Passion at Play in "Vicky Cristina Barcelona"

(Note: This article appeared in the 27 August edition of the Piedmont Post.)

You don't have to be overly familiar with Woody Allen's extensive oeuvre to enjoy his newest film, "Vicky Cristina Barcelona," a sensual, finely tuned exploration of love's confusion staring some of the most gorgeous people on the planet. It is an engrossing investigation of the difficulties of knowing what one wants in and from love, difficulties compounded when you know what you want, but can't attain it.

Billed as a romantic comedy, Vicky Cristina Barcelona's main characters are so desperately lovelorn and lost that most moviegoers will be too wrapped up in their juicy love quadrangle to think twice about laughing. And that's not a bad thing.

Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a level-headed graduate student spending a summer in Barcelona studying the buildings of the Spanish architect and artist Gaudi. She is joined by Cristina (Scarlett Johansson), an impetuous, wandering soul regarded by her friend as a "mental adolescent." While Vicky's stated goals for the summer are academic, Cristina is eager to fully immerse herself in the indulgent side of Catalan culture—art, wine, leisure, sex and passion—and her prayers are at least partially answered soon enough.

It's not long before the ladies encounter Juan Antonio, a talented abstract painter, artistic celebrity, and dyed-in-the-wool romantic played to perfection by Javier Bardem. Throughout the film Bardem has the sultry, punch-drunk look of a wolf on the prowl. He approaches Vicky and Cristina in a restaurant and with only the briefest of introductions proposes that the two friends fly to Oviedo in the north of Spain with him for a weekend of food, wine and sex. Cristina is instantly charmed, Vicky less so, but Juan Antonio's magnetic sex appeal is undeniable, and the ensuing tryst is unadulterated voyeuristic candy.

While Cristina is the first to be seduced by Juan Antonio, she falls ill at the worst possible moment. With Cristina incapacitated, Juan Antonio focuses his sight on the reluctant Vicky, and he captures his willing prey after filling her full of wine, tapas and Spanish guitar. Vicky would love to give herself over to Juan Antonio. She yearns for him endlessly, as does Cristina. But inevitably some entertaining wrenches are thrown into the works.

For one, Vicky is engaged to Doug, a preppy young go-getter back in the States who keeps interrupting her Spanish dream with lovelorn phone calls. Cristina and Juan Antonio, both hopeless romantics with insatiable appetites for life's rich treats, seem perfect for one another and move in together. Problem is that Juan Antonio is recently divorced from and clearly pines for Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), a frenetic apparently bipolar sex bomb.

When Maria Elena tries to commit suicide, Juan Antonio rescues her and brings her back to live with him and Cristina, which is initially an inconvenience. Soon though, Juan Antonio, Cristina and Maria Elena establish a healthy ménage a trois of a relationship. Meanwhile, Vicky still lusts for Juan Antonio, she and Doug elope in Barcelona, and everything goes awry when Cristina makes one of her idiosyncratic impetuous decisions.

If all of this sounds like a month's worth of soap opera episodes crammed into 90 minutes, you've got pretty good ears. There's even an attempted double murder and a disenchanted matchmaker to help Vicky Cristina Barcelona fit
the daytime soap bill.

To his great credit, Woody Allen manages to keep Vicky Cristina Barcelona above the level of crass melodrama. Much of the film's success is due to the sexy, talented cast, especially Bardem and Cruz, whose gazes might have you sweating in the air conditioned movie theatre.

In the end, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is a delightful, indulgent way to pass a late-summer afternoon or evening, and may have you asking yourself some of the same questions facing the main characters. That, or make you want to move to Spain.

Surfing the World, One Couch at a Time

(A much shorter version of this article was published in the March 30 edition of the Catalyst, a monthly magazine in Salt Lake City, UT.)

The Freedom of Couches

One of my friends says CouchSurfing.com is for bums. My girlfriend’s father says it’s for freeloaders. CS.com’s nearly 150,000 users believe the site helps unite the world—its cultures, locations, and its travelers—in trust, tolerance, consciousness, and understanding.

CS.com is not your run-of-the-mill social-networking Web site: It helps you sleep on people’s couches. Whereas sites like Facebook.com, Tribe.net, and MySpace.com serve mainly as a means to keep tabs on one’s circle of friends and keep them informed of the crucial events in one’s life (actual quote from a random MySpace.com blog: “Every few days I would buy a bag of Hot Cheetos…”), while these sites serve mainly to foster online community, CS.com seeks to actually physically connect people, to put travel-weary butts in otherwise unoccupied couches. By providing travelers a resource to help them find cheap, friendly accommodations, and hopefully an informed and friendly personal guide to a new place or culture, CS is revolutionizing how the world interacts via the internet and rewriting the rules of travel. I was eager to test my hypothesis so I created my CS.com profile, made my own couch available to potential surfers, put some serious miles on my personal pedometer, and went out to surf some couches.

Losing My Couchsurfing Virginity

This past September I traveled to West Africa via NYC and Paris, laying-over in both locations for a day or more.

FACT: I cannot afford either of these places.

Using CS.com’s “CouchSearch” utility—the White Pages of the CSing community—I found and contacted Tim Tolka in NYC. When CouchSearching one can choose from a number of potential hosts, that number ultimately dependent on how remote or otherwise your destination is. At the time of writing there were 300+ potentially available couches within 10 miles of NYC: There were four couches in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

It took one simple email exchange to finalize my surfing Tim’s couch, but I soon learned there would be a catch.

In late September, Tolka was subletting with a couple guys in Queens. The CSing situation there was a little tense. Tim had failed to let his roommates know about the CSer he had previously hosted which proved to be something of a surprise when his roommates came home in the middle of the night and found an apparent intruder asleep on their couch. We were, as Tim told the story, old friends. In reality we had met in Union Square earlier that day.

I was standing baffled among a squad of rollerblading thirty-something’s, all wearing matching white shirts, red sweatpants, and clad in neon-green helmets and hand, knee, and elbow pads. Along with a growing crowd we were watching a break-dance troupe perform coordinated head-spins and various other acrobatic maneuvers (for which, and I apologize, I don’t possess the necessary terminology) when Tim found me. Here is a transcript of our introductory conversation:

Tim: Are you Ben?

Me: Yes.

Tim: Do you smoke pot?

Me: Every once in a while.

