The Dishwasher Door

In salute to Harvey.

This Sunday my 13-year-old piled her camp-bound luggage in the kitchen, and buzzed around like a hummingbird in anticipation of her pick-up. This is her first summer camp experience. I had mixed feelings about it all, of course, but mostly I was happy for her.

I was clearing out the dishwasher. There's a screw on the dishwasher door that I ritually check: if it gets loose, the door unhinges on one side and it's a pain to reattach. This partial stripping is the result of an accident that occurred six or seven years ago, shortly after I installed the dishwasher. It was late in a weekday, and my wife had just got home from work. The girls saw her and started skipping around. My wife came in the door, and my daughter (six-years-old, then) skipped backwards, right onto the open dishwasher door.

The whole damn thing ripped right out of its mounts, right out of the floor, the wall, the counter. There was my daughter with a baffled look on her face, sitting inside a dishwasher rack. I can't remember if I had other frustrations from the day contributing to my reaction, but I was furious. I clenched my teeth and very quietly asked everyone to please please please just go outside. My wife gently collected the girls, and out they went.

I doubt it took any longer than an hour to get everything more or less back where it belonged. I had cooled down a bit, but probably not enough. The dishwasher door was never going to be the same.

Back in the here and now, I was looking at the door and musing over how little I cared about its permanently flawed state. In fact, looking at that door I had a crystal clear vision of my six-year-old girl in her white shirt and blue jean skirt, happily skipping backwards in bare feet, arms waving, thrilled to have her mother back from work. If she hadn't collided with the dishwasher — and if I hadn't taken it so personally — I wouldn't have that lovely vision to meditate on.

It's funny how your mind sometimes works.

Krull-Inspired Desperation

It should surprise no-one if I admit that I was one of the original contributors to the meager box-office pot of 1983's galling sci-fi/fantasy mash-up stinker Krull (i).



Youngsters who have been raised in this golden era of Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings and Ron Moore's Battlestar Galactica might find this difficult to believe, but 20 years ago the pickings for fans of either genre were so slim, we happily joined the queue. And when the movie was over, we marched over to the video arcade to play the game -- our desperation was just that great.

Having said that, I don't believe even I would have been so desperate as to willingly give myself away in a Krull Wedding promotional stunt. Unbelievable, but true (via boing-boing).

Whither Canuckle-head Critical Culture?

André Alexis takes the back pages of The Walrus to bemoan the decline of Canadian Critical Culture here. I'm not altogether sure what I make of the piece, but he's definitely got me meditating on it. Alexis' mention of Stan Persky and Jay Scott reminded me that there was a time, in the late 80s/early 90s, when I saved and savored the Globe's weekend "review" section. I'd almost forgotten how much fun it was to take in those voices, and aspire to similar flights of public persuasion.

Anyhow, when my mulling makes the transition to early vintage, the post will be duly served.

Progress, Continued

When last we glanced at the back yard, it looked like this and this.

This morning it looks like this:



A closer look at the deck:



A closer look at the concrete walk leading to the mud-room:



Alright, that's this week's blog. I apologize for being slow to post, but between getting other things done and attempting family vacations that is unlikely to change for the next week or two. Typically for this time of year there are one or two larger posts on the back-burner. I'll continue stirring and adding ingredients to those dishes. In the meantime, CP is diggin' on Grace Potter (plus a few others).

Harvey Pekar: October 8, 1939 – July 12, 2010

News of Harvey Pekar's recent death has not been easy for me to digest. Now that Pekar's seemingly incessant running commentary has in fact ceased, it feels like a significant amount of air has been let out of the white balloons floating over my own head.

Pekar was the first, best blogger. He sifted through anything and everything in his search for the poetry of human value. People say he “explored the mundane,” but that's wrong: he turned the mundane on its head until it was mundanity's exact antithesis. In this, his early attempts at stand-up served him very, very well. His shticks never began with, “What's the deal with airline food?”; they began with, “Ever since I was a kid it seemed I collected something.” The details continued in a matter-of-fact exposition that disarmed and entranced. Where the hell is he going with this? became Oh my God: that's me!

I first tuned in during the late 80s at the comic book store, where I opened American Splendor and encountered this short chapter about record collecting (excerpted from Ron Mann's neat-o doc Comic Book Confidential). At the time I was gripped in a collecting frenzy of my own: comic books. When I read Pekar's confession, something turned for me, too. I bought the Pekar/crumb work, and left the men in tights alone. It's funny how your mind sometimes works.

As in the above example, Pekar's gentler observations ended with a “How 'bout that?” tone, but he was also keen on the not-so-gentle observations. If he was pissed off about something — and he was always pissed off about something — he let everybody know. If he was wrong, he wasn't just quick to admit it — he reveled in the fact, before moving on to the next outrage.

I was never a Pekar completist, nor would I recommend that route to the innocent bystander. But you can't go wrong with The Best of American Splendor (A). The movie (with Paul Giamatti and Hope Davis, who are both brilliant) is a knowing, quick-witted abuse of Pekar and his material, and a lovely experience because of it. Our Cancer Year (A) is a good read, not just for cancer survivors, but anyone who's married. And The Quitter (A) is just out-and-out superb.

I rather doubt The Beats (A) will be Pekar's final work to receive printed notice, but it is a coda of sorts. For once Pekar is talking about someone besides himself, giving deft summaries of people who were bums and heels, who produced a lot of questionable work but also not a few artifacts of lasting value. If there is a “theme” that runs through Pekar's typically unblinking appraisal of this scene, it is the surprising depth of friendship that held each of these faulty and frequently cruel beings in good stead. I'd say that is the worthy epitaph for Pekar himself: a guy who could rally other people into helping him illustrate and bring to larger narrative life his own inglorious, and thoroughly American, splendor.

Comment Moderation

I've switched from "anything goes" to "comment moderation on posts older than 14 days." Regular readers are quick to pipe up, so this isn't going to affect many people -- just the anonymous ones who keep linking to off-shore "opportunities" (this post is a particularly popular target).

"I may not know what I like, but I know art!" Further Thoughts On Video Games

Roger Ebert waves a sort-of white flag on the issue of whether a video game can be art, and scratches his head over the results of his push-poll.

It's been a month since I plugged in the PS3 I got for my birthday and played a bit of catch-up with Gaming's High Society, and I've been mulling over the "But is it art?" question. Ebert admits to two fatal flaws in his original rant: he didn't provide a definition of "art", and he is entirely unwilling to play a game -- any game -- that could potentially change his mind on the matter. To my mind the former fault is the greater. A link to Denis Dutton's criteria for art would have settled the matter in Ebert's favor.

I'm not completely on-side with Dutton, however, and I doubt Ebert is either. I'm happy to accord artistic value to Swamp Thing, a movie that amuses but does little to disturb the viewer into a heightened state of unanticipated empathy. Similarly video games: a player would have to be a morally stunted not to feel at least a little squeamish about some of the choices pointedly put to the fore in games like Bioshock and Half-Life 3. But in the main even these games are structured as a combined thrill-ride/shooting gallery. If you're not a gamer, imagine riding through Disney's Haunted Mansion with an Uzi. There is a textured aesthetic, and frequent meta-references. Video game aesthetics might not penetrate the player's consciousness to the degree that Huck Finn or Pride & Prejudice does. But is that depth necessary for something to be called "art"?