R.I.P., Beard

Take a good look at the beard, because you're not going to see it much longer. I decided that with the Winter Meetings coming up this week, it was time to clean myself up...

I could go for the baseball lifer look...but it's not as convincing without flecks of gray in the fu manchu.

    

 

Making progress...

 

Perfection!

Dear Inlet Bay

This is an actual email I just sent to the managers of my apartment complex.  I'm so glad we just renewed our lease this week.

Hello,

I’m in apartment (XXX). I’m not sure there is anything that can be done (legally) about this, but a resident/neighbor of mine is flying a Confederate flag from the back of his monster truck. He’s been parked here (near building 16) for at least a week now. Needless to say, it looks very trashy and I think it reflects negatively on this apartment complex.

Sorry, I just had to say something...thanks!!

Dave

The Omelet to End All Omelets

Shadow gets friendly with a totem pole in downtown Seattle.

It was a typical September day in Seattle, Wash.  Beams of sunlight splintered through mostly-cloudy skies. The crisp air smelled of fallen rain and pine trees.

It was 2005.  I had graduated from Taylor three months prior and my old roommate, Shadow, one year before me.  We flew into Seattle to begin our road trip down the Pacific Coast and rented a car at the airport.  After a two-hour detour in downtown Seattle, we drove another 10 miles north -- with the windows down and the sun setting -- to our first real destination.  He parked on a hilly residential side street. 

Around the corner was Beth's Café.  I had read about their infamous 12-egg omelets in a book called Road Food and couldn't pass up the challenge.  It was a modest-looking restaurant, painted blue.  Inside were a wide variety of people.  Hipsters in flannel.  A retired couple.  Teenyboppers in black.  Mexicans.  The walls were covered with taped-up scraps of paper with crayon illustrations from customers.  A mellowed-out waitress with several tattoos seated us and poured me coffee. 

Giddy, we explained how we had sojourned 2,500 miles for a pair of 12-egg omelets.  I felt like I was in a Monty Python movie hunting down the holy grail.  She didn't share our enthusiasm, and threw down a fistful of crayons to keep us distracted.  Fifteen minutes later, they arrived:

They were served on a veritable mountain of hash browns.  It wasn't really my plan to conquer it all at once, but we did our best.  I ate a little more than half of my plate.  We boxed up the leftovers, dropped them in a cooler -- which didn't help much -- and finished them off over the next couple days as breakfast outside our tent.  It was the first of many adventures on that trip.  (That same night, in a tent about 50 yards away from ours, a tripped-out woman screamed through the night that her leg was broken and she needed a medic.)

Last night I was talking with Shadow on the phone and the topic turned to the Seattle leg of our trip.  Turns out, his brother tipped him off that Travel Channel's Man vs. Food featured Beth's Café and the very same "throw rug of eggs" earlier this year.  In fact, they held an eating contest between two guys to see who could finish it first.  It should be noted that their Southwestern omelets -- loaded with beef brisket chili, salsa, and sour cream -- are a slightly different animal than our more traditional plates.  (If the video below doesn't work, follow this link.)

Generation Y Meets the Outdoors

I went camping for two nights last weekend at Fort De Soto Park with an extended group of friends. The campgrounds are surrounded by water but are protected from the Gulf by another peninsula, which boasts the pristine Fort De Soto Beach -- a true gem with powdery sand and partially shaded by huge Australian pines.

Fort De Soto North Beach

It's almost unfair to call this "camping." The weather couldn't have been more ideal. Gas stations and condos were five minutes down the road. The grounds are impeccably maintained. Many sites are occupied by posh RVs with more amenities than my apartment, and the restrooms are cleaner than my own, at times.

Then, we barrel in with air mattresses, a coffee maker, a fancy propane grill, and speakers wired to a vast library of digital music (or Pandora radio, if we preferred). Not to mention Blackberrys, chargers, etc. I didn't even set foot in the camp office -- an iPhone could access their FAQ page within seconds, so why bother?

Note the queen-size air mattress inside. This was after Friday night. On Saturday night, an even bigger air mattress was squeezed into this tent!

There's something special about being outdoors with other people, isolated from modern conveniences. The simple act of removing yourself from the grind of the corporate world, school, or whatever your lot, creates memories. The entertainment, as we know it, is muted. The ping of an email, whir of traffic, and beep of a timer -- it all stops. Instead, waves lap. Treetops rustle. Fire crackles. We are forced to entertain ourselves.

I'm beginning to think I was born in the wrong century.

I worry, sometimes, that my generation -- and all generations to come -- has forgotten the importance of silence. Our time at Fort De Soto was refreshing, and we had a healthy turnout. I would totally do it again. But looking back on it, the weekend was tainted. Is it still possible, today, to spent a few days outdoors without a cell phone, iPod or air mattress? Without coffee, beer or bottled water? To cook food without propane, charcoal, lighters or matches?

I'll take the credit/blame for the coffee maker.

Maybe I'm getting carried away. After all, I cheated last weekend, too. I'm not much of a hunter, gatherer or fisherman. I'm the only Boy/Girl Scout dropout in my family. But if John the Baptist can subsist on locusts and wild honey, I think we can do a little better.

I'm concerned because many of my fondest memories in life are rooted in camping trips, or some variation of them: Fourth of Julys at Fireside Inn. The August 1998 family voyage to Montana and back in a 15-passenger van, and the countless KOAs where we bickered at night. Quiet bonfires at the cabin in Michigan. My college roommate, Shadow, and I trekking down the Pacific Coast Highway, camping next to a Washington riverbed and Crater Lake in Oregon, beneath California redwoods, and in Death Valley.

Will my kids and grandkids be able to appreciate God's creation in moments like these, or will they be too distracted by their video games, iPods, texting, and whatever else is hip in 2053?

