LOOKING FOR VENKMAN

Watching the recent kids flick Zathura on the big screen with an eleven-year old in tow, noting his reactions, I remembered how I used to watch films and TV shows, and how I sometimes still do. Not so much watching as reacting, participating, shifting left and right in anxious anticipation as something bad may or may not happen to the central characters who flicker through the gaps from the projector's indifferent light. Rocking back and forth in the seat. Cringing in embarassment when something humiliating happens to somebody we like. As a child, I used to sometimes turn away from the screen while watching silly shows like Three's Company, because, silly or not, I didn't like to see John Ritter be humiliated; I couldn't stand it when the character not-in-the-know remained not-in-the-know while everybody else knew the real deal. The anticipation of waiting for when the unenlightened one had the light shone on him stressed me out. Or when somebody was about to be told something really, really hurtful, or truthful. (Which are usually the same things.) That was bad, too. 'Bad' meaning good, meaning I was there, in the moment, believing in what I saw. No cynicism, no maturity, no understanding of scripts and directors and actors and audiences. And I remembered, too, telling a four-year old acquaintance of mine, back when I was a wise old sage of thirteen, that Venkman in Ghostbusters II was not Venkman at all, but Bill Murray, an actor, paid to play a part. "No, no, he was Venkman," the kid, Blair was his name, insisted. And he was right. For him he was Venkman, not Murray. He was there, on the screen, and it was happening, to him, as we watched, immobile, inert, and sometimes, occasionally, on my good days, when I feel quite young and new, I can get those feelings back, hold them tight, almost horde them.

YOUR GUESS IS AS GOOD AS MINE

I was, if not an expert, at least not a novice. In my knowledge of comics, that is. Every Saturday or Sunday for a good many months during my tenth and eleventh year of life I would meet Jason and Joel, classmates of mine at Pine Grove, at the park adjacent to Evangelista Court, where I lived. We would climb the climbers and slide the slides, all the while discussing the intricate layers of past and present that formed the grid of super-hero powers and etiquette, histories and capabilities, writers and artists and storylines (oh my) that formed the crux of our reading. I had been reading comics a little bit longer than the other two, collecting them a little bit longer; I was a veteran. Years later, long after our weekend comic-chats had gradually faded into that slightly purple haze that childhood memories eventually succumb to, that anaesthesic mix of nostalgia and haziness, I heard about Jason and Joel again. From another friend of mine, Mariano, who attended the same high school as they did. As told to me by Mariano, when finding out that Mariano knew me, the two boys turned to each other, grinned, and said in a sing-song voice meant, I suppose, to replicate my own pre-adolescent tone: "Do you believe in God?"

We choose what we want to remember, at some level, unconscious or otherwise, and what I remember about my weekends with Joel and Jason are questions relating to Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk, while what my playmates recollect are my inquiries of a more celestial nature. When hearing about their good-natured mockery of me, I was hurt, almost offended. I had always remembered, fondly, our afternoon bull-sessions; I didn't recollect any religious discussions. Now, from an even more distant vantage point, I can admit that I probably did question them regarding the nature of God's existence, and the ultimate validity of His supposed mojo. I don't remember doing so, but I also don't remember much about nursery school, either, and I'm pretty sure I spent a year there. (Though I do remember the apple juice they served, in little blue plastic cups. That was some good shit, that juice was.)

Raised in a non-religious house, I've always viewed religion itself, the organized kind, with a slightly puzzled detachment, curious but somewhat mystified by the whole spectacle, like an Upper-West Side New York intellectual watching highlights of NASCAR. (Is that where New York intellectuals live, the Upper-West Side?) Thesights and feelings and outright human emoting I could empathize with, even, at some level, yearn for; ti was the logic that eluded me.

