HOW TO KNOW YOU'RE IN A RELIGIOUS PLACE

When the signs on the edges of the highway do not feature the speed limit but, instead, offer The Ten Commandments, from one to ten, every few kilometres or so, you know you're in a religious place.

VARIATIONS ON A THEME

I should be more psyched about Superman Returns. I should be counting down the days until it comes out. I should be stalking the theatre, demanding to see posters and props from the upcoming film. Given that I revered the Christopher Reeve films from the seventies and eighties, one would think that I'd be salivating at the relaunch of the franchise.

But perhaps that's part of the problem -- my love of the original films, that is. They formed the nucleus of my childhood. All four Superman films implanted something into my DNA that cannot be replicated or reproduced twenty some odd years later. That's what I'm realizing.

The new Superman movie will, I'm sure, rock. It even incorporates footage of Marlon Brando from the first picture, which is kind of cool, kind of scary. Because that fact, coupled with the fact that the new Superman, Brandon Routh, looks disturbingly like Christopher Reeve, makes me worry that the new flick will do nothing more than trade on our collective nostalgia for the earlier films. (Hell, the preview even features John Williams' original score, intact. Do I want to hear that again in Dolby sound? Hell yes. Does it scare me that the directors' are whoring out, in a sense, our collective goodwill from the first film? Hell yes.)

There's nothing wrong with nostalgia. I love it. Rewatching the original films makes me feel like an eight-year old again. But a new Superman should be just that -- new. When I watched the George Reeves' series from the 1950's as a kid, I liked the fact that it was different from the Christopher Reeve ones. (And am I the only one who finds it supremely, well, odd that the two major Supermans of the twentieth century had almost identical last names? I mean, what are the odds of that? 'Reeves' versus Reeve'. I don't know; I find it kind of cool, anyways.)

Everybody looked different, talked different, acted different in that old fifties show. It was old and odd and unique. The Superman mythos is valid enough and strong enough to sustain itself amidst a variety of different interpretations, from comic books to novels to cartoons to movies. (The same with the Batman character. The forties serials, Adam West's comedic version, Tim Burton's impressionistic rendering, Christopher Nolan's psychologically viable interpreation -- they're all great.) The various composions of Superman in various media are variations on a theme, that's all.

I worry, though, that the new Superman flick will not only be a variation on a theme, but a replaying of the theme itself, if you catch my drift. I'm sure the special-effects will rock. I'm sure it will tell the tale of Krypton's last son in a fresh, offbeat way. I hope that it's new enough to entice younger children into worshipping the Superman legend, and entertain us older geezers with a subtext of maturity and responsibility.

I guess I'm saying: I don't want the Christopher Reeve films, redone. If I want those flicks again, I'll tie my old Superman cape made by mother around my neck and fire up the DVD player, and lose myself again, and forget for a moment, that Reeve is dead and gone, that Margot Kidder went crazy for awhile, that a man can't truly fly. (Though watching those films, I do I do I do believe it is so...)

MARATHON MAN

Yesterday, while running my laps around the Baguio Hospital Parking Lot, I thought about an old Runner's World article I had recently read only a few days earlier that detailed Lance Armstrong's ex, Kristin, and her dream of finishing the New York City Marathon, and I started to think about Armstrong, and his retirement from cycling, and what an ultra-competitive guy like him actually does when he can no longer do what he always did, and I thought about that other excellent American cyclist from the eighties, Greg LeMond, and how he went into stock car racing, and I started to wonder if Armstrong would ever do something like that, or even if he would ever run a marathon, and take the risk of not only being possibly, in this event, average, but conceivably even finishing in a worse place and time than his ex-wife, and then I came home, washed, flipped on CNN, waited for Larry King, and saw the sportscaster announce that Lance Armstrong had decided he would run in this fall's New York City Marathon.

I don't know about you, and I don't know what this means, if anything, but it is fucking weird, is what I'm saying.

QUOTES I LIKE

The trouble with advice is that you don't know whether it's good or bad until you've taken it.

-- Frank Tyger


I get fascinated with anything I don't understand, and since I don't understand anything, I have a very busy life.

