My beautiful boy #1

Austin Jameson -- on the Sound outside of Seattle -- 2003

Beautiful boy # 2

How can you not laugh? Jackson seriously tried to talk to this angry duck for five minutes. Finally, the duck settled down and listened after Jackson started talking to him on his level.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Gil Grissom

Just this week I re-read "The Red Headed League" by A.C. Doyle. It's such a classic Sherlock Holmes mystery. I must confess I'm a big fan of London's greatest detective. My grandfather used to read me his tales when I was just a young lad.

Holmes is a pretty easy guy to admire. He is wicked smart, likes his brandy and pipe, and prefers a good riding crop over a hand gun. It was from Holmes and his singular adventures that I first realized brains beat braun, wit beats foul play, and logic always wins out over violence.

My composition instructor is using Holmes to illustrate his teachings on argument and logic. I would venture to say Holmes is one of the best examples you could give for deductive logic -- the inclusion of Holmes in the class is elementary, if I do say.

However, the other example Mr. Lee used was CSI (the original, not the crappy, ego vehicle of David Caruso) and specifically Chief investigator Gil Grissom. Now I have always admired the work of William Peterson, specifically in the underrated Manhunter, the original Hannibal Lecter film, but I was skeptical about comparing this T.V. character with the legndary Sherlock Holmes.

But you know what, I wouldn't mind seeing a deductive battle between these two. Call it an assumption, obeservation, and deducing throw down.

After watching a few episodes of CSI with the express purpose of analyzing the logic I came away impressed. First off, the show is different than other crime shows. The crime, and more specifically, the evidence is the story. Grissom is a careful observer. He is equally as eccentric as Holmes -- a key chracteristic of a great detective. Grissom figures things out based on evidence. Most importantly, he questions the assumptions that make up the base of his logical conclusions.

Now to make this competition fair we would have to take technology out of the equation. I mean imagine what Holmes would have done with a DNA centrifuge and some high-end digital photo enhancing software. Hell, imagine what he would have done with a camera and fingerprints. Had Holmes access to the Las Vegas crime lab, there would have been zero crime in London gauranteed.

No, we would have to present the two of them with a singular event told to them by an unwitting and hapless victim (I'm thinking of a curvy red-head in a low cut dress; I think we are safe including some technological advances in clothing). Then the two of them could face off looking for clues, interviewing suspects, and setting up a fantastical trap to catch the evil-doer red-handed.

I would watch that. I would read that story.

The thing is, both detectives are gifted at what they do. All criminals make mistakes. And in the end, with careful reasoning and deductive locic, these two role-models of any age always catch their crook.

Logic always wins out ... elementary, my dear reader.

Sherlock Holmes vs. Gil Grissom

Fate and the Golden Girl

Today was a big day. An important day. In fact, it could be one of those four or five days you have that change your life.

I don't remember where I first heard that idea, but it goes something like this -- throughout your entire life there are only four or five days that truly matter, the days when you stand at a crossroads. A decision looms. It may seem insignificant or you may realize its weight. Regardless, the path you choose shapes the rest of your life. And, except for those four or five days, everything else is just fate.

I'm a firm believer in fate. I can point back to times in my life where I was led to a destination, not by my own devices but by the overarching guidance of something else. I've thought something was meant to be in my life only to see it fall by the wayside and reveal something even better smiling at me. I've made sweet mistakes that turned out to be gifts. I've looked back on things that I wanted so badly at the time and been thankful that they weren't mine. Call it what you want my friend but it is true and it is real. Destiny. Kismet. Moira. She leads you where you don't know you're going.

Anyway, today could have been one of those four or five days. I'll let you know how it turns out. In honor of the day and of fate I thought I would share a story I wrote last year.

It's a story of love and wonder, dreams and connections.

And fate.

The Golden Girl Behind the Fence

My earliest memory is of a woman. Go figure. She was a little girl actually – the golden girl behind the fence.

