news from the haunted fishtank

I've continued my journey through the James Bond films. Despite the ubiquitous viewer passions, there are no clear patterns of quality that follow actors or directors. People will be convinced that, for example, Roger Moore ruined everything he touched, or that On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) sucks because of George Lazenby. Lazenby didn't help, of course: he wasn't actually an actor, he bluffed his way into the role, and you can tell by the way he's play-acting rather than inhabiting the part. But he didn't write the terrible script, it's not his fault Diana Rigg would have outclassed almost anyone, and presumably he didn't cast Telly Savalas as a really, really, really lame supervillain. Similarly, yes, Live and Let Die (1973) is awful, but Roger Moore didn't write a script whose racial themes make Shaft look like Malcolm X.

Lest you want to blame it on the director: Guy Hamilton directed Diamonds Are Forever (1971, possibly the worst of the entire lot) and Live and Let Die, but also the excellent Goldfinger (1964) and the entirely serviceable The Man with the Golden Gun (1974). Honestly, the 60s and 70s produced a vast, awe-inspiring trove of terrible action movies (The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt, The Towering Inferno, all intensely boring), and I think the Bond films simply got caught up in the times.

Now that I'm feeling more mentally present and like an ordinary sleep-deprived person, I'm getting back to Mad Men, which I left at the beginning of season 2. I don't know what it's like to watch if you actually lived through 1960, but it tends to confirm my suspicion that it was a pretty crappy time to be alive. The white men have all the power, but they live in a straitjacket of roles and expectations, unable to express themselves, create, or freely love. Anyone over 35 30 or so has the extra bonus of being scarred by service in World War 2 or Korea. They drink a lot. I've been drinking more than usual the past few weeks--I've just discovered the Old-Fashioned--and let me tell you, I cannot conceive of drinking at their level. Every conversation seems to require straight whiskey. How do they work?

If you're not a heterosexual white male, you're pretty much hosed. Women get called "sweetheart" and coerced into sex at company parties, eking out scraps of power and agency whenever and however they can. So far (season 2, episode 2), black people exist only as an underclass of amiable laborers in the background. Homosexuality is furtive; there's a gay character who stays safely closeted and, at least where men are concerned, celibate. And who could blame him? This world is why words like "heteronormative" had to be invented.

In one scene at a multi-family weekend barbecue, a child runs through the house and breaks a dish. A man grabs the kid and slaps him:

"Watch where you're going! You understand?"

This man turns out not to be the kid's father; the kid looks at his father for confirmation, and the non-father demands:

"You want some more?"

The father says, "No, he understands, don't you? Go on, play with your friends."

These are the educated, well-off middle class: mid-level executives with summer homes and shiny new cars. They're not shown as icons of domestic violence. The casual violence in child-rearing resonated, and I realized that these adults on Mad Men are (roughly) my parents' parents, carrying the baggage of the Depression and war. The world for them doesn't make any sense: their previous 50 years, 1910-1960, created fractures my era's generations can barely imagine, even with the end of the Cold War and the onset of the 9/11 epoch.  They're trying to live out the roles they saw their parents live, and it's not working because everything is broken and shifting under their feet. They inhabit their lives like a pair of shoes that don't fit, but they insist on wearing them because those are The Shoes One Wears.

They're the kind of lives that get you talking about "living with authenticity," with the inevitable difficulty of clearly defining what "authenticity" is, but knowing in our heart of hearts that these people aren't living it.

grab bag o' updates

I've had a couple nights with the CPAP machine, and while I still feel crappy, I am noticeably more clear-headed. That's still not saying a lot, but I've been able to do some things about the house, and Anna and I have enjoyed me being able to have conversations again. (We like each other! Good thing.) I seem to wake up after a couple hours on the machine, and then it's too distracting to fall asleep again, so I take it off. It's a process.

As we know from watching House, sometimes the only way to determine if a medical condition is present is to treat the patient for the condition and see if the symptoms go away. There are other sleep apnea treatments, but they don't work on everybody; in theory, if you have sleep apnea at all, a CPAP machine should help you. I think that's becoming pretty clear, so once we've established the apnea is the problem, I can look at less baroque ways of treating it: one friend can't tolerate CPAP, and likes these ProVent things. I'm not sure I can tolerate CPAP either, and in any case I'd like some options that don't involve being tethered to a machine with a wind tunnel up my nose for the rest of my life.

As part of my epic staring-off-into-space project this year, I've started watching all the James Bond movies, in order of release. It turns out I'd never actually seen most of the first one, Dr. No (1962), and it is surely among the best of them all. Thunderball (1965) was much better than I expected or remembered, and far better than its later remake under a cloud of legal and financial disputes, Never Say Never Again (1983). I watched From Russia With Love (1963) recently--meh. Goldfinger (1964) is notable for the discussion at the beginning about how the U.S. and the U.K. use the world's gold reserves to calculate "the true value of the dollar and the pound," a reminder that in 1964 we were still in the dying days of the gold standard (Nixon unilaterally killed it off in 1971). The idea of a currency having some "true value" has to make you laugh, if you grew up with free-floating international currencies and you understand that money is a consensus social fabrication. (A critically important one, for individuals and for civilization! But it's a fabrication, created out of our collective imagination, to lubricate the machinery of human societies.) And Auric Goldfinger is the archetypal Bond villain, repeatedy declining to kill (or even shackle) the obviously-dangerous Bond, deciding instead to explain his devious plans prior to executing them. And Goldfinger's associate is named Pussy Galore, which wasn't exactly subtle in 1964, either.

I am skipping 1967's Casino Royale for the moment as being too challenging, but I'll come back to it eventually. I'm currently on You Only Live Twice (drinking game: take a sip for every scene of Orientalist pandering), and am dreading the terrible, awful, insane Diamonds Are Forever, with their creepy gay sociopathic assassing couple (whiskey. tango. foxtrot.) and hideous 70s...everything. The shag carpet and the big glasses and the bell bottoms and awful filmmaking and (if I remember correctly) the substantial blaxploitation.

I've slacked off a bit on playing pool, because I've found I lack the mental focus to play well enough to keep myself entertained. I stumbled onto league night at a local bar, though, and got myself onto the list of alternates, since they've got a full team and haven't really seen me play. I watched the other guys (they're all guys, but you knew that), and I definitely fall squarely in the right skill range, at least when I can play at all.

I still want a pool table, but I have mixed feelings about dedicating almost the entire garage to it. Bar tables are built to be flipped on their side for moving and storage; good pool tables, the kind I would like, are not. In fact, there seems to be no universally accepted mechanism or technique even for moving a non-bar table around in the same room--which, itself, sounds like an intriguing construction project. (You have to lift the entire thing all at once: no levering one end at a time.) So I need to measure and draw and think about stuff. In the meantime:

The house moves steadily towards closing. The price is agreed and the loan is approved, and there's still a ton of paperwork, but those sweet, juicy closing costs are paying someone else to do it. The tentative plan is a week from Monday, then work to make it habitable should start immediately and take 2-3 weeks. (I don't know how long it will actually take, but there's reason to believe the Remodeling Ninjas know their stuff.)

Let's see how I'm doing:

• Got married.
• Acquired a kid.
• Buying a house.
• Bowling Billiards league.

I think I next have to buy a lawnmower. And a Shop-Vac, of course.