…and we walked to a set of benches deep in the by then dark heart of Union Square, G. Washington’s back to the soon-to-be and currently drug-addled homeless men there, and Tim and I really no better at law-abiding, though we really were hitting it off like the old friends we were supposed to be. He had even blown off a hot-date with a 32 year old Puerto Rican so he could show me around.

I asked Tim if smoking herb in the middle of a public park in the heart of downtown was something he did often, seeking reassurance that this was a common and probably safe thing to be doing. His reply, “I’ve never done this before,” was quite distant from the response I was hoping for.

This was all as I had imagined the CSing experience to be—well, minus the pot-smoking. Before setting out from Salt Lake I had described CSing to my inquisitive family and friends as essentially like having a friend wherever you went. An acquaintance who would enthusiastically welcome you into their culture and home, and it turns out that’s exactly what it is.

Tim and I had only ever communicated in a sum total of two emails, and we had little in common besides our love for travel, but we are both open and trusting people, which, as we shall discuss later, turn out to be the most important characteristics of the CSing community.

How Safe Can This Thing Be?

But before we get any further I’ll address what’s probably on your mind; all of the above raises a number of issues, most importantly, safety.

How safe is CSing if the first thing my host asks me is whether I’ll do drugs with him? That’s a hard one. I guess if one has ever had any experience in turning down drugs or alcohol the situation is easily diffused. There are several approaches one can use, the most effective probably being “No, thanks.”

But what about potentially hostile, dangerous or mal-intentioned hosts or surfers? According to CS.com, “CouchSurfing has implemented several precautionary [safety] measures for the benefit of its surfers, hosts, and community. Every user is linked to the other users he or she knows in the system through a network of references and friend links,” which benign though it may sound is really CS’s best safety measure. It functions basically on the same feedback system used by eBay, which seems to work well-enough for major, frequent, and global exchange of goods and currency.

Had Tim proven to be a less than savory character I could have gone onto the website and posted a negative opinion of him on his profile, thus alerting others. This kind of feedback is highly encouraged by The Collective, a group of constantly rotating volunteers who manage the website from a globally inconstant location. Peer review has proven to be a reliable safety-valve for the most part.

Of course, some bad-apples slip through the cracks. When that happens, the only option available to The Collective and the CS community is complete exposure.

Recently, a user known as REDXKING was accused by CSers of writing fraudulent checks for thousands of dollars and stealing credit cards. So a mass-email was sent to all 150,000 members containing the user’s name, his photo, his email address, and his aliases. His profile was disabled, and every effort will be made to prohibit him creating a new profile. That same email emphasizes CS’s safety measures:

“Our referencing system is the most important security measure, which I would like to reiterate to our members: If you have a negative experience with another member of this site, it is your duty to leave an honest factual reference. Your reference could help to protect another member. Safety on couchsurfing is the responsibility of all of our members, not just a few!” (Emphases theirs)

Meanwhile, Back In NYC…

My Kongian backpack was killing me so Tim and I went back to his place in Queens and then out into the city. I have never been to NYC and Tim proved to be an exceedingly friendly, knowledgeable, and willing host, introducing me to the city as no guidebook ever could. Together we explored more of Manhattan in one night than I possibly could have through the lens of a Lonely Planet or Fodor’s.

While such books are largely necessary for a traveler without ties to a location, they become wholly optional for the CSer. A guidebook could never be as dialed into a city or culture as a local.

With Tim as my guide we ended up in a Texas-themed bar crowded by white-collar suit-&-tie types where a lady dressed in black leather chaps and wielding a bull-whip danced on the bar to “La Cucaracha” then poured vodka all over the bar, took a swig herself and proceeded to blow fire and set the bar ablaze. We got a ride with a porn-star cabbie, visited a poetry-bar where I talked with a fifty-something Aussie punk lady obsessed with Andy Warhol, met up with one of his friends who revealed her engagement to an Israeli, and ate pizza slices at two in the morning and talked with a trio of Japanese musicians who had traveled to NYC to start a band.

Suffice to say it was a rich experience and I slept like the dead at the end of the night on Tim’s full-size couch.

So This is Paris?

I arrived in Paris after a restless flight across the pond. FYI: flight-attendants on Air India have a tendency to physically wrest you from sleep (or else employ other passengers to do so) to offer you free booze and really delicious Indian food, which sounds cool, but at three in the morning over the central Atlantic you might not be all that interested in a tall glass of Johnny Walker; I don't know, maybe it's just me.

A quick ride on the Réseau Express Régional—the rapid-transit train that connects Charles de Gaulle International Airport with the Île-de-France region of which Paris is a part—dropped me off at Le Forum des Halles in Paris’s 1^st arrondissement. All of this might be as familiar to you as it was to me at the time, which is to say not at all!

I had no idea where I actually was in Paris until I found the house of Julien de Casabianca, my host there, and his fellow artists on a corner on Rue St. Martin. Nobody was home so I put my bag down and waited in front of the door, feeling really out of sorts because I had only studied French for two months before setting out to explore Francophone West Africa.

I was soon approached by a friendly German who spoke perfect English. I explained my lack of geographic orientation and he told me that I was only a block from the Louvre; that I was in the heart of one of Paris’s oldest and most popular districts.

Rooms in the 1^st arrondissement run from roughly $150 to $600 and into the unadvertised if-you-have-to-ask-you-can’t-afford-it range. There are about four hostels in the area and they will all cost you US$50 and up. Thanks to CouchSurfing, I would be staying here for free!

Julien’s housemate Sophie arrived about an hour later. She let me in, showed me my room, and told me that Julien was busy working but that I should meet him at 8:00pm at La Fontaine, a café on rue de le Grange-Aux-Belle at the Colonel-Fabien stop on the Metro. I explored the Champs-Elysées, walked in and out of the Louvre, and then jumped on the Metro at 5:00 to make sure I knew where I would be meeting my CouchSurfing host.

I killed time in the area by walking to Montmartre, running up and down the seriously numerous stairs that lead to le Basilica de la Sacré Coeur, and then jumped back on the Metro.

Unfortunately, Julien and I were unable to connect at La Fontaine that evening. Instead, I sat outside of the packed bar and talked with Damien, a circus performer who was more than happy to help me muddle through my limited French comprehension.