My mom tells me that I couldn’t have been more than two. That sounds about right. We were living in Austin, Texas. My father was back from the war and attending the University of Texas on the G.I. Bill. Everything about that time seems golden to me. It was the early ‘70s and Austin was still holding on to Hippy values. Both of my parents worked at Garner and Smith, a college bookstore on the Drag. Like so many things of that time, I don’t believe it is around any more, certainly not the way I remember it.

My father did the books for the place and my mom worked behind the counter. My father would drive the bright orange Vega to work early in the morning -- the one that he purchased in Vietnam and was shipped to the states for him. My mom and I would ride the bus to the bookstore later in the morning. We had to change buses and almost always stopped in a park by the river to feed the squirrels a bag of nuts my mom purchased from a man that sold things out of a cart. If you’ve never seen a young boy feeding a bag of peanuts to squirrels in a park, then you haven’t lived. I can’t tell you how much joy that daily feeding gave me at the time and in the years since while looking back.

We entered the bookstore by the rear entrance. Everything was cool and glossy in the back. My dad’s desk was tucked back in a corner amid boxes of books. There was such a distinct smell about the place. It was the smell of new books, the spine yet to be cracked, the pages yet to be turned. It was a clean, crisp smell that makes me think of metal and knowledge, acrid to the nose but far from unpleasant.

It was a great time. We were surrounded by hippies and intellectuals, but I always just felt I was surrounded by love. My father, being a few years older than the average student, got along better with the professors than the students, something that has been passed down to me interestingly enough. There were always people around that embodied that peace and love value system. And I was right there with them.

I was walking and talking by then. I apparently had a pretty large vocabulary for a boy not yet two-years-old. Picture if you will a tiny little boy under two-feet tall walking around dressed in delicious leisure suits that my Granny had sewn for me, using words like “enunciate” and “cumulus clouds.” I was the hit of the party.

It was just my parents and I. A brother and sister would come along four and six years later, but then I had them all to myself and I relish those memories. It’s selfish and embarrassing to admit, but I would guess that most people with younger siblings secretly hold the time before the brother or sister arrived like hidden gold or the last piece of candy from Halloween. It’s not something to share.

Anyway, back to the golden girl behind the fence.

As I said before, it is the first memory that is truly mine. There are some memories that I call merged memories. You’re not sure if they are truly yours because you remember them or because you heard the story so many times that you convinced yourself that, yes indeed sir, I remember that. No this one is real, there was only her and I on that golden afternoon.

We lived in a small house, the kind a young couple in college could afford. I must have gone out back to play. As I ran around in circles looking for butterflies, a glimmer caught my eye from next door. There standing on the other side of the fence was this little blonde-haired girl in a flowered dress. Her hair was blowing gently around her face from the breeze, and the sun had her backlit so that this golden glow emanated from around her, shining through her hair like a simulated sunset through a theater scrim. She had something in her mouth. It could have been a lollipop or perhaps a barrette that she had taken from her fluttering hair for something to chew on. She didn’t say anything. She might not have even been able to talk; she really was only a toddler.

I walked towards the fence and she did the same. It was a chain-link fence, dull gray. I always associate the smell of chain-link fences with having a bloody nose, a combination of a metallic smell and taste at the same time. When you look at one, the wire squares always seem to be smooth, but inevitably there are imperfections on the surface of the links that surprise your hands with a prick or a scratch. I don’t like chain-link fences.

We met at the fence and stared at each other through the squares. We studied each other for what seemed like hours but was probably just seconds. She put her hand through one of the links and touched my shoulder. I put my opposite hand through the fence and held her hand. In my mind she smiled. At some point her mom or grandmother – whoever it was looked really old to me – came out to get her. She went in and that was the end of it. I don’t recall ever seeing her again.

It was years later, probably about 25, when I realized that little girl turned out to be my wife. Probably not actually the same person. My wife, Shannon, assures me she never lived in Austin. Still, throughout my life I seemed to be always searching for the golden girl behind the fence. She represented all that was beautiful to me. That little smile with a lollipop or something stuffed in her mouth, the flower print dress, the human contact and her ethereal glow; all out of my reach, beyond the chain-link fence. I often thought of my golden girl during times of depression, which I’m not ashamed to say, I’ve had more than a few times. It was one of those black periods that I made the connection between the golden girl and my wife.

