VIDEO GAME MAYHEM

               In the first 24 hours of GRAND THEFT AUTO V’s release nearly twelve million of the games were sold. Like it or not ultra-violent video games are here to stay and the bloodier the better. While neither Wife nor Daughter (the gamers in the family) have yet to buy GTF they enjoy some violent games. But generally their games are set in post-apocalyptic worlds where they blast spidery/monster thingies into multi-colored goo. 

In any case a hue and cry has been raised concerning ultra-violent games’ possible influence on younger players. (Actually Daughter is the family expert on gaming, violent or otherwise. See http://www.gamesr4fite.com.) But meanwhile I find myself wondering if ultra violent games do influence impressionable players?

Pop quiz! What two things do Richard Speck, Charles Whitman and Charlie Starkweather have in common? Answer one: all three were young American males who felt no compunction about snuffing out the lives of fellow human beings. And two: none of them had ever played a video game, violent or otherwise, in their lives. In their time transistor radios were about as high tech as the average American got.

On the other hand Dr. Fredric Wertham, if he were here, would argue that video games do indeed influence America’s youth and not in a good way. There were no video games in his day either. But there were comic books. And crime and ghost story comics, insisted the good doctor, were a direct cause of young people committing violent crimes across the nation. Even Superman was suspect.

So in 1954 he wrote a book titled SEDUCTION OF THE INNOCENT. In period magazines and newspapers there are photographs of earnest adults burning stacks of comic books. Barely twenty years had passed since the Nazis had burned books they didn’t like either.

Yes, movies and television shows are becoming more gory, excessively and unnecessarily so. But that’s not new either. Take movie director Herschell Gordon Lewis (Please!). No, he is not studied at the University of Southern California’s film school. He made a few soft-porn movies (GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BARES). They didn’t do all that well. Then he discovered gore.

Not just splattered blood gore. Slice and dice, rip and tear, dismember and disembowel gore. Movies so gory theater managers refused to show them because patrons vomited on the seats and floor. So throughout the 1960s and early 1970s Lewis showed them in drive-ins, movies like BLOOD FEAST, COLOR ME BLOOD RED and his magnum opus, GORE-GORE GIRLS made a fortune (all lost in bad investments). 
    

Have we become more violent as a society? Maybe not, maybe we just have better technology. In 1881 the infamous gunfight at Tombstone’s OK Corral claimed only three lives, nothing compared to today’s mass murderers. But then Wyatt Earp and his brothers only had primitive six-guns. Now if Doc Holiday, instead of a borrowed shotgun, had a modern AK47, well… (Incidentally Earp contemporary John Wesley Hardin murdered 44 men before he himself was gunned down. So serial killers aren’t new either.)

Maybe violent games are a bad influence. Do violent kids become violent adults? I don’t know but I offer this: Lincoln Park in West Seattle, Washington is haunted by the ghosts of numerous outlaws, enemy soldiers and even a few space aliens. I know because years ago I personally shot them with my cowboy cap pistol. And I don’t even step on bugs if I can avoid it.

Dad out.

THEY CAME OUT OF THE WOODWORK

           They came out of the woodwork almost immediately, the haters. Even as Nina Davuluri was crowned Miss America their venomous tweets were already seeping into the internet. They hurled names like mean children throwing rocks at a bird sitting on a limb. “Terrorist!” “Anti-American!”

“I am disgusted,” screeched one, “that a true 100% American did not win.” Never mind that Davuluri was born in Syracuse, New York which makes her as American as Mickey Mouse and hotdogs. A graduate of the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Science degree and a straight A GPA, she is considering becoming a physician as is her father.

But none of that matters to the haters. What matters to them is that in her features can be read her heritage of Mother India. Never mind that she was born in Syracuse. “Demand to see her birth certificate!” howled one tweet.

Which brings me to a man I know who was not born in Syracuse. He is a Sikh, born in the Indian Punjab, inheritor of a great warrior tradition. When India was the Jewel of the British Empire the Sikh cavalry regiments with their great stallions and pennants fluttering from nine-foot lances were the backbone of the Anglo-Indian Army.

The man looks every inch the Sikh he is, bristling black beard, obsidian eyes, precisely wound turban. He is married to an Indian lady and they follow the ways of their forbearers. But I doubt that he would have made much of a warrior. Better he be what he is, a small-town veterinarian.

I only saw him lose his temper once and that was at us, Wife, Daughter and me. Daughter, who loves all living things, had rescued an abandoned cat. The cat was terrified. And coated with dirt, its matted fur alive with crawling things. We brought it to the veterinarian. He looked at it and then at us.

“HOW LONG HAVE YOU HAD THIS ANIMAL!” he roared.

“About twenty minutes,” squeaked then eleven-year-old Daughter.

Reassured that we had not abused the shivering creature on the examining table, he apologized, carefully examined the cat, prescribed some things and told us to go home and give the cat a good bath. Then bring it back to begin its shots.

Daughter came back again and again, sometimes dragging me along. Soon she was appointed official-comforter-of-frightened-staying overnight-animals. Occasionally she did little chores for which he gave her a couple of dollars. And because she was truly interested, he eventually allowed her to watch while he performed minor surgery on hurt animals.

We worried for his safety in the aftermath of 9/11. Haters can be found in small towns too. But we needn’t have. No one called him hateful names or scrawled hateful things on the walls of his pet hospital. The parade of hurt and sick animals to his clinic continued unabated.

And why not? True, he in his turban and his wife in her graceful sari looked a little exotic compared to us in our J.C. PENNEY jeans and shirts. But they were and are as American as us. As American as my ancestors who fled starving Ireland only to find NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs in Boston store windows. As American as Nina Davuluri of Syracuse, New York who has just been crowned Miss America.

Dad out.
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TEX AND I IN NEW YORK

Standing on Fifth Avenue in New York City I craned my neck upward and wondered how the hell they get the toilets to flush on the ninetieth floor! Think of the water pressure it must take! A moment later a postal worker trundled a wheeled bag through a door. In a regular town a letter carrier’s route is horizontal. Like house to house, you know? But in mid-town Manhattan it’s…vertical.

            I’d flown in that morning on a 747, the first time I’d flown in a plane big enough to have its own zip code. I was on assignment, an interview. Talk, talk and back the next day. No time to see the Statue of Liberty. 

            I defy anybody not to be overwhelmed the first time they see New York City. But then the tallest building in the town I was living in at the time was only three stories tall which made me pretty easy to be overwhelmed.

            Standing outside the hotel I saw my first real-life New York doorman. He wore a crisp white uniform with enough gold braid for a South American general. Two generals!  I wasn’t sure what the protocol was. Was I to tip him when he opened the door?

            I was rescued by a friendly voice behind me, a colleague who wrote for a paper in Texas. He wrote elegantly, his prose graceful, each word carefully chosen. But when he spoke it was with a Texan twang strong enough to hang laundry on. "Don’t worry," he assured me, “lessen they call you a cab or somethin’.” The interview was the usual pantomime, the subject doing his/her best to look excited as I asked the same questions the previous five journalists had asked. Afterward I met up with my Texan friend in the lobby. With a little spare time I wanted to see the Statue of Liberty. Too late, closed for the day.

The hotel concierge, hearing Tex’s drawl, sort of sniffed and suggested that we “gentlemen” might enjoy a nearby music club known for its western ambiance. Maybe he thought we’d be more at home there. In any case we walked the four blocks (to the concierge’s horror. Apparently people don’t walk in New York, they “cab.”) to the club.

A band on a small stage was laying waste to a perfectly respectable Hank Williams tune. The floor was filled with twenty-somethings in jeans and Stetsons drinking beer out of long-necked bottles. Tex (who hated being called that) ordered us a couple. When the crowd heard his west Texas twang they were entranced. “Say something else,” they pleaded. 

But when I took out my credit card to pay it brought down the house. “Look,” someone cried. “It’s got a stagecoach and horses on it!” Well, yeah, we (Wife and I) happened to bank at Wells Fargo. So?

“I reckon,” yelled Tex, “they figured that when the automobile got invented the Wells Fargo folks burned the stages, turned the horses loose and went out of business.” In any case neither of us had to pay for a beer the whole evening (kind of wasted on me since I don’t really care for beer).

The next morning, I boarded a plane home with an I (Heart) NEW YORK coffee mug for Wife (no Daughter yet) in my camera bag. The 747 roared into a cloudbank. I peered out the window searching for the Statue of Liberty below. But all I could see was cloud. To this day I still haven’t seen the Statue of Liberty.        

                  

Dad out.

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MY FRIEND CANDY IS ON THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL WALL

            I had a friend whose name is on that great black wall that is the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. But if I were there I would never be able to find it etched on the granite. That’s because his "real" name is on the wall and I don’t remember it. We, his friends, never called him that anyway. We always called him Candy because he so loved chocolate candy bars.

            We all lived in what was then a semi-rural area, a valley of dairies and farms. Sometimes Candy and I would take dates to the drive-in theater. We’d turn the pickup truck’s tailgate toward the screen and then, leaning against the cab, stretch out on the truck bed.

            But before the movie started Candy and I would make the obligatory run to the snack bar. When we returned I carried the soft drinks and he the popcorn and candy, a chocolate bar for each of us plus two for himself. I liked cowboy movies while he liked comedies with pretty girls with pony tails.

            A world away from our valley tens of thousands of Americans our age were fighting and dying in Vietnam. It was only a matter of time before our draft notices arrived. Candy enlisted, figuring that way he’d have more of a choice of how he served. I hoped they would find him a nice, safe typewriter to pound. Someplace for a gentle man.

            Meanwhile I was ordered to report to the Greyhound Bus Depot at four in the morning where with thirty or so other young males I boarded a bus. For two hours we rolled through the predawn darkness to the military examination center. There we were given rudimentary examinations. Nobody talked much on our way back. In the end I did not go to Vietnam. Nixon ordered the troops home and I did not even go into the military.

But Candy did. He flew to Vietnam aboard a chartered airliner. Two months later he flew back, this time in a metal box in the cargo bay.

I think of Candy occasionally when on the evening news broadcasts I hear sabers being rattled and bellicose speeches being made. Increasingly now the heated rhetoric concerns Syria. Wars are not new to Syria. Over a thousand years before the birth of Christ Ramses II hurled his war chariots against the Hittite king in what is now Syria. At the Battle of Kadesh both armies were badly bloodied. Afterward both kings went home proclaiming great victories.

I don’t know what will happen in Syria in the next weeks. But I like to think I know where Candy is. He’s someplace where he can have all the candy bars he wants. And where there’s funny movies with pretty girls. With pony tails.

Dad out.                  

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IT’S OK, DAD: MOVIE MEMORIES

Long ago in a faraway land I was a film critic for a major daily newspaper. Well, not really that far away. It was in Central California. The paper’s circulation covered an area larger than New Jersey, Delaware and Massachusetts combined. That’s a lot of theaters in a lot of small towns where there often isn’t much to do except go to the movies which made being the local film critic kind of a big deal.

I got the job for three reasons. One: I attended a university film school. There I saw lots of French New Wave cinema filled with metaphors for contemporary social values and brooding Scandinavian films with lots of pale people. Two: I had actually worked around television and movies so I knew the technical jargon like “Cut!”

 

And three: with Wife locally employed I was not going to move to a big city where, stimulated by the vibrant lifestyle, I’d probably have won a Pulitzer. In other words I would stay put and work cheap.

It was a good gig, particularly when the studios flew me to “the coast” to see free movies and interview people I usually saw only on the cover of PEOPLE. The parties were fun and I was welcome to bring Wife. To this day Daughter is jealous that we did not include her but as I keep reminding her she wasn’t born yet.

Part of the movie TIME AFTER TIME is laid in Victorian London. At the San Francisco opening we were served champagne by people dressed as if they had wandered over from Downton Abbey. Meanwhile a hidden machine puffed out fog that swirled around our knees.

After seeing BLUE LAGOON in Hollywood we were directed behind the theater. There Columbia Pictures wizards had transformed a parking lot into a Polynesian beach. In New Mexico I waited on a dusty movie set for the Lone Ranger to gallop up on his great white horse Silver. (Unfortunately Ranger suffered a wardrobe malfunction (split his pants) and arrived by stagecoach instead.)

That by the way was not the current Lone Ranger box office flop. It was an earlier Lone Ranger box office flop starring Klinton Spilsbury. Who? Exactly.

A sense of the absurd helped. Like at the CADDYSHACK party in Rockefeller Center’s plaza (the one you see in movies about New York). The plaza is a level down from the street and open to the sky. Passersby look down on you. I looked back up, sipped my cocktail and thought, “My God, they shot the Czar for living like this!”

That was then and this is now and yes there’s times when I miss it. But then something happens to make me realize that I don’t. Not entirely anyway. Certainly not the many clinkers I had to sit through. Which brings me to having just sat through IDENTITY THIEF.

   

According to its DVD box IDENTITY THIEF is “hilarious” as well as “smart and funny.” Two (count ‘em) hilarious (There’s that word again) comedy stars (Melissa McCarthy and John Bateman).

Uh uh. Predictable plot, unlikable characters, unnecessary “ehuu” moments. Hippo of a movie, lying on its back, waving its stubby feet in the air, begging to be thought of as sharp and funny and just not making it.

Kind of movie people should be paid to sit through. Come to think of it, kind of movie I was paid to sit through.

Dad out. 

    

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WALT WOULD BE SAD

I have this little pamphlet. It’s faded and tattered by the passing decades. The title (“Information for Your Visit to Walt Disney’s Magic Kingdom Disneyland, Anaheim, California”) is a bit stiff but it was printed sometime in the 1950s, a more formal time. Moms and dads wore pearls and ties at home (at least they did in TV shows like LEAVE IT TO BEAVER). And Disneyland, as explained on the pamphlet’s cover, was “an entirely new concept in family entertainment.”

            There are some lovely little pictures inside (In color!). In one a four-horse team pulls a stagecoach across the “Rainbow Desert.” Yes, Disneyland once had stagecoaches and no, despite what my daughter insists, I don’t remember them.

            In another a helicopter files over Tomorrowland’s TWA rocket (“…blueprint of things to come in the world of 1987.”). I suspect the helicopter is an LA AIRWAYS flight about to land at the Disneyland Hotel heliport. Yes, there was a time when commercial helicopters whisked vacationers from Los Angeles’ airport directly to Disneyland.

            The heliport was next to the Disneyland Hotel’s “Magic Kingdom Golf Course.” Yes, there was a time when families could play eighteen holes of miniature golf, each hole decorated with a scaled-down replica of a Disneyland landmark. And no, despite what my daughter insists, I don’t…oh never mind.

            One of the most interesting things about the pamphlet is its question & answer section. Remember Disneyland was very new and people wanted to know if there were places inside to eat. And “Should we bring our cameras?” (“By all means, yes.”)

            And of course the all-important “How much will it cost?” Not to worry. “Disneyland,” the pamphlet promises, “is designed for the enjoyment of everyone and will always be within everyone’s budget.”

            Well…maybe Paris Hilton’s budget.

            For the rest of us the new $92.00 a head adult admission is an awful lot of money. And should you go you may want to leave the kids home with Rover and Muffin. At $86.00 a kid, well, you do the math. And don’t forget sixteen dollars to park. And you may want to eat.

            But of course you will bring the kids. You can always figure out some other way to pay for college.

            The Disney corporation maintains that the “price hikes were brought on by a variety of factors but represent a great value given the breath and quality of attractions and entertainment at the parks.” (By “parks” I presume they mean CALIFORNIA ADVENTURE next to DL and the various Walt Disney World parks in Florida.)

            To an extent they have a valid point. Bills have to be paid and a reasonable profit made. Walt Disney was a practical man, a business man. He would understand. But I suspect he would also be saddened to see so many families priced out of his creation.

            A friend of mine put it rather well, observing that there are children growing up within earshot of Disneyland’s nightly fireworks who have never been inside. And now, with the new price hikes, are even less likely to ever do so.

            Dad out...         

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