I know, I know -- it's about faith, not logic. But the questions I had as a child are the questions I have now:

If you have to give your heart to Jesus to go to heaven, then what about all those people who were born before Jesus? Where are they? And what about all those people who died in the immediate days and weeks following his supposed resurrection, before word got out about his rise from the dead, and the subsequent rules that had to be followed? Were they fucked from the get-go? And what about all those people who were planning to convert, possibly next Tuesday, only to be run over by a Mack truck on Monday night as they raced home on a snowy, slippery road to watch the Leafs play Tampa? And what about all the child molesters and murderers who find God in the clink? What, they get a free pass into heaven, but Nelson Mandela doesn't? And what about the millions of Jews, one billion Chinese, one billion Indians, seventy million Thais, sixty million Vietnamese, and twelve million Cambodians whose faith is aligned with a different deity? They burn in Hell for eternity? I always thought that if there was a God who would do that to His people, than that wouldn't be a God I'd want to follow in the first place. And if Allah is the answer, why does He allow terrorists to wreak havoc in his name?

These are the questions that acquire a deeper resonance after seeing what an unfair shithole a lot of the world really is.

As I get older, as I travel, I'm starting to connect my own dots. They may, in the end, on my deathbed, end up forming a picture that resembles a Rorscach test designed by a lunatic, but so be it. (Or, considering my childhood pastimes, they would probably resemble a Horshack test, given how many episodes of Welcome Back Kotter I've seen. And am I the only who thought the show went to shit when Gabe Kaplan left and Travolta was reduced to the odd cameo every now and then? I mean, Kotter without Kotter would be like Laverne and Shirley without Laverne. Except, now that I think about it, Laverne left that show too, but they kept her name in the title. And if that's not enough to make someone an atheist, then I don't know what is...) I'm beginning to view religion itself as a gradual, man-made response to the sheer unknowability of life itself. Every culture has incrementally authorized its own interpretation of who we are, how we got here, and where it thinks we ought to be going. The fallacy of religious thinking, for me, is the belief that our way, my way, is the one way.

If something is taught to us as children, we believe it. It validates our existence. If we are taught that Jesus is the way, Buddah is the way, Allah is the way, it does not become a learned fact; it becomes an emotional reservoir. Someone much smarter than me once said, maybe it was John Ritter, possibly Don Knotts, that you can't use logic to argue somebody out of something that they didn't learn logic to learn to begin with. Most people's religious belief isn't logical; it's emotional. That's fine; I'm all for emotion. I live for emotion, adrenalized. But when I hear somebody like the Hawaiian-shirt wearing pastor Rick Warren, the author of The Purpose-Driven Life, advise people to "doubt their doubts and believe their beliefs", I throw my hands into the hair and sigh. (The fact that all pastors and priests often seem so damn smug doesn't help, with that calm, confident, condescending smile that arises when one realizes that they have booked a passage to Heaven, first-class, while the unenlightened ones are waving good-bye from the dock, waiting to be trampled by the horsemen coming sometime soon.) Don't question things, he's saying. Don't examine what you believe, and why. Just go along with what you've been taught and what you've been told and what your religion tells you. (And if that plan includes travelling to poor countries and informing their impoverished but good, decent citizens that their entire religions and cultures are based on false principles, and the only way to achieve immortality is to believe in what I believe, well, so be it -- God is great. Never mind that Hamas and Israel are killing each other for religious land. Never mind that a belief in the validity of one's one faith necessitates a belief that all others are flat-out wrong. Never mind that travel is supposed to broaden one's mind, not shrink it, ossify it, close it off. There is a plan, so I've been told, and, between you and me, if you're not part of it, well, hellfire is hot, have you heard?)

Fine. But that's not, well, human. A child is full of doubts, questions, concerns, uncertainties, proclamations. A child looks to the adults for the answers about why the sky is blue and where grandpa goes when he dies, and, all too often, the adult gives them what they want to hear, often in the form of a magic book that has all the answers, an idealized deity set in type.

Maybe I'm biased. I don't know. My church as a child was Marvel comics and the Lincoln Cinema, Ponch on C*H*I*P*S and the Duke boys barelling through Hazzard county, catching the crooks and swigging some moonshine. But I remember those sessions at the park, talking comics and, I guess, guessing about God. They were good times, maturing times. We were out in the world and wondering about it, in our own childlike way.

And maybe, in the end, it's better for adults to point the kids in the direction of their local park and say: "Look, those are tough questions, real questions that you're asking, but we're all novices in this department, and there are no experts, so why don't you head on down to the swings, and shoot the shit about comics and God and life, and see what kind of answers you come up with, because in the end, kid, your guess is as good as mine."

MY (BELATED) TOP TEN

Given that I haven't really seen enough of last year's films to produce a comprehensive list, I've decided instead to offer my top ten Steve Guttenberg films (a tradition I started last year, so why stop now?):

1. Police Academy
2. Diner
3. Police Academy IV: Citizens on Patrol
4. Short Circuit
5. The Bedroom Window
6. Three Men and a Baby
7. Cocoon
8. Police Academy III: Back In Training
9. Cocoon: The Return
10. Three Men And A Little Lady

WHY AMERICAN IDOL MIGHT JUST SIGNAL THE END OF THE WORLD

After watching the enormously entertaining season premiere of American Idol last night, I'm convinced that it's either the most compulsively watchable show on television, or an obviously imminent sign of the final apolcalpyse that awaits us all, the end of the world, the harbinger of the seven horsemen, minus the horses and plus Paula Abdul, which is not a bad compensation, come to think of it. Watching people with no talent assuming that they have talent, only to hear the distinguished panel of judges rip them to shreds in front of the whole world, appeals to our baser instincts, our less wholesome, voyeuristic qualities that get off on seeing other people in pain, while we sit tight, content, relaxed, swigging a Snapple and downing some Doritos. It's not a particularly American impulse, I don't think, given that the show originated in Britain, has licensed spin-offs around the world, not to mention innumerable rip-offs right here in the Philippines, but it is a fundamentally human impulse, of that I'm sure. And while it's undeniably kinda fun, I'm not so sure that it's totally healthy.

This is the thing. Competition makes the world go round, like it or not, love it or not, and a lot of us like to see others win while others fail. That's fine. That's normal. It might be built in to our genetic structure. Whatever. But it seems to me that this obsession with shows like American Idol, on the part of the participants and fans, hints at a darker, creepier desire, the one that says that the only validity in life comes from reams and reams of people worldwide clapping their hands in unison while shouting our names as we stand on a stage and smile and bask in the adulation. It's not the urge to make music or sing nice songs that's wrong, and a lot of the contestants on the show seem to genuinely have that gift; hell, most of the people in the Philippines are fantastic singers who sing for the sake of singing. But it seems like a good percentage of those bouncing around the American Idol stage are there simply because they need to be liked and loved, big-time, all the time.

There's this cool psychotherapist named Arthur Ellis, ninety-plus years old, who has boiled all of our foibles and insecurities and neuroses down into three simple categories, the anxiety over which fuel most of our (usually) irrational compulsions. We think thus:

1) People Must Like Me
2) I Must Do Well
3) The World Is Unfair

That's it. That's all. The winners and losers of American Idol seem to fit squarely into any or all of the above categories. (As do the rest of us.) Ellis's advice is rather startling, in this new-age, psycho-babble society we inhabit -- he recommends a) liking yourself regardless of what others think; b) liking yourself even if you do not do well; and c) recognizing, like an adult, that the world is unfair, so get over it.

Period.

So simple, and yet so difficult to follow.

He's basically saying: "Look, fuck what everybody else is saying, do what you want, do your best, and recognize that life sometimes, if not often, screws you over." Most of our problems arise not from the problem itself, he postulates, but from our worrying over the problem, its root, its source, its effect on the rest of our lives. Just like yourself because it makes life easier, he's saying; just live life and take the bad with the good and don't whine.

Again, not easy.

But I can't help but think that he's on to something. All those preening and desperately anxious faces on American Idol so want to be loved, need to be loved, because, well, that 's what our culture decides success is all about -- having groups of strangers applaud us for doing well and scorn us for trying, and usually failing. Fuck it, Ellis says; just get on with it, he says.

Good advice. Advice I will try to follow, to be sure.

In the meantime, should I happen to, you know, accidentally encounter the newest edition of American Idol on Star World Channel 28 next Wednesday at 8:00 p.m. (Filipino time), I might, you know, take a gander for a moment or two.

I mean, come on -- do you expect me to change overnight? And besides, Simon's one-liners, cruel as they are, can be spot-on and dead-on funny sometimes. Life isn't fair, and neither is he, which is either comforting or disturbing, depending on how you look at it.