My wife and I had been married for about a year and were living in Los Angeles. The week had been one of darkness and depression, the kind where I would slowly sink inward and tune out the business of life about me. I came home from bartending late, after 1 a.m. I was looking at a room screen that was actually a frame for fifteen eight by ten pictures that we had received for a wedding present. We had decided to display our wedding pictures in it.

Our wedding was a wonderful, happy day. We were married in an old Victorian house in Pasadena, California. It was a great party filled with friends and relatives and dancing children. Almost all the people that needed to be there were, and it still ranks as one of my three best days.

As I looked over our wedding pictures in the screen frame it hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. The golden girl behind the fence and my wife were one and the same. It was the center picture, a black and white nostalgic looking print of my wife alone by a big window in the upstairs of the house where we were married. The dress was a simple, white, classic style. There was no flower print little girl’s dress but everything else was the same. Shannon is looking down at her bouquet, but you can see a faint smile one her face. There was the magical glow of sunlight coming in from the window and lighting up her veil like a halo. The depression fell off me as I realized I had found what I had been looking for all my life.

It’s funny how things work out. I married my wife because she is beautiful and smart and funny. I married her because she is a great complement to me. I married her because I love her, not because I thought she was the golden girl that first touched my heart. It turns out that I got both, which let me put to rest that need to find something I never felt I could.

I finally got over that chain-link fence.

Fate and the golden girl

Sunday morning skepticism

I woke up pretty early this morning ... too early actually. But that's what happens with two boys. The wife and I kept them up late last night, tired them out during the day -- hoping in vain that they would sleep past 7 a.m.

Yeah, well it didn't work. They were both crawling and clamoring in to our bed, making noise and putting cold feet in places they shouldn't. I had to resort to starting a video in the playroom. The boys watched a couple episodes of Blue's Clues while the wife and I stared at the back of our eyelids wishing for a few more minutes of sleep that wouldn't come.

Naturally, while staring at the ceiling, I daydreamed about the old days. The days before children when we could sleep in on Sunday, rise mid-morning to a strong pot of coffee, and leisurely peruse the Sunday paper reading interesting tidbits and facts to each other as the a.m. became p.m.

Those were the halcyon days, the days when I was well-rested, the days when peace and quiet were not foreign concepts, the days when a nap on Sunday was likely not a pipe-dream ...

Those were also the days when I believed almost everything in the Sunday paper.

For our most recent blog assignment we were supposed to tell someone the "bathtub hoax" and see how that person reacted. Did they believe it, when did they figure it out, etc. I told my wife. However, she knows that I am both skeptical and full of shit, so she quit listening less than 20 seconds in. I figured as much.

The idea of the assignment was to start a discussion about the verifiability of the news and history. Well, I have worked in a news room. In fact, one of my main duties as a news assistant was to fact-check -- to make sure that everything in the paper was true and verifiable. Let me tell you, I caught many mistakes nightly. Most were harmless mistakes, spelling errors, style and the like. But every now and then I would catch a big one -- a whale-sized, lawsuit-inducing mistake.

For example, imagine the fallout if a picture on the front page of the City section depicting an accused sexual offender was actually a local high school coach that was awarded for helping inner-city kids. Someone in the art department had accidentally swapped the photos in setting up the page. Fortunately that one was caught, but there were plenty more that I and others missed.

The point is, don't believe everything you read -- current or historical. Little mistakes or hoaxes can grow to become accepted as fact, just like the supposed visit by Millard Fillmore to Adam Thompson's "first" real bathtub in Ohio.

When I read the Sunday paper now (earlier than I used to and not so leisurely thanks to the boys) I'm skeptical. I see a factual or spelling error and I doubt the entire story. If I read an article that is especially flattering to a company, I discount the piece as a P.R. release.

