistic young male scorned and humiliated, the cleverly articulated and pervasive rage. Of course I liked all the stuff I knew I wasn't supposed to, and Eminem became one of my dark and secret pleasures. Anyway, if I told people I liked him no one believed me.

 

I leave it to more learned types to dissect and critique the musical and lyrical content of the Eminem ouvre. I will say that I've never heard anyone else rap about Munchhausen syndrome and don't expect to. On Recovery he muses "why is it when I talk I'm so biased to the 'hos?" He must be working his program.


 
 




When I started going to doctors all the time, I developed a compulsive desire to listen to Eminem in my car.  I could not even turn the ignition key unless I had a CD cued up, if not Em himself, at least D-12 or Bad Meets Evil. Loud. When my mom was there, I turned the volume down, which didn't stop her from informing me every time she got in the car that he doesn't get along with his mother. (She knows because she's from Detroit.)

I had CDs on the seats, under the seats, and spilling out of the glove compartment. I found that when a thought came into my mind it tended to sound like an Eminem lyric. At work Slim Shady started trying to hijack people's therapy sessions. I had to choke back "Why the fuck do you give a shit anyway?" and force "What do you think makes it so important to you?" out of my mouth.

On a recent Sunday, I went to a restorative yoga class. Afterward I floated back to my car, sat in the driver's seat and realized that I didn't need to hear Eminem. Yoga had freed me from bondage and I put on Arthur Rubenstein and Queens of the Stone Age. I still like Eminem, though. In fact, I'm listening to him right now. 

Photograph by Wendy Brusick

 

SHUTTER ISLAND

Recently I forced myself to sit through an entire DVD showing of Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island, starring Leonardo Dicaprio.

I'm not the most avid fan of Mr. Scorsese. For one thing, when I turn on a late night talk show, if Martin Scorsese or Robert DeNiro is a guest, I can never tell which one it is. Of course, the fact that one always seems to be acting in the other's movies doesn't help clear up the confusion.

A few words about Scorsese movies:  Taxi Driver: OK, Color of Money: OK, The Last Temptation of Christ: What a blast wading through throngs of angry Catholics to get into the theater to see that one, Goodfellas: OK, Cape Fear: Histrionics and a lot of water splashing around, Casino and Gangs of New York: OK, The Departed: Was pleasantly surprised, but check out the Hong Kong original and vastly superior Infernal Affairs, which brings us to Shutter Island.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a US Marshal who is larking about trying to locate a patient missing from a mental hospital on Shutter Island. I won't bore you with my repetitious complaining about movies set in mental hospitals. My friend Gordon and I saw West Side Story together and agreed that years of interactions with actual juvenile delinquents make it hard to suspend disbelief when the ones on the screen start doing Jerome Robbins choreography. Similar difficulties arise when someone wants me to pretend I'm seeing the criminally insane in their natural habitat.


Plot wise, I can't help but wonder why Leo is so determined to portray a nut case in virtually every movie he makes. What happened to that cute boy we loved so much as a junkie in Basketball Diaries and Johnny Depp's troublesome brother in What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

Visually, this movie was exquisite. Better turn the sound down though.

Actually, You Don't Smell Like a Brewery

Did your mom or your grandma ever tell you that someone smelled like a brewery? I used to sit with my grandparents on their enclosed porch in the summer. My grandpa read aloud from the Detroit News while I perused grandma's Scots Magazine which had articles with names like "Ah, Sangobeg..." and "Leith's Little Eskimo." In the mean time, grandma would monitor and comment on the activities of the neighbors. Almost every day, she had reason to announce, "There goes old MacNeil, awa tae the beer garden." On his way home, he invariably smelled "like a brewery," since he'd been drinking beer all afternoon.

Recently a brewery opened up a few doors from my office. Naturally it is a "micro-brewery." In case you need to know, you can drink as much beer as you want until you pass out or float away and you will never smell like a brewery. You will smell like beer. A brewery emits a peculiar and disgusting odor. Words fail me when I try to describe it or compare it to anything else. So drink your beer and if someone makes a comment about how you smell, smack 'em one.

The Killer Inside Me

 

I could try to be cute and claim that I didn't know Casey Affleck was Ben Affleck's brother. Of course I knew, although I'd never seen him acting before. As a small town psychopath, Lou Ford, who relaxes of an evening playing classical piano, reading great literature, and listening to Donazetti on his late father's Victrola, Affleck will curdle your blood and turn your bowels to water before you finish your popcorn.

Enjoying Una Furtiva Lagrima

This movie is about as noir as noir gets, but the sunlight in 1952 Texas is so bright it will make your eyes hurt, the characters are always sweaty and grimy, and Texas swing plays endlessly on car radios. If you want dark alleys and moody black and white cinematography, you probably should skip this.

