The Usual Christmas Post, Part 1: What Was The Best Thing You Got This Year
Merry Christmas! As is my Christmas tradition, I want to celebrate the season by knowing what joy your morning brought. And so I ask:
What was the best thing you got this year?
As for me, the obvious answer is “life,” as I wasn’t guaranteed it this year (and a sudden and vicious cold-induced asthma attack/heart-pounding panic attack brought me that close to spending Christmas in the ER). But leaving that wondrous thing aside, there were three prominent gifts:
1) The Gift Of Who. My Dad got me the Black Guardian Doctor Who trilogy on DVD, and I am totally psyched to rewatch what is literally the first Doctor Who serial I’d ever seen. It’s with my favorite Doctor, Peter Davison, so the joy is all the more doubled.
2) The Gift of Laughter. Gini got me Greg Sestero’s book on the making of The Room, the worst movie ever made – thanks to my, uh, best friend Angie for pointing it out to me – and in doing so, we discovered that Erin’s boyfriend and my mother had never seen it. So we hauled out our well-worn copy of The Room for a Christmas Eve showing, and laughed so hard that Mattie’s chest hurt, and made more converts to the cult of Tommy Wiseau. Watching them slowly realize what an incomprehensible mess this film is – The Room is one of those films where you really need a comedy coach to get you through it – was the delight of the evening.
3) The Gift Of Pain. I had not shared my straight razor porn addiction with my wife, as straight razors are expensive and pretty and completely superfluous. You have one, it shaves, end of story. But my blade had been tarnished from poor storage during the trip to Hawaii – don’t put it away wet, or it rusts where you bind it – and since last Christmas’s gift of a straight razor starter kit had made me a convert to the One True Way, I spent a lot of time looking at pretty, expensive blades I had no right to own.
So when I discovered, as my last gift, that Gini went off-list and purchased me an absolutely breathtaking top-of-the-line Dovo blade, with a rich wood handle and a much greater heft – you can feel the better construction in your hand – well, I regretted shaving that morning. It’s beautiful, and I can’t wait to cut the hell out of my face with it.
But that’s enough about me. What about you? What’d you get?
Saving Mr. Banks
At first, Saving Mr. Banks seemed to be a writers’ horror story. The prickly Ms. Travers, author of beloved childrens’ book Mary Poppins, has fallen on hard times. Walt Disney wants to make a movie of her book – has courted her, in fact, for twenty years. And now, lacking other choices, she ventures to Hollywood to try to protect the integrity of her book.
P.L. Travers is presented as an irascible, unyielding creature – and oh, how I rooted for her. Because dammit, she is the creator. Mary Poppins was so real to her that she made Mary Poppins real to thousands of children, and so to me Saving Mr. Banks was about watching an author slowly beaten until she was worn down enough to allow other people to compromise her vision.
Fortunately, the film became a little more complex than that.
Saving Mr. Banks is smart enough to make this not about one artist fighting a soulless machine, but rather one artist’s vision conflicting with another artist. For Walt Disney is presented as a successful creator as well, and there’s a very telling scene where he knows he’s not going to be able to make Mary Poppins because a successful artist once tried to purchase Mickey Mouse from him when he was poor, and he never would have given that mouse up.
What we have here is an interesting bit of conflict, housed in a sugar-coated casing. P.L. Travers dislikes frippery, dislikes anything that erases the idea of hard work, dislikes sentimentality. And yet that’s precisely what spurs Walt Disney as an artist, and the fact that he has caught on to the very real core of Mary Poppins as a savior narrative has pulled him in a different way. There’s a fascinating interplay here that explains to the general public what every artist who’s ever released a work knows: you don’t get to control how other people react to your work.
What Walt Disney loves about P.L. Travers’ work is nothing that Travers intended. And Saving Mr. Banks admits that Walt Disney is essentially filming Mary Poppins fanfic.
But Walt Disney is, thankfully, very good at fanfic.
The reason I say this is a “sugar-coated casing” is because the outcome of this battle is well-known: Walt did get his way, Walt’s vision was wonderful, and even if Mary Poppins the film isn’t the book it’s still a classic. Yet this battle takes place a thousand times a year in Hollywood, this compromise of vision, where a producer’s idea obliterates the author’s intent… and most of the time, it’s fucking horrible. Hollywood is littered with eviscerated books, where the producer overrode everything the author created to insert needless sentiment, put in a good love story, make it fun for the kids… and the movie flopped.