I don't enjoy my relaxing Sunday mornings anymore ... but maybe that is for the best. Now they are full of skepticism, noise, chaos, little cold feet and little sticky hands. Sunday morning is much less peaceful and infinitely more complicated ... but a hundred times more wonderful.

Advertisements abound ...

So I took my dog (the big Great dane) for a walk to look for advertisements and logos. She got tired out and I counted 83 product placements. My math could be off a few, but you get the idea ... it was more than I expected.
Most of these were brand insignias -- car names, clothing labels, etc. There were a few billboards and those funny signs on stakes about gauranteed weight loss and real estate success. I realized I mostly ignore all that stuff. It's sort of like white noise, I just gloss over it. Still, advertising messages are everywhere.

Suburban Madness

I have a little love affair going on with Canada.

Toronto to be specific. I was fortunate enough to get a gig as the dialogue coach for a Movie of the Week that was shooting there. It has since become one of my favorite cities. Toronto has a life and vibrancy that affects you when you walk down the street or ride the rocket (the subway) or sit in one of the many beautiful parks. The people are friendly and liberal -- both in thought and in behavior. I would go back anytime.

It's funny how things work out. I thought I had left the film business behind. When my wife and I left L.A. for different prospects in Houston I left my dreams of acting and writing in the little house we had just off Melrose Avenue. It took a while to reconcile that decision. Sure enough, just as I had come to terms with things, I got the call about "Suburban Madness." Call it a twist-of-fate, cosmic irony, small world type of event. A friend of mine recommended me to be the dialogue coach for this film about Clara Harris, the woman who ran over her cheating husband three times with her Mercedes. The movie was being shot in Toronto and they needed someone to add a little authenticity to the production.

Most of the actors in the film were Canadian, except for the leads -- Sela Ward, Elizabeth Pena, and Brett Cullen. It seems that the cast (who were supposed to be residents of Friendswood) didn't sound like they were from southeast Texas.

Well after some negotiations, some soul-searching, and encouragement from loved ones, I left for 28 days to work on the film. And I loved it. Besides the fact that the cast and crew were wonderful, both professionally and as friends, I was reminded that I have something to offer.

Since leaving L.A. I had felt adrift. I wasn't sure what I was going to do or even if there was anything I could do. Those 28 days in T.O. (that's Toronto, Ontario for those in the know) taught me a lot about myself. Obviously I missed my family the entire time I was there, but I came back a changed person. A better person I think, someone that you might like to be around, someone that my wife and kids could smile about.

The film was OK. To be honest, I thought it was going to be better while we were filming. But the experience, the process was magical, and one I am thankful for.

So I would like to say thanks to all the friends I made while in Toronto. I was happy to be a part of it.


Some cast and crew of "Suburban Madness" at my goodbye party overlooking downtown Toronto.

Lahey and Borel

1. Summarize the Lahey essay on Borel's essay "The Decorated Body."

The idea that the human race, regardless of culture or geography, modifies the body to brand themselves as human -- to show that they have evolved and are more than animals -- is well reasoned, both historically and in Borel's essay. However Lahey seems to argue that the claim should delve deeper. The motivations and reasons behind the modifications and the political, cultural and moral implications of those manipulations need to enter into the discussion.

2. Discuss at least two ideas from the Borel essay that Lahey either ignores or misunderstands.

I happen to agree with Lahey that the argument leaves one lacking. As is the case with most anthropological studies, Borel focuses on the big picture. He takes on humanity as a whole. His claim is broad and simple -- humans decorate themselves to publicly brand themselves as a human, part of an organized group. And he does a solid job of supporting his claim with a wide and varied parade of mainly primitive cultures that, in often startling ways, accomplish that feat.

The thing is though, any moderately intelligent person, with or without an Intro to anthropology class, probably knows this. Since the first Cro-whatever-man threw on a Cave Bear skin to keep out the cold, modifying the body has declared us as above beasts and members of a group. I bet back in the Cro-whatever days, that guy who killed the Cave Bear probably shared the pelt with the rest of his clan signifying they were part of a group. Don't mess with that tribe; they killed a Cave Bear.