-- Joseph Esherck


Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.

-- Steven Wright

RICHARD NIXON IN THE BARBER'S CHAIR

Near the end of Woodward and Bernstein's fantastic book The Final Days, Richard Nixon, the soon-to-be-ex-president, sits himself down for a haircut. His last haircut. (As a president, that is.) His usual barber is summoned for the cut. They make small-talk for ten, fifteen minutes. And the whole exchange I found riveting, for two reasons: the fact that Nixon was getting ready to resign from the most powerful office on earth, and the fact that here, for a few moments, he was immobile. At someone else's mercy. Unable to move or write or do much of anything. In other words, the same way we all are, every one of us, whenever we place our asses down in that barber's chair.

Think about it. Getting a haircut is one of the few times in life, outside of meditation, where you have to just, well, sit. You can't read. You can't listen to music through your I-Pod. You can't watch TV, although some salons try to add that feature to their hairdressing experience, as you strain to see what's going on in the inverted images the mirror reflects back at you. You have to simply sit there, plain and simple, while some stranger with a sharp object cuts your little life away.

Every single time I sit myself down and set myself up for the sometimes subtle, often flagrant flicks and snips of a barber's blade, I find myself wondering about the person hovering over me like a benovelent, indifferent vulture. Who is he (or she)? How many heads have they cut today? How many heads have they cut total? What happens if they sneeze while the scissors are snipping my nosehairs? If the blade pierced through my nostrils, into my brain, would the pain be as instantaneous as the blood? (Yes, these are the kinds of things I think about...) Would I be able to sue them? How are they trained as barbers, anyways? Do they practice on models first -- plastic models, not Tyra-Banks models? My first day moving houses, I was told: "Don't tell anyone it's your first day." If I were to ask a barber how long they had been cutting hair and rinsing heads, and they replied that I was, in fact, their first customer, wish me luck, what would I say? What would I feel?

And I come back to that image of Nixon, in the barber's chair, getting his cut. I'm not sure why. It just seems so sad, almost pathetic. Most definitely human. Nothing for him to do but watch himself in the mirror. Ten, fifteen minutes of friendly chatting. His thoughts elsewhere. I think about Hitler, and Pol Pot, and Elvis Presley, and Brad Pitt, and Albert Einstein, and Wayne Gretzky, and that asshole at work you hate, the one with the bad jokes and even worse breath. At some point, every month or so, they're utterly placid. Almost alone. A sheet tied around their neck. Impotent, for all intents and purposes.

Whenever I'm intimidated by somebody's power or intellect, I just imagine them, alone, in the barber's chair, docile as a drugged-up child. Makes me feel calm, even connected to others. Perhaps only Nixon could have gone to China, yes, but even Nixon had to have a little off the sides, longer on top, every now and then.

EVEN SO

There's this scene in Almost Famous. You know the one. Young William has helped rescue and return Billy Crudup to the boys in the band on the tour bus, after the singer went AWOL and dropped acid at a neighbourhood party. They're all pissed off at each other, the band is. They're sulking. Everyone, silent, as the landscape blurs by the bus. From that magical place that exists only in the movies, music suddenly emerges, the subdued, confectious, contagious joy of Elton John's Tiny Dancer. As the song builds, the band beings to sing, united in their love for music, until ultimately Billy Crudup joins in, too, the animosity forgotten, the music binding their bond even tighter.

It's a scene that could have been sappy and trite, but the writer-director, Cameron Crowe, undercuts the good-natured togetherness by having William tell Penny Lane, the groupie, that he has to go home. "You are home," she answers, the look on his face indicating that he doesn't quite believe her. Or disbelieve her, for that matter. His confused, adolescent ambiguity is what transforms a feel-good scene into something deeper, darker, richer.

Even so. Watching that scene, I can believe, if only for a moment, that some things can last. I know, I know -- disease and age will eventually overtake us all, bring us all down for the count. Even so. Watching this scene, I can hear the music, and watch the world go by through the windows of a bus, and imagine, if only fleetingly, a togetherness and resonance that will endure, even ascend.