Brian the Chicken Fryer?

On Sunday, I played Risk, the classic game of world domination. JJ, Megan, Mariah and I sat on a blanket in the park and let the sun warm our bodies as we slaughtered hordes of imaginary millions for our own amusement. A puppy someone else brought bounded around awkwardly nearby as its owner seemed to take pleasure in sharing with it what must have been one of its first park experiences. Even more nearby, a large group of twentysomethings arranged a first-rate picnic. They had a little hibachi, coolers, multifarious blankets, and more importantly, several kites, including a pink Barbie kite, which they proceeded to lodge in a tree, one of barky those millions that line the aesthetically pleasing modern shore of Lake Michigan north of Chicago. But why would I tell you people all of that? This doesn’t seem like that kind of blog, does it? Of course it doesn’t. And isn’t. But think about those twentysomethings. Think about the four of us, and think about the puppy’s owner. Does the fact that one of the twentysomethings is about to move to Nashville for his residency matter? Do we need to know that he’s in med school? Do you need to know that I teach English? Much like Martin Blank, “I don’t think necessarily what a person does for a living reflects who he is.”

Like Martin Blank, Tyler Durden in Fight Club holds a system of belief that doesn’t associate vocation with identity in the sense that most Americans do. Tyler Durden doesn’t care if you’re a waiter, an auto mechanic, janitor, a junior associate manager, or an accountant. That makes no difference to him. What matters instead is how effectively you can battle against the system in order to break free of it. By the end of the film, Tyler doesn’t pay big-time rent. He doesn’t own a car. He doesn’t want digital cable, or a clever end table in the shape of a yin-yang. Instead, he’s destroyed credit card companies and set the credit record back to zero. He’s managed to extort a year’s salary out of a despicable automobile company. He’s destroyed a number of those horrid chain retailers that make our landscape so disgustingly uniform that an intelligent person might no longer be able to tell whether he or she were in the suburbs of Seattle, Austin, or Newark. Our hero, Durden’s transcended the work week and made something interesting of himself. He is not Tyler Durden the waiter or Tyler Durden the Soapmaker.

I can only hope that in my future as an attorney, people will know me as Brian, not as Brian the Lawyer, and that at present, people know me as Brian, not as Brian the Disgruntled English Instructor. At the same time, how could our occupations, those things with which we spend exponentially more hours than we do with each other each week, not affect our identities? If I go to law school and spend 60 hours a week studying law, how do I avoid becoming Brian the Law Student? How much do you consider your identities to include your vocations? Does this bother you?

Ah, the beer flick...

Last weekend, while in Chicago visiting JJ and Megan, I had the good fortune to see Wedding Crashers at the Brew & View, an old converted theatre where patrons come to see a double feature for five bucks and drink the beer that can be purchased at the two bars in the back of the room. This, like many things tend to do, got me thinking. What are some of the best drinking movies? Now, I'm not talking necessarily about movies that involve a lot of drinking, though some of the ones I'll mention do, but about those during which viewers might particularly enjoy a few brewskies.

Of course, The Big Lebowski warrants first mention. My old roommate and compadre Bridger introduced me to this film, which I saw for the first time (for all you Griz alumni) in Urey Lecture Hall. I know that people have tried to match the dude white russian for white russian while watching this film, but that's impossible, and it's just inviting disaster. No one wants to consume that many mixed drinks in 117 minutes. I've also heard of people playing a game in which participants have to take a sip of their drink every time someone says an obscenity. If the white russian for white russian thing is inviting disaster, this other game is inviting death itself. I mean, seriously, the dude knows how to swear. But the point is that this film must be one of the best drinking films since it is so absurd and since it has inspired such hard-core drinking games in the past. I'm sure there are reasonable ways to practice structured drinking during The Big Lebowski, but I haven't devoted much time to thinking of them. Suggestions, perhaps?

Top Gun seems to come to mind at this point, and I know JJ and I have often suggested playing a drinking game in which participants take a drink every time there's a reference to sex. A bit extreme, perhaps, but nothing like the swearing game accompanying The Big Lebowski. In any case, Top Gun's classic cheesiness seems to lend itself to the sort of mindset involved in drinking beer while watching a film. And this film is so familiar to many of us that we don't even have to pay much attention to it while we watch. I know I could flip off some belligerent mig pilots and make a pass at my flight instructor while fetching beers from the fridge.

But anyway, even though I've only suggested two films, I'm calling it a blog. I'm sure there are many possibilities here, and perhaps over this season of holidays some of us will get together and explore them.

In the beginning, there was High Fidelity

Clearly, the logical place to start something like this is that film from the year 2000, that film entitled High Fidelity. Even if it didn’t bring about as original material the idea that what we read, listen to, and watch is important, certainly it gave a certain cinematic presence to it, or articulated it in ways the rest of us didn’t imagine. Its top-five lists and constant references to popular movies and music place it in the same genre as this potentially ill-fated blog. Without the popular culture surrounding it, the film High Fidelity couldn’t have existed in any meaningful way.

When I think actively about this movie, which I frequently do, I can’t help pondering the scene near the beginning of the film in which Rob and Dick are listening to “the new Belle & Sebastian” in the record store when Barry barges in and replaces Belle & Sebastian’s melodious melancholy with a mix tape populated by some kind of offensive 80s-sounding pop. Before Barry barges in, Dick lovingly and curiously mentions that what he and Rob are listening to is, in fact, “the new Belle & Sebastian.” I can’t help remembering at this point, from my own experience, Carolyn C’s awareness of said band in high school, and her presenting to several of us that album cover of “Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant,” on which a woman seems to interrogate some manifestation of her own reflection. At any rate, I can recall Carolyn playing this music for us, and I can recall feeling as the result of this band’s work the same sort of comforting, homelike presence which Dick and Rob clearly experience in that early morning, workaday scene of High Fidelity. But then Barry comes in with his offensive mix tape, representing the mass of mainstream culture who have no appreciation for the harmonies of something like Belle & Sebastian. During that era, in the mid to late nineties, neither Carolyn nor I could very well have gone to school and talked to anyone about Belle & Sebastian. Bethel Park and Peters Township are not communities suited to the appreciation of that sort of cultural pleasure.

But apart from the Belle & Sebastian scene, the thing I revisit most frequently in High Fidelity has to be the scene featuring Rob standing outside, nearly under the L in the Chicago rain, yelling “Charlie! You fucking bitch! Let’s work it out!” toward his ex-girlfriend’s condensation-filled window. I’ve visited JJ and Megan’s place in Chicago and gone places on the L many times, and this scene seems to encapsulate that quintessentially Chicago experience while at the same time paying respect to the hurt everyone has felt at the breakup of some significant relationship. JJ and I have, at intervals too frequent to enumerate, recited this line to one another, albeit with mostly humorous intentions. Still, it’s at least a second something that resonates with the film’s audience, and this constitutes a presence in viewers’ minds that most films can’t claim to generate.