Good Enough

Do exercise you like to do, do it often and if possible, do it with friends, like these chaps at a Washington, D.C. YMCA, circa 1920. 

“I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”
— Daily Affirmations With Stuart Smalley

A key consideration when exercising is to ask yourself why you are doing it in the first place. Do I do it to look good or feel good? Do I do it so that people like me? Hell no, I do it so I like me. I really don’t worry anymore if other people like me but I do worry about me liking me. I’m my own worst critic after all. Years ago I realized no matter how fit I got I would never have that cut physique so in fashion amongst the Hollywood elite or gym bros. I used to think “I just want to look good naked.” But I also realized how rarely anyone sees me naked. Nowadays I’ll settle to look good fully clothed, but maybe I should just buy clothes that fit.

My true reasons to exercise may be hidden in my lizard brain, and vanity is part of it. Mostly though it’s to stave off the side effects of aging. The worst side effect of aging is of course, dying. Less final side effects include heart disease, stroke, diabetes, dementia, immobility and looking terrible in a snug t-shirt (again, a reminder to buy clothing that fit).

Recently, after a bout of inactivity, due in part to travel and laziness, my back seized up. Having back pain, if you are unfamiliar, can be debilitating. You can’t move freely (or at all) and the pain can cause numbness in your limbs if a nerve is pinched or constricted. It can lead to numerous headaches and other aches (hips, knees etc) and most annoyingly, grouchiness and despising people who just flaunt their ability to walk on a balance beam or even down the sidewalk. I can’t recommend any quick fixes to back pain (osteopaths, chiropractors, massage etc.) but I do know a slow and gradual fix. Apply heat, apply cold, massage, stretch and strengthen, which I’ve done solidly for a couple of weeks and I’m finally recovering, by which I mean I can stand up without looking like I’m trying to pass as an 80-year-old.

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Seen in July

Just two nice kids but only one is a horse, in My Lady Jane

Sometimes I realize that I subscribe to too many services, but occasionally there is a month when I actually do use every one of those services, which is sad when you find that there is no one service that gives you what you want. I can only hope you don't have this problem.

My Lady Jane
Prime
Sometimes history sucks, especially for women in the 16th century. Lady Jane Grey should never have died. It just wasn't fair. She was executed for high treason at the age of 17 for accepting the crown she never wanted. Yet what if it didn't have to be that way? What if magic existed and you could use great pop and rock music in a show set 500 years ago? Also, this fictional period comedy is a lot of fun and you should watch it.



Michael Fassbender in The Killer

The Killer
Netflix
David Fincher explores a weirdly common theme here. An assassin (Michael Fassbender) slips up, which brings consequences to his home life, and initiates a revenge plot similar to John Wick et al. My only criticism of this plot is that the killer is introduced as precise, patient and calculating, yet makes a dumb mistake, and then launches into a well-planned and executed escape route. When he realizes that someone has come and invaded his super secret hideaway (apparently not so super secret), he puts in motion a series of acts of revenge to ensure it doesn't happen again. If he was as clever as we're told, how did it happen in the first place? Never mind the details of the minimal plot. It is as Hitchcock said a "MacGuffin", a detail necessary for the story to move forward but irrelevant to the story. For some, they may find the patient pace of this stylish film too slow, but for me, it reinforced exactly what our protagonist tells us at the beginning, "If you are unable to endure boredom, this work is not for you.", likewise, this may not be the film for you. In the end, this film owes more to Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samouraï and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai than to John Wick or A History of Violence (though it does share that the story originated as a comic book). Also notable is the use of the music of The Smiths as the primary music of the film (I'm assuming Fincher is a Smiths fan).



The charming Time Bandits

Time Bandits
Criterion Channel
Best described by a reviewer, as having a "creaky charm". It's now a series on Apple TV+, this 1981 film from Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam is one of my favourites though rewatching it was hard to say why. Funny lines? Yes. Funny performances? Definitely. Yet, maybe it is the "creaky charm" of the simple effects and uneven story plus the appearances of Sean Connery and Ralph Richardson as the besuited "Supreme Being" that stick in my memory.
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Walk like a dog 

Walk like dog, if you wish.