I returned to Julien’s place in Les Halles and found my bed on the second floor of his apartment, in a studio space that was occupied and used by a number of artists. As I learned from another of Julien’s roommates, Héloïse—a somewhat surly and moody but altogether charming girl who kind of fit my personal prefab mold of a Parisian—the house I was staying in was an artist’s squat-house provided at no-cost to Paris’s more creatively talented.

Luckily for me, most Parisians speak better English than a good deal of Americans (which made me feel like I fit the typical prefab mold most of the world has of Americans as insular and unwilling to learn another language or culture, but hey, I was doing my best). Héloïse squatted at the edge of my bed and smoked maybe five cigarettes during our hour discussion about travel and art and people’s preconceived notions of Americans and Parisians.

The following morning Julien and I finally met. He was handsome in a rustically urban kind of way, his hair and well-trimmed beard variously black, grey and white. He could easily get work as a model for expensive men’s clothing.

As kind of a rule of CouchSurfing etiquette, a CouchSurfer treats his host to a drink or does the dishes or polishes the silver or something. Julien and I went down to the café next door and had the opportunity to finally get to know each other. CouchSurfing is a great way to build one’s interpersonal skills. If you have a shell you’ll need to come out of it to get the most out of the experience.

As it turned out, Julien had been at La Fontaine the previous evening, but because A), the place was so packed, and B), we both had no idea who we were looking for, we just missed each other. He told me that La Fontaine was Paris’s first Jazz bar and really important to a lot of people, and that, for reasons I couldn’t quite intuit, it had just seen its last jazz performance. I had unwittingly witnessed history in Paris thanks entirely to CouchSurfing.

Julien and I talked about a number of things over strong and delicious French espresso, getting a feel for each other, trying to find common ground. If you’re at all interested in sports and traveling abroad I recommend learning about football, “soccer” to acolytes. If you do so, you will almost automatically be able to generate conversation.

Sports aside, there’s something about the brief time a CouchSurfer has with their host that makes everything you say doubly important. Because you’ll only know this person for maybe a day or even a single evening, and because they’re opening their door and their home for you and extending you a terrifically generous amount of trust and kindness, you want to be as genuine and real with them as you can, as a way of showing them that you appreciate their efforts. Sincerity, gratitude, and your honest interest in your host or CouchSurfer is worth much more than a beer or a cup of coffee.

CouchSurfing Vs. The Hotel Industry,

I’ve slept on numerous couches, often under less than sober and/or ideal conditions, on couches soiled, frayed, and outright decaying. I have also slept on floors, and once on a lawn. These occasions were often impromptu and (maybe you can identify with all of this) unenviable and often followed by a morning of intense cerebral trauma: some report feeling as if they were struck by an eighteen wheeler, and typically a couch isn’t as comforting as one needs after such an experience.

In such instances, CSing lacks in glamour, comfort, style, and is maximally utilitarian, primarily a last resort.

While not typically as cushy as any number of chain-hotel accommodations (there are always exceptions), the perks inherent in CSing are manifold and are in many ways more valuable than simple comfort.

Allow me to explain by example.

During the Research Phase of this article I completed a trans-continental drive from SLC to Providence, Rhode Island. Along the way I CSed in Lincoln, Nebraska, Indianapolis, Indiana, and Poughkeepsie, New York. If one follows the posted speed limit, SLC to Lincoln is approximately a thirteen hour drive. If you’ve never experienced thirteen solo hours behind the wheel yammering to yourself and chewing at your cheek, consider yourself cosmically blessed.

In Lincoln, Avishay Artsy, my CS-host there, and his roommate Amy took me out to a downtown bar called Duffy’s where a metal-turned-bluegrass band was covering Misfits (“an American punk rock band formed in 1977” (source: wikipedia.org)) tunes with thunderous banjo twang and washboard scratching fit for the gods.

At the end of the night I slept on the Persian rug pictured in the inset. As you might expect of a rug, this one was on the floor. Sleeping on the floor isn’t most people’s idea of a luxurious get-away, and I’ll be honest, if luxury is what you’re after you might want to forgo CSing and surrender your hard-won cash to the hotel industry’s overflowing coffers. I for one would prefer to spend my hard earned cash on a dormitory experience that excludes 150 channel television, single-serving shampoo bottles, and sheets starched so effectively I’m afraid they’ll cut me.

Having just spent thirteen hours in an accelerated solitary confinement bubble I was eager for some human interaction, and CSing helped me find that. There is no doubt I would have slept better on a hotel bed a hundred yards from the highway, far from the bustling, raucous center of NE’s liberal heart. As it turns out, I had in fact stayed in a hotel just outside Lincoln on a previous cross-country journey, years before CS.com went live. That experience was only note-worthy for being stunningly bereft of redeeming qualities.

CSing isn’t only valuable as a way to meet people and create memories; it’s also a valuable alternative. Let’s be honest: the majority of hotels that anyone on a limited budget can afford suck.

Staying in a hotel is an exercise in confinement. They confine one to a familiar and antiseptic environment. They are designed to mollify and passively entertain. There is little or no active stimulation. They are lonely, innocuous, and unoffending. Like schools, hospitals, government buildings, and most business offices, they are, by their very nature, institutional, that is “characterized by blandness, drabness, uniformity, and [a] lack of individualized attention.” You get the point.

Hostels are little better. One often shares a room with others, the noise-level can be unsuitable for getting adequate rest, they are difficult to find and in short supply. Hostels are cheaper than hotels, but sometimes only marginally. Still, they cost money, and money spent on accommodations is money that cannot be spent on transport, entertainment, dining, adventure, or shopping in strange bazaars and markets

Give me accommodations in the homes of friendly, outgoing, generous, intriguing strangers who will welcome me and my dog; give me a sleeping bag on the floor; give me genuinely friendly faces in the morning and a bowl of cereal and genuine house coffee; and give the continental breakfast to the guy in room 33.

Not Your Typical Surfers

I hope you’re not getting the impression that CSing is a social-networking site for ascetics. There are cushy couches out there. One such “couch” is that belonging to Peter and Thily Hayes.

As you can plainly see, to call the accommodations provided by the Hayes family a “couch” would be like calling the sun a “light bulb.” The tranquility of the bed is enhanced by the view it commands: the back of the Hayes’ eastside Salt Lake house lets out onto a local mountain-fed stream which one can see from the large window that sits above the bed.

According to Peter, “Accomodations are primo!”

He, Thily (pronounced TEE-lee) and their son Lucas invited me to their gorgeous home to talk about CSing. In true CSing spirit they also fed me dinner and introduced me to their pet ferret Ding-a-ling, after Chuck Berry’s only U.S. number one single.

It was Thily who first suggested that the family provide their downstairs bed to travelers. She self identifies as the family’s CS liaison.

“I read about [CSing] in a local paper a year ago and I created my profile soon after,” she told me.

Thily also describes herself as a very shy person. For Thily, CSing has been a good way to overcome her timidity. Peter, on the other hand, is as shy as a Kandinsky.

The Hayes’s are apparently financially well-off and live in an affluent neighborhood, which is to say that they’re not living or traveling on a strict financial budget as some CSers are. I asked them if CS.com enables freeloaders.

Peter was adamant in his response. “CSing is absolutely not for freeloaders.”

I then asked him why he and his family recently CSed for five days in an unoccupied beach house in Florida if he could afford to have stayed in a hotel instead. “Nobody in the U.S. is saving money,” he told me, “So we save our money rather than spend it on hotels. I’d rather take a vacation and save money for something else. Is traveling only for the affluent? Is there another way that people can afford to travel? There is. Listen: CSing is a legit way to travel and stay within our means. Period.”

Tourism is considered by most to be the largest and fastest growing industry in the world. According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the tourism industry generated US$680 billion in revenue in 2005. Numbers aren’t available for the global hotel industry, but Smith Travel Research tracks U.S. hotel revenues. In a press release published last May, STR made the following statement: “The year 2005 marked the most profitable year ever for the US hotel industry. [It] generated some US$122.7 billion in revenue.” That’s only accounting for the U.S. market, the third largest tourism market in the world behind France and Spain. Even considering that the UNWTO’s numbers account for other receipts (e.g. entertainment, attractions, ancillary services, surf-side daiquiris, etc.) the U.S. hotel market alone accounts for almost 20 percent of tourism revenue. That seems like a pretty significant share to me. Hotels are doing just fine; spend your buck elsewhere.

Financial concerns notwithstanding, when Thily first mentioned CSing to Peter the idea raised some red flags for him.

“I was leery at first because of stories you hear,” he said, “But every experience we’ve had has violated that initial trepidation. It reminds us that people can be friendly and nice. We grow up in a paranoid world. You can’t try anything new because you’re so worried about what could happen.”

The Hayes’s have hosted five CSers in the year that they have been part of the CSing community. Their guests have run the demographic gamut, from a recently widowed 60 year old attorney out on the road to rediscover her life, to Adam Schofield, the legendary couchsurfer who is on a mission to couchsurf the world and write a book about doing it. For the Hayes’s, CSing reflects the trust we have for one another.

“Trust is something we need to get back to,” said Thily. “Everyone we’ve met has been an intellect. [CSers] are not superficial or flashy. They’re liberal, open-minded, activists, Burning Manners; very Bohemian. They’re adventurous and they’re not a threat. CSers are not out there to get you.”

Peter has come to embrace CSing, but he wants to keep things in perspective. “There could be predators,” he said, “To say that something couldn’t go wrong is irresponsible. Just don’t be stupid. If you sense something is odd, trust yourself. We have no reservations about denying someone who wants to CS with us if they look sketchy,” said Peter.

The Big Question: Can I Trust You?

All of this is a circuitous way of addressing one serious flaw in American social relations: “stranger danger.” I’m unsure exactly when this term entered our popular lexicon, but its basic premise is that people you don’t know want to harm you and you’d best avoid them. This dangerously loaded term is directed at America’s youth but ends up permeating pretty much every age demographic.

I ran into an 18 year old guy while CSing in Indianapolis who said he liked the idea of CSing but would only ever CS outside of the United States because people here are dangerous psychos. I don’t want to get into all of the logical trapdoors of this guy’s impaired reasoning, so let’s just say this: he was talking to one of those potential psychos—me. I left him unharmed.

Embracing CSing makes a statement about one’s value of community. Communities only exist through a web of trust expressed through tacitly understood and adhered to agreements. Take, for example, the simplest, most historically common community: two platonic, heterosexual friends. There are so many trust agreements here that to list them would bore us both, so let’s list one: You do not kill a friend. Pretty elementary. If you and a potential friend can’t reach an agreement on that one I recommend discontinuing relations post-haste.

But these are unspoken agreements. How do I know that you know that you’re not supposed to kill me? I could ask you, but if you really wanted to kill me you probably wouldn’t let me know. So, I have no alternative but to assume that you know you’re not supposed to kill me. I have to trust that you won’t kill me. But I can best extend that trust if I myself am also willing to agree to that maxim. I trust you because I hope that you trust me, and then over the course of a relationship, no matter how brief, we continue to define where our trust boundaries lie. Sure, this is all theory, but much of our social lives are built on just this theory of trust.

Agreeing to a CSing exchange is an amazing expression of trust in other people. It expresses our belief in humanity and the kindness and generosity of strangers, people who we’re constantly reminded—by news organizations of all kinds, by our governments, by our schools, etc.—want to harm us.

In addition to the safety measures noted above, the all-volunteer Collective that manages the site encourages minimizing rather than encouraging the growth of the CSing community. They want the cream of the world’s traveling and hosting crop, people who trust other people. This could potentially insure CSing’s independent and free status: by maintaining a small, tight-knight community of users, CS.com can be effectively managed by a small team at a low cost (which cost is now funded entirely by donations: the site also operates free of annoying advertisements—thus, it receives zero advertising revenue); it can also fly under the radar of companies who might potentially want to purchase it to make a buck

But so, let’s face it: someone with less than golden intentions will, in the end, take advantage of the admittedly utopian altruism of CSing. Bad things happen, and maybe one prerequisite for joining the CSing community is a pair of roseate glasses. It is unfortunate but inevitable that some great misfortune will befall a CSer or a CS-host. The questions this eventuality poses are crucial to the future of CSing.

What will happen to CSing and its values when this bad thing happens? Will the community dissolve and return to its hostel and hotel beds? Knowing that bad things can and will happen what do we do? Do we remain geographically stationary? Do we allow fear to force us to experience the world, its cultures and peoples, its wildlife and landscapes, its winds and tastes and smells and textures, its smiles and frowns, it beauties, do we let ourselves be compelled to experience all of these only so far as the internet or magazines or television or radio shows or hotels can take us?

Or do we allow ourselves a tiny slice of utopia? Do we open ourselves to the possibilities contained in trust?

Another Lemon from Skywalker Ranch

The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the latest and easily the worst chapter of the Indiana Jones saga. The movie's plot is nearly as undecipherable as ancient Mayan ideographs, and is coupled with unrelenting, moronic action that pins the viewer somewhere between amusement at the preposterousness of it all and a desire for escape. It is a clumsy mishmash of previous, actually entertaining films by Steven Spielberg (who directed Crystal Skull) and George Lucas (who wrote the story upon which the movie is based) grafted Frankenstein-like onto an absurd tale that may well have been salvaged from the X-Files' rubbish bin.

The plot centers on the delivery of a crystal alien skull to the legendary land of El Dorado. Indiana Jones (played, of course, by Harrison Ford) is being pursued by the KGB, led by Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett), who have infiltrated America with the goal of enlisting Indy to help them locate the Crystal Skull, a weapon so powerful the Commies could use it to paint the whole world red. Mutt Williams (Shia Lebeouf) tags along as Indy's young sidekick and heir apparent in more ways than one, and the flame kindled between Marion Ravenwood (the preternaturally grinning and playful Karen Allen) in Raiders of the Lost Ark is reignited.

After opening with a bang of historic proportions and the kind of classic adventure we've come to expect from the Indy Jones franchise, the film slogs through an hour of exposition that drew more yawns than laughs from the viewing audience. When the familiar airplane travel montage sends Indy and Mutt down to South America in pursuit of adventure, the pace rapidly accelerates, and the action sequences are smashed together so tightly there's barely time to squeeze a one-liner in edgewise.

There's even a brain-washed adventurer, Professor Oxley (John Hurt) who preceded Indy through the booby-traps and puzzles, a useful plot device to insure the action never lets up. If Indy's too busy wasting time trying to piece things together, then that's one less car chase, and we'd maybe have to do without the idiotic Tarzan scene, the flesh eating bugs, the sword fight, and the obligatory blood-thirsty savages. Sure, the previous trilogy of Indy films were also action packed, but the action in those movies was more intricately paced, more believable, more creative, and possessed greater tension.

There are, however, two redeeming things about The Crystal Skull: Ford and Allen. Seeing Ford flash the bullwhip, hearing the "thwump" of his fists against a Commie jaw, and watching him slip right back into a character he hasn't portrayed in nearly twenty years is a source of giddy nostalgic willies. Allen looks like she's having so much fun hamming it up that it's hard not to smile along with her. And you have to hand it to Lebeouf, who isn't half bad as a switch-blade toting greaser sidekick.

Legend has it that Lucas wrote Crystal Skull around the same time as he did The Last Crusade. He also wrote The Phantom Menace prior to producing the original three Star Wars films. After seeing Lucas's last four travesties of both film and storytelling, I am convinced that everything he ever wrote of any quality was filmed prior to 1989 when The Last Crusade was released. I also believe that any and all scripts, stories, treatments or ideas scribbled on a cocktail napkins he has squirreled away in some crannie of Skywalker Ranch should be seized – hopefully in an entertaining act of derring-do – and tossed into an action-packed bonfire before he has the notion to actually produce those films and once more pilfer several million dollars from the naively trustworthy theatre-going public.

Piedmont baseball shoots down Pilots

(NOTE: This story appeared the Piedmont Post on 9 April 2008)

Piedmont jumped out in front of St. Joseph (9-4) in the first inning and hung on for an 8-4 win at the College of Alameda last Wednesday. The Highlanders improve to 4-2 in the Bay Shore Athletic League, 10-4 overall. They are second in the BSAL behind undefeated St. Mary's.

Senior Jordan Remer was a double short of the cycle and drove in three runs in a 3-3 hitting performance. He also pitched two perfect innings in relief of starting pitcher Bryce Chu. Remer walked one batter and struck out six to preserve the win. He ranks second in the BSAL in total strikeouts with 56 in 28 innings of work.

Against a lineup loaded with the league leaders in batting average, Chu pitched out of trouble in every inning, but only allowed four hits and gave up only one earned run. His 1.313 ERA is second in the league behind St. Mary's' Matt Flemer. The win over St. Joseph gives him five wins on the season, second most in the BSAL.

Piedmont held the league's top three hitters, all batting over .475, to a single hit each.

Junior Alex Steady, recently recovered from a hamstring injury sustained in the early part of the season, was put in the lead-off position against the Pilots. He reached base three times and scored twice.

Remer's triple after an eight-pitch at bat in the top of the first scored Steady to draw first blood.

Bradsby, who batted 2-3, started the second with a triple, but the Highlanders couldn't bring him in to score.

Steady's lead-off single jumpstarted a three-run third inning in which Piedmont sent eight batters to the plate. Steady stole second, and Remer moved him to third with a single. With runners on the corners and Remer given the sign to steal, Chu hit into a fielder's choice. Steady scored, Remer beat the throw to second, and Chu was safe at first. Senior Alexander Menke then doubled to drive Remer around to score, and Bradsby followed with a sacrifice fly to score Chu.

Patience pays dividends

The St. Joseph pitcher entered the game with a perfect winning percentage, 7-0. He was throwing off-speed stuff all day, and the Piedmont coaching staff instructed their players to draw as many pitches from him as they could. By the end of the third, he had thrown 70-plus pitches.

According to assistant coach Dave
DiFabio, senior Kyle Bonacum smashed a foul ball over the right field fence that easily cleared 400 feet. His lead-off hit in the fourth was somewhat less audacious. He hit a slow roller to first base that trundled Buckner-like through the first baseman's legs.

"We were saying on the bench, 'we have to make that hurt,'" said DiFabio.

Remer stepped up to the plate knowing he had to keep his weight back, that he had to be on the lookout for breaking balls, and that he was going to hit the ball as hard as he could.

"And that's what I did," he said.

Remer crushed the first pitch he saw an estimated 390 feet over the fence in right-center for his second homerun of the season, giving the Highlanders a 6-0 lead.

Piedmont added a run in the fifth when Steady walked to drive in a run with the bases loaded.

The Pilots scored two runs in both the fourth and fifth innings, but Remer emphatically shut the door on them in the seventh and eighth.

Looking ahead

The Highlanders play John Swett (6-7 overall) in Crockett this afternoon. The Indians lost 12-0 to St. Joseph in March.

Remer, who leads Piedmont with a .367 batting average and 13 RBI's, hopes his team can swing the bats with a little more urgency in their next handful of games.

"We were solid on defense during the first half of the season, and if we had been stronger on offense at times, we could be undefeated. I think the games we lost were because of a lack of timely hitting," he said.

How It Will Crash

(NOTE: This story appeared in the 2005 edition of the Onion River Review)

His hair is being blown by the wind and he has what some might call "a real head of hair," golden, soft, conditioned several times during each of two daily showers, about shoulder length, layered, leonine, blowing in the wind like a field of majestic American-Heartland wheat, and his cleft-chin, jaws clenched, smile broad, cutting through the wind, big black sunglasses impenetrably dark and glossed with a reflective coating that reflects only the sun's rays in a top-down convertible in Des Moines, driving down roads the television audience can't even distinguish from the roads in their own hometowns, and so they may, momentarily, wonder where they were during the day before learning that, yes, in fact this did occur in Des Moines, and before learning this they wonder if they may have been driving down a road parallel to the road he was driving down, the great green wave that billows from the back seat of his top-down convertible composed of so many verdant leaves, and all the leaves have a face imprinted upon them, the face of a man whose devotion to and espousal of the American DIY philosophy has probably been the single greatest and consistent catalyst for what we now call the "American Dream." And so there are "Benjamin's" flying out of the back of this car, the man at once pulling more of the same currency from the pockets of his ebony suit-coat, and, perhaps more worrying to some safety-first-type television viewers, taking both hands off the wheel, opening up the glove-box while still propelling down the road, near-misses thanks to the alert maneuvers of other motorists and the athletic diving and fast-twitch self-preservation responses of pedestrians, ignoring stop lights and getting away with it, the glove-box loaded with hun's, and he pulls them out and puts them in his mouth and somewhat ravenously gnashes at them, and then he spits them out at parked cars and balls up a wad of them and throws them at some kids waiting for a bus on the side of the road, and when people see this broadcast on one of several cable news channels—because they all manage to get a hold of the same clip—the audience echoes the sentiments voiced by all the talking heads on all the stations, something to the effect of "God damn, I wish I was there," the talking heads saying only this much and of course berating the man for his lack of concern for the safety of others, they and the television audience unaware of this man's motivations as he dispenses hundred dollar bills from a well-aerated American-made vehicle on a well-paved homogenous American highway in a well-organized homogenous American town. Because how could everybody know the rather complex reasons behind the expansive generosity of this man, that four days earlier he had pledged to forgo his psych-meds for the foreseeable future, he just didn't need them anymore, he explained to himself; that he, a former childhood actor whose appearance in a highly successful and well-received oatmeal commercial was judged by his the parents of his fellow childhood actors to be the performance of the year in a nationally syndicated cereal/grains spot in 1985; that he, the man in the open-air convertible whose acting talent had failed to mature, had instead earned an advanced computer sciences degree from the U. of Michigan and had programmed, released, and sold a wildly-successful social-networking website, Smallworld.com, for midgets/dwarves/little-people, for a number in the higher triple digits; that his meds were administered to control irrational behavior of the same variety (pulling out all his hair and pasting it on a dozen (he being an incredibly hirsute individual…) hairless cats he adopted from the local humane society; adhering sticky-notes (…and also having a definite "thing" for adhesives) upon which he had written his credit card number on all the windshields of all the cars parked at Kinnick Stadium on a game day when the Hawkeyes were playing the Buckeyes (result: 21-42, some very displeased creditors appealed to successfully by a very pricey lawyer, and the reestablished solvency of his fortune)), that just yesterday he had liquidated his stock-options, his 401k, various CD's, and his savings and credit accounts, maxed out platinum, black and gold credit cards, requesting that all the funds be dispensed in brand-new $100 bills, that he had then purchased this shiny top-down convertible, a really snazzy new jet-black designer suit-coat, reflective UVA/B blocking sunglasses, a box of mint flavored condoms and, perhaps too predictably, a metric ounce of superbly potent cocaine, that he expended all the cocaine over night and utilized, selfishly, all the condoms, and had also during the course of this epic binge polished off three liter-sized bottles of a popular cola beverage, a six pack of tall-boys, a liter of American whiskey, a box of saltines, a gallon of cookies 'n cream ice cream, two bags of chips as well as two large and rapidly delivered extra-pepperoni pizzas, then tossed two full-size travel suitcases filled with his now portable financial assets into the back seat of the new car, and proceeded, pantsless, to a local all-hours diner where he continued to eat one plate of steak and eggs, one of a tall-stack of flapjacks, a plate of hashbrowns, two hot-fudge sundaes, and consumed four pots of coffee, went back out to his car, emptied the contents of the suitcases into the back seat, tossed the now empty suitcases at a passing cross-continental semi-truck, violently and vociferously hurling compliments at everybody he passed or encountered ("Has anybody ever told you how god-damn fucking beautiful you are?" this to a little girl in the restaurant; "You, sir, cooked those cock-sucking eggs to perfection!" this, inexplicably, to an elderly lady pulling out of the parking lot), and peeled smoking European-imported radial rubber up the on-ramp, onto the freeway, the wind in his hair like the fingers of a loving woman, like a mother, feeling free from chemical dependency as well as any sense of hypocrisy, a verdant and expensive contrail of magnanimous generosity flitting behind him. How could you or the television news personalities know all of this; he is just an image on a screen, "a crazy man" who is now pulling off the freeway—and you can see this on the newscast, a disembodied voice narrating—and now careens down another anonymous American street, people running after him, grabbing spastically at the flapping bills, hands stuck out of moving vehicles he is passing in a delirious haze with a smile and a bloody nose, hollow-eyed and knuckles white on the steering wheel, hands now clutching the face of Benjamin Franklin emblazoned on perhaps the most singular piece of currency in the world. He's flying through red lights barely avoiding collision, performing the actions earlier noted (bill-chewing, using innocent children for target practice), swerving manically into and out of oncoming traffic, the trail of bills now getting thinner, and he lets go of the steering wheel, pulls his wallet out of his back pocket and manages to stand erect in the moving vehicle, and then holds the wallet up in the air with both hands above his head like an offering, eyes heavenward, muttering incomprehensible probably profane prayers lost in the wind and unheard by the helicopter whirling over the scene to capture the spectacle for the television audience, the wallet's contents spilling out behind him. He laughs boisterously between inchoate mutterings, bearing a grin shared only by those similarly enthused, intoxicated and afflicted, the grin of the ecstatically ignorant of their own mortality, as the car veers wildly to the right, slams into and bounds over the curb, he thrown headfirst from the car, it crashing into the glass-façade of a mom & pop soul-food restaurant giving Ma such a fright as she dips the po'boys into the Fryolator that she experiences an acute cardiac arrhythmia and falls bodily into the hot oil, and outside the restaurant, right next to the still intact door of The Southern Bell, you can, if you look very closely at the footage (which is of course now available for review online), see her, red hair in pony-tails, white-shirt almost brown and wholly tattered, jeans down around her ankles, about five or six years old, missing both upper lateral incisors, and, one would surmise, somewhat similarly maladjusted, squatting over a tin bucket with a mop handle protruding from it, peeing in a gentle stream, magnificently oblivious to the shattered glass sparkling in the humid and endless Iowan summer sun, the disconsolate caterwauling of a widower, the thrum of the car's engine and the whir and spin of its wheels, all these sounds drowned out for her by the reverberant and mesmerizing ping of her fluids against the bottom of the bucket, and the man lay in the parking lot, a ruddy puddle collecting beneath his head, still smiling, penniless and breathless.

The House of Everyday Magic

(NOTE: This story appeared in the 2006 edition of the Onion River Review)

"Magnanimous"

There is a building around here that people call "The House of Everyday Magic." It has twelve floors and four apartments on each floor. Two of the apartments are now vacant. The landlady, a first generation Russian immigrant named Anastasia Kukov, has taken out adds in the local papers to have them filled. Rent is cheap around here. Ms. Kukov, who has never married and who loves the hot smell that comes from the vent of the laundry room, chooses her tenants carefully. She wants only dreamers to live in her rooms.

On Thursdays, Ms. Ekaterina Mostovoi joins Ms. Kukov in her kitchen to drink coffee and talk about Russian tennis players. They are also learning to play the American boardgame "Risk."

At night, alone, Ms. Kukov likes to turn the lights off and paint on the canvas in her living room w/ her eyes closed. She smears her hands all over the painting when she gets tired. In the morning, when the sun is up, she dances w/ the canvas from the night before, hugging it close. "There are so many colors around," she says, standing in the bright sun-beams coming through her kitchen window. "So many colors together. So bright."

"Frozen Dreams"

On the 11^th floor, in apartment B, there is a boy named Paco who lives alone. Nobody knows where his parents are. He pays his rent on the third Tuesday of every month. When he does, he shouts through the door, "Hello, Ms. Zukov! You are a very pretty woman!" He slips a check under her door and runs up the stairs like he's being chased by dogs, a nirvanic smile on his face, "You are very, very pretty!" shouting as he runs. Ms. Zukov, sitting at her kitchen table, smiles and blushes, sipping from her cup of beige coffee, plotting to invade Brazil.

Paco freezes his dreams in ice-cube trays. He places his nocturnal reveries, represented by figures cut from construction paper, fishes, and exclamation points, and clouds, he places these in the dry bottoms of empty ice cube trays then covers them with water. When he takes them out of the freezer the next morning, the cubes are filled with stories, resplendent with images from Paco's dreams.

Look in this one. Can you see Paco on riding a whale? He's got a cowboy hat on! And there, do you see on the horizon? Paco's grandmother dancing on her rocking chair with a commandant, the chair rocking on an upside down skiff! Oh, no! She knocked the commandant off with one of the oars! Paco kisses the whale and waves at grandma. And here's another one, where Paco is walking along the limb of a tree, trying to grab at the leaves which are all photographs and rustle in the strong wind that threatens to blow them away. As he reaches to grab one with the tips of his fingers he can see his parents smiling out from the picture, and then, suddenly, the wind picks up, and all the leaves are blown away.

Hurry up; drink your water, Paco. The ice cubes are melting, the dreams are fading.

"A Story About Oranges"

The hallway on the 6^th floor of the House of Everyday Magic curiously appears to be longer than the building itself could possibly be wide enough to contain. Housing inspectors have taken meticulous measurements of the hallway and are always confronted with the dilemma it is a full twelve feet longer than the building, and so floor number six should, for all intents and purposes, jut out above Coventry Street on the north-side and Hudson Street on the south, a phenomenally impossible salient.

"You can't stop it being what it is," Ms. Kukov told Inspector Juho Eloranta, himself an immigrant from Finland, "With all your observations and second-guessing, and what do you know now?" Juho, holding his hat, a crushed, plaid fedora, in one hand, could only respond by scratching his furrowed brow and pursing his lips which made his big shaggy mustache rub against his nose, and in a herky-jerk spasm he sneezed into his hat. He looked despondently at Miss Kukov, who gave him a sympathetic little pout and a sideways tilt of the head, then they both laughed and she escorted Juho down to the front door as a gracious hostess always does, and she was ever graceful.

The walls of the hallway are decorated with paintings of Technicolor ducks w/ bright white smiles! They may be laughing at a joke one of them told; ducks are of course the stand-up comedians of the animal kingdom.

There are words scratched on the post of the stairwell's railing: "because," and "& Yet," and "maybe tomorrow," and "like our pure personalities."

There is always the scent of oranges on floor number 6 because Miss Julia Festival of 6C keeps several orange trees in her largely empty studio apartment. Her bed, nothing more than a mattress on the ground, is piled so high w/ comforters of motley hues and patterns that at its tallest point it reaches Julia's belly-button. Sifting through the covers for a sleeper is like looking through a deck of cards for the joker. The bed lay below a sunny window on the right, and across from it, on a desk she was given by her grandmother, sit dozens of tin cans, the labels peeling and worn, all filled w/ quality soil, all w/ their own tender young orange shoots, delicate like feathers. In the middle of the room, stand three mature and fruit-laden orange trees, growing right out of the wooden floor. "Take one," Julia will say, "Grab an orange. They're always in season up here on the 6^th floor. It's on account of the fine weather."

