Comfort Video: Epidemic-Style

Epidemic movies, how do I love thee? For some reason, when the going gets tough, I like to curl up with a disease movie—even a bad one—where some poor schlub brings a virus back from overseas. Before long, a lot of people are red-eyed and sweaty, and a character we care about dies in a plastic tent, and some clumsy pathologist infects himself by breaking a beaker or ripping a hole in his hazmat suit. Why, oh why, is this all so entertaining? I mean, if anything like that really happened to me, I’d hate it. The insurance paperwork alone would ruin my week.

Today I saw Contagion, the latest epidemic movie, and an all-star one to boot. I fully expected to love it—I mean, it’s got Steven Soderbergh with his signature glowy lighting, and Matt Damon in his everyman mode, and scary-smart Jennifer Ehle. But I can’t decide whether I love this movie or merely like it—because it’s too good. Specifically, it’s too real, and it lacks the all-important cheese factor: There’s no villain who gets fired by the indignant president; nobody has to rappel out of a helicopter onto a heaving cargo ship. No, this one unfolds slowly, letting us get attached to the characters and creeping us out with the garbage piling up in the streets and looters overrunning a small Minnesota town. And the mysterious virus doesn’t look like some preposterous bug we’ll never get, but in fact it looks a lot like the Spanish Flu (see below), which was very real, and very, very bad. Contagion hits too close to home, which, for me, takes all the zip out of a disaster movie. This could actually happen? Not fun at all!

Here, then, are some of my favorite fun disease movies—scary-fun in some cases, and campy-fun in others.

Outbreak (1995). No disease-movie list would be complete without this cheesefest starring Dustin Hoffman and Cuba Gooding Jr., both of whom chew the scenery like bulimics at a buffet. It’s got everything: an infected monkey roaming the countryside, a helicopter chase, a young and wry Kevin Spacey, and a nuclear detonation. And, as a big added bonus, it’s got my former 4-H friend from Westfield, Mass., Michelle Joyner*, playing a housewife who gets infected and is then hustled off to quarantine, which, in this movie, means certain death. And we get Hoffman and Gooding trading dialog that they seem to have made up during the walk over from the makeup trailer. Not that it matters.

Quiet Killer, a.k.a. Black Death (1992). Never heard of this one? You’re not alone—it was a TV movie starring Kate Jackson at her sensible best, and it disappeared so quickly and completely that you can’t even get it on Netflix. (A “collectible” copy lists on Amazon for almost $200.) It involves a young woman who comes back sick from a trip (stop me if you’ve heard this before) and infects most of New York City with pneumonic plague, a deadly sister disease of bubonic plague. The highlight, aside from the usual pleasures of people coughing up blood and packed like sardines into hospital hallways, is epidemiologist Jackson peering into the corners tenement buildings with a flashlight and declaring in her flat Alabama accent, “This is the same disease that infected half of Europe during the Middle Ages. Haaaff.”

Children of Men (2006). Sci-fi and a disease movie? Shoot me now, ’cause I’m in heaven already. But this is a disease movie of a different stripe, with the mysterious illness long past. The story is about the disease’s aftereffect: No one on Earth can conceive children anymore. That wonderfully simple premise drives this scary plot, and no one is more scared than our reluctant hero, Clive Owen, who gets dragged through terrorist bomb-blasts, riots, and anarchy that’s hammering away at the foundations of civilization, looking all the while like he just wants to go home. This movie is right up there with Minority Report and 12 Monkeys in its depiction of an unhinged, dystopian near-future.

American Experience: Influenza 1918 (2006). Okay, this one isn’t comforting at all. It’s a genuinely frightening documentary about one of history’s worst pandemics—one so recent that my late Aunt Helen remembered it. (She was fond of saying that she didn’t know if she lost her sense of smell during the Spanish flu pandemic, or when she poured a bottle of perfume up her nose.) This flu, of course, was the mother of them all, and the prototype for many a disease-disaster movie. This was the flu that infected a third of the world’s population, killed more than 50 million people, and caused such high fevers that it turned Katherine Anne Porter’s hair white for the rest of her life. Influenza 1918 scared the socks off me, mostly because of the punchline: No one ever figured out how to cure the Spanish Flu, and then it just went away. Meaning that it could just come back.

