Separated At Birth?

Maybe it's just me, but the resemblance is uncanny. It kind of freaks me out. Do you think Emmylou Harris could have been MJ's long lost sister? Maybe she has the other diamond-studded glove. I wonder if she can moonwalk?

Be My Wingman Anytime

I'll admit to a pretty dorky obsession with Top Gun. I still love the movie as much as I did 25 years ago, and I don't care if you think that's lame.

Kayla Webley's recent TIME magazine piece about Top Gun has started some interesting conversations for me lately. She has ten reasons to share about why Top Gun is "still awesome." I'd have to agree with her.

Bring up Top Gun, and everyone over 30 has an opinion. I say over 30 because my wife had no opinion on it and hadn't even seen it until I insisted that she give it a chance a year or two ago, and she just turned 30 a few months ago. Now she usually just rolls her eyes when I mention it.

I was born in 1976. In 1986, when I was nine or ten years old, I was visiting my Grandmother in Hawaii and saw Top Gun in the theatre. It exploded onto the screen with a velocity of sheer awesomeness I could never have imagined. I didn't think it was possible for anything to approach the level of awe that the Star Wars trilogy already inspired, no, stamped upon my impressionable young brain, and until I walked out of that theatre as a pre-pubescent aspiring naval aviator, Star Wars was it, period (read my previous post/rant about George Lucas for more evidence of this). Somehow, going Mach 2 with my hair on fire in an F-14 seemed like the best way to spend my future adulthood. Sadly, my nascent dream was soon crushed by a guy my mom used to date who referred to me as "Piss Ant." Dick (his real name) pointed out that I was "too tall to be a pilot" and "not good enough at math." I imagined my neck snapping like Goose's did while ejecting after being caught in a jet-wash (Goose was taller than those other pilots, I worried), and I gave up on being a pilot. I even ceased my pathetic attempts to emulate Ice Man by trying to comb my wavy hair straight up from my forehead. Still, my love for Top Gun endured.

Obviously, when I saw the film, I didn't have much of a concept of sexuality, hetero or otherwise. I only began to understand the sexual undertones of the film years later, as a cynical teenager, and man, was it macho. It celebrated dudes and jocks and machismo to the fullest extent of the word. I was something of an outsider in high school. I got along with most people but hung around with the artists, musicians and misanthropes. The jocks, macho men and prom queen types were not part of my group. Or maybe I was not part of their group. Either way, I always found the outsiders to be a lot more interesting. Despite its unabashed celebration of everything jock, even in high school, I still loved Top Gun.

Yes, the movie has been and could still be fairly referred to as a Reagan-era military recruiting video, and I was listening to heavy metal, growing my hair out, discovering punk rock and turning into an angry teenage liberal, eager to expose the evils of the system. Yes, Top Gun was a product of late-stage cold-war paranoia and flag-waving patriotism, but even if I didn't admit it at the time, I loved my country, and despite my teen angst and too-cool skateboard buddies, I still loved Top Gun.

Even though Tom Cruise had literally been an Outsider, as Maverick he was captain cool, mister macho, the ultimate lady killer . . . a jock type that was not the kind of dude I'd be hanging around in high school, yet Maverick too was an outsider until he proved himself in battle and won the respect of his peers. None of that mattered to me; I just loved the movie. It wasn't real life. It couldn't be, for me, at least. It never represented me or anyone I knew. It was just supreme entertainment.

After reading Webley's article, I passed it along to several friends and family members, most of whom responded positively, agreeing with me that the movie is definitely "still awesome" as she claims. I found the "homoerotic subtext" bit an amusing way to read the film. I'd never thought of the movie as gay, but Tarantino's rant in some unnamed movie about Maverick "coming to terms with his homosexuality," along with the re-cut trailer that turns the movie into a romance between Maverick and Ice Man were just creative and funny, I thought. I discovered that a lot of people have written about the movie in this way. Just
Google Top Gun and "gay" and see what you get. Even though I minored in film studies in college and grad school, I somehow missed this "homoerotic" take on one of my favorite movies.

I can remember a certain drunken event in my freshman dorm room involving about eight male friends, arm in arm, in white tank tops, singing along with the Top Gun soundtrack at the top of our lungs, but hey, uh . . . that's not gay, is it?