SOMETHING ELSE

The best things in movies, as in life, are the little things. The unexpected insights gained from a barely glimpsed sight spotted at the corner of the frame. Visible only for a second or two, leaving you to wonder about what you saw, and about what it meant. When the little girl in the new movie Narnia lets her eyes wander across the bookshelf belonging to the strange creature whose house she has recently entered through the surprisingly vast back of a rather large wardrobe, we spot, briefly, a weathered, well-read book entitled: Is Man A Myth? Then her eyes shift, the scene shifts, and off we go into the story, ready or not, olly olly oxen free.

It's the little things. The title of that book suggests a world where minotaurs and witches and talking beavers are a rather mundane norm, while 'man', that esoteric beast, a mythical abstraction, an almost arcane possibility that nevertheless remains tantalizing, even as it stays clouded in doubt, and more than a little fear. For if man -- the stuff of legends -- exists, then that would mean that there is the possibility, however remote, but a possibility nevertheless, that the prophecy could come true. And if the prophecy were to be fulfilled --

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Narnia is full of Christian symbolism and allegories, a fact I know for certain because a) the movie is based on a series of children books written by famed Christian writer C.S. Lewis and b) everything I've read about the flick persistently reminds me of this fact. For some reason or another I avoided these books as a child, but I can't remember why. As an adult, however (or a close approximation of one), I can appreciate some of the religious metaphors being shoved in my face, but when the movie works, it works not because of any religious message but because of its wholehearted embrace of fantasy. (And the central hook of the story is a doozy, religious or otherwise -- four bickering siblings are sent to the safety of the English countryside during World War II. In their real lives, the children are at the mercy of adults, helpless bystanders in a war that determines their own future. In the magical realm of Narnia, they are destined to fulfill the prophecy, engage in battle, and ultimately bring peace and prosperity to an entire civilization, saving a whole world from extinction. What kid wouldn't just love this situation?)

I'm not an aficianado of fantasy books, if by 'fanatsy' we mean elves and goblins and gnomelike races battling the forces of evil. That's not a value judgement on the books themselves; they're jsut not my cup of tea. But if by 'fanasty' we're talking about that slow and steady, fast or furious entry into a world like our own but not our own, then count me in. Stephen King and Peter Straub and Rod Serling and Robert Bloch and Ray Bradbury, always Bradbury, patented and perfected this kind of story. The Brits are great at it too -- Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker and James Herbert have an elegant approach to the supernatural, an airtight and economic use of prose that accentuates the dread and eloquently guides us from our elementary concerns of bills and babies, jobs and mortgages into something...else.

Yes. Perhaps that's the world. Else. Science-Fiction also gives us 'else', true, but most of it (in prose, anyways) is too high-tech, too, well, scientific for me to get a grasp on. The best stories of 'else', however, use the medium of the fantastic to explore who we are in this work, and why it is that we do what we do. Stephen King even chose to conclude this three-decade long Dark Tower fantasy saga by inserting himself into the narrative as a character, whereby the protagonists gradually realized that they were nothing more than fictional creations of King himself. And yet, they end up saving King from his famed auto accident of 1999.

It was an audacious move on King's part, at once a monumental cheat and utterly appropriate. What he's saying, I think, is that we create the fantasy, yes, but the fantasy completes the cycle by saving us. We can use the works of the fantastic, both dark and light, to view and comprehend our own lives through a more multi-faceted prism than everyday life usually allows. We can glimpse a book entitled Is Man A Myth? and once again ask ourselves (if not for the first time) that very same question. Ask if we, too, have the possibility and capability to transcend our own mortal lives, to become larger than ourselves, more heightened, almost elegaic.

DEPENDING ON HOW GOOD YOUR SEATS ARE

I don't watch much sports on tv, and rarely, if ever, watch an entire game of anything from start to finish, but I love reading about sports, especially books by coaches, and especially books by smart coaches who have figured out a particular philosophy for their game that somehow is able to correspond to another kind of game, life.

Phil Jackson, current coach of the Los Angeles Lakers, former coach of the Chicago Bulls, is one of those spiritual cats I can dig. His 2002 memoir More Than A Game, written with friend and basketball writer Charley Rosen, is a memoir of the game filled with detailed technical minutiae that soared right over my head, and intriguing spiritual concepts that rang achingly true.