*Double bonus: Michelle Joyner was also in Cliffhanger, where she got killed off in the first reel. She’s a rock climber who gets stuck, and Sylvester Stallone tries to rescue her on some sort of improbable zip wire, and then he drops her. The accident then haunts him through the rest of the movie. (I think that’s “haunted” he’s playing; it’s hard to tell.)

Poem: Boy with a Lost Shoe

for Mason

Already she mourns the summer,
the creek riding past, waving,
looking back over its shoulder,

her son with a tentative stick
in sand, uncertain of what to draw,
his pants a bunched elastic.

Already the swings have emptied
of the pushy girls. The dogs drag
their late-day leashes home.

She brought so few raisins,
impractical apples he dropped,
bothered by bees.

Madrones gripping their leaves,
the light on its August slant—
when did the trunks go red?—

and her son has lost a shoe
somewhere in the long afternoon
and he peers for it deep

in the cold-breath blackberries
lining the path he walks
so carefully, looking back
to see if she is watching.

Posted for OpenLinkNight #8, dVerse Poets Pub http://dversepoets.com/

(appeared in Alehouse)

The Books and the Boots

I just sized down to a smaller house. It’s a good thing—a decision, a life plan. The house I was in was too large and too expensive, and I found a smaller one that I could actually own and not rent. All good.

But along with the excitement of a new place came the thing that I’ve done a jillion times but have never mastered: moving. I always think I travel light; I don’t have that much stuff. And then I spend a couple of weeks touching every single thing I own. By about day 2, I can’t believe how much crap I’ve accumulated. If I have to look through another box of mason jars or user’s manuals or letters from the 1980s, I might actually puke.

This time, the move was largely about books—namely, getting rid of them. Unlike the poet Thomas Lux, who once said that his ambition is to have 10,000 books by the time he dies, I think it’s possible to own too many books. These days, I’m embarrassed to say, I don’t actually read much. Since I’ve become an editor and have to read all day, I can’t muster much enthusiasm for reading when I get home. My shelves are filled with books that I haven’t read or didn’t finish. I also have a lot of reference books, but that’s a habit that I’m glad to have. I think it’s good for a writer to have a copy of Royce’s Sailing Illustrated and The Atlas of American History close at hand.

So there I was a few weeks ago, going through my bookshelves and closets, packing the “keeper” stuff in banker’s boxes and tossing the “get rid of” items in big, unwieldy boxes destined for Goodwill. I loaded up one Goodwill box with about 15 horse books, along with an old velvet hard hat and three pairs of riding boots. Now I was really making progress—vestiges of my childhood were sloughing away like unwanted pounds. I’d been carrying those horse books around since the 1970s—picture books like Horse Fever and Clear Round! and Steeplechasing. I’d finally started to realize that I owned these books, but I didn’t use them, and that wasn’t right. Their intended purpose—to be read and looked at by 12-year-olds—wasn’t being fulfilled. I pictured some little girl finding them at Goodwill and going gaga over them. Or maybe her mother or grandmother would buy them for her, as my mother and grandmother did for me. They’d make some kid happy. So it was easy—into the Goodwill box they went.

But the riding boots didn’t go quite so easily. One pair was only about 10 years old, and I’d spent more than $100 on them—beautiful black knee-high field books with lace-up ankles—but they didn’t fit over my calves anymore. (I kept thinking, what fat person gave me these calves?) Another pair were my “good” cowboy boots, ornately carved in beautiful chestnut leather, that I’d nearly worn holes in when I worked at a riding stable years ago. I couldn’t even get my feet in them, they were so small. And then there were the hardest of all to part with: my beautiful brown, calf-high English jumping boots that I bought about 25 years ago, that also didn’t fit anymore. I’d bought them when I took up riding again—jumping, in particular—with a vengeance in my 20s. So many of my dreams and ambitions were embodied in those satin-smooth boots—the Olympics and the U.S. Equestrian Team; of training show jumpers and owning a ranch. I’d wanted so badly to be worthy of those boots.

