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The Burning Bush

Big Love, Smallville, and Messianic Fiction

The spring of 2011 marks the finale of two television series that have been keeping me company for several years, each of which I feel a little misty at the thought of letting go of. Beware, traveler: herein lie spoilers for Big Love and Smallville.

The protagonists of the two programs hardly seem similar, at a passing glance. Big Love's Bill Henrickson is a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist, a family man, and an entrepreneur. Smallville's favorite son, Clark Kent, is a monogamist of undetermined Protestant stock, single, and searching for the right career.

  

But scratch the surface a little (with Kryptonite, if you must), and it's easy to see how the two characters have more than a passing resemblance to one another. Even beyond generalities one could draw regarding each program's implicit statements about the American Dream, for example, each continuity's set of thematic elements mirrors the other so well, in fact, you'd think the writing teams were each cribbing from the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index. (And heck, if one subscribes to the Campbellian monomyth theory, as does your humble host, the popular wisdom is that we're all cribbing from it, all the time, simply by being part of our own culture.)

The Secret Identity

Both Bill Henrickson and Clark Kent protect double lives, secret identities. The lies and deception that these two men, each of whom purports to rely on values such as honesty and forthrightness, are born of their iconoclastic and idiosyncratic natures. Bill is forced to hide his family life away from the American and mainstream Mormon publics that will castigate him for his lifestyle choices, while Clark must obfuscate not only his abilities, but his very species, in order to lead a normal life and to facilitate helping others.

Elastic Journalism

On Friday, the First Lady of Inkville and I checked out "Multimedia Journalism & the Landscape of News," a talk by The Daily's Gabriel Dance. It was sponsored by my old stomping grounds, the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication.

Dance was a popular act; we arrived a few minutes late, and found the room already at capacity and hotter than Hades. Good on him.

A lot of what Dance had to say really hit home, especially his strong recommendation that 21st century journalists need more than one skill set. And as I can attest both as a freelancer and as a former magazine staffer, it's hard out there for a pimp, assuming the pimp is a writer trying to support himself solely through freelance.

Dance's song-and-dance about multimedia was interesting, and he aptly demonstrated how the concept of "journalism" is elastic enough to encompass computer animators, designers, illustrators, and other creatives.

All Dance's examples stemmed from his time at The New York Times, and I'll admit I was hoping for a bit more about Dance's new gig at The Daily. But that job is new, so perhaps Dance deserves a pass for at least a few more weeks. And frankly, The Daily has thus far failed to impress me.

But what really left me scratching my head was the amount of culture shock Dance must be experiencing transferring from the Times, a supposed liberal bastion, to working for Rupert Murdoch. As I type this, Dance's personal website features a link to an article about a journalist's "battles" with Murdock, so perhaps The Daily really is enacting a separation of church and state for the purposes of doing business.

Call Me a Duck

My marketing job in the University of Oregon's Office of Admissions allows for a whole lot of creative leg-stretching. An indulgent and supportive boss, ditto.

Videotaping a ghost hunt in a cemetery? Go for it. Facebook-based essay contest? You betcha. Foursquare scavenger hunt? Sure, why not?

But nothing—and I mean nothing—has been so much fun (and so unexpected) as the writing, production, and creation of "Call Me a Duck."

Based on Maino's "All the Above," the video was launched last Friday, and as of this writing we're closing in on 160,000 views on YouTube... and still climbing.

Originally the brainchild of my boss Holly Moline Simons, "Call Me a Duck" was fast-tracked and produced on a shoestring budget once we learned that On the Rocks, the UO's resident male a cappella group, was going to appear on this fall's The Sing-Off on NBC.  (By the way, "fast-tracked" in academic parlance means just under half a year.)  Our boys were eliminated just shy of the final round, but hey, we'll take it!

Besides teaching me how to spell "a cappella," this project afforded me the chance to write and produce a rap song, which is a résumé line item I never would've considered. 

I was privileged to work with an amazing cast and crew.  Special shout-outs are due to Holly, as well as director Michael McDermott, director of photography John Waller, amazingly organized assistant director Christopher Parker, effervescent OTR liaison (and crystal-clear tenor) Jeffrey Rogers, audio engineer (and OTR founder) Peter Hollens, and the rock of UO Admissions, Jett Nilprabhassorn.

Funny side note: In a few weeks the UO plays Auburn in the BCS championship game.  I learned something interesting today.  Guess what l'il ditty Auburn has adopted this season as the football team's "pump up" song?

Maino's "All the Above." Complete coincidence, Tigers, scout's honor!

Photo courtesy of Michael McDermott.

Celebrating Hard Times

Local craft distillery gives Eugene a buzz

My able editrix for this piece asked that, if I was going to write for a second time about my buddy James and his bootleggin', I'd have to identify myself as his friend, make it clear we have a personal connection. That was a good idea. The line between business reporting and nepotism can grow mighty thin when covering local folks. One thing that made it simpler was the fact that I honest-to-God find James' and Dudley's efforts fascinating. The boys, James in particular, have been striving for so long to reach this level, that it's really gratifying seeing them hit the mark. Cheers, gents!