I don't the know many of the rules of basketball. The specifics of the game elude me. Even playing the sport in high school gym class, I had no idea what to do, who to throw the ball to, how to move. But I've gradually realized over the years that my ignorance of basketball's (and cricket's, and American football's) rules is actually a good thing. A potentially enlightening thing.

When Phil Jackson watches a basketball game, he is seeing a level of life, a component of life, that I am not capable of appreciating. I liken it, as a former (current?) film snob, to people who watch a movie but aren't really into movies. They're fans. They like a good flick. They don't live and die for cinema, though. They're not watching the same movie I am, even if they are. (If you catch my drift.) And when I watch a hockey game, even though I played the sport as a kid, I am not watching the same game that Wayne Gretzky or Mario Lemieux is watching. They see things that I don't. They understand plays that I can't even conceive of, let alone catch on a single viewing. They are observing the game, the sport, from an altitude I can't, and won't, ever reach.

I think we're all somewhat dismissive of that which remains foreign and incomprehensible to us. I look at cricket and wonder what the fuck's going on and why anyone is watching it. I read certain authors and wonder what everyone else sees in them. And yet this is the impulse that I've slowly, over the years, tried to eradicate from my human vocabulary.

Because the longer you look at something, the harder you look at something, the more life you bring into your observations the more that the observed sport/game/book/movie/country/person will look into you. You bring life into the game, and the game brings life, or a reasonable facsimile of it, into you. For Phil Jackson, basketball coach, basketball is not merely a metaphor for life; as his co-writer Rosen wittily puts it, 'life is a metaphor for basketball'. A group of people working in synch; a synergy passing from one player to the other; until the end result, at its most pristine, ultimate level, has little, if anything to with competition or winning. It's about the dance and sway of life, lived at its highest possible plateau. For Jackson, he incorporates Native Indian mythology and Buddhist precepts into the sport; me, I always just saw, well, a game.

That's the point, though. What you see and what I see and what matters to us and what matters to them are rarely, if ever, identical, or even similar. Fraternal twins, not identical ones. My wanderings through Japan and Cambodia and the Philippines have been experiments writ large; in the end, what I have been trying to comprehend is little more than an extension of what I try to do while watching a sport I only dimly understand -- I look for common points of interest, I investigate the unfathomable, I try to put two and two together.

Those pieces in chess, that baseball diamond, the empty net on the ice -- these are merely the respositories of our human instinct to apply order to a chaotic world. If you delve deep enough into any game, try hard enough, you can energize your own philosophy of life, however slipshod or rudimentary it may be. Or you can see it all as a game, period. One way is not better than the other; games are meant to be fun, after all. Life is simple or complex, depending on how good your seats are.

But I'm reminded of what some Israeli politican (whose name escapes me) recently said when asked whether he was optimist or a pessimist.

"An optimist and a pessimist both die the same way," he said. "So I choose optimism."

Recently Read, Recently Enjoyed...

Some stuff I've read recently, if anyone's interested:

The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton by Michael Mott -- Is it possible to write an engrossing biography about a man who spent the better part of his adult life trapped inside a Trappist monastery in Kentucky? Yes, it is, as this very readable biography of the famous religious writer attests. Leaving behind numerous volumes of diaries and essays on a variety of topics, Merton comes across as a man committed to authentically seeking a religious life simultaneously on his own terms and God's terms -- and the conflict that creates in his psyche makes for interesting reading, even for an agnostic like myself.

Hard Revolution by George Pelecanos-- Another excellent crime novel featuring African-American D.C. detective Derek Strange. Only this time, Pelecanos has taken a page out of Walter Mosley's stylebook and transported the action back to the sixties, so we can see, clearly, vividly and heartbreakingly, how racial violence drove Strange out of the police force and into the man he became.

The Old Boys by William Trevor -- Trevor is one of those writers who I always mean to get around to reading but never do, only this time I did. (His book Felicia's Journey was adapted for the silver screen a few years back by Canadian director Atom Egoyan.) An Irish writer who, this novel, takes a biting look at the effects of a private-school life on a group of old men who still, like it or not, remain intrinsically connected to their alma mater of fifty years ago. British writers often remind me of Japanese writers; they both are raised and reared and exist in an extremely conformist, ostensibly formulaic society, and yet their work reveals that they are all too aware of the fundamental human foibles that exist beneath the most placid of societal surfaces. Very funny, erudite and touching, this one is.