I sat and looked at them for a long time, at the worn spots where the stirrups had rubbed the finish thin, and the faint bubbles of horse sweat from years past. The thing that really stung was that those dreams all went unrealized. I could never quite figure out how to make a life with horses. One thing I did figure out was that it took a lot of money. Having even one horse takes a lot of dough; having a sick one, as I did when I was a teenager, can be life-changingly expensive. My family wasn’t rich, and I found out that a catastrophic horse injury or illness can pretty much bankrupt you and force you to sell your horse. I don’t know if I could go through that heartbreak again, that guilt. I have never really come to terms with it. And that hard lesson was all wrapped up in those boots.

But I kept coming back to the fact that those beautiful jumping boots didn’t fit anymore. I knew I should pass them along to someone who would take good care of them, make good use of them. But that’s a bloody uncertain thing, sending your ambitions and visions along to another person. I steeled myself and lifted the box of boots and horse books, getting ready to take it out to the car—and I just couldn’t do it. I put it back down. Physically, it weighed maybe 10 pounds. Emotionally, it might as well have been an aircraft carrier. I had to just leave it there. I busied myself with other rooms, other closets and bookshelves. A few hours later, I went back and looked through that box—and it was transformed back into just books and a hard hat and some riding boots that some kid would be thrilled to have. Then it was easier—out to the car with it, a short drive to Goodwill, a quick handover to the nice guy at the loading dock. It was just a box with beautiful brown boots lying there, dreaming and remembering.

Poem: Crocheting in Four Steps

1. The Color

Know this: You
will end up hating it. Half-
done, the blanket will wind
through your sleep
in marled blue, horse-blanket
blue, a shower of chaff
in the barnlight,
red-flecked like the roan
you dreamed of riding. You wake
to solid white.


2. The Hook

An oar pulling the water. Pull
the face of it through, pull
the night behind you. Set
the face of it down. Rest.
Your hands must learn
the language of water, where
it ends, where the air begins,
where the dock is waiting,
stoic, hushed, a placid pole
that wants the rope.


3. The Knot

Build them alike, and they’re
an auspicious chain, as if
you never planned to pull them apart, as if
the knot were the aim and not
a mistake made over.


4. The Wool

Try not to think. The world is full
of things like this. In the morning,
you know the sheep are rising
like everyone else, and that
is living enough. At night, try not
to think of shears, or pens,
or moonlight speckled
through a ruined roof. Say
if they lived with you, you’d
take only what they brushed off
on a bush. You’d watch them
from the house,
clipping the hills like razors.
You’d never presume
to call them yours.


Posted for OpenLinkNight #5, dVerse Poets Pub http://dversepoets.com/

(appeared in Rattapallax)

Comfort Video, Disaster-Style

The other night I got home from work, exhausted and out of sorts. I was debating what to do with my tired-ass evening when I saw just the ticket—some cable station was showing Deep Impact at 7:00. Perfect! It’s my favorite kind of comfort video—a disaster movie. There’s something wonderfully escapist about doomsday flicks; my own troubles always seem smaller when I consider the fact that I don't have to pack my car and head for the Southern Hemisphere like those poor schlumps on the screen. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Deep Impact, or chunks of it, and that got me to thinking about other movies that I watch over and over and never get tired of. They aren’t by any means my favorite movies; strangely, most of my favorite ones (The New World, Minority Report, L.A. Confidential) are so stressful that I can’t watch them very often. No, these comfort movies are different—they may not be great cinema, but I love them and I end up putting them on again and again like a pair of warm flannel pajamas. So here are the first three comfortfests that spring to mind, starting with the aforementioned Téa Leoni classic. Now that I see these in a list, I notice that they all have very strong female leads. Apparently when I want comfort video, I also want feminism.