Such advanced culinary skill!

The view of the bayou that our campsite bordered.

**All photos stolen from Heather Bale via Facebook**

Let the Wild Rumpus Begin! (spoiler alert)

Photo: Warner Bros. Pictures

I’m a sap for Where the Wild Things Are. It was one of my favorite bedtime stories back in the day. Maurice Sendak earned a Caldecott Medal for illustrations that were quirky masterpieces, and wrote nine vivid sentences to accompany them. Why ramble on when you’ve got mysterious beasts with huge yellow eyes, terrible claws and teeth? And thick vines poking through bedroom floors and ceilings?

I’ll skip all the back story on the production of the movie. (This New York Times article on the director’s struggle to create Wild Things is fascinating – well worth it if you have twenty minutes.)

But several months ago, when I first saw this trailer in all its artsy-indie-Arcade-Fire splendor, my skepticism was turned on end. More recently, even when Blockbuster began stocking its checkout line with stuffed Wild Thing dolls, my excitement could not be killed.

At midnight Thursday – after many fruitless efforts to convince friends to join me for the Friday night opener – I made a rash decision and bolted for local theater to see the true opener. It was my first-ever midnight movie premiere. I walked in with previews well underway, just in time to find an end seat near the front. To my left and behind me were throngs of college students, it seemed, watching with reverence. Their faces glowed as the screen flashed, and I noticed several wearing pointy crowns and fuzzy pajamas.

The movie began with the playful humming of Karen O. (who did the entire soundtrack, at times backed by children). The opening scenes introduce Max (Max Records), an iron-willed but sensitive boy, in perfectly typical situations. He builds an igloo. Picks a snowball fight with his older sister and her friends. Daydreams as his science teacher explains doomsday. Max has a wild imagination and rage issues, but he is a strikingly normal kid – something very hard to find these days in big-budget movies.

Max’s dialogue and interaction with his single mother (Catherine Keener) is authentic and intimate, shot mostly with a hand-held cam. The scenes carry an unscripted, organic, emotionally-charged quality that sets the tone for the rest of the film.

Director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Dave Eggers took some minor liberties in transporting Max to his imaginary haven, but the story was not compromised by this. Each Wild Thing that Max meets is a caricature of one certain trait, many of which are very personal to him. Carol (a male) has an explosive temper just like Max. Alexander is ignored and insecure. K.W. is like his distant older sister, Claire. Douglas is talented and smart. Judith is outspoken and something of a mother figure. The Bull is mysterious and silent, perhaps like his real father. (We receive only one clue about Max’s father: a globe on his dresser, with “from Dad” inscribed on the base.) All the creatures are at least slightly depressed. The island is infected with sadness, which they want their new king, Max, to drive out. He greets them with false bravado and accepts their challenge.

Max tries his best to inject excitement and adventure into their monotonous lives, but the Wild Things sober up shortly after each effort. Before long, he comes to realize he does not belong in their wilderness – and the creatures realize he’s not a king – and he decides he’s ready to go home.

I’ve been saying that Wild Things is almost a genre unto itself. It took me a few days (and a second viewing) to decide what I thought about it. The unique thing is that Jonze isn’t trying to captivate you with a driving plot like 95 percent of movies do. He’s trying to make you feel like a nine-year-old again, and not just by the simple vocabulary that could’ve been written by one. He wants you to feel the frustration of not understanding the world, the absence of a father, the pain of being ignored, and the guilt for lashing out. On the island, we feel his sense of wonder, his creative spark, his occasional boredom and ultimate disappointment. The soundtrack by Karen O. plays a big part in building these feelings, too.

Visually, the film is stunning. The images, shot in Australia, are crisp and earthy, with abundant green, brown, gray, yellow and orange. Max arrives on a rocky beach with cliffs and spots the Wild Things in a dark forest. They build elaborate forts out of sticks near the water, and decorate it with golden wildflowers. They roam through pristine woods, with sun peeking through treetops, to discover a sweeping sand dune. At one point, pink petals fall from trees like it’s autumn.

Building the creatures themselves was an Oscar-worthy achievement, but one that was costly, time-consuming and fraught with problems. Wrote Saki Knafo in the above-linked Times piece, “Jonze wanted the wild things to look like real creatures, dirty and feral, with bits of leaf and twig ground into their fur, and at the same time, he wanted to maintain the fantastic proportions of Sendak’s drawings.” In the end, they used actors to move around in the suits and later used computers to generate facial expressions.

Max’s declaration of “Let the wild rumpus staaaaart!” reminds me of when my brothers and I would shout, “Rough booooys!” and terrorize the living room with our dad. The Wild Things clobbered each other with tree limbs and dirt clods; we used sofa cushions. We blew off steam with great violence, but almost magically, we felt immune from pain and injuries.

I have to think that most people who didn’t appreciate Wild Things – and it sounds like there are many – failed to do their homework. It doesn’t have a racing plot, airtight script with slapstick humor or innuendo. It wasn’t especially scary, either. To pull a moral from the story requires some thinking. Many parents have complained that this isn’t a kids movie. (It never claimed to be.)

After some thought, I see significant parallels to another favorite of mine, Into the Wild: Character imagines a world where the grass is greener, chases after that world with reckless abandon, meets quirky characters along the way, learns about himself, and realizes solitude isn’t what he imagined. Maybe stories like this resonate with me because I have dreamed about a life like that. (And no, it’s not a total coincidence that both these films and my blog share the word “wild.”)

Did Wild Things live up to the hype? Absolutely, but it was a little more melancholy, more reflective, than I expected. I didn’t anticipate being time-warped back to childhood. I like this description, that “it invites the audience to watch the action almost as though it were under glass.”

Wild Things is a breath of fresh air, and one very impressive cinematic achievement.