Of course, teasing macho men with their macho-to-the-point-of-homo antics is nothing new, and is often funny, not because there is anything wrong with being gay, but because ultra macho men are often super homophobic, and homophobia is easy to make fun of and laugh at, if you ask me. Top Gun isn't the first ultra-macho movie to be called gay. It's not hard to find similar claims about 300, Batman and Robin (not just the crappy movie--the canonical relationship itself) and several films involving Sylvester Stallone.

A respected family friend and ex-marine who is at least 30 years my senior didn't agree with me at all about the amusing nature of Webley's article and responded with an unexpected homophobic tirade that really caught me off guard. He is also a fan of the film and was furious about Webley's suggestion that there was any trace of homosexual subtext in the film. He found the notion insulting to the "military ethos" and was eager to let me know that the "marketing" of homosexuality as "normal" really pissed him off. I told him to lighten up. He went on to call Webley's article "evidence of our society's ever-increasing rate of descent into depravity, marketed as 'sophistication' to suck (no pun intended) in the unwary."

Wow. I can't expect to change my friend's viewpoint, but I responded honestly, telling him that I respect the men and women who wear the uniform immensely, straight or gay. I find his homophobia disgusting, but for many other reasons, I respect this man and call him a friend. When speaking of this episode and how to deal with it with my mom, she found it ironic that I once used gay slurs as a teen, and reminded me of how she had sat me down and firmly instructed me that I was not to be critical or insulting of people who live their lives differently from the way I live mine. I guess I learned the lesson because I don't remember saying those things, and I am vehemently opposed to anything less than absolute equality when it comes to gay rights, including marriage and everything else. I didn't expect the backlash. I just thought Webley's article was entertaining, and let's not forget that the "homoerotic subtext" was only one of her TEN reasons why the movie is STILL AWESOME.

I saw Top Gun in the theatre at least six times. I watched it on TV. I watched it on VHS and DVD and have yet to watch my blu-ray copy, but hell, it's the 25th anniversary this summer, so I should. Happy birthday, Top Gun. I'm starting to feel the need for speed, so let's see if I can get my lovely wife to take one more trip back to Miramar. Show me the way home, baby.

Fighting For My Right to Write

Last week at my new job--which isn't really a new job since I've been there a year now--I had to wear a suit and tie for three consecutive days, which already puts my sum total of days spent in a monkey suit at a potential all-time high for 2011. I've already worn it a couple times this year, so that makes five. I don't like how this is trending.

I own just one plain, black, three-button suit jacket and pants, and it is accustomed to making only periodic appearances at weddings and funerals. I prefer it that way really; I feel like an imposter in a suit. It's like a fancy fabric-based trap, impractical, restricting, a seemingly pretentious status symbol that says "take me seriously. I have shoulder pads." How the hell James Bond always manages to kick so much ass, execute sweet stunt driving moves and defeat all manner of adversity in such an outfit is mysterious if not preposterous. I find it difficult to merely back out from a parking space with the constrictive uniform of international business choking and straight-jacketing me.

But once and a while is really no big deal. Every day is casual friday at this cubicle job of mine, and I don't even work fridays anymore. I sit in a cube but wear jeans. Yes friends, I have been gainfully employed as a technical writer for just over one year. You read that right. Read it again. My job title features the word "writer." Jamiroquai! How could this have happened?

Crossing over again, back into the white collar milieu, having survived one week at an insurance company, three months of unemployment, seven months in retail sporting goods, four more months of unemployment, three years of hauling barns on a truck (being HARDBARNED in rural BFE) and five months in corporate business sales (just to flash back in reverse through my last six years of trudging through the post-higher-education wasteland), if I have to wear a monkey suit once in a while, than so fucking be it. It only took about five thousand job applications over five years. I could be exaggerating, but holy crap it was hard to get the proverbial foot in the door.

