Hello Neon, Bye Bye Formula

…well, at least for the next 2 months or so.

Part I. The Crash. On December 4, 2007, on a cold (but not snowy) evening, I left work and drove down the road to go home. Turning a curve, the car spun out, and crashed backwards through the woods (I was acquitted of “failure to maintain control” due to my own pro se representation). The driver’s side window was completely destroyed, the driver’s side door banged up enough to prevent it opening (see pic above), and various other body panels also suffered their fair share of damage. The passenger side tie rod end was busted, meaning the car is neither steerable nor drivable, though it fires right up on all 8 poorly injected cylinders.
The insurance company, sending out a special adjuster who divides a car’s fair market value by half and issues a check for that, and yanking rental car coverage before it had even issued that pathetically inadequate check, was happy to rip me off and reward me for 15 years of loyalty. So I had to go down to Woodbridge, to a large used car auction dealership, and snatch the first cheapo econobox that wasn’t a total piece of shit.

Part II. The 1995 Plymouth Neon. Actually, the car is pretty nice. Smurf blue, fairly clean grey interior, automatic transmission, with working air conditioning and 4 wheel antilock brakes. It had no stereo, so I had to get a nice one from Crutchfield, a Pioneer CD player with one of those incredibly cool but equally distracting blue screen displays. I installed it myself, aside from some help from Myer-Emco because the factory harness refused to supply a constant 12 volt power supply. I also got floor mats with the embroidered “Plymouth” logo, as the car didn’t even have any mats. But the car passed inspection with just a new fog light and cleaning up the headlights, and passed emissions with flying colors.

Part III. Formula vs. Neon. Hmm. 5.7L OHV V8 vs. 2.0L SOHC I4. 300 horsepower and 350 lb-ft of torque vs. 134 HP and about 120 lb-ft of torque. Black on black vs. blue on grey. RWD vs. FWD. WS6 performance suspension on 245/50ZR16 tires, vs. go-cart suspension on 185/65R14 tires. Although the Neon is lighter, it doesn’t handle nearly as well as the Formula, and it has a cheap, small, fragile tin can feel to it which doesn’t inspire any sense of safety or security – despite the anti-lock brakes, which work as though the brakes are failing, not working properly thanks to higher technology than the older brakes on the Formula. In all these categories the Formula is definitely superior.

But in two categories, which you can probably guess, the Neon triumphs: INSURANCE went down by almost 50%, from $140/month to $80 a month (for a code 10 Neon vs. a code 20 Firebird Formula) and FUEL ECONOMY jumped dramatically, from 13 mpg in the Formula to 24 mpg in the Neon. Instead of filling up every 3 days with 93 octane gas, it’s every week with 87 octane. The econobox does have its advantages.

I did do some research, and discovered that performance parts are available for this Neon. Header (as in ONE), cat-back exhaust, SOHC camshafts from Crane and Zex, and a few other parts. But it’s not nearly as much as for the Formula and even with all those parts thrown in together, the HP would still be only something like 180, well short of the 240 HP the Formula had in stock condition, never mind the modified condition it’s in now. Perform the same modifications on a V8 and you’d be seeing twice the overall output, in a car that’s only 50% heavier. There’s a reason hot rodders have preferred V8 muscle cars for so long. These stupid rice racers and import/compact tuner crowds act as though they invented a hobby which didn’t exist in any real sense before 1998 or so (for their crappy excuse for performance cars) – whereas Edelbrock was modifying the Camaro as soon as it came out in 1967 and Hot Rod has been published since 1948. Bootleggers had been souping up their Model Ts and Deuces (first mass-produced V8, Ford in 1932…first small-block Chevy V8, 1955) long before Toyota, Honda and Nissan were out of their automotive diapers. Hoorah for “Fast & Furious 2” for showing us some REAL cars: the Yenko Camaro (’69 w/a 427) and a ’70 Hemi Challenger.

Fortunately, the Formula isn’t dead, it’s merely resting in a lot down in Stafford. Someday, it might rise from the ashes like its namesake. We’ll have to see. But at least in the meantime I have the Smurf-blue Neon to drive.