Table Money by Jimmy Breslin -- Breslin is the long-time reporter for the New York Post, and this novel from the early eighties is a wonderful, understated look at an ordinary couple from Queens, trying (and sometimes failing) to make their way through the world of fidelity and work and alcohol. The book starts two hundred years ago with the influx of Irish immigrants into New York, and delicately traces the ups and downs of life and living through the viewpoint of a working-class husband and wife. Realistic dialouge is difficult to write, but Breslin can write like the wind.

Death In White Bear Lake by Barry Siegel -- I'm a sucker for true-crime books, and this one is a good one. A crazy mother longing to adopt, a murdered baby found in her home, a birth mother reopening the closed case thirty-odd years later -- what's not to like? True-crime books often come across as lurid and exploitive, but the best of them use crime as a mirror to reflect the hopes and fears of an entire community. This one does that, painting a portrait of a family and a town and a society that has not quite figured out how to ensure the safety of those with whose care we are entrusted.

W: Revenge Of The Bush Dynasty by Elizabeth Mitchell -- This is the second biography of Bush I've read, and it does a good job of illustrating how clearly Dubya has followed in his father's footsteps throughout the course of his life, from Andover to Yale to the oil fields of Texas to the ultimate endpoint of the White House. Bush comes across through these pages not as an illiterate moron but as a personable, compassionate, highly-educated and extremely likeable guy who never really got going in life until he quit drinking and found Christ. Make of that what you will, but the book hints that even Bush himself has not been aware of how much influence his father and his friends had in greasing the wheels of his eventual success. How much are we ourselves, and how much are we the repositories of our parents' success and failures?

The Beatles: The Biography -- by Bob Spitz -- Ever wondered why Ringo's called 'Ringo'? Or how Paul McCartney and John Lennon hooked up? Or where the phrase 'a hard day's night' comes from? This mammoth new book about the Beatles explains at all. The first part of the book is the best part; reading, in exhaustive detail, about how the Beatles became the Beatles is riveting stuff -- you can almost smell the smoke and taste the beer. It's as much a portrait of twentieth-century England as it is of the Fab Four, and it pulls no punches. A great read.

A Certain Justice by P.D. James -- A confession: I never understand, ever, when the mystery is finally revealed and all is explained. I'm serious. The explanations are never enough, and I'm continously left puzzled. I watched Ocean's Twelve the first time and blamed my confusion on the fact that all the titles (dates, times) were written in French, as I caught it on a bootleg DVD. When I watched it again, English dates and times intact, I still didn't get it. (I'm also of the opinion that Ocean's Twelve is one of the most genius sequels ever, but that it's also fundamentally flawed -- it takes everything that was fun and stylish about the first film and inverts it, resulting in a strange, somewhat bland movie that is neither arthouse nor mainstream but something in between, which is not necessarily bad, but it is decidedly, well, muddy.) My inability to understand who killed the butcher in the laundry room, and why, is why I approach mysteries with a certain sense of trepidation, but P.D.James is one of the really, really good mystery storytellers, judging by this book, and I'm looking forward to reading more of the series featuring Inspector Dalgliesh, complete with the tight, crisp, eloquent prose that seems to be a trademark of any writer emanating out of Britain. (Oh, and, of course, I didn't quite get what happened at the end, but I'm blaming me, not her.)

Home Town by Tracy Kidder -- A wonderful, non-fiction evocation of small-town North Hampton, Massacheussets. I'm a sucker for any and every story set in a small town, and this real-life chronicle is a sober, warm-hearted doozy. We get into the lives and the loves of the mayor and the police chief, the town nut and the local druggies. It reminded me of my hometown, it made me feel nostalgic, it made me want to read it again, and it made me want to write a book just like it.

The Inner Circle by T.C.Boyle -- A fictional imagining of what it must have been like to have worked alongside famed sex researcher Dr.Kinsey during his groundbreaking investigations. If you've seen the movie Kinsey, this book makes a fascinating counterpoint; if you haven't, it's still an entertaining, eloquent look at the uncomfortable collision between the intellect, emotion, sex and societal convention.