Apparently, there was much controversy about violence against women in this movie when it came out. I've seen more than my share of murder and mayhem on the big screen, and I'm not sure I have much light or heat to add to the debate. I will comment that if your story includes people beating other people to death you should probably make it pretty violent, and not in a Quentin Tarantino way.

 

Dental Death Match

I was going to the same dentist in Chicago for about thirty-five years before it hit me that there was no reason he should be entrusted with my teeth for the rest of his career, or my life, whichever ended first. So feeling very pleased with myself, I went and found a new dentist. My primary requisite was that he or she have graduated in 2000 or later. Research shows that psychotherapists' performance improves with experience. I have no reason to assume the same goes for dentists. Under the care of my new dentist I have benefitted from technology much improved since the 1960s. For example, no more scrape, scraping with those nasty looking picks to remove plaque from the teeth.  My new dentist uses some whirring electronic device that takes less than half the time as the old method, eliminates the chalk on blackboard sound, and doesn't involve a less qualified person than he fooling around with my teeth. He is great. If anybody wants his contact information, send me a direct message, as I assume he probably would rather not have his practice associated with some of the weird shit on this blog.

Recently we decided I should get one of those mouth guards that prevent one from grinding or clenching one's teeth while sleeping. A plaster mold went off to the laboratory, but when the wee mouth guard arrived it proved to be tighter than Mamie Eisenhower's girdle! It went into my mouth just great, but we had to take turns wrestling it out, with him exerting masculine force, me scratching my gums, and him exhorting me not to break my nails in the process. After much grinding, adjusting, and inserting and removing, it seems to fit, and I have dutifully been sleeping in it. My name is cleverly inscribed inside the plastic, which again brings me childish pleasure, although I'm not sure what contingency might make that necessary, and try not to speculate too much about it.

Google 'mouth guard images' to see what can happen when you don't use one! 

Dragonwyck

Totally stumbled on the film Dragonwyck due to my interest in Gene Tierney. Some people carry on about how she was the most beautiful woman who ever acted in film. I can't see it, but her work is awesome and her life was very interesting (See Self Portrait by Gene Tierney).

Dragonwyck features Vincent Price, Walter Huston, Spring Byington, Harry Morgan, and Jessica Tandy, along with Tierney. This is an over the top Gothic movie, set in New England rather than the Cotswalds, or where ever else they have in England. This was Joseph Mankewitz's directorial debut, it was produced by Ernest Lubitch, and featured other Hollywood luminaries such as Alfred Newman and Arthur C. Miller. It also showcases a hair-raising performance by Connie Marshall as Vincent Price's daughter, who without a doubt has an impaired capacity for object relations.

Great date flick!

Michael Haneke

By my late teens I had developed a taste for the arty, esoteric, and obscure, especially in the world of cinema. While attending a screening of Nicholas Roeg's Performance (still love this movie big time) in Carbondale, Illinois (home of my alma mater: SIU-C), I listened with approval while one drunken frat boy encouraged another to "Just go with it" when he expressed perplexity with the rather non-linear narrative of the film.

A couple years later, I was sitting in a theater in Chicago watching the opening of David Lynch's Blue Velvet when the gentleman in front of me (perhaps more interested in getting out of the cold for a few hours than expanding his knowledge of avant-guard film), turned, looked me in the eye, and asked "What the fuck is this shit?" Following the example of my frat boy fellow film enthusiast, I attempted to reassure the man and encourage a "go with it" approach. This did not stop him from whipping around in his seat periodically to fix me with a look of disapproving perplexity during the rest of the movie.

So I was primed and ready for my first look at Michael Haneke who is an Austrian director. My friend Gordon and I went to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see Benny's Video, one of a number of "Why are these normal boys suddenly killing other kids for no reason?" pictures that hit after Columbine i.e. Zero Day and Elephant. Benny's Video may not give you any big insights into the problem, but I guarantee it will turn your blood to ice water.

The same might be said of The Piano Teacher. Isabelle Huppert stars in a fearless performance as a woman whose sexuality boils to the surface in spite of the icy clamp of repression from mom, society, men in general, a lover and God knows what else. Women are condemned for sexual frigidity but cast into the fires of contempt and perhaps banishment to hell when the scent of semen on a tissue arouses them.

Thanks to our dear friends at Netflix and The Chicago Public Library, I have been exploring the oeuvre of Mr. Haneke. You can check out The Castle, Funny Games, (in English and German), Code Unknown, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Cache, and The White Ribbon among others that I haven't tracked down yet. I usually don't do this, but here's a quote from the New York Times Magazine: "Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly — in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen." Often there isn't a whole lot in the way of story lines with Mr. Haneke's pictures, but I generally find myself riveted from start to existentially bleak finish with them. Strangely, from the numerous Haneke interviews in the Special Features section of the DVDs of the above films  he seems to be an affable, laid-back guy, although there was one "behind the scenes" type feature where he totally blew up at his cinematic crew because they weren't doing exactly what he wanted. Who knows?