Stoner Rock 101

I suppose it started with Hawkwind…Pink Floyd….Blue Cheer…maybe even Captain Beyond. Up until the early 90s, heavy metal was alive and well, as we could see in “Heavy Metal Parking Lot”. Then Nirvana came around and ruined it all with grunge (see my grunge blog). Now we have “nu-metal”, Good Charlotte, A Simple Plan, Disturbed, etc. all the dazzlingly brilliant and original (ha!) bands on the Ozzfest. Hold on, where’s the real metal? And I don’t mean Manowar….


I’m talking about bands that know, understand, and live for riffs, guitars, guitar solos, old-school, old-style banging around like …Black Sabbath, who are probably the most important influence to many of these bands. But despite the name, you don’t have to smoke dope, or get stoned, to listen to this or enjoy it, although obviously many of these bands are probably chemically inspired in different ways, to various degrees. For some reason many of the bands come from California. Oddly, there’s little jamming and not much psychedelic (except for Gas Giant) – just straightforward heavy guitars and good fun.


So what passes for real metal these days is best known as “stoner rock” and will not be found opening for Ozzy or Black Sabbath. Maybe just as well, because it means we can see these bands at local clubs for $20 a ticket and maybe even meet the band members after the show. Who are these bands? Here are a few of the most important (i.e. these are not only the ones I’m most familiar with, but who are also the most popular and tour the most – with the exception of sHEavy, mentioned below - and the list is by no means exhaustive):


Kyuss. They are considered the first stoner rock band, if you leave out Hawkwind and Black Sabbath (precursor bands). I actually saw them in concert years ago and can’t remember a thing. D’oh!


Queens of the Stone Age. Derivative of Kyuss thanks to Josh Homme. Despite the name, none of the band members are female. This is one of these more original bands with its own sound that’s hard to describe, but it’s definitely heavy and definitely different. My favorite album is Rated R. I’ve been able to see them a few times, including with Dave Grohl of Nirvana on drums (Songs for the Deaf tour).


Fu Manchu. If Black Sabbath were surfers and into vans, cars, etc. you’d have Fu Manchu. Scott Hill is a bit smarter, and has a better voice, than Ozzy. IMHO, their best album is King of the Road. This is the band of these that I’ve probably seen the most.


Nebula. A three-piece that used to be ¾ of Fu Manchu, with Scott Hill being the 4^th who remained the core of Fu Manchu. Nebula sound almost the same, though with a more spacey riffing and losing the vans & surfing themes.


Monster Magnet. From New Jersey, and led by Dave Wyndorf, the closest thing to a rock personality that stoner rock has. They have several albums and are heavily influenced by Hawkwind – they even covered “Brainstorm” and “The Right Stuff.”


Atomic Bitchwax. This started out as a side project of Monster Magnet guitarist Ed Mundell, but now has a life of its own with replacement guitarist Finn Ryan, who looks like a blond version of Jason Lee. More riff-oriented than Monster Magnet; my favorite song is (surprise, surprise) “Black Trans Am.” They even cover Deep Purple’s “Maybe I’m A Leo.” I got to meet the band in Baltimore and talk to Chris Koznik, the bassist/singer.


Electric Wizard. From England, EW tune the guitars down to C and really, really drone on. Their album Dopethrone should be a dead giveaway (wizard w/bong) as to their inclinations. Imagine Black Sabbath slowed down half speed…and you have Electric Wizard.


Acid King. Now…substitute a female singer in EW and you have….Acid King. Pretty much the same deal. They do an excellent cover of BTO’s “Not Fragile.”


sHeavy. Of all these bands, sHeavy have by far the closest sound to Black Sabbath, thanks to the singer, Steve Hennessy, who does a dead on Ozzy impression. For some reason, this Canadian band doesn’t tour. I finally saw the DVD that comes with their latest album, The Machine That Won The War, and could see why: half the band (aside from Hennessy, who looks like he belongs in a band) look like they have day jobs, wife & kids, etc. and can’t go off on a money-losing tour of Canada or the US. Too bad, as they are damn good.