Deep Impact. This is the one about the comet that’s on a collision course with the Earth (not to be confused with Bruce Willis’s hamfisted Armageddon, released the same year, which starred an asteroid and Ben Affleck’s fake teeth). What I love most about Deep Impact is how we see the disaster unfolding from the viewpoint of Téa Leoni’s greenhorn TV reporter—she’s the one who shows us what’s at stake, all in the way her hands shake as she clips a microphone to her lapel, or how she chugs a martini during an awkward get-together with her father and his new wife, who are oblivious to the looming disaster. The movie also got stellar performers for the smaller parts—Maximillian Schell, Vanessa Redgrave, James Cromwell, Robert Duvall. This movie’s full of good scenes, so I can tune in at any point and watch a half hour and enjoy it. But seen in its entirety (2-1/2 hours), it’s surprisingly touching—it makes me cry in all the sucker spots. The Duvall subplot is the only thing that holds on too long, and there’s a car accident in the first reel that feels completely gratuitous (you can practically hear somewhere at the script meeting saying, “If only it had a fiery crash in the first five minutes.”) And by the end, I’m always playing a game with myself—name any other good movie that Téa Leoni made. (I looked up her filmography just now. Thank goodness for Ricky Gervais’s Ghost Town.)

Contact. Confession time: I usually can’t make it past the part where they figure out the alien Rosetta Stone. And though it's not technically a disaster film, up to that point, Contact is everything I love in a movie—an ambitious sci-fi plot; the biggest discovery in the history of humans; an obsessed, socially challenged female scientist (Jodie Foster); and even Matthew McConaughey, before he got ground down to a soft powder by all those romantic comedies. Again, the best part is seeing the thrill of the story—somebody out there is trying to talk to us—through the eyes of Jodie Foster’s character. In fact, the first, crucial moment of discovery—when Foster hears that pulsing screech in her headphones—is played out in an extreme close-up of her eyes, which suddenly fly open. And then it’s all headlong, techie bliss as she throws her laptop in her old convertible and fishtails across the desert, yelling right ascension and declination numbers into her walkie-talkie to her napping crew back at the SETI lab. Later, after they crack the code on the alien transmission and figure out what the message says, they lose me with the fanatic preacher guy, and the weirdly gratifying death of Tom Skerritt, and a few clumsy forays into religion vs. science. But the charm of the movie is that it’s a love letter to the universe penned by the always upbeat Carl Sagan, who was a treasure—sort of a Gene Roddenberry for the real world.

Twister. This one is pure guilty pleasure. I know the special effects are cheesy, and houses don’t actually roll like tumbleweeds. And the way they call the benign, doughy Bill Paxton “The Extreme” makes me wonder what actor that line was originally written for. But I love the way the two women play off each other. There’s Jami Gertz, with her pretty teeth and terrified-deer eyes, playing—let’s face it—the sane one. And then there’s Helen Hunt in her wifebeater tank-top, basically playing a hyperactive ten-year old, with just a touch of oil-rig worker. And there’s poor Bill Paxton in the middle, getting smacked by both of them, and then by Mother Nature as well. He sort of saves the day, but Helen Hunt saves it too. And handsome-but-evil Cary Elwes gets his comeuppance (I like to imagine him yelling “By…your…leave!” as he’s sucked into the tornado). But of course the actual twisters are what move the movie along—pretty much one for every scene, more of them than most storm-watchers get near in a lifetime. And a special shout-out to Alan Ruck, who is sweetly memorable in everything he does, from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off to Eureka to—again—Ghost Town.

More later.