We've all done it. We all have it. We all have a song that despite knowing the lyrics, we still hear them incorrectly, usually to humorous effect. The Bruce Springsteen song, Blinded by the Light, in its original version has the curious lyric, "cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night." The "deuce" refers to a nickname for original V8 engines or something. Even in that explanation, I wouldn't have understood it. Now listen to the Manfred Mann version, wherein an English vocalist evoking an American accent sings something that sounds more like "revved up like a douche" and you have added confusion. The fact that this version was played constantly on the radio of my youth only made my brothers and I even more confounded by it. The more you heard it, the more it confirmed your suspicion of it. More commonly, listeners to Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze, often wondered if the singer was excusing themselves to either "Kiss this guy" or "Kiss the sky"? A friend of my brother's was sure the chorus the 1981 Kim Carnes' hit "Bette Davis Eyes", came through our fuzzy dashboard speakers as "She's got thirty days inside", instead of "She's got Bette Davis eyes." To be honest, the misheard lyrics sound as improbable as the actual ones. There are dozens and dozens of other examples.

In 1954, writer Sylvia Wright gave this phenomenon the name, “mondegreen”. As a child she claimed to have misheard a line of poetry as:
"Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray,
And Lady Mondegreen."

The actual verse is, "They hae slain the Earl o' Moray / And laid him on the green." Thus "Mondegreen" was, if not created there and then, at least given a name.
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Seen in June 

Nick Cage is the dullest version of Freddy Krueger in Dream Scenario.

It turns out that when the NHL and NBA playoffs are done, you find you have more time to watch cycling races, and The UEFA European Championships rather than movies and televsion. It does seem lately that "going to the movies" is on the back burner. It used to be my first thought to escape the heat was to go to a cinema, but now I'd have to leave my comfortable home, and go out in the heat to escape the heat, which doesn't make so much sense.

The Little Mermaid
Disney+
Having seen a live version performed by kids, I thought it was time to finally watch the original animated version. One of Disney’s big animated hits that kicked off a long run of box office successes, it’s strange to watch this 2D traditionally animated film now, especially one that isn’t in 4K. While feeling like a throwback to a time gone by it’s still a tidy 90-minute film based on the classic fairytale of a mermaid who falls in love with a human and has to choose between her love and her family. As this is a Disney film, characters can make difficult choices without compromise or repercussions while singing catchy tunes about it.

Dream Scenario
Hoopla
Nick Cage plays, Paul, the most uninteresting professor of evolutionary biology to ever teach the subject. He’s not just unassuming but also unable to exert any particular control over his life. He isn’t unaware of his fecklessness. When a former colleague tells him she’s about to publish a paper based on research they worked on together, he’s unsuccessful in getting her to admit his contribution. Even one of his own daughters admits that he’s appearing in her dreams but only as a bystander even when she is imperilled. This view of him as a disinterested nonparticipant frustrates him. Then it fascinates him when he discovers he’s appearing in the dreams of complete strangers. After briefly trying to capitalize on this unexplained phenomenon his life is turned upside down when those dreams begin to become menacing. The film is darkly funny and slightly disturbing. Is it a commentary on social media or our so-called “cancel culture”? Is it a warning about the gentrification of culture via the Internet? In his classroom Paul talks about how the natural camouflage of the zebra only works when the animals herd together and yet the same markings call attention to the animal that has strayed from the group. Can someone be so “normal” that they are abnormal? Can setting yourself apart from the crowd threaten your existence? Discuss amongst yourselves.



Sheng Wang, who is a basketball-loving, Asian American who went to the same middle school as Beyoncé, also he's very funny.

Sheng Wang: Sweet and Juicy
Netflix
Sheng Wang is an unexpected gem of a comedian. An Asian American who grew up in Texas and attended the same school as Beyoncé his low key humour delivered in the most low key manner reverberates long after the show is over. Highly recommended.

