This is Your Brain on Boil

It was a tough week and then it ended thank God, thank God.Even my new pink bra couldn't cheer me when the temperatures climbed.I felt like a tea cake on a hot summer day in Alabama.That's from To Kill a Mockingbird, that image.Here's another: Sometimes when I'm looking out the windows of my office at the schoolchildren waiting for the bus, or the little boys wrestling one another to the ground, I feel like shy Boo Radley peeking from behind his curtains. "I'm the Boo Radley of the neighborhood," I sometimes say to the younger moms and dads, who smile nervously and edge away. No doubt in another ten years I too will be leaving notes in the hollow of the old oak tree.My point is, your thoughts DO melt and slide around in the heat. Slider thoughts they are and while I'm at it whose idea was it to name little burgers 'sliders'? Talk about cue the paramedics and brush up on your Heimlich Maneuver! Burgers don't slide down the throat, you have to chew them, kind of a lot in fact.And why was Chewbacca named Chewbacca? Was that some sort of product placement for the smoking lobby? Freud died of throat cancer I'll have you know... So sometimes a cigar really is a cigar and cigars give you cancer.Well that's it for me. Slammin' this little 'book' shut and heading for the country where it's all so QUIET.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw_-THlcyHc]Y'all have fun now too, heah?

Flightpath

At times in my life I've felt like that Up in the Air guy George Clooney plays, when he’s flying around the country firing people.

(Well, anyway he’s doing that until the foxy chick played by Vere Farmiga­­­ breaks his heart. We’re not sure what changes his character will undergo when the screen fades to black.)

I travelled for 25 years for my job, by car mostly, but also up in the air.

By now I can whip that laptop out of its bag as fast as the best of them.

Quick as a wink I can take off a coat, un-holster a phone, give a special curveball of a kick to my shoes so they shoot right up into my hands, first the right, then the left, and in one sweet motion land in one of those bins.

Being used to the whole drill frees me to look around a little and that’s what I like best.

This time I saw a chubby eight-year-old talking to his toy in a high squeaky voice. I also saw many grownups doing that but the toys in their cases were  their phones.

I saw a hipster in a T-shirt reading 'Honey Nut Cheerios' staring glumly for 30 straight minutes at his phone.

I saw a family of eight madly snapping pictures of each other, changing positions, forming groupings and calling "Mira Mira!" as they looked at the shots.

Theyoung  flight attendant on the Chicago to St. Louis run looked like Brad Pitt from the back - Brad P the movie Burn After Reading I mean, with his hair half dark and half bleached brassy blond.

At least he looked young until I saw him full face.  He wasn’t really  young at all. AND he had dyed his eyebrows dark.

It's weird what happens to your eyebrows as you age. Mine used to look like Jennifer Connelly’s when she was a child actress doing the movie Labyrinth with David Bowie.

Now they’re like that flight attendant’s a month after his last dye job.

Our family’s new baby has no action in the eye brow department either I notice so I guess that’s the arc of it for us humans. We take off, we rack up a lot of miles, flying here and there and all around and then we turn back into babies. It sounds kind of nice doesn’t it? It sounds like it all might work out after all, even if most of us DON'T win the equivalent of Vera Farmiga at the end of the picture.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7k6FwXJhNk]

What You Can Learn at the Movies

Face it: most of what we know about famous figures we know from movies about them. In fact what notable figures haven’t had a movie made about them? Dian Fossey you say? Wrong: Gorillas in the Mist. Howard Hughes? Nope: The Aviator.  Moses? The Ten Commandments. Certainly not Jesus who’s had TWO movies made about him just in the last 20 years, one starring Willem Dafoe and one starring Caviezel who at least looked a little mid-eastern (AND spoke Aramaic. The whole movie had subtitles, remember?)

But let's look at the life of Mozart just because we’ve been thinking about him these last few days. Most of what I know about Mozart I know from seeing Amadeus. Here’s the trailer for it now with Mozart being played by Tom Hulce fresh from his star turn in Animal House:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du-rD2QL1Pc]So too , most of what I know about Beethoven I know from seeing Immortal Beloved and here’s that trailer :[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS9MTQqVUFY.]It leaves you really hoping that the writers of all these screenplays stuck to the facts. I mean you try to learn about all the great figures but it’s a daunting task. Our lives are so short and here’s this ever-growing tail of human history. In a way it’s a wonder we remember anything at all of what went before.Anyway here’s  the movie that taught ME the most about a  historical figure and  then sent me right to the bookstore for the 400-page book about him (which, come to think of it, I should probably take down from the shelf and read again.)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVwCeGxTN-A]