Julia, a soft, waif of a girl in her young twenties, pale like cirrus clouds, w/ stringy brown hair, has eyes like polished emeralds, and is dieing. She is dieing because one bright summer day, while on vacation on a remote Micronesian island, she witnessed a full solar eclipse while being held close by the loveliest woman she had ever met. After the event, they had silly, fun sex on a beach and then fell asleep. When they woke up, under quicksilver skies glowing w/ the full spread of a galaxy of stars above, they went skinny-dipping in the ocean. A riptide pulled her friend out to sea from where she never returned.

The island's undermanned rescue crew was unable to retrieve her body.

Julia's plane was not scheduled to leave for three more days. She languished. She grieved. She composed an elegy that she read to the sea that was holding her dearest.

Understandably distraught, Julia sought the advice of a local medicine man, who told her that the belly of the sea was a warm place. This failed to console her. He gave her what he claimed was a philter of magnificent strength, a blessed concoction distilled from coconut pulp (and other unmentionables) to which Julia had a fierce allergic reaction which almost instantaneously reduced the size of her heart by half, and still now causes her heart to shrink. Today it is the size of a plum.

Miss Kukov, stirred by Julia's story, gladly welcomed her into the House of Everyday Magic and she moved in about a month after the incident on the island. She began cultivating orange trees soon after. She purchased the seeds from a toothless Chinese man whose tan skin was brown like paper-bags. He manned a booth in the Sunday open air market in Chinatown. "Make you happy," was all he could say, and he kept repeating it to Julia as she walked by, "Make you happy. Make you happy." She grew the seeds and planted the saplings in the cracks b/n the planks of the wooden floor.

If you open one, if you do take an orange—and Julia will insist that you do—you'll see that they are in fact blood oranges and you'll know that because of the vermillion tears that leak out. However, you will probably first see that the pulp of the fruit is a twinklingly radiant mix of silvers, blues, and greys.

"Delicious, aren't they?" Julia asks and smiles so big it hurts you inside like a punch. The leaves on the trees shake from a stiff breeze coming through the window and it sounds like breaking surf.

Former Highlanders baller turns “Semi-Pro”

(NOTE: This article appeared in the Piedmont Post on 26 March 2008.)

Peter Cornell, a Piedmont native and Highlanders basketball center back in the early 90's, has never given up his dream of making it to the big leagues. Since finishing up his college ball at Loyola-Marymount in 1998, Cornell has done his time in minor and foreign leagues. The quintessential journeyman, he played ball for Partizan Belgrade in Yugoslavia, the Honka Playboys in Finland, the North Charleston Lowgators in South Carolina, the Fukuoka Red Falcons in Japan and many other international and domestic teams. It has taken years of effort and countless frequent flier miles, but Cornell has finally made it. In 2007 he landed a supporting role with the Flint Tropics, playing alongside such stars as André Benjamin, Woody Harrelson and Will Ferrell. That's right, Cornell has made the big leagues on the silver screen.

In "Semi-Pro," the new Will Ferrell movie, Cornell plays the role of Vakidis, a laconic and bewildered but athletic giant from a "weird country called Lithuania." Vakidis is a peripheral character, and Cornell has only a couple of speaking parts in the film, each of them limited to three words, the extent of Vakidis' English vocabulary: "Yes. Right on."

The pivotal moment for Vakidis is when he sinks a game-winning basket for the Tropics that costs the penny-pinching Tropic's player/GM Jackie Moon – played by Ferrell – several thousand corndogs.

Without question, Cornell's first love is basketball. Being 6'11", determined and talented has helped him land roster spots with 27 different professional and semi-professional teams around the world, but he has appeared in almost twice as many television commercials, almost always as a basketball player, though he has moonlighted as "axe murderer" and "passenger." He appeared in commercials opposite such basketball greats as Shaquille O'Neal, Kobe Bryant, Duane Wade and Dick "It's awesome, baby" Vitale. Doing commercials helped supplement Cornell's income, and gave him the financial support to continue pursuing his basketball career.

Cornell even has an Internet Movie Database entry. He has an agent in LA, and a publicist in West Hollywood. His physique is athletic, his age range is 24-34. He shared screen time with Brendan Fraser in Bedazzled (2000) and L'il Bow Wow and Crispin Glover in Like Mike (2002). But when they were offered, movie roles always came around during the basketball season, and while the paycheck from movies and commercials was pretty healthy, Cornell didn't want to sideline his primary ambition.

Cornell spent the last four years playing in Australia, and after finishing the '06-'07 season with the West Sydney Razorbacks, he returned to the Northern Hemisphere and read for the part of Vakidis. He was offered the role and took it because it wouldn't interfere with basketball. He quickly found that filming a movie was no easy task.

"Honestly, it was one of the most difficult times in my life," said Cornell, speaking from his residence in Los Angeles. "We spent 17 hours a day, six days a week, for three months working on the movie. I had a bout of walking pneumonia I was so exhausted. It was very fun, but very tough at the same time."

To look the part of a Stahlinistic Lithuanian basketball player, Cornell wore a Caesar wig and a push-broom mustache. For inspiration, he used his own experience as an intercontinental athlete who was sometimes totally befuddled by a foreign culture. It also helped that Cornell is of Yugoslavian heritage, that he traveled there when he was younger, and actually played two seasons in Eastern Europe.

"I grew up with some bad-ass Serbians around me. They were very stoic, and they looked like they were ruling the world even though they didn't know what was going on, so I was definitely able to size-up that vibe."

During his first season in Japan, Cornell wasn't appointed a translator, and he was as lost in translation as Vakidis is in "Semi-Pro." To properly portray the character as he was instructed, all Cornell had to do was tune out and ignore what was going on around him. His experience had so prepared him for this that the director approached him after a couple days and complimented Cornell on his performance.

Since the release of "Semi-Pro," Cornell has coached Ferrell and other celebrities in the NBA Entertainment league. He also landed the role of George Mikan in the upcoming film "Sweetwater," about Nathaniel Clifton, the first African-American player signed to the NBA. He hopes to return to Japan this summer to play for the Hitachi Sunrockers, finish up his basketball career there and eventually transition into sports broadcasting. Cornell will also take film roles as they come, but he doesn't foresee that becoming the focus of his professional life: "I could be a good character actor, but it depends. Unless they start casting giants in regular dramas, there just aren't that many roles out there for me."