Second Breakfast

We got back on Sunday evening after spending a weekend with friends up in Eastport, which is a small town on the northern edge of Grand Traverse Bay. Having grown up in Michigan and having lived here my entire life, it is easy to become very used to the abundance of natural beauty that surrounds us here. So even for a jaded Michigander, the Grand Traverse area is a spectacular place. Beautiful blue skies, a warm, clear bay, trees and beautiful (if rocky) beaches for miles and miles. Actually the rocky part is a plus, because one can hunt for petoskey stones, which are fossilized pieces of coral from the vast, shallow sea that covered what is now Michigan 350 million years ago.

I can only imagine what the European explorers must have thought to themselves when they first came upon the Great Lakes. Calling these huge bodies of fresh water a “lake” is somewhat of a misnomer. Lakes have rafts, and little boats, and a dock, and you can see the other shore except on foggy days. These are huge, freshwater, inland seas. They have tides (albeit rather small ones), create weather (anyone who lives on the western side of Michigan can attest to the abundance of “lake-effect snow” during the winter months), and experience storms severe enough to sink large ships even in recent history. Finding such a large abundance of fresh water in such a beautiful setting must have been considered something of a miracle.

Michigan tends to be ignored much of the time in American popular culture. It is not talked about as a vacation destination (although Michigan has a large tourism industry), is usually skipped over in national weather reports (you’ll notice that Chad Meyers on CNN never highlights the Detroit weather forecast when he’s skipping around the weather map), and isn’t even crummy enough to be the butt of much regional humor. We seem to exist in a lacuna of American media. Its easy to internalize the unsubtle message that this can send and think “I don’t live in such a nice place”. But this simply isn’t so.

The Michigan state motto is “Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circum spice” (If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you). Spending a weekend on the Grand Traverse Bay reminds me to “circum spice”.

We saw March of the Penguins last night at the Michigan Theater. Despite my misgivings (and the poor quality of the print and sound), it was a marvelous film.

At dinner beforehand, one esteemed literary friend grimaced slightly when I mentioned we were going to see the film, and opined that “it would be a great 30 minute special on the Discovery channel, but two hours is a lot of penguins”. Even with the gravitas of a Morgan Freeman voiceover, I wasn’t sure if a film documenting the lives of a bunch of waddling birds on the ice would be compelling. It is definitely compelling, and the narrative that Freeman voices provides enough of a hook to keep the film from being too abstract.

What I found interesting was the audience’s reactions to the story. There was a lot of laughter at the predictably “cute” moments in the film, and tears at the very sad, which seems to hang on the intentional and heavy amount of anthropomorphizing of the birds. The main thrust of the story is the extraordinary lengths that these animals must go through in order to mate and raise young. Each half of the breeding pair will spend many weeks without food, the males having to protect the egg during the harshest months of the Antarctic winter while the female feeds and later returns to feed the now-hatched chick. So when one mother’s chick dies of exposure, the narrator tells us “the loss is unbearable”, and indeed we hear the female bird cry in a lost, forlorn sort of way. Or was it a “lost, forlorn” cry? I don’t want to argue whether or not animals have feelings — they certainly seem that they do, but I find it dangerous to rely completely on interpreting the rest of creation entirely through the lens of human emotion. It either leads to arrogance (they don’t have feelings, so why does it matter), or silly, stupid sentimentality (oh, those bears are so cute! RAWR!….I don’t feel so good).

Regardless, this film is worth the hype. You’ll be glad to step out into the humid, August air after having watched these poor male birds stand about in -100F weather while protecting a single egg with their feet.

Okay, I admit it. I like Harry Potter. Even if J.K. Rowling is the richest woman in showbiz, and 11 steps richer than the Queen, the books are imaginative, the film adaptations fun, and the whole enterprise has gotten a lot of kids passionate about reading. That’s a good thing.

I usually avoid “phenomena”. I’m one of those people who likes to read stuff and listen to music that no one else does. It its obscure and cerebral, its all for me. Despite (or perhaps because of)
my rather humble origins, I have a rather elitist, intellectual sensibility. So stuff that lots of other people like rarely appeals to me. So I avoided the Harry Potter books for a long time, but after seeing the first film, I was hooked.

Alan and I went gay campground camping a couple of weekends ago. I counted at least four other people there with the same pretty purple book under their arms.

I have a tiny bit of shame I carry around about my passion for fantastic lit. I remember having Frank Herbert’s “Eye” in my pile of books in 9th grade, and having the jock guys in choir behind me looking at my stuff. I’m sure they thought it was cool, but I remember that I was mortally embarrassed for some reason. But to this day I tend to want to turn over the covers of my books when I’m out somewhere reading. I think partially its because its often difficult to explain what a really good sci-fi or fantasy novel is about. But partially its because of that sense of being seen as “wierd” by what I’m reading.

There was one obnoxious guy named Bob at the campground, whom we nick-named “Bobnoxious” because of his winning personality. He gave me attitude about what I was reading, which immediately brought to mind that moment in 9th grade. However the guys behind me were blond, jock twins (John and David Hance…I do wonder whatever happened to those guys), and this guy was unappealing in about fifteen different ways.

In any event, despite its hefty price tag (I paid thirty bucks!), the Half-Blood Prince does not disappoint. And I warn you that once you’ve read to “The Cave”, you absolutely will have to finish the rest of the book.

Rented “Constantine” last night. Was hoping for a fun, flashy popcorn movie with a cool gothy theme (demons and angels, impending armageddon, and so on). Instead we were treated to a boring barrage of oversimplified Catholic theology and pointless plot twists that weren’t particularly twisty but very plodding.

So there’s this guy, John Constantine, who can see stuff that other people can’t. Turns out there are semi-angels and -daemons that walk among us (”half-breeds”), and God and Satan are embarked on a detente game of influence with our souls as the prize. There’s rules to the game, and Constantine has established himself as the enforcer for those daemons who cross the line. Apparently he tried to kill himself because of his terrible visions (imagine seeing the undead on the bus every morning), and was dead for a couple of minutes before he was revived. But because he “took a life” (his own, although he’s not dead, so wrap your brain around that logic), he’s damned to hell for all eternity. Constantine hopes that if he does enough good stuff (i.e. blow bad guys back into the Pit where they came from) he’ll earn enough Elysian brownie points to put himself back in the good graces of the Almighty.

As you can imagine, the folks down below aren’t a big fan of John’s, and as Lou (wait for it….Lou….Lou….Lucifer!) points out to John when he pays him a visit: “We’ve got a whole theme park waiting for you, John”. And John’s got lung cancer, after smoking a pack a day since he was fifteen. Blah blah blah…we can all see where this is going.

Oh yeah, someone also happened to find the “Spear of Destiny” (the one that the Roman soldier pierced Jesus’ side with), wrapped in a Nazi flag in an abandoned church in Mexico, and the now-posessed guy is walking north on his way to Los Angeles (could the movie be set anywhere else than the City of Angels? No, of course not.) When he gets there, something bad is gonna happen.

All of this makes me say “Thank God I’m not a Catholic”. Not that this represents except in the most debased ways the teachings of the Catholic faith as I understand it, but I’m sure that for a lot of folks who see and read this kind of stuff they think “that’s why I hate religion…all of these arbitrary rules about who goes to heaven and hell”. The focus on hell and punishment that a lot of folks seem to go on about is truly macabre and sadomasochistic, but that seems to be the emphasis, if not the point of their religion. Our proper response to God is fear and trembling, because if we don’t mind our P’s and Q’s the Old Man in the sky is gonna send us down to the Old Man in the Ground, where we’ll be “torn apart again and again for all eternity” as the movie reminds us.

Where is the mercy of God in all of this? Where is the God that identifies so strongly with us that he suffered and still suffers with us? Where is the possibility of transformation, of repentance (that is, “metanoia”, or literally, to think again), of grace?

I’d say avoid this movie. There’s little in the way of entertainment here, and a lot to dislike.