Fireball Ministry. These guys sound like 70’s Black Sabbath with 90’s-era Ozzy singing.


Pentagram. The DC area’s Black Sabbath. Remarkably, they’ve been around since the 70s yet only put out an album until the 80s. The only consistent member is singer Bobby Liebling, though their drummer, Joey Hasselvander, recently played drums for Blue Cheer, and I found out that Liebling was at the Blue Cheer show I saw at Krug’s Place in Frederick, Maryland (see the shot of me and Dickie Peterson on my Yahoo 360 album).


The Suplecs. A trio from New Orleans. Fortunately they’ve survived Katrina, but I haven’t seen them tour around this area yet. “Cities of the Dead” is my favorite song, and they do a knockout cover of the Beatles’ “She’s So Heavy.”


Gas Giant. These guys are from Denmark, not to be confused with an Arizona band called the Gas Giants. They have two albums, Mana and Pleasant Journey in Heavy Tunes, both of which are fantastic. They actually have some pretty psychedelic stuff going on, more so than even Hawkwind these days.


Orange Goblin. This was one of the first of these bands I heard, and I got to see them play in Baltimore. Pretty damn good. They are one of the more Sabbath-oriented groups, though the earlier material from the first three albums, Frequencies from Planet Ten, Time Travelling Blues, and The Big Black, are the trippiest.


Lowrider. Teleport Orange Goblin from England to Sweden and you have…Lowrider.


Valkyrie &The Sword. For some reason I put these two together and can’t pull them apart in my mind. They both sound the same. I suppose it’s because The Sword evoke a lot of Norse mythology, which matches up with the name of Valkyrie. They should definitely tour together.


Wolfmother. This new band from Australia gets lumped in with these other bands. They’ve been compared to Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin, but I hear more Grand Funk Railroad – but I seem to be the only one making that connection.


Even within this narrowly limited genre of rock music, there is much variety, but in addition to cool riffs, they share a remarkable talent for cool album covers, as you can see.

H.P. Lovecraft

This one was way overdue. I’d actually referred to Howard Phillips (H.P.) Lovecraft in previous entries but never gave him star billing until now. He’s a horror writer whose active years were 1915 to 1936, but who didn’t become famous until the 60s, thirty years after his death. I started reading his stories in high school, and re-read them periodically to this day. I’m not a fan of horror, whether books (haven’t read a single Steven King story) or movies (don’t waste my time with that crap) but I make an exception for Lovecraft.

Life. Born in 1890, died in 1937, Lovecraft spent most of his life in New England, specifically Providence, Rhode Island, where he’s buried – with a brief spell spent in New York City when he was married to Sonia Greene. Hardly surprisingly, most of his stories take place there too – with one story, “The Horror at Red Hook”, based in NYC. He wrote short stories for Weird Tales and other pulp magazines, plus a fair amount of amateur journalism, the latter recently compiled into a book called Miscellaneous Writings, which collects his nonfiction. He missed out on WWI (“The Great War”). He travelled to the South and was both a major Anglophile – making it a point to give all his words English spellings when appropriate – and a Confederate sympathizer despite being a Yankee’s Yankee.

Stories. These were published separately during his lifetime and mostly ignored except by other writers in his circle of friends, which included Robert E. Howard of “Conan” fame. His friend August Derleth compiled them into book format in the 60s, and at this point finally – long after his death – people began to pay attention to him at last. They vary from short stories and poems all the way to longer epics like “At The Mountains of Madness” and “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”

By now there are two volumes of “Annotated H.P. Lovecraft”, which include extremely helpful and illuminating annotations to the stories, explaining obscure references or archaic terms, in many cases clarifying points which may have been common knowledge to a reader of Weird Tales in the 20s and 30s but would be completely alien to a modern reader. Unfortunately the two books come nowhere close to covering all of Lovecraft’s stories.

