Summer Finale
September 11, 2003
Before fall officially begins its short-lived season of crisp evenings and apple cider and the crunch of fallen leaves turns to the crunch of hard packed snow, lets recap the all too quick summer of 2003 with a mock game of Jeopardy. The category is “Summer Fun”, “I’ll take 400 please, Alex.” And the answer is, “A cartoon fish, a blackjack dealer named Isaac, and a 20th century modernist masterpiece.” Buzz, “Yes, Adam”-“What are three things to complete a memorable summer?” If only Trebek were really here to tell me if I’m right or wrong, but those three seemingly unrelated topics were indeed, and I’ll get to each one momentarily, small parts to a larger whole known as summer entertainment; a special sub-genre of pleasure when time has a gloriously relaxed freedom thanks to long days and vacation.
Summer is a time for many things: for catching up on your reading, for maddeningly trying to perfect the unperfectable golf swing. For a loud and fun time at the cinema full of blockbusters large and small, for a quiet evening on the patio, revisiting Rick and Ilsa on the new “Casablanca” DVD, or for checking in on MSG to see how badly your beloved Mets lost again. Personally, I’m a big fan of all of those (“Casablanca” over the losing Mets, obviously) and if you’re still curious as to what a fish, a blackjack dealer and a modernist text have to do with a memorable season, than stick with me on this one as I recount to you a few tales of interest from my busy summer of reading, golfing, traveling and (most importantly) watching, hours upon hours of movies and television.
I’ll get to the fun media related stuff later, but first lets start with what a normal person would consider appropriate summer behavior, namely, vacation and outdoors recreation. Being a creature of the indoors, the pleasant weather really doesn’t do much for me, as I’d just as soon put on a pair of boots and trudge through a foot of the white stuff, but if there is one key thing I dig about the nice weather (though we haven’t had much of it this year) it’s golfing. Frankly, I don’t know why. It does more to trigger my temper than anything else that is supposedly relaxing, and I couldn’t drive a ball straight if my life depended on it (and sometimes it does, when I go out with my evil friend Auric Goldfinger), but still, the challenge of it all, and the glory of a few good swings is enough to keep me coming back. And after six months of downtime, who doesn’t look forward to that first tee box and that first awkward slice of the spring?
Not everybody likes to golf, and not everybody gets the time to do so, but I hope everybody did get at least a week of freedom away from work to take a vacation. I know people who will swear by the beaches of the Carolina’s and Florida, but I say who needs that when you can take a quick eight hour drive through Pennsylvania to Atlantic City, which not only has a beach (an ocean to be exact) but offers a wide variety of pleasures. Such as gambling, buffets, gambling, free drinks, gambling, nightly entertainment, and, did I mention gambling? For sure, we have all of this an hour away in the Falls, but it’s not as extravagant, and besides, go enough and the hotels will start giving you stuff, like free rooms and food, and if free isn’t the greatest four letter word in the dictionary, than you’ve got me.
But a word to the wise A.C. traveler; a lethal combination of free Manhattan’s, cheap cigars, a three hour stint at the mercy of Isaac, Harrah’s blackjack dealer extraordinaire, and a tauntingly accessible MAC machine will leave you pretty dizzy come morning after four hours of sleep. It’s like my man Isaac says, “You stay too long, you stay wrong,” and boy how those words are forever etched into my mind.
An eight-hour jaunt to Atlantic City provides precious time to focus on music and the CD’s you may have been neglecting. On a long trip I’d advise to mixed things up, search for good radio stations in between studies of full-length disks that make for good time filler. I notice, in any drive of 400 miles or longer, that our country is ruled by classic rock stations, with names like The Whale, The Shark, and The Eagle (no Dinosaur or Fogy) that tend to overdose on Zeppelin, Stones, and AC/DC. That’s not entirely a bad thing, but seriously, if I hear “Satisfaction” or “Whole Lotta Love” one more time in the next month I’m going to need a stairway to heaven for my sanity.
In personal choices, the best albums of the year won’t be heard on classic rock stations and aren’t even by American bands; they’re mostly Canadian and British. Canuck’s like Matthew Good (whose first solo album, “Avalanche”, is a masterpiece filled with anthems and magnum opuses) and Finger Eleven (quickly becoming a Buffalo favorite) keep my eardrums rocking while the more experimental and soothing voices of Brits like Thom York and Chris Martin (Radiohead and ColdPlay respectfully) provide a nice counterbalance. Everyone this summer seemed to be talking about the scantily clad power whaling of Beyonce and her rapper boyfriend Jay-Z, but in my opinion, the hottest and catchiest single of the season was “Creatures” by 311, the bands best single in ages. A classic? Probably not, but a song this bouncy with more distinctive tempo shifts than there are excessively long white T-Shirts in Philadelphia (and believe me, with this latest hip hop inspired trend, Fruit of the Loom must be making a mint) is worthy of some recognition.
