Looking for Ava Gardner: part 5

The full moon hides behind a cloud
Just like a golden flirt,
The waves roll in and out as if
The sea’s raising her skirt,
And Ava walks the beach at night
In someone else’s shirt.

The stars are twinkling in the sky
Like sea glass in a stream,
The shadows lie like men in love
(They’re never what they seem),
And Ava walks the beach at night
In someone else’s dream.

The sea keeps reaching out to touch,
Then pulls back with a start.
The shore just keeps his distance and
Remains a thing apart.
And Ava walks the beach at night
With someone else’s heart.

The tide will wash up everything
Onto the shore somewhere.
It’s yours if you can find it.
Nature is cruel but fair.
And Ava walks the beach at night
Till someone else is there.

-- Matthew Wells, 7/8/07

The Funeral of Captain America

So Cap gets his Arlington funeral this week, as the Associated Press reported, complete with stunning John Cassaday art:

It's not the first time Cap has died (Steranko killed him off in a memorable arc in which it was revealed that the God of Thunder is susceptible to knockout gas), and it may not be the last, but give Marvel (and Cap writer Ed Brubaker) credit for giving this death the kind of weight and significance that makes it feel like it could be the real thing.

Will Marvel bring him back? Well, they brought back Bucky. And you can make a case that Steve Rogers has done nothing but come back from the dead since he was reintroduced to the MarvelVerse in Avengers #4. When I bought that issue, I didn't know who the hell he was. But my Dad did. "Captain America? Christ Almighty!" he said, "I used to have all those comic books when I was a kid, until your grandmother threw them out." (This was about two years before my mother threw out all my comics. Some experiences truly are cross-generational.)



At the time, there was a 20-year gap between Cap's last official appearance at the end of World War II and his revival as an Avenger, which is next to nothing in comic book years, and that's probably why the man-out-of-time facet of Cap's character took another 20 years to be played with by writers like Frank Miller, who refers to Cap as "the soldier" in his Daredevil run and portrays him as a man for whom the sound of helicopters is a constant reminder of how out of place he feels in these days of modern times. He is, after all (as my father would be the first to remind me), a man who made his entry into the world by punching Adolf Hitler in the face:




Talk about your wish-fulfilment fantasies, huh? I guess something analogous would be like, oh, I don't know--maybe seeing Batman hunt down Osama Bin Laden. (Like that's ever gonna happen. Oh wait.)

What's interesting to me is that, since Cap is a child of the 40's, his death implies a critique on a set of values from that era in a way that his resurrection and survival never did. Created during a time of war, Steve (Captain America) Rogers wasn't a symbol of anything more than the national desire to kick Nazi ass. It's only after the war is over that his symbolic nature becomes confusing or questionable. So perhaps it's fitting that the week of Cap's funeral (which also occurs during a time of war) sees the reissue of one of the best, if briefest, re-envisionings of Steve Rogers, the Roger Stern/John Byrne run:

Why did I like this run so much? Because it not only dealt with Cap's history and continuity, it dealt with the idea-of-America part of his character that, to me, is what makes him interesting, inspirational, and potentially tragic. It opens up all kinds of stories revolving around the nature of patriotism, nationalism, and obedience to authority; and whatever your opinion of Civil War, putting Cap on the anti-government side feels exactly right. (My opinion of Civil War? Great concept; lousy execution. For something that was supposed to be politically relevant, it's totally ironic and fitting that it's the epilogue--Cap's death--which is resonating more with the public-at-large than the actual issues leading up to that death. Although, can I just say? Tony Stark is a dick.)



To my mind, the flag and the shield make Cap's death more (shall we say) thought-provoking and socially relevant than the death of Superman. Is it a symbol of the death of the New Deal? The death of conscience? The end of nationalism? --patriotism? --jingoism? The death of the dream? (What dream?) Or is it, like an amendment to the Constitution, part of an ongoing, on-growing experiment in government?

In the end, it's like any other life--now that it's over, we try to figure out what it all means.