   Lovecraft’s angle is that there are vast, cosmic secrets which man is too small, puny, and insignificant to understand or even grasp. Man is alone in a hostile universe. Strange entities from outer space, including Cthulhu, the Deep Ones, the Old Ones, the Great Race, all colonized Earth before even the dinosaurs roamed the planet, building vast cities in what are now remote, desolate areas. These deities and races consistently pop up in his stories, referred by him as “Yog Sothery” but today are well known as “the Cthulhu Mythos”.

His top stories are:

At the Mountains of Madness. Actually published in Astounding Stories instead of Weird Tales, which rejected it. Antarctic explorers find an ancient alien civilization dating before the dinosaurs, buried deep within the mountains. The aliens are the Old Ones, barrel-shaped with star-shaped heads and membranous wings. Their slaves are the shoggoths, semi-sentient gelatinous beings. The hero, stunned enough to find all this, finds even more horrors: the civilization isn’t quite dead….

The Call of Cthulhu. Considered his masterpiece. An artist has mysterious dreams, and finds that others around the world have been having similar nightmares at the same time. A police detective finds a bizarre cult in the swamps of Louisiana – which matches other cults in equally remote locations across the world, all disturbingly similar. Finally, a ship finds Rl’yeh, a city of non-Euclidian geometry sunken deep in the Pacific, which rises above the waves “when the stars are right.” The HP Lovecraft Appreciation Society produced a B&W silent movie version of this story which is probably the best movie adaptation of any Lovecraft story produced by anyone at any time.

The Shadow Out of Time. A university professor falls into a bizarre trance for 5 years, then wakes up with a strange, but imperfect, form of amnesia. Soon thereafter he starts having strange nightmares of a prehistoric city in Australia full of cone-shaped aliens – and he is one of them. Eventually he goes to Australia and finds the city…and finds that he knows his way around despite never having been there before. As if the city itself wasn’t horrifying enough, he finds something even worse.

The Colour Out of Space. A strange meteor lands in backwoods New England. Soon the farm near it is corrupted, everything turning to grey dust. The family goes mad and eventually perish in a horrible fashion. The excellent horror of this is that the malevolent entity is not some doofus in a hockey mask or a Fedora with wisecracks and razor nails, but an impersonal, mindless substance from outer space which defies the scientists’ best efforts to identify it or analyze it.

The Whisperer in Darkness. A Vermont man is abducted by strange fungi-like aliens from Yuggoth (Pluto) and horribly corrupted.  The HPLHS people followed up "The Call of Cthulhu" with an adaptation of this one as a "talkie", which they couldn't resist: the buzzing sound made by the Mi-Go as they attempt human speech.  The film adaptation is super creepy and very well done.

The Shadow Over Innsmouth. A Massachusetts town has a horrible secret: it has been cross-breeding with bizarre monsters from beneath the waves. The protagonist discovers the secret and barely escapes, for the time being. After doing some research into his own genealogy, he finds his own relationship to Innsmouth is closer than he imagined – too close.

The Dunwich Horror. A corrupt family breeds a half-monster son, Wilbur Whatley, whose quest for The Necronomicon at Miskatonic University ends in his death. But the monster he had been hiding at home, an invisible monstrosity, no longer fed prodigious amounts of raw meat, breaks out and terrorizes the local town. Finally a doctor, who has himself educated himself with The Necronomicon, leads a small group of brave townspeople to defeat the monster – with magic.

He also liked fantasy, indulged in the extended epic “Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath”. It’s good, but not nearly as good as Howard, Tolkien or Moorcock. He has one (1!) science fiction story, “In The Walls of Eryx.” He co-wrote a story with Harry Houdini, “Imprisoned with Pharaohs”, which I read on my trip to Egypt in high school.