And what then? How’s the author feel when she’s been shoved into abandoning everything she loved about the book she created in order to make money, and then the movie was awful?
Some day, the Alamo Drafthouse will hold a back-to-back showing of Saving Mr. Banks and Barton Fink. Just to show both sides of that coin.
But of course, things did turn out well, and the movie is wonderfully acted by Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks and Paul Giamatti (yay!), and the story has very little to do with real life. It bends Travers’ history to make Walt seem wonderful, which of course is what we want to believe in, and I don’t mind; that’s the movies. They don’t have to present reality. Some present a tinselly fantasy, and Saving Mr. Banks is a pretty nice fantasy, that two people can help reclaim each other’s childhoods.
I wouldn’t take this film any more seriously than Mary Poppins, but it’ll get some Oscar nominations. It’ll be worth them. And once again, you can hear the muffled screams of P.L. Travers bellowing, “That’s not the way it’s supposed to be!” – and you can safely ignore her, because, well, this may be a lie but it’s a pretty good one.
A Closed Door: Goodbye, Grammy
When my Uncle Tommy died, I wrote several long entries on his death and what it meant to me. And when my Gramma, Tommy’s mother, died, I wrote a long essay on all the ways she affected my life. And when my Grampop passed on, he too, got a long discussion of how his wondrous life shaped me.
Yet my Grammy died in August, and not one word on the blog.
This one’s too painful.
It’s not that my Grammy ranks higher in the pantheon of my beloved dead, but rather that she is the last. My grandparents are all gone. A whole era of my childhood, wiped by mortality. And to a very real extent, Grammy was the axis on which the Steinmetz family turned; my Grammy was the social one, the one who remembered every name of every nurse in the assisted living facility even when senility took bites out of her memory, the one who loved parties and get-togethers and trips.
She stayed that way right up until the end. The last time I saw her, she asked about my trip to Hawaii – re-asked the questions several times, as the memory of a ninety-something year old woman has a few gaps, but by God she remembered to tell me to exercise, Billy, exercise, we were all so worried about you with your heart.
And in the end, I can’t. Encapsulating who my Grammy was to you is closing the door on myself, acknowledging that the last of that generation of relatives no longer walks the earth, and I would have to say goodbye not just to Grammy, but her husband Grampop, and Gramma, and Tommy. I will say that the Steinmetz family now lacks a spoke to revolve around; with Grammy, we were one great family, all dancing to please her and be pleased in turn, as Grammy was the sort of person who expected you to be wonderful and so alchemically transformed you in her presence so that you were wonderful. Without her, we are still a family of sorts – but separate ones spinning on our own axes, intersecting on Facebook. Will there be any great family parties to return to? Will we have this cohesiveness?
I doubt it. She was special that way.
And I keep looking in the mail for that $10 check from Grammy, that tiny Christmas present that maybe bought a meal at Boston Market but told me she was thinking of me. She is still thinking about me, I’m sure, but from a place she can’t send me postcards and newspaper clippings and tiny angels in the mail.
I don’t owe you anything when it comes to this blog. But the blog is, in some sense, a chronicle of the great events in my life, and Grammy passing is a great event. Just not one that struck like thunder, but a slow ebb that’s hard to chronicle.
No matter. They gave her daisies.
Good night, Grammy.
Walking The Dog, Walking The Dog
So my Mom is visiting for the holidays – yay! – and she brought her adorable dog Koshi! Yay!
Koshi and Shasta are going tooth and claw at each other! Boo!
So we hauled them off to our dog trainer – we have a dog trainer – for an emergency negotiations, and within half an hour she had them sorted out. Koshi and Shasta are by no means buddies now, and we do have to watch them closely, but we’ve learned the signs of impending aggression and know how to cut them off. They’re dogs, so a brief “HEY!” at the right moment can completely knock them off track.
The most revealing aspect of it, however, was when the dog trainer was talking to my Mom about how to work with her dog.
“We’ll work on this,” my Mom said.
“No,” said the dog trainer sternly. “You will work on this.”
Which is the weirdly fascinating thing about dog training. The dog has tendencies, but mostly? The dog is a product of their environment. Give the dog a situation where the dog feels no one is in charge, and the dog starts to break down. The dog has to take over, and the dog is simply not equipped to deal with modern life. The dog does not understand the context of a car, or know what this mailman is, or comprehend how the food gets here. So the dog makes doggish decisions, freaking out from the stress, and becomes a neurotic doggie mess.