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St. Sammy Peeps 

Samuel Pepys, Portrait by John Hayls, 1666

At this year’s TCAF (the Toronto Comic Arts Festival), I saw a talk given by Rosena Fung about her book “Age 16”, which is a work of fiction that borrows from her own life. It wasn’t an autobiography or memoir but clearly her personal experiences helped imbue her characters with a certain truth. In talking about her work she mentioned how she created a lot of “self documentation”.

Of course, I could empathize. For over twenty years, I’ve maintained a blog. For 17 years I’ve taken entries from that blog and published an annual compendium. Since I’ve owned a smartphone I have taken random photos that I have kept that not only record an image, but the exact time, date and usually a geographic location (my iCloud album goes back 22 years). For the last 9 years I’ve kept sketch books, which started as a daily way to keep up my sketching and use up empty sketchbooks. I now have 14 of them. Since 2010, I’ve kept my work notebooks (this is surely something that I could give up). I have letters and other sketchbooks that go back to the 1990s. After maintaining a blog for over twenty years and a comic book journal for almost ten, my remarkably dull and inoffensive journaling is more like a public "notes to self" than a really honest and insightful diary. I've also started logging my workouts, keeping track of what I eat, allowing Google Maps know my location and I've started using Apple's Journal app (and may occasionally use the Kennedy app which does pretty much the same thing). While none of these are revealing any deeply held secrets or worrying psychosis, they certainly are a record of self-documentation, perhaps of the dullest kind.

I’ve since learned from David Owen’s New Yorker piece, How To Live Forever, that this self-recording is known as solipsism. “Solipsism (from solus 'alone', and ipse 'self') is the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist. As a position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.”
- Wikipedia

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Cap it and Forget it 

Washington, D.C., circa 1919. "Hat display, Saks & Co." Panama hats, and how they're made.

Something attributed to Fran Lebowitz has stuck in my head. Lebowitz is an American author and, I don't know, "cultural critic" or something (she hasn't published anything in some time but often is asked to speak publicly on numerous topics). The quote I heard is that men over sixty shouldn't wear baseball caps. Lebowitz is for some reason seen as having insight on fashion. I don't know why. In my estimation, she has worn the same outfit for decades, which is essentially heavy tortoiseshell eyeglasses, a man's blazer (too large for her small aging frame), straight-leg, high-waisted denim jeans, a crisp white dress shirt, and cowboy boots. This is to say, I wouldn't necessarily consider fashion advice from Lebowitz as useful or relevant. Though, I'm not sure I would take fashion advice from anyone anymore. I'm in my mid-fifties and to be honest, dressing to me is personal and simultaneously, trivial. I do think I understand her point, however. Baseball is a young person's game, and men in their sixties are not usually leaving the house for the park for a game of pickup, so they really should dress for their age and not the age they want to be.

In my neighbourhood, I do see many, many men, my age or older, who are definitely not dressing suitably for their age and forget about dressing for the job they want. Often it's that particular look of the white rapper with oversized ball caps, oversized basketball jerseys worn over oversized tees, paired with oversized basketball shorts, or oversized jeans crumpled atop loose-fitting, untied basketball shoes. Not only is this a look fit for the 13 to 25-year-old crowd, but it was a look that was only fit for 13 to 25-year-olds about 30 years ago. I have no idea what these guys are thinking, and often I worry about my classist assumptions that most of these men are absolute idiots who simply don't know any better. Or worse, they are so ignorant as not to be aware of their ignorance. What it appears to me is this is an individual who has not matured past the age of 15 and is stuck thinking a life dressing this way is somehow showing their individualistic, "stick it to the man" independent streak that says, "I don't have to dress like I have a job, because I don't have a job!". Good for you. Let everyone know, that you're out here living in the streets, free from income. It's none of my business. I saw the most egregious of this sort when I witnessed a fellow who appeared to be in his 50s (or older), again wearing the sideways-pulled cap, oversized tee and shorts while riding a teeny-tiny BMX bicycle. Not only was this gentleman not on his way to the ballpark but he was also not on his way to a skate park to try out some new bike tricks. I would say getting on or off the bike was his big trick.
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