His writing is extremely pedantic and he uses lots of arcane, obscure, and archaic verbiage. Women are almost nonexistent, except the villain in “The Thing on the Doorstep”, and the hero never has a love interest (no, not even a male love interest – according to Sonia Greene, Lovecraft was not gay) unlike the Robert E. Howard stories based on the same mythos; Howard takes the pedantic language down a notch and his heroes – notably Conan – are more muscular men of action than Lovecraft’s intellectual dreamers. The compendium of Howard-written Cthulhu Mythos stories is called Nameless Cults. Many stories begin with the narrator about to commit suicide because he can’t live with the horrible knowledge he now possesses, and the story consists of telling us what he learned (so we, in turn, can also kill ourselves. Thanks, asshole.) Others, such as “The Lurking Fear” and “The Rats in the Walls”, concern bloodlines irretrievably corrupted with debauchery and insanity. Insanity is also a common theme: someone’s mind breaks from having seen too much, and they end up locked away in an asylum, babbling disjointed fragments of Cthulhu Mythos jargon in various obscure, ancient, and dead languages no one would have occasion to learn.

Since by now I’ve read all the stories, some more than twice, my tolerance for his ponderous verbosity is less than when I was 15 and reading the stories for the first time. Even Tolkien is easier to digest in large quantities than Lovecraft. And I find that, unlike many other books, such as Atlas Shrugged, where I found something much different as a 30-something reader than I did as a 15 year old, with Lovecraft I still find the same thing over and over again. Even so, for a newcomer the charm and horror should be fresh and new.

The Necronomicon. Throughout the stories a fictional book, The Necronomicon, periodically plays a role, most importantly in “The Dunwich Horror”. Supposedly written by a mad Arab in the Middle Ages, it contains horrific knowledge and means to summon various unbelievably vile monsters and deities. Of course, the book doesn’t exist, it was merely created by Lovecraft as a plot device, though that hasn’t stopped plenty of people from believing, quite seriously, that it does exist. In fact, twenty years ago I found a “real copy” years ago at B. Dalton, of all places, which turned out to be a complete paperback Charmin – full of “Sumerian mythos” spells in Enochian and having zero to do with Lovecraft. Apparently someone thought they could throw this BS together, call it “The Necronomicon” and make some easy cash. Avoid at all costs, as it’s not even particularly interesting on its own merits. It’s not even worth picking up for $1 at a used book store, thrift shop, or garage sale.
More recently Donald Tyson took a stab at it, and scored 100%. Not only does he evoke the Mad Arab – giving him a complete motive behind his depraved lifestyle – he takes us on a tour of Egypt, Damascus, Memphis, Thebes, Babylon, the Nameless City of Irem, Stonehenge, the Plateau of Leng, the Tower of Babel, and even the Garden of Eden. All your favorite Lovecraft villains are here: Cthulhu, Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep, Azathoth, Yig, Shub-Niggurath, and Dagon. He dovetails the Cthulhu Mythos into the Bible and everything we think of as pre-Christian Middle Eastern history, weaving it in with a subtlety and cleverness that even Lovecraft couldn’t manage. I like that he effected the style of how Arabs write, and didn’t fall into the trap of trying to evoke Lovecraft’s style of writing. It’s probably the best Lovecraft-related fiction not written by Lovecraft himself.

Movies. Some of his stories have been made into movies, with varying degrees of faithfulness and success. The most notable are “Herbert West: Reanimator” and “The Dunwich Horror” (featuring Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whately). John Carpenter’s “The Thing” takes place in Antarctica and has a definite Lovecraft influence. Even “Ghostbusters” had a Lovecraft element, this whole business of the post-WWI architect and the apartment building; and there is an episode of the animated Ghostbusters series in which they actually take on Cthulhu himself. Probably the best was the “Call of Cthulhu” silent movie mentioned above. Part of the problem with the Lovecraft movies is that he became popular in the 60s, and the idiots cluelessly expropriating the story names to make films had NO IDEA what his books were about and simply took a stock “ooh, scary spooky monster!” type film and slapped the Lovecraft name on it, obviously hoping to cash in on it. The recent Stuart Gordon films (“Reanimator” and “From Beyond”) are a case in point: 99% gross-out, disgusting crap, when Lovecraft was all about situations and horrible truths, a huge, horrible cosmic picture, not someone’s intestines falling out on the floor. I’m not a fan of horror movies, for that reason, aside from “The Sixth Sense”, which was put together like a Swiss watch and not simply an endless barrage of decapitations and disembowlments.