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The last time I wrote in these pages about the liquor-distilling ventures of my friend James Stegall (“Money Where the Mouth Is,” 3/13/08), he had a different business partner, a different company name and a different plan for his product line. 

He also had 100,000 fewer miles on his car’s odometer, now the legacy of commuting among a day job in Albany, his home base in Eugene and the clean and earthy refurbished granary in Monroe he shares with business partner Dudley Clark and two stills composed of copper tubing and stainless steel.

They make an unlikely pair, smooth-headed, thirtysomething Stegall, and Clark with his longish silver hair and swashbuckler’s goatee. “We don’t always see eye to eye,” says Clark, “but James and I have figured how to be partners in a very deep sense. Almost like brothers.”

It’s been a busy fall season for these almost-brothers and their business, now christened Hard Times Distillery. After more than two years of work fueled by a loan and training courses courtesy of Lane County’s Entrepreneurial Development Services (eDev), their product finally hit liquor store shelves in early October.

Continue reading "Celebrating Hard Times" at Eugene Weekly.

"These Guns are Fully Loaded"

If the fever dream scene from last night's episode of Glee had aired in the 1980s...

 

...a spinoff Glee Babies Saturday morning cartoon would be immediately rushed into production.

 

That is all.

Summer Vacation: Getting Animated

This blog post is horribly overdue, I'll admit. The First lady of Inkville had a work conference in Los Angeles back in August, and I tagged along. Besides visiting to Disneyland, eating Brazilian food, and  hitting numerous tiki locales, I flew solo for one day and visited the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where I saw two fantastic museum exhibitions, both of which were ending that very day.

The AMPAS Ray Harryhausen exhibition was an incredible collection of photographs, film clips, and, most excitingly, scale models. Many non-geeks are sadly unaware of Harryhausen and his legacy. The man was a genius of stop motion animation, animating fantasy sequences in films like Mighty Joe Young, The Seven Voyages of Sinbad, and, most excitingly for this 7th grade Greek Mythology fanatic, the original Clash of the Titans.

 

Photography wasn't allowed in the galleries, and a dude behind a desk was glowering at me a bit, so I hope you'll forgive these grainy, through-the-lucite iPhone photos, one of the models for Perseus and the Pegasus, the other of the monstrous Kraken. Seeing these models up close reminded me of the amazing level of fear and anticipation Harryhausen inspired in my middle school self with his Medusa sequence, and how the CGI effects of the recent Clash remake fail to deliver in terms of visceral fright... even with the requisite mental adjustment to account for nostalgia.

The second exhibition was even more amazing, and the real reason I mastered aggro Los Angeles traffic to make the commute to AMPAS. The exhibition featured materials and ephemera from the career of Chuck Jones, the amazing director of a number of your favorite Looney Tunes shorts from midcentury ("What's Opera, Doc?," anyone? "One Froggy Evening"?), including animation cells, cartoon scripts, personal correspondence, video clips, and even the man's Oscar statuette.

  

Chuck Jones was a bit (okay, a lot) of a personal hero of mine in the 80s and early 90s. I read the man's autobiography, as well as several other tomes on animation history. I watched Looney Tunes incessantly. I still think that the two-part Elmer Fudd hunting series cartoons Jones directed stand as some of the best-timed and funniest animated films in the medium.

Again, no photos were allowed, so I grabbed these images of the Internet. In fact, security was so tight at this thing, I halfway expected to see Foghorn Leghorn with a baseball bat whacking weasels on the head. When a couple of confused museum-goers confusedly attempted to stray into the AMPAS screening theatre, they were escorted back out again, quite definitively. A far cry from laid-back Oregon.

Amazing exhibitions, amazing trip. That's all, folks!

Summer Vacation: Tiki Travelogue

A couple of weeks ago, the First Lady of Inkville attended a work conference in her professional capacity. I tagged along to Los Angeles in a decidedly un-professional capacity. Still addled on the rum-soaked fumes of the Northwest TikiKon earlier this month, I decided to cram as much Polynesian pop as possible into my visit, with one goal in mind: Tiki pilgrimage.

And what Los Angeles Tiki travel would be complete without a visit to the Enchanted Tiki Room in Disneyland? The entirety of the Adventureland portion of the park is pretty Tiki-tastic, but the Tiki room (complete with its delicious and overpriced pineapple Dole whip) remains the Genesis moment for many Tikiphiles' obsession, including that of your intrepid guide.

Spoiler alert: those Tikis totally come to life.

After working up a sweat escaping the Haunted Mansion and whining about the insertion of Johnny Depp mannequins into the original Pirates of the Caribbean, we adjourned to downtown L.A. to quench our thirst at the Trader Vic's:

True Confessions of a Slugette

"If I had a nickel," I said, "for every time I've listened to sax music while walking down the street wearing a dress..."

"...You'd have a nickel!" my friend Scott Smith interjected. Like me, Scott was clad in a black cocktail dress and a black hat, striding down Broadway Avenue on a warm August evening in downtown Eugene, Oregon.