So where do I stand on the "Will they bring Cap back?" question. I'd like to think that Cap will stay dead because freedom demands sacrifice--because soldiers give their lives in every age for the values of this country. But mostly, I'd like him to stay dead because that's what happens to real people. And to me, Captain America was real.

Short People Got No Reason To Date

From Saturday's New York Times:

Cosmopolitan, citing an unnamed online dating study, said that women would “relax their standards of how tall they want their mate to be” if the man earned enough money.

How much?

A man who is 5-foot-6 would need to make $175,000 more a year to be considered as desirable as a man who is 6 feet tall.

At approximately $27,000 per inch, that means I only need to make another 71K to be 5'10". Whoo hoo!!

Looking for Ava Gardner: part 4

"Find me a starfish!" e-mailed Ava, who is busy saving orangutans.

Here you go, honey:

Dinner With Competitive Friends

“This is what he does 24/7: He is a competitive eater; that’s his occupation.”
-- 2007 hot dog eating champion Joey Chestnut on the 2006 champion, Takeru Kobayashi

To the surprise of no one, the winner of the 2007 Oom Galla Galla Competition was once again a Presidential candidate. Named after a famous joke about Native Americans, the North Dakota contest has become a quadrennial rite in the political life of aspirants to the White House, and this year was no exception, drawing over two dozen declared and undeclared candidates, most of whom were left in the rhetorical dust when Senator Hillary Clinton clocked in at over twenty meaningless buzz words per sentence. This torrid pace far outstripped her closest competitor, ex-Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani, who basically said nothing but “9/11” for ninety minutes straight. Senator Clinton’s victory also came as no surprise to her husband William. “This is what she does 24/7,” he said. “She’s a competitive bloviator; that’s her occupation.”

Plans for CourtTV’s new reality show, “So You Want To Be A Serial Killer,” were put on hold today after series star and renowned mass murderer John Jacob Loomis was arrested by Miami police at the scene of his latest atrocity and charged with 147 counts of murder. Loomis, who has won the Gacey Invitation for five years straight, was held without bail under a new Florida law which disallows the so-called Fox Exemption for spree-killers who commit murder on-camera. While Loomis himself refused to comment on the arrest, his press agent released a statement claiming that the arrest is “a slippery slope, at the end of which competitive hit-and-run drivers may be arrested for running over little old ladies, competitive slumlords may be held without bail for freezing their tenants to death by shutting off the heat in winter, and competitive White House aides convicted of lying and obstruction of justice might actually have their prison time reduced or even eliminated by a Presidential pardon.”

In an upset victory, Austrian Dieter Roland won this year’s Einstein Memorial 50K by setting a world’s record time of 45 seconds for creating 50 units of kinetic energy (K) while contemplating the test question, “How many Frenchmen can’t be wrong?” Herr Rohan’s wife Else, who feeds him intravenously, cuts his hair, and spends her spare time trying to get a reaction out of him, was not surprised by her husband’s victory. “This is what he does 24/7,” she explained. “He’s a competitive thinker.” When reminded that trying to get a reaction out of your husband makes you not much different from most wives, Frau Rohan laughed and replied, “Well, most husbands don’t get paid for being distant and unreachable, do they, dear? Dear? Dieter? I’m talking to you, Dieter. Dieter, will you at least for once acknowledge that I’m talking to you? Dieter? Oh no. Oh no. Don’t you dare give me that ‘I’m competing’ look or I’ll tell everybody in the world all the thoughtless things you do when you ‘think’ I’m not looking. Do you hear me, Dieter?”

Facing fierce competition from the Fox Network, the entire Bush Administration, and the autobiographical writings of Henry Kissinger, Republican spokesmodel Ann Coulter won this year’s Richard Nixon Invitational last night by lying continuously for twelve straight hours without a break until she finally admitted: "I'm a competitive liar; this is what I do 24/7." Beginning her acceptance speech with the words “I am so much smarter than anyone in this room, and stop groping me, O'Reilly,” Ms. Coulter continued to lie repeatedly until she was gagged with a hot dog by second-place finisher Richard Cheney, who competed as Vice President, as the President of the Senate, and as a private citizen who can’t break a ten without swearing that you just gave him a five. Because Ms. Coulter’s jaws continued to move even after the initial frankfurter was shoved down her stupid throat, it took 74 more hot dogs in the space of ten minutes to finally shut her up, which was a first and a world record at the same time.

Looking for Ava Gardner: part 3

Six things you can do on a raw cloudy day when you can’t hit the beach in a town where there’s nothing much to do except go to the beach:

You can e-mail everybody you know who’s stuck in work today and spend the entire day waiting for one of them to reply.

You can go see a movie with your niece and nephew, but since they don’t get up till after noon, and they’re not really human till about 2, the earliest show of Transformers you can see in the Hanover Mall is at 4:45, which is about the time that your nephew hangs out with his friends on the sea wall and your niece watches VH-1 while playing Mad Libs with herself.

You can read a book in the back yard and fight off the bees that think the pollen-like aroma of your Hawaiian Tropic suntan oil means that your face is the pistil in a strange new honey-providing flower.

You can watch a DVD on your nephew’s PlayStation, but you have to sit two feet away from the screen because the volume level on the TV speakers only goes up to 2 out of 10 when playing a DVD even though it can go to 10 of 10 when you switch back to cable.

You can work on that romantic comedy script you brought with you and drop it after ten minutes because you’re much more interested in plotting out the three new ideas you got on the beach yesterday.

You can update your blog with entries like this.

4th of July, Ocean Bluff (Alyssa)

The call of the running tide

Looking for Ava Gardner: part 2

It's not common knowledge these days, but Ocean Bluff, Massachusetts, was originally founded by a group of Quakers who designed the town to be a memorial to every Massachusetts Indian tribe which had been wiped out by the Pilgrims. The original street map (which was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1941) contained over two hundred Indian tribal names, from Pequod to Wampanoag, but once the Ocean Bluff population began to grow, the town council started renaming streets after themselves, as town councils have been doing since the beginning of time (or at least the beginning of towns), and now there are only seven Indian street names left:

Ironically enough, the single street name that was not the name of a tribe, but the catch-all name of every tribe's destroyer, is the one name that was never changed. Whether this proves that the Ocean Bluff Town Council had no sense of history, or a highly developed sense of humor, is a question that only future historians can answer.

If the Seattle School District decision had taken place in Germany in 1937

The Supreme German ReichGerichtshof declared on Thorsday that local communities cannot seek to resolve the Jewish Question through measures that take explicit account of a citizen’s racial background.

Voting 5 to 1, the court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Johann Scheisskopf, invalidated pogroms in München that sought to maintain racial diversity in the Fatherland by taking a Jewish applicant’s racial background into account as a “tiebreaker” for admission to particular schools.

In his majority opinion, Chief Justice Scheisskopf said such pogroms were “a fair and impartial method to achieve racial balance,” a goal he said was forbidden by the Reich Constitution’s guarantee of unequal protection under the law.

“The way to stop discrimination against the Jews is to stop discriminating against the Jews,” he said. This interpretation, the chief justice added, was “completely in the spirit of Braun v. Unterrichtsministerium,” the landmark 1924 decision that gave Jews, gypsies and homosexuals equal rights with Aryans.

Concurring with Chief Justice Scheisskopf were Justices Arschkopf, Douchekopf, Schweinkopf, and Antonin Vaginakopf. The lone dissenter, Justice Todeskandidat, was declared a Jew and sent to a resettlement camp in the East.

In a related 5 – 0 decision (with one Justice resettled), the Court ruled that the use of euphemisms to describe the so-called Final Solution is upheld by the new Reich Constitution, which is currently being rewritten by three men in a back room in Berlin. Declaring that “the way to utterly destroy the Jews is to stop saying out loud that we want to destroy the Jews,” Chief Justice Scheisskopf assured the Jews of Europe that they have nothing to fear from Hitler’s Germany.