New Things in the New Neighborhood

 Jumping spiders

Very big ants

A brown grasshopper on the freshly painted front door

The whispery poplar tree in the back yard

Canada geese honking overhead

Quails running into the blackberries at the end of the dead-end street

The wuhf of the neighbor’s Basset Hound

The big, empty softball field behind the Mormon church

Box elder beetles walking across the driveway

Skylights

Air conditioning

The Swiffer

The oven, which beeps annoyingly whenever it’s done something that other ovens take no pride in, like reaching the temperature I set it for

The sliding screen door that doesn’t latch

My neighbor, whom I can barely see over the back fence, a man who never seems to wear a shirt and may be naked entirely

Middle-aged women talking to themselves in the aisles of the Shop-N-Kart

The gun aisle at Bi-Mart

The two horses grazing across the street, their long tails sweeping across their hocks

My neighbor Alissa, who goes for walks in the middle of the day

My neighbors, two young men who open their garage door on hot days and play ping-pong

My garage, which smells like my father’s work clothes

Top 5 Scariest Things in Houses for Sale

I recently bought a house. This didn’t happen overnight—it was the culmination of a 15-month search during which I toured 42 houses and drove by about 100 more. With the help of my saintly real estate agent, I feel like I just finished a college course (ask me anything—flag lots, tankless water heaters, asbestos siding). And during the journey, I saw some scary stuff. Sure, there were the usual horrors—water damage and crumbly carpets and retaining walls that were about to fall and kill somebody. But it was often the small things that soured me on a house, the little stuff that made me scratch my head and say, “Who thought this was a good idea?” These, then, are my top 5 house turn-offs.

Cutesy wallpaper. During the Victorian era, wallpaper served a purpose—covering up old horsehair insulation or something. But the 1960s had no such excuse, unless people thought there was a shortage of ducks and flower baskets, judging by how many families glued nostalgic patterns of them to their walls. My favorite is the wallpaper that runs in a strip around the top of the room, a busy motorway of violets or frolicking children that pulses at the top of your view no matter where you look, making even an empty room look messy. It’s basically two-dimensional clutter.

Blue countertops. What was it with blue kitchens in the 1980s? Did interior decorators make a deal with psychotherapists and try to give us all clinical depression? Some of these gloomy countertops still linger, bathing whole kitchens in their sickly glow—dingy yellowish blue, leisure-suit powder blue, plastic-turquoise blue. Just try to find potholders that go with those.

Religious icons and new-age kitsch. I’ve got nothing against crosses, crystals, or Buddhas, but even for a skeptic like me, those objects leave a kind of spiritual wake behind them. I can’t help thinking, are the old owners taking God with them when they move? How will the spirits of fortune find me when all those prayer flags and guru pictures go somewhere else? In one house, the owners had taped “affirmations” to every wall—little strips of paper with empowering messages typed on them, like “I am wealthy in every way” and “I will always have more than enough money.” Ironically, it was a short sale. This made me think way too much—about how these people so obviously failed; about how religions prey on people who are down on their luck; about how some people soldier on with only their paper-thin faith. It sort of got in the way of “my couch would look good in here.”

Strange smells. This was a tough one—I’m sure that most owners cleaned the house before they showed it. But I still picked up on odd smells all the time. Over and over, as I walked into houses that smelled vaguely of dogs, or farts, or old people imprisoned in the attic, I thought of that cliché about how you should bake cookies just before you show your house. It’s good advice, and not just because it masks bad odors. Sometimes the “clean” odors are the worst of all—one person’s “fresh” is another person’s “motel smell.”

Slipcovers. I know you’re not buying the furniture when you’re looking at a house, but I was surprised at how much slipcovers put me off. I don’t care if you dress them up with piping or velveteen ropes—those ill-fitting muslin sacks are the decorating equivalent of the scariest type of horror movie, the kind where all the gore takes place off-screen. That couch can’t possibly have as many cigarette burns and cat stains as I’m imagining. Or can it?

OK—your turn. In the comments section, what are your top house-for-sale turn-offs?