Switching mediums, television had plenty of bright spots this summer with the return of “Monk” on USA, and a surprisingly funny concluding season to the long-in-the-stiletto “Sex in the City”. The best drama of the year, “Boomtown”, a show I can’t seem to stop talking about, reran its brilliant first year on TNT, hopefully picking up much needed viewers going into its second year, with a time change to Friday’s at 10 on NBC (please watch). HBO enjoyed another strong summer with the second season of “The Wire”, featuring a season long case study of the Baltimore shipping docks under police surveillance and highlighted the years strongest Greek Tragedy; the downfall of the hardworking, but perpetually bad choice making union family, the Sobotka’s. In a summer that saw breakout hits like “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” and the welcome return of the fabulous “Monk”, “The Wire”, as followed by the equally compelling “Project Greenlight” was the seasons must-see TV.
Speaking of “Project Greenlight”, the HBO reality series that documents the behind the scenes turmoil (and I do mean turmoil) of a low budget movie being made by novice filmmakers; I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to catch the finished product, “The Battle of Shaker Heights” in Philadelphia, on one of the 13 screens Miramax released it onto nationwide. As expected, the show itself had more memorable moments than the movie, which was sloppy and predictable, with too many plot threads and not enough character development, but if you take it as a 14th episode to a great television series, than it’s only a one shot foul, but in Hollywood, that may be enough to get you a technical.
By now you’re wondering about those initial three subjects and how I’ve only mentioned Isaac, the memorable stone-faced blackjack dealer, so I’ll spill the beans on the other two as an intro into my final two fun summer categories: movies and reading. The cartoon fish is obviously a reference to Pixar’s “Finding Nemo”, not only the best and highest grossing film of the summer, but one of the funniest and sweetest animated films of all time. ‘Nemo was the best the cinema had to offer us so far, but “Whale Rider”, “Owning Mahowny”, “Winged Migration” and “Raising Victor Vargas” (recently released on DVD) run a close 2-5. On the DVD front, the most significant release this summer (alongside that spectacular “Casablanca” double disk) is a newly enhanced boxed sex of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1988 10-hour epic “The Decalogue”, a made-for-Polish-TV series of ten hour-long films, all taking place in one Warsaw apartment complex and each revolving around one of the ten commandments. I’ve been known to obsess over the late, great Kieslowski and it’s something of a godsend to finally have his ultimate masterpiece available again on DVD.
You can purchase “The Decalogue” for cheap online (www.deepdiscountdvd.com offers lower rates and fast, free shipping) but if you want to test the waters you can do what I do and either rent from Netflix, the great online DVD rental service, or make a rip down to the Prendergast Library in Jamestown, where it sits on the shelves of the Film & Video room, my home away from home. Two film buff Mecca’s, the library and Neflix have allowed me to deepen my study of favorite directors like Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer and Jarmusch while providing an important opportunity to get my hands on harder to find films like Olmi’s “Il Posto”, Weir’s “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and the great South Korean military puzzle “Joint Security Area”, a smart and brilliantly photographed film about the DMZ that comes from a country with one of the worlds burgeoning national cinemas. I could go on, and on, and on, and on, but my point has been made; if you’re dedicated to perfecting the peculiar art of film geekdom, than the resources are readily available at your disposal.
I fear this wrap-up is now officially longer than summer itself, so I’ll conclude with the final piece to my original Jeopardy answer by way of the Jazz Age and the modernist prose in question being F. Scott Fitzgerald’s supreme read “The Great Gatsby”, which I became enchanted with once again this summer. I had other seminal reads this season, like the wonderful and dense instant non-fiction classic “Seabiscuit”, the works of the almost forgotten ‘40’s Californian master John Fante (“Ask the Dust”) and some selected plays by Mamet, O’Neill, Sartre and John Osbourne (“Look Back in Anger”), but I always come back to Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, Nick Carraway, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, the eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg, West Egg, the green light and the ultimate disillusionment of the American Dream. “So we beat on, boats against the current,” reads the classic final line to the best American novel of the 20th century, and our leave from summer into fall and beyond, “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
by Adam Suraf