Seriously though, although Lahey wants more from Borel's claim (and me too by the way), the claim is what it is. I believe Lahey misunderstood what Borel was trying to say. Borel is claiming that humans do this, not why. In fact, he states in paragraph 8 that "The fact that such motivations and pretexts depend on aesthetic, erotic, hygienic, or even medical considerations has no influence on the result, ..." He acknowledges that there are other, deeper reasons behind his claim but doesn't dig into them.

So Borel supports his claim adequately, but by making a blanket statement he is bound to run into trouble and the sort of misunderstandings that came the way of Lahey. In paragraph 10 Borel says that "The absolutely naked body is considered as brutish, reduced to the level of nature where no distinction is made between man and beast." However, most of the examples he used were from cultures whose idea of the "naked body" is much different than that of the Western cultures. In the next sentence of paragraph 10 he states that a decorated or clothed body "if even only in a belt" exhibits humanity. For a long time "only a belt" did not signify humanity to Europeans and Americans. It was still a brutish, naked body. Without putting his examples into some context, Borel makes his case murkier than it needs to be.

Going Sideways

I'm a firm believer that the impact a movie has on you has almost as much to do with timing as it does with quality. Sure, a good movie has to have the goods ... good script, strong performances, direction that doesn't insult the viewer. But for a movie to become great, the viewer has to believe it. I don't mean believe it intellectually, but with your heart. You form a connection to the film because of the type of person you are and where you are in your life.

Sideways was one of those films for me. It has all the nuts and bolts needed -- amazing performances; a beautiful, genuine and original script; stunning camera work; and a brilliant yet underappreciated director. That is enough to make it a very good movie. But for me it was great and I'll tell you why. It could have been my story.

I'm happily married, but there is always that "what if." What if my marriage hadn't worked out. I saw myself in Paul Giamatti's character, a man who has reached middle age with not much to show for it except disappointment. He dreams of being a well respected author, yet his novel, what he has poured his soul into is not very well received. In essence, the things he saw for himself have come up as failures. In the story he searches for some sort of success or redemption -- not just professionally but in love, relationships, and himself.

I'm getting near that middle age and although I have had success in a number of areas, I have more than my share of failures. I know that many of the things I saw for myself have gone away. Either changed to something else or simply expired, failed. Sideways moved me. For me, it was a great film, but if I had seen it 10 years earlier I doubt it would have meant as much to me.

The list of my "all time great movies" includes a few staples -- pantheons of the screen, if you will. Yeah, Casablanca and Scarface are there. The General sits right alongside Chinatown, and Dr. Strangelove and Citizen Kane came to the party. But a few others are there because of what they meant to me when I saw them.

The Piano, Jane Campion's masterpiece, is one of those films. I was a struggling actor in Hollywood having some success, but not quite enough. Time had been passing me by and I was starting to realize that some dreams don't come to fruition. When I saw Holly Hunter pouring her heart out in silence, a number of feelings and fears and wishes coalesced into an unforgettable two hours in a dark movie theater. Everything fell away except me and the movie. When I got up from my seat I was forever changed. I realized that life is unfair sometimes and you can't, as Mick sang many years ago, always get what you want.

Big Fish, the labor of love by Tim Burton, affected me even more. It's number one on my list. My wife took me to see it on my birthday. I had already gone back to school, and I had realized that I was here to tell stories. That is what the acting was about and why I added a Journalism major. I had been writing my memoirs for about a month before I saw the film -- reliving old memories and getting reacquainted with my family and friends through reflection.

The mystical joining of mind, heart and movie happened at the theater. Everything fell away from me but the movie. Here was this story of an old man that told stories and the son who becomes a friend during his dying days. I balled throughout the film and couldn't stop thinking about it for weeks after. That's the beauty of movies. Some of them, because of their art and your willingness to let them in at a particular time, wrap you up in a celluloid cocoon and leave you changed when their magic falls away from you.