Music. The obvious one here is the band H.P. Lovecraft, a 60s psychedelic band similar to Iron Butterfly. They have two albums, but only one song, “At the Mountains of Madness”, based on Lovecraft: the rest is typical 60s pop music. Metallica have two songs, “The Call of Ktulu” and “The Thing That Should Not Be”, based on Lovecraft. But I discovered that you can literally write a whole book just on Lovecraft-inspired music, because someone did: The Strange Sound of Cthulhu, by Gary Hill.

Of course, the best site to check out is the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society at http://www.cthulhulives.org/toc.html. Check it out.

Last Tango in Paris vs. 9 1/2 Weeks vs. Fatal Attraction

Three films, two of which are supposed to be highly erotic, and the third a sensational thriller. Verdict? No, no, and NO.


Last Tango in Paris. The plot from this was loosely ripped off to make “9 ½ weeks”, and like that film this is more disturbing, pretentious, and fucked up than erotic. Marlon Brando plays an American living in Paris whose wife has just been brutally murdered. He meets the chick (Maria Schneider) and they engage in an anonymous love affair in a rented apartment into which neither of them moves into, except for the barest of furniture and a mattress on the floor. Each time they meet up there, they have sex and engage in pointless chatter about random topics. Eventually the affair turns sour when Brando starts acting extremely weird and abusive, for no apparent reason, a similar ending as with “9 ½ Weeks”. I will say, though, that Maria Schneider is very cute – far sexier than Kim Basinger - and Marlon Brando is handsome in a less annoying and more endearing way than Mickey Rourke. But he still turned out to be a jerk in this film. Plus, it’s PARIS.


9½ Weeks. Supposedly the hottest, sexiest, steamiest movie around. I can see why people seem to think so, but it didn’t do much for me. Kim Basinger plays an art gallery owner, Mickey Rourke plays a stockbroker. Gee, 1986...can we do anything original here? Apparently the deal is they have this steamy relationship for... 9½ weeks. She’s divorced, his marital status is unknown. He’s kind of creepy but also mysterious in a sexy way. They have lots of passionate sex in various ways, including food in the kitchen, out in the rain in a dark alley (after fighting off some thugs – danger! adrenaline! aphrodisiac!), the ice cube down the hot body shit, etc. In this sense the movie is far more adventurous and ambitious than “Last Tango”, where all the sex takes place in one semi-abandoned apartment. Of course the guy can cook (all romantic men in these movies can cook, and it’s always sexy food, not frozen pizza or tater tots) but eventually he gets too kinky and drives the relationship into bizarre places which no longer feel sexy or arousing but simply annoying and perverted. I was never that attracted to Kim Basinger, and surely if there was any film calculated to change my mind about her, this is the one. She is pretty, though, without being sexy – at least not to me.


Fatal Attraction. Remarkably, I had NEVER seen this film before. To round out my collection, so to speak, I rented this one from Netflix. Here’s a not-so-brief synopsis.
Michael Douglas plays Dan Gallagher, a successful lawyer in New York City with a beautiful wife (Anne Archer) and a daughter (Ellen) who looks like a son. He meets Alex Forest (Glenn Close) (similarly, a woman who looks like a man – I can’t imagine ANY amount of alcohol, or any drug, which would make me get in bed with her) at a cocktail party and hooks up with her soon thereafter, when his wife and daughter are off in the countryside (Long Island? Connecticut? Who knows). Since Alex knows that Dan is married – happily so, though not for long – Dan assumes that Alex can figure out that their passionate weekend was all it could be, and will leave him alone after that.

WRONG. Alex grows possessive and obsessive, announces she’s pregnant with Dan’s child, threatens to tell Dan’s wife, and begins calling him at work, then showing up at work, then calling him at home and showing up at home. She cooks Ellen’s rabbit, destroys Dan’s car, and even takes Ellen off to an amusement park, driving the wife crazy. The woman is the quintessential “psycho bitch”.

