Month: December 2007
STEROIDS
Everybody’s screaming about steroids. Steroids are bad! Steroids are horrible. Steroids are a curse. We spend all this time and money debating and policying and testing. I say we’ve got it all wrong. We should embrace steroids. Steroids are the future. It’s evolution. Its survival of the fittest, not the most drug-free. You think when the cave men were running from the saber-toothed tiger they had time to get drug tested. Hell no! Do you know why? Cuz they’d be dead that’s why. Look science is what separates us from the beast. That and porn on the internet. And weapons of mass destruction. You don’t see NASCAR doin’ cart and buggy races. Nobody wants a basketball game where short white guys shoot two handed set shots. Nobody wants to see skinny little dudes hit fly balls to the warning track. We don’t want slower 100 yard dashes. When I see a linebacker hunting down a flanker comin’ over the middle, I wanna see him take the guy’s head off, snap him in two, leave him a twisted wreck while he roars over the fallen warrior like a gladiator screaming triumphantly over a dead Christian.
I say we have two games. One for steroided athletes. The other for Naturals, we’ll call them. Let the roideds get as big as they want. Breed them so every generation gets bigger faster and stronger. Maybe if Marion Jones and Barry Bonds mated when they were chock full of human growth hormones they could produce and evolutionary marvel, a new missing link that takes us as a species to the next level. I mean come on. How cool would it be to see a baseball hit a thousand feet, a 100 meter dash in five seconds a golfer drive a drive on a 550 yard par five, the Tour de France winner racing the whole course without ever once stopping.
New ideas are scary. The all laughed at Christopher Columbus said the world was round. They laughed at Al Gore when he invented the internet. But who’s laughing now.
You can’t fight evolution. If you don’t believe me, go ask a dinosaur.
I say, instead of moaning and groaning about steroids, let’s make them our friend. If you wanna be a Natural, be a Natural, but if you don’t mean your reproductive organs shrivel and breaking out in acne and decreasing your life expectancy I say that’s your right. I for one relish the chance to see a 650lb shortstop hitting a 200 mph fastball outta the Grand Canyon.
I saw the new Coen brothers movie. No country for old fuckers. It’s a beautiful movie. I love the way they inhabit different parts of America. Fargo. Depression era deep South. Arizona. And in this one, they really capture the desert, the colors and the heat and the language and the moral code, the fabric of life in this corner of the world. And at this point, Tommy Lee Jones face is like a piece of incredible scenery. It’s like the craggy rocks with all their creases and crevices in the sunbaked tableau of the West. He just seems so authentic to that part of the world. And javier bardim is unfuckingbelievable. For my money, not that I’m putting any on the line here, but if I were, that is the performance of the year thus far. And his chosen weapon of destruction is so unique and beautiful and poetically violent. Air. Josh Brolin, the guy who finds the money, was also quite great. As was his girlfriend/wife, Kelly McDonald, from Trainspotting and gosford Park. As usual the brothers Coen got superb performances out of every one. It was gorgeous to look at, it was suspenseful, the soundtrack was excellent, a fantastic meditation on good and evil, chance and fate, wisdom and bravery, it was such fun to be securely in the hands of masters. That being said, I felt let down by the end of the film. Actually, let down is a gross understatement. One of my pet peeves is the unsatisfying ending. I hate it. It leaves such a toxic taste in my mouth. When I say satisfying ending, let me be clear, I don’t mean it has to be happy, that everything has to work out peachy and keen. But that can be just as unsatisfying, when its false. In Thelma and Louise for example, they fly off the cliff to their deaths together. But it’s so satisfying. It all makes such beautiful sense. And it’s so lovely and yes, I’m going to use the word again, poetic. But the freres coen, imho, left out a couple of crucial scenes. After following this guy who finds the money through the whole movie, I am rooting for him to escape evil. They have proven to me that he is a worthy hero to follow. A hero full of flaws, which you want your heroes to be, but a scrappy resourceful hero. The whole reason he got into trouble in the first place was that he tried to bring water to the shot-to-shit dying man. An act of kindness and charity. What Jesus would have done. So I have followed him throughout the whole story, but when it gets to the ultimate moment, the climax, the payoff, that scene is missing from this movie. I hated that. Same thing when Tommy Lee Jones walks into the room and nothing happens. It rankled me. I think it’s bad storytelling. I hate it when people try to tell people how to make their books or movies or art. But I also hate it when a storyteller leaves out the climax of their stories. I want to see the movie again, to determine whether I will feel as angry and unsatisfied, so like a lover who is brought to the brink of climax and then shut down cold, rode hard and put up wet, left with artistic blue balls. But having seen it once, that’s my opinion from the clear blue sky and the deep blue sea, that’s my two cents worth. And with inflation, I owe you one.