Gleaning from Glee

I’m coming in late on the whole Glee phenomenon but now that the show has picked up five Golden Globe nominations I thought I’d better finally look at it systematically. I've just watched four episodes One-Two-Three-Four while pounding the treadmill in the attic. (Well, not pounding the treadmill the WHOLE time. I touched up the finish on a sweet old chair while watching and also sorted 100 photos from the 1990s, but in the end someone looking in the window at that messy third-floor room for 75% of the time would have seen a person watching a TV screen. Just fixedly watching the screen, which is maybe how most people watch TV I don’t know.)There’s a lot I still don’t get though - like why the cool director Mr. Shuester would marry that moron of a woman in the first place? And what’s with bald-guy pederast in the pink sweaters? Wouldn’t it be better to have just one nice normal gay male in the person of the sweet rosy-cheeked Kurt Hummel character?I need to catch up I realize; these are just the first four episodes of the very first season I'm talking about.I do get the satire though. It’s funny that little Kurt Hummel looks like a Hummel, the little figurines your elderly aunt collected and displayed in her Colonial-style curio cabinet.I also 'get it' that creating a character like the wide-eyed hygiene obsessed Emma Pillsbury is an homage to 1978’s Animal House and the white-glove-wearing character Amanda Pepperidge. (Anyone remember her? And they say drenching sexual content is new!)Anyhow... She’s the one in the headbands in this witty clip-plus-music but oh John Belushi where are you when we really need you? A shame and a waste, your death from speed-balling. Who would ever have guessed back in ‘78 at the huge, huge part drugs would play in wrecking so many lives? Click through to YouTube to watch it and remember to KEEP ON SMILING or else we're all lost![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fAqFAx_zzk&feature=fvw]

The Bad Hair Clue

I just saw Crazy Heart with the wonderful Jeff Bridges who looks like such a wreck in the early scenes as a down-on-his-luck country singer. His hair is oily, his belt's undone, his face looks as bad the face of Nick Nolte drinkin' again. But here's what I really liked: in every scene where his hair's a mess, bad things happen. When the hair is bad and the face gets all dour you just know he's going to start throwing up again. You just know it'll be cryin’ time again for Maggie Gyllenhal and her kid with the Cabbage Patch face. Then, when Jeff is nicely barbered and NOT sweating clear through his clothes, you know that kissing is up next and you think they just might make it after all. (You have to go to the movie to see if they do.)My one criticism: he seems to get sober in an awful hurry. We see only about 90 seconds of one of the doubtless hundreds of 12-step meetings he'd have had to attend and hey: the Steps deserve more credit than that. But my favorite part, besides getting the chance to see him work with Robert Duvall? Realizing that the great Jeff Bridges once had chickenpox  because there it is, as plain as day when he lies on top of Maggie: the little crater that marks him as one of us after all.

Paging Mel's Handlers!

The ant-Semitic remarks Mel Gibson made while resisting arrest for drunk driving in 2006 hurt him and I admit I wasn't thinking of them when I posted about his new movie yesterday. As a Jew, journalist Sam Ruben felt targeted by him with his "You got a dog in this fight?” remark. For sure he's testy these days: he got really sore at entertainment reporter and critic Dean Richards who was interviewing him via satellite feed. You can tell by his  body language, and the way he handles his coffee cup. You can tell by the way he calls the reporter an asshole when he knows very well the man can still hear him. All I can say is I hope he doesn’t carry a gun these days. In his new life. With that young model. As the father of seven or maybe eight. As a devout Christian/Charismatic-Catholic man.... His PR people must be tearing their hair out.  Hmmmm. Maybe next time he should try saying 'asshole' in Aramaic.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TJ3Ss4Q8BY&feature=related]

Tough to Get Your Tongue Around

One of my kids gave me the Flip mini for Christmas and on hearing me enthuse about it a few weeks later cautioned me not to be 'one of those sad people making videos of themselves and posting them on YouTube'.Silly boy. I’m one of those ridiculously merry people making videos of themselves and posting them on YouTube.And here today, a video report card for Mel Gibson on how he did with that tricky old Boston accent in his new revenge film Edge of Darkness. His poster boy looks are gone now – with the deep naso-labial folds he now has he looks a little like the old guy in Disney-Pixar’s Up, with enough cross-hatching under his eyes to make a chain-link fence of - and don’t get me started on what’s going on inside the man’s head these days - but by Gosh he nailed the accent. Check out these sample phrases and see if you don’t agree:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAuZBSVbMao]