Celtics Win! Celtics Win!

Running dialogue from Game Six of the NBA Finals at the Cicak residence last night:

ERIN: So, let me get this straight. Do we have to watch any more games after this one?

BEN: No. The Celtics are going to win in five minutes and thirteen seconds.

ERIN: But they’ve won before.

BEN: But this is going to be their fourth win. It’s best-of-seven.

ERIN: Thank the Lord.

MIKE CICAK: KG looks like a human preying mantis.

GAIL CICAK: Yeah, he kind of does.

ERIN: Those players look so disgusting and sweaty. It must be so smelly in that arena right now.

MIKE: I bet it’s pretty well-ventilated.

ERIN: I would just kill myself if I had to be there.

BEN: Hey, does everybody remember the time Erin thought the Crosstown Shoot-Out was a game of horse?

(Laughter all around except from ERIN.)

ERIN: Whatever. At least I know the Xavier X-U cheer.

MIKE: I apologize in advance for the world of hurt you all are about to be in.

ERIN: Are they really going to keep chanting “Na Na Nah Nahh, Na Na Nah Nahhh, Hey! Hey! Hey! Gooood-bye” for the next four minutes and thirty-one seconds?

GAIL: What are you talking about?

BEN: Oh, I smell it.

GAIL: Sweetie.

MIKE: I couldn’t help myself.

ERIN: I apologize too.

BEN: Don’t threaten her! It’s like when animals need to express their dominance when challenged.

GAIL: I’m going to open a window.

ERIN: Is that Jason Schwartzman playing for the Lakers?

MIKE: That’s Sasha Vujacic.

ERIN: He looks like he really smells.

MIKE: Do you guys want to hear a joke? What did the brown chicken say to the brown cow before they made out?

BEN and ERIN: I don’t know.

MIKE: Brownchickenbrowncow!

BEN: I got one. How many Polish firemen does it take to put out a house fire?

MIKE and GAIL: How many?

BEN: Forty-nine. One to hold the hose and forty-eight to pick the house up and move it back and forth.

ERIN: Where did you hear that one?

BEN: SNL.

MIKE: Lamar Odom’s pretty good, but I’ve always thought he could’ve been great. I guess he smoked too much dope.

GAIL: How do you know that?

MIKE: Everybody knows that.

BEN: If this conversation somehow ends up on our blog someday, I’ll be sure to footnote it so that no one thinks we’re maliciously slandering him or anything.

GAIL: NBA players are allowed to do that?

MIKE: Hey, have you guys ever felt a baby kick?

ERIN: Ooh! Can I feel?

MIKE: Yeah, come over here.

BEN: This is the happiest I’ve ever been at the end of an NBA season.

MIKE: Put your hand there. Sweetie, is he kicking tonight?

GAIL: You have to talk to him. He might need to wake up.

MIKE: HEY! WAKE UP!

ERIN: Nothing yet.

MIKE: LITTLE MAN, MOVE!

GAIL: Did you know he’s four pounds right now?

ERIN: Wait, there was something. I don’t think it was a kick though.

MIKE: It might’ve been his butt. He likes to shake his butt when he dances.

BEN: Did you guys hear that? I think Jeff Van Gundy is coming on to John Havlicek.

ERIN: He’s really shakin’ it now.

MIKE: DANCE, LITTLE MAN! DANCE!

ERIN: Is it finally over?

BEN: No, it’s just a commercial.

ERIN: How do the players know when a commercial’s over and they can start playing again?

BEN: Well, in football, a man in a yellow shirt steps onto the field and play can’t start again until he steps off.

MIKE: I know two people in the world who still like to eat their boogers. My friend Adam and Wally Szczerbiak.

ERIN: I used to keep a pick pad in elementary school.

MIKE: What’s a pick pad?

BEN: I thought boogers tasted good when I was a kid.

MIKE: Dude, this makes me nauseous. We can’t keep talking about this.

GAIL: Did they just dump Gatorade on that coach?

MIKE: I’ve never seen that before in an NBA game!

BEN: David Stern cannot be happy.

ERIN: Is the Gatorade on the playing field? What if somebody slips on it?

MIKE: I’m just glad we’re not talking about boogers anymore.

Slayer Is The Best

There is a novelty book out now, popular in stores such as Urban Outfitters, titled Church Signs Across America. The signs, collected by Steve and Pam Paulson during cross-country road trips, run the gamut of spiritual corniness, from “Searching For A New Look? Have Your Faith Lifted Here!” to “Be An Organ Donor. Give Your Heart To Jesus,” with occasional forays into sturdy old maxims you might’ve heard your grandparents say once upon a time (“A Clear Conscience Makes A Soft Pillow”; “Forbidden Fruit Creates Many Jams”).

One sign that was not included in the collection is one Erin & I saw when we still lived in Nashville, a k a “The Buckle of the Bible Belt.” On my daily five-minute commute to work, I passed six churches, all of different denominations, all dispensing the same kind of spiritual truthiness sampled above.

One night when Erin & I were driving home down Murphy Road in Sylvan Park, we passed Calvary Baptist Church, which used its marquee for both high-minded spiritual platitudes and more prosaic announcements for Vacation Bible School and the like. That night, however, we were greeted with four words that can instantly put us in a good mood whenever we recall them today:

SLAYER IS THE BEST.

After a moment of stunned silence we erupted in laughter, then pulled a u-ee to confirm that we really had seen what we thought we saw. We pulled up to the marquee and saw, below SLAYER IS THE BEST, all the other letters from the pre-Slayer message jammed into the bottom of the sign.

“That’s a beautiful thing right there,” I said.

“Slayer really is the best,” Erin chimed in.

Why we never took a picture, I still don’t know. The next day those four beautiful words were gone, replaced only by blank whiteness. The sign stayed that way for several weeks, until finally another announcement went up, this time behind a glass enclosure that locked at the top. No doubt a humorless committee had gathered around a table and concluded, gravely, that no expense must be spared to lock up the church marquee so that vandalism such as this would never transpire again.

What I still appreciate is the politeness of the anonymous spiritual tagger. He or she had plenty of letters with which to write any number of profane things, but no curse words were used. No anti-church sentiment was expressed. All the other letters were left there to be used again, not stolen or strewn about. Just SLAYER IS THE BEST. Silly and juvenile, yes, but also — for me, anyway, in the humid religious climate of Nashville — subversive and endearing. What if Calvary Baptist had kept it up there? That’s the kind of church you might really want to visit.

The Happening

Most people would agree that M Night Shyamalan’s best movie was one of his earliest (The Sixth Sense), and that every movie since has been progressively worse. (We were partial to The Village, flaws and all.) Where exactly The Happening ranks on the scale is a matter of debate, but we don’t recommend you having it.

The movie begins with an idyllic tableau of Central Park: dog-walkers, joggers, bench-sitters, all blissfully unaware of the sinister breeze in the canopy of trees above them. Suddenly a bench-sitter removes her hair pin and stabs herself in the neck. Cut to a construction site, where four workers sharing a crude joke witness a fellow employee crash to the ground. Another body falls, then another, and soon it’s raining men. (The picture of these men stepping off the girders into a free fall, with its echoes of 9/11, is the creepiest scene in the movie.)

What’s going on here? The premise might have been intriguing on paper. And by moving into R-rated territory, Shyamalan gets a little extra juice out of some grisly deaths, with results ranging from effective (one death involves a lawnmower) to unintentionally comical (a zookeeper meandering into the lion’s den). But mostly this film is a stinker.

If you really need a lyrically apocalyptic fix, read The Road. Or, if you hate books, wait until November.

Both The Happening and the upcoming film version of The Road do beg the question: Why does the end of the world happen in Pennsylvania?

And memo to aspiring actors/actresses who want to appear in an upcoming Shyamalan movie: 1) Practice making your eyes look extremely big in the mirror (like Zooey).

 

 

2) Stand in place for long periods of time, gazing fearfully into the distance.

 

 

3) Even better, do this in large groups.

 

 

Congratulations! You’ve just been cast in his next film. But we won’t be watching it, unless you pay us.

Vincent D’Onofrio, Animal Tracker

Actual dialogue from tonight’s channel 64 episode of Law & Order starring Vincent & Anna:

CORONER (kneeling over dead body): It looks like some wild animals got to the body before we did.

VINCENT: Coyotes, judging from the paw print.

Introducing a Regular Friday Feature…

And one solely for your benefit! 

In this space, we will recommend a nugget to treasure in one of the following categories: literary, musical, and visual arts. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, Where do we even begin? There are so many books, albums and movies worth recommending, and so many more that are not. So, for starters, we’ll give you one in each category. The first, a film, where the Vores as we know them began; the second, a book, that both Vores have recently read; and the third, a musical that Jon G. and the Squish (my parents) treated us to for my (Erin) graduation.

1.  Film: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.  A documentary about Wilco by Sam Jones. 

Before Ben and I knew each other, there was Wilco. And it was good. Before Ben and I were an item, there was Ben’s Nalgene bottle, decorated with Wilco’s Sumerteeth sticker. From the moment I saw that bottle under the bug lights of SB2W’s mess hall, I knew I’d befriend its owner. By that point in my time at camp, I’d had enough Amy Grant to beef up the spiritual quotient of any pagan nation. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is what Ben calls our first date, and what I call our first outing. Before there was us, there was them, and they filled our heads with glorious images of Jeff Tweedy trying to play nice with an increasingly hostile and be-dreaded Jay Bennet. What strikes me most about the film is the final scene played out to Gene Wilder’s exit comments in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  The same mystical eeriness that struck me as a kid while watching Charlie exists in the Wilco film — the sense that something has changed and that something can’t be recovered, but perhaps it’s for the best. I don’t like to overanalyze who Wilco is or is not, or what their music means. I more than like their music, I heart their music. Or so the diary entry says…

2.  Novel: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.  Diaz just won the Pulitzer for this novel, which took him a decade to write. I’m wary of recommending this book to more than half the people we know because it’s loaded with spanglish and many, many a crude and profane image or word, but it was really, really good. It’s part truth, part fiction, and it’s about Oscar Wao: son of Dominican immigrants, morbidly obese, lover of ladies (who, sadly, are looking for someone less fat, less pock-marked, and less into Star Trek). The story is told through several perspectives: his roommmate, his mother, his grandmother and his sister. It traces back to Trujillo and his reign of terror from 1930 to 1960. Some parts are funny, others are gut-wrenchingly sad. Thank you Hecks for loaning us your book.

3.  Music: Jersey Boys: The Musical.  As a rule, Ben hates musicals. Except this one! It helps to sit next to The Squish, who clapped during most of the songs. Jersey Boys was essentially the greatest VH1 Behind-The-Music ever with cool sets to boot. And Joe Pesci is a character too. But he doesn’t sing. Which is probably for the best.

“It came with the frame.”

There’s a scene from The Burbs when the neighborhood visits the shadowy Klopek residence to find out who exactly they are and what exactly they are doing in suburbia. (Spoiler alert: They are crazy people who are incinerating bodies in their basement.) As Tom Hanks and crew prowl around the Klopek living room making awkward small talk, Bruce Dern’s character takes a picture frame off the mantle and says to Hans Klopek, “Pretty girl. Friend of yours?” “No,” Hans responds, “it came with the frame.” This gets a guaranteed laugh out of Ben’s mom Donna every time. 

Astute readers of this blog will notice that our banner photograph of a cityscape “came with the frame,” as it were. This may lead you to several different conclusions:

• The Vores really don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to this blog thing.
• The Vores are distant relatives of the Klopeks and serve sardines to their guests.
• The Vores kill people and incinerate their bodies in the basement.

None of these conclusions could be further from the truth. The truth is that we currently lack the capability to post our own photos because our Macbook and digital camera are in possession of the Deer Park police department. They ended up there after they were stolen two months ago but subsequently recovered. Because of ongoing legal proceedings, we cannot have them back yet. When we do, you will see pictures.

It’s hard now to recall exactly what it felt like to have our house broken into. We always thought it was the kind of thing that happened to other people, until we became the other people. There’s something about seeing your drawers and clothes and boxes thrown all over the floor, knowing that some faceless stranger has been standing in your bedroom going through your stuff, that’s very violating, to say the least. We were lucky: neither one of us was home, and our brave cat was unharmed because he hid under the bed. Aside from a rare coin collection and jewelry, nothing was taken that was irreplaceable, and most of those items have now been recovered.

After this happened, we figured we should introduce ourselves to the neighbors, who may have jumped to certain conclusions after they saw a police car sitting outside our house for three hours. Erin made them cookies and assured them that our friends aren’t the kind of people who try to kick in our deadbolted front door at noon on a Friday. Stories were exchanged, hands were shaken. We regained a little foothold in trust. What if the Klopeks had done a similar goodwill tour? They just might’ve gotten away with it.

A Good Scythe

In his essay “A Good Scythe,” Wendell Berry writes about buying a Sears Roebuck “power scythe” after he and his family moved to a farm in the Kentucky River Valley in 1965. The farm was “mostly on a hillside” and covered ground that was difficult to mow. So Berry bought the power scythe to solve that problem, only to find that it created more problems, among them that it was heavy, clumsy, dangerous, noisy, tempermental and undependable. His friend Harlan Hubbard then shows him an “old-fashioned, human-powered scythe” that had, Berry writes, “an intelligence and refinement in its design that made it a pleasure to handle and look at and think about.” Wendell is so enamored that he orders one himself from The Marugg Company in Tracy City, Tennessee. The essay is only five pages long, and I’m certain scythes everywhere (at least the non-power ones) have surely memorized every word of this love letter to their kind. Berry concludes by praising all the virtues of his new, Marugg scythe: it is light, less dangerous, quiet, cheaper and requires no fuel.

This being our first summer as homeowners, we now have a lawn to tend. Growing up in my (Ben) family, lawn-mowing was something of an art form. We had a large yard, with many slopes, some leading down to a stream that ran along our property. Our yard now is much smaller in comparison, a corner lot, with just three sections (front, side, back) and almost no slope. We really have no need for a gas mower, so my father-in-law gave us an old push mower with a wooden handle. I want to say it’s a good scythe, but I’m still getting there.

It is lighter, quieter, cheaper, less dangerous and much less gas-guzzling than a push mower with an engine. It also gives me blisters and jams every time I run over a pine cone. My arms want to fall off after I’m done using it. And it takes quite a bit longer than a mower with an engine would. Corners are harder to negotiate, and it spits the grass up and back so that when I take off my shoes inside, a good portion of the lawn is stuck to my ankles and socks.

On the plus side, I sweat like a beast, something Erin finds terribly attractive. And it is a good workout. Wendell says as much about his scythe:

The other difference [between the two scythes] is between kinds of weariness. Using the Marugg scythe causes the simple bodily weariness that comes with exertion. This is a kind of weariness that, when not extreme, can in itself be one of the pleasures of work. The power scythe, on the other hand, adds to the weariness of exertion the unpleasant and destructive weariness of strain. This is partly because, in addition to carrying and handling it, your attention is necessarily clenched to it; if you are to use it effectively and safely, you must not look away. And partly it is because the power scythe, like all motor-driven tools, imposes patterns of endurance that are alien to the body. As long as the motor is running there is a pressure to keep going. You don’t stop to consider or rest or look around. … And because it is not motor driven and is quiet and odorless, the Marugg scythe also allows the pleasure of awareness of what is going on around you as you work.

This last point is very true. You can have a conversation using a push mower, as I have had with several neighbors. “I haven’t seen one of those in twenty years!” said one woman walking her dogs. “Best mower in the city right there,” said a man who stopped his car to talk to me. “I’ll give you two weeks, tops,” said another walker, laughing and shaking his head. “No I like it,” I told him, sweat pouring down my face, arms twitching from exertion, blisters swelling up every second. This is worth it, right? Wendell would be proud of me, I tell myself. This guy isn’t. “Two weeks,” he repeats. As he turns and walks away, I picture a good scythe lodged in his back.

This is just a modern blog.

One night, during a commerical break on the Channel 64 eleven-thirty “Law & Order: Criminal Intent,” starring Vincent D’Onofrio and Anna from What About Bob?, Erin asked me what we should name our imminent blog.

“It needs to reflect all the different categories we’re going to talk about,” she said. “Art, music, movies, kittens.” Our eighteen pound cat Scooter was at the foot of the bed, being large.

“Let’s come up with a list,” Erin said as she gave me a pencil and paper. “Go.”

An hour later, after Vincent had convicted the killer using his deft head tilts and subtle voice modulations, we compared lists.

“Hmmm,” she said, nodding and studiously checking off certain titles. “‘Chubby Rain’ has potential. So does ‘The Mick Jaggernauts.’”

“I like ‘Mad Farmer Blog,’” I told her. “And ‘Sense Offensers.’” We had just watched Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale. Do not see this movie.

“Let’s narrow it down to five,” Erin said. We did. They were:

The Opposite of Hallelujah. Lovesick. The Laughter of Hate. Kicking & Screaming. What We Talk About When We Talk About Blogging.

“The Opposite of Hallelujah” is the name of a song by Jens Lekman, a Swede whose show at The Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky, in July 2006, easily made both of our top five concert experiences of all time. When my brother saw Jens in Portland this winter, he introduced one song with, “I wrote this song for a girl, who didn’t want it. So I’m giving it to you.”

“Lovesick” is the name of the mix we gave to our wedding guests. It included two versions of Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s “New Partner,” The Flaming Lips, Wilco, Yo La Tengo and others. We are told by some friends that they still enjoy listening to it, which makes us happy.

“The Laughter of Hate” is a line spoken by David Brent in the British “Office.”

“Kicking & Screaming” is the first film by Noah Baumbach, about four college graduates making their way in their first year out of school. Erin’s favorite scene is when Otis and Eric Stoltz’s character are having a book club discussion about All The Pretty Horses. Otis has not read the book but describes the horses as “violently arousing.”

The last one, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Blogging,” is the one we picked.

“Do we want a little paragraph here where we say what we’re going to talk about in this blog?” Erin asks. “Are you writing down my dialogue?” We’re still trying to figure out the process. “I just farted,” Erin added.

I have to leave the room.