Part of being an American means earning the right to complain, doesn't it? Where else in the world can a majority of citizens have everything they need for basic survival, not to mention an insane amount of extraneous bullshit they don't need, and still have the time to complain about their less than inspiring "careers?" I have finally conquered the epic "do something at least slightly related to your education and skill set" challenge. The next looming task involves finding work that not only engages my education and skills but also focuses on something that I am truly inspired by and exited about. Ha! How ridiculous and naive of me, right? Work is work, right?

I must reject this maxim and remain optimistic that one day I will derive income from creative, invigorating work that engages my true interests and enthusiasms.

But for now, I continue to welcome enthusiastically the long awaited arrival of gainful employment featuring the word "writer" in the job title over my previously accustomed slog through a horribly depressing morass of unsatisfactory labor . . . though I remain hopeful that one day the words "creative" and "passion" and "artistic" have at least something tangential to do with my full-time job.

Until then I remain grateful for the right to write and edit TPS reports.

Keef versus Prince of Darkness

I finished Keith Richards' autobiography Life recently, thinking it might be a good time, as I had laughed out loud all the way through Ozzy's thoroughly hilarious memoir I Am Ozzy. Though I admit to being a bit of an Oz fan, I was never a big Stones listener, but I always liked them better than the Beatles and was interested in their history. I can't say that Life had as many laughs (Keith didn't blow away his pet chickens with a shotgun--not cool but funny to read about, sorry PETA--or pour seven pints of cognac into his wedding cake batter, but he did stay awake for nine days on a bender and pass out for three more underneath a recording console and wake up during a random band's session) it was engaging if occasionally rambling. I can't quite lavish the praise Liz Phair manages in her NYTimes review, but I enjoyed it. 'Keef' also gave an entertaining interview to Terry Gross when the book came out late last year.

I really liked the bits about writing songs, recording and touring. The pure love for the music this man espouses cannot be disputed, and his various encounters with just about every influential blues and rock musician (mainstream and otherwise) from the 50s through the 70s is unparalleled. Of course there was plenty of band drama, drug drama and lady drama, and it's as scattered and disheveled a memoir as the man himself appears to be, but overall I'd still recommend it highly as a window into a fascinating life that has impacted rock history significantly.

I've never seen the Rolling Stones, though I did once deliver a plate of chocolate covered strawberries to their hotel room. They weren't there. I saw Ozzy live twice. Once in the early nineties with Alice In Chains and Sepultura (awesome) and once about six or seven years ago with the original Black Sabbath lineup. Ozzy kept forgetting the lyrics to all the classic songs. Whenever he couldn't think of what to sing next, he'd grab a bucket of water from a stage hand, dump it over his head, and yell "I love you! I love you! I love you!" into the mic until he remembered the next line.

I still think that John Mayer and Jason Mraz should fight to the death in a cage match, but maybe Keef and Oz should start a side project. Keith points out his lack of appreciation for punk rock, but he never gets after the metal crowd, and even though he never mentions Ozzy, I somehow think these two would make a hell of  a songwriting team. They just seem like they're made for each other, don't you think?

The Truth

The Multi-Billionaire Strikes Back

Star Wars has been on my mind a lot lately. It started this summer when a friend noticed my beard and said that I looked like Ben Kenobi. That got me thinking about Halloween. I skipped the holiday of holidays last year out of apathy when I looked at costumes in the store and nothing inspired me. I dressed as a bargain basement zombie for the two years before that. But I looked like old Ben, huh?

Inspiration struck. I found a pattern online after discovering the legion of costume-obsessed freaks that invent their own Jedi names and lurk on costuming forums with flashing banner ads featuring photos of themselves mugging in character, eager to dispute the authenticity of Stormtrooper injection molds and Sith Lord robe thread counts. My recently retired mom who loves to sew was happy to enlist in my efforts to make a solid try at an authentic Obi-Wan costume. I cobbled together a couple of old belts and a couple of pouches and buckles that I filed and scraped to arrive at the appropriately weathered look. I got a nice pair of brown boots that I might actually wear again if I ever get another motorcycle, and a relatively authentic lightsaber with light and sound effects.

My next job was to convince my wife to dress as a Star Wars character. She had only seen the original trilogy once, at my insistence a few years ago, when she was in her mid-twenties. Let's just say her enthusiasm after having her first go at the trilogy didn't quite match mine. But to be fair, how could I really imagine