Realizing he has to defuse the situation somehow, Dan tells his wife about the affair. Needless to say, she ain’t happy. They split apart for some time, to give the wound time to heal. Meanwhile, Alex keeps getting more and more bizarre and dangerous.

Finally she attacks them in their own home. After she appears to be drowned, she suddenly revives and wife shoots her dead with Dan’s revolver. People seem to make a big deal about this, but her “death” lasted only a minute or so, she never left the bathtub, and wife quickly finishes her off. It’s not nearly as disturbing as the Terminator’s comeback from several different “deaths”: (1) blasted several times at point blank range by Reese with a shotgun; (2) slammed into the concrete barrier head-on at 90 mph in a stolen police car; (3) run over by the 18 wheeler truck; (4) incinerated in the same truck, reduced to the “alloy combat frame”, a walking metallic skeleton; (5) blasted in half by a stick of dynamite stuck in his midsection. He’s FINALLY destroyed in the press machine by Sarah Conner. Alex’s ONE revival hardly measures against Arnold’s standard.

The DVD includes an alternate ending in which Alex kills herself by slitting her own throat (Madame Butterfly style – the female version of seppuku). The police arrest Dan on suspicion of her murder, but the wife discovers Alex’s tape in which she threatens to kill herself if Dan doesn’t go back to her; wife brings the tape to the police, and we can assume that Dan is eventually absolved of Alex’s suicide. Actually it’s not such a bad ending; it just lacks the energy and suspense that the original ending had.

A few notes: (1) Who on Earth considers Glenn Close – here done up as seductive as anyone short of Lucas’ Industrial Light and Magic could achieve – attractive? She looks like a MAN in drag. Anne Archer isn’t the hottest woman on the planet, but she is clearly a woman. (2) Crazy woman = great fuck. A familiar theme in various movies, and a popular consensus among some men. Even if were true, though, that still consigns crazy women to be mistresses and not wives. On a long term basis, I think I speak for 99% of men when I say I’d gladly accept a sex life that was less than “animal sex 24/7” in exchange for a wife I know won’t kill me in my sleep. The subcategory to this is, probably 80% of men would accept a sex life that was less than “animal sex 24/7” in exchange for a wife we knew would remain faithful to us. Great sex doesn’t make up for constant paranoia that the woman is cheating on you. And these great-sex-but-can’t-keep-her-panties-on women wonder why no man wants to marry them. (3) Do as we say, not as we do. Hollywood again gives us a movie warning against marital infidelity, yet we know how faithful Hollywood celebrities are to their spouses – no more so than any other Americans.

Rio Trips I-V

After New Year’s Eve, spent in exotic (and ice cold) Alexandria, Virginia, I’m reminded of two far more special New Year’s Eves, spent south of the Equator…in Rio de Janeiro. Five trips in total from 2000-2005, including two at New Year’s Eve (none during Carnival, unfortunately). My companion was a beautiful Brazilian woman, born and raised in Rio, chamada Leila.

Rio Trip I. June-July 2000. This was my first trip. It was winter in Rio, though “winter” means 70 degrees, fog on the beach, and it gets dark at 6 p.m. We stayed in a temporada (furnished apartment) in Copacabana: on Domingas Ferreiras in between Constante Ramos and Santa Clara, just a block off from Avenue Atlantica. July 4^th was nothing, as we were not invited to the festivities hosted by the US Consulate at the EARJ (American School of Rio de Janeiro). I did get to see Pão de Açucar, Cristo Redentor – as the sun was setting – and got my first two soccer jerseys, Flamengo and Botafogo. We met Leila’s sister, her mother, her nephew, and even her younger daughter’s godfather. Our last day was drama getting back from Barra da Tijuca in time to make the 9 p.m. flight home.

This trip set the tone for the rest, and gave me the earliest memories.
1. The ride in from the airport, Galleão, aka Tom Jobim (code GIG). The bay on the left, the favelas on the right, before the cab comes into the southern zone, then hits Avenue Atlantica, before depositing us off at our destination.