And those decisions have to be made from the dog’s perspective. From my Mom’s perspective, whisking Koshi off when she starts barking at another dog is mere courtesy; who wants a yappy dog in their presence? But from Koshi’s perspective, she just started screaming her head off THERE’S A THREAT, THERE’S A THREAT, and the pack leader just picked her up and ran off, and my God, what a horrible place this must be, we’re always retreating from life-threatening dangers, I must be alert.
But if you make the right decisions for the dog, the dog is fine.
Which is a little discomfiting, really. Is a dog nothing more than an organic program? Put in good input, the dog behaves appropriately; put in bad input, the dog goes berserk? And the answer, to a distressing amount, is “yes.” There are factors of temperament, of course, and some dogs have been irreparably damaged, but in general Shasta has behaved vastly differently depending on how we treat her.
And if Shasha can be so altered, what about us?
I know Gini used to be a different woman. She used to go skiing every other weekend. She used to quilt a lot, nearly an obsession. She never used to watch TV. And now, she doesn’t ski, she doesn’t quilt, and ZOMG SLEEPY HOLLOW IS ON.
I have altered her with my presence. She is, in many ways, an entirely different wife than she was to John, simply because I reward different things. And I too am different; this house is far cleaner than it would be without her, and I go to many more parties because she is the social one.
Gini and I are not merely a married couple; we are a shaped unit. We would be, to a very real extent, totally different people in the hands of other spouses. One of the reasons we adore our marriage is not just that we make each other happy, but we make each other into people that we like better. I’m wiser, more compassionate, and more resilient in the presence of Gini than I ever was dating other people. There are many wonderful people who, if I dated them, would make me more neurotic and panicky.
What we surround ourselves with is who we are. And to think, “Gee, I’m not much different than a dog” is a scary thought, as it brings up all those tangles of free will and our core personalities and humans are more than animals and whatnot. But it’s true. You surround a dog with firm leadership, the sense that the right things are handled for the dog, and it thrives. Give it a place where, for whatever reason, it feels out of control, and the dog spins apart.
I don’t like to think that I’m a blend of external forces. I like to think there’s a core of immutable me-ness, a fortress of unalienable personality that is never touched by other humans. And that exists, to be sure; I’m always going to be a little neurotic, I’m always going to be stubborn, I’m always going to be thoughtful.
But that core is much smaller and more malleable than any of us want to admit. We, too, are input machines, functioning according to what the world hands us. And we don’t want to admit that maybe, if we were placed in someone else’s situation for a decade or too, we might become very much like people we despise.
I don’t know who I’d be if I’d grown up poor, or molested, or black, or gay. I most likely wouldn’t be talking to you now through blogs, and I’d certainly be saying different things.
I’ve been trained to be who I am. I’m glad I like that. I’m glad I got that luck, because we certainly don’t choose our environment.
Which isn’t a bad thought to have as the holidays arrive.
This Comic Is So Brilliant, I'm Going To Devote A Blog Post To It
If you had asked me, “Ferrett, would you discover your absolute favorite Marvel comic of 2013 the week before 2013 ended?” I would have said “No.”
If you’d then asked, “But what if that Marvel comic isn’t even produced by Marvel?” I would have squinted at you.
But this is the case. My slam-dunk, perfect Marvel comic is all about the Avengers, and yet… it isn’t about the Avengers at all. It’s about Steve Rogers, dealing with PTSD by drawing his life in webcomic format, in a beautiful webcomic called American Captain. It’s like a perfect intersection of Harvey Pekar and superheroes. There are no battles. Just perfectly delineated conversations about a man with realer feelings than I’ve ever seen in any Marvel comic, trying to come to terms with waking up from World War II in the middle of a very strange 2013.
And the conversations are beautiful. They’re what should happen in between all the punching, though there is no punching. And it takes a while to really roll into what turns out to be a storyline, as it should – Steve Rogers’ take on things is a little disjointed – but by the time it gets to “Little Dog,” it is firing on every cylinder it should be.
This is a comic for people who don’t love comics, and a comic for those who really do. It’s the best comic I’ve read in 2013. So wait until you have a half an hour or so to get in, and then I urge you to read it.