When Scott's wife and my good friend Debbie Williamson-Smith told me she was campaigning in Eugene's annual Slug Queen competition (held this year on Friday the 13th, reasonably enough), it sounded like a natural fit. Debbie is a smart, civically engaged, and artistic professional communicator.

Debbie even had an ace up her sleeve: cross-dressing. Liberal Eugene is always up for a little gender transgression, and the Slug Queen competition has a long tradition of drag as evidenced by the 2009-10 queen, Mark Van Bever, er, make that Ana Slugsia. Unfortunately, what Debbie had in mind was me cross-dressing, along with hubby Scott and friend Jonathan as her back-up singers.

What sounded like less of a natural fit was Debbie's vision for her theme: Breakfast at Tiffany's. With the adopted moniker Holly GoSlugly, a sixties-inspired up-do, and a social media-based campaign, would hippie-tastic Eugene appreciate the "tackily tasteful" (or was it "tastefully tacky"?) Williamson-Smith and her rendition of "Slug River" (crooned by all of us to the tune of "Moon River"?)

Evidently so. With her effective judge-bribing program, Ms. GoSlugly and her team made it to the top two, were just baaaarely edged out (half a stinkin' point!) by new "raining" Queen Slugasana. Debbie vows she'll be back, in the GoSlugly persona or with a brand-new character, in 2011. Who knows what her theme will be, or whether she'll need a helping hand (or antenna?) from a friend willing to show a little leg?

In the meantime, I'll be trying to rebuild my professional reputation...

Photo credit: kval.com

Sex and the City: Now it can be Told

Special to the Star

My column “Sex and the City” first began appearing here in the New York Star during the heady days of the late nineties, when I was in my late (okay, very late) twenties. I think my weekly reflections on the metropolitan escapades and complicating sexcapades in my own life and those of my girlfriends were shocking to some people, at first.

After all, just a few years earlier, Newt and his cronies had ushered in a renewed focus on “family values,” and “safe sex” was the ubiquitous buzzphrase.

Through it all, you, my readers, helped me answer one overarching question: What happens when an urban journalist opens each column with a rhetorical question based around wish fulfillment of late twentieth century American women?

The answer, of course, is lying. A whole lot of lying.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Things are very different for me since the days the column began, almost as if my life was one large character arc on a half-hour sitcom dramedy.

These days I have a couple books under my (Gucci) belt, and the occasional headline appears in Vogue and other publications just below my byline. So you can imagine how concerned my editors and agent were (not to mention my husband) when I told them I wanted to come back to the Star one last time, for a tell-all goodbye column.

The Old Rugged Cross

I had been waiting for last night's premiere of HBO's new series Treme for months. An ongoing program that takes place in perhaps my favorite city in the world, bolstered by the usual deft characterization and commitment to world-building endemic of HBO shows like Deadwood and The Sopranos is too good to pass up.

Watching the series, even just the first episode, felt like coming home. Seeing the dive bars and grimy row homes, and even the Tower Records on North Peters, on television give me that weird little thrill one gets while seeing an accustomed haunt on the local news.

Whether the series is any good remains to be seen. HBO's programming is notoriously slow to start, and Treme's rambling, shambling, 80-minute opening episode is no exception, doling out juuuuust enough characterization for each of the principals to barely keep the viewer engaged. The music was slammin', of course, and the naturalistic writing and acting, de rigeur for HBO, more than make up for the plodding pacing.

It's difficult to watch John Goodman play a character and let the man simply inhabit it; he's always just so John Goodman-y. But I couldn't help grinning and nodding along as Goodman's character lit into a British journalist dismissive (or ignorant?) of New Orleans and what it stands for in the American imagination. Wendell Pierce's performance was reliably droll and understated, and his character's consistent shortchanging of his cabbies was not only duly funny, it was a compelling and simple symbol for the dire straits in which New Orleanians (not to mention musicians in general) found (and find) themselves. And Steve Zahn... well, maybe he'll grow on me.

The true crime behind Treme, the real sadness behind it, is that enough of the city is still in wreckage in real life that the film crew was even able to identify neighborhoods that could pass for the devastation of late 2005. Our trip there in 2008 revealed plenty of ruined homes, three years after their destruction.

Amusingly, with this summer's welcome return of True Blood, HBO will now have two series taking place in Louisiana. And did I mention that 2011's big-budget Green Lantern movie is filming in New Orleans, as well? I just hope the entire state of Louisiana isn't so trendy and gentrified that we're too priced out of it to, well, head down and move into a gentrified neighborhood, provided we someday, hopefully, relocate there.

Until then, I'm trusting Treme to present a nuanced, heartwarming, heartbreaking portrayal of the Big Easy, and to laissez les bons temps (et les mauvais temps) rouler. This opening episode of Treme ends with a traditional New Orleans jazz funeral, but only with the downbeat half that leads to the cemetery, the portion set to a funerary dirge. By forgoing the second, upbeat, from-the-cemetery portion of the jazz funeral, the portion traditionally set to hot jazz, the series indicates its characters are at their nadir, three months after Katrina has ravaged them. The central tension of the series, a tension to which I'm looking forward, will be in watching these characters rebuild themselves, and the city they love.