2. Brazilian beer: Brahma, Antarctica, Skol, and many others. With such good Brazilian beer, foreign beer – though available – is hardly necessary. And chopp (draft beer) is the best, preferably with some pastelzinhos or batata fritas.

3. Brazilian food. Churrasco! Delicious meat, all different cuts, cooked juicy and pink. A vegetarian would be hard-pressed to remain faithful with all this fantastic carne everywhere, and for such reasonable prices you can eat steak every day and not go broke.

4. Brazilian TV: lots of soccer, and those damn novellas. Unlike the US soap operas, the Brazilian variants only last one season; each season a whole new slew gets cranked out by the geniuses at TV Globo. Usually there is at least one set in old times (Portugal, old Brazil, or the early 20^th Century) and one comic one, with an adult-oriented one (no nudity, though) at 10 p.m. after the meninos and meninas have gone to sleep. My favorites were “Uga Uga” and “O Cravo e a Rosa.”

5. Temporada. Instead of being in a hotel, isolated with tourists from the rest of the local population, we stayed in a furnished apartment (except trips IV and V when Leila was actually living back in Rio), among the other regular residents going about their daily lives. We shopped at the local supermarket (Zona Sul, Sendas, or Pão de Açucar), walked along the same streets, and ate in our kitchen like anyone else.

6. Beaches. Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon. They’re excellent to simply lay on the sand on a towel and get a tan, if you pace yourself, wear the right strength sunscreen, and pick the right time. Oddly, you can get burned on a cloudy day. Fortunately I usually managed to get a modest tan without getting burned, mainly because we never seemed to have enough time to tan every day. Of course, the girls on the beach were certainly worth enjoying the view.

Rio Trip II. December ’00-January ’01. We got there after Christmas, but in time for New Year’s Eve. We stayed in yet another temporada in Ipanema (Barrão de Torre in between Garcia D’Avila and Anibal de Mendoça). I had to leave before Rock in Rio to get back for a job…which I lost anyway. It was raining on the beach of Copacabana, near Leme, on NYE but the fireworks went off anyway. Getting back to our place in Ipanema was a nightmare, it took over an hour. We also managed to see, on TV, the Vasco-São Caetano game which ended in a brawl in 12/31 (featured in the Steve Harris section of Iron Maiden’s “Rock in Rio” DVD). I completed the set of jerseys by getting Vasco da Gama and Fluminense. This time I went back to Cristo Redentor, now that it was summer there – much better lighting conditions.

Rio Trip III. December ’02-January ’03. We came again for New Year’s Eve, this time staying in Copacabana, off Nossa Senhora de Copacabana and Barrão de Ipanema. Her younger daughter was staying with us, her older daughter stayed with friends – the first time all four of us were in Rio together. We rented a Fiat Palio for two days and went to Buzios, a little beach town on the coast where Brigitte Bardot used to go. This time it wasn’t raining on NYE and our voyage back to the apartment took all of 15 minutes. For the last two days we stayed at the Sheraton Hotel. Her older daughter bought a miniature pinscher, Sula, in Curitiba.

Rio Trip IV. January-February ’04. By this time Leila had moved back to Rio and was living in Copacabana on Barata Ribeiro near Republica de Peru. I got there before Carnival. This was the trip I finally got to see Flamengo play at Maracana, vs. Fluminense. An amazing game, Flamengo won 4-3. Immediately after the game we went directly to the Lord Jim Pub in Ipanema to watch the Patriots-Panthers Super Bowl.

Rio Trip V. January-February ’05. Yet again, I got there, and left, before Carnival. Leila had moved to Leblon, off Bartholomeu Mitre, 6 blocks from the beach and 2 blocks from Flamengo’s complex. We did get a chance to go to several blocos, including Suvaco de Cristo. These are rowdy street parties a week before Carnival, in which the street is closed off to traffic, and a crazy, drunk, noisy crowd winds its way down the street. I enjoyed several beers and some mystery meat on a stick, dipped in sawdust. Then it was back to the US for more cold weather.
A cidade a mais maravilhosa do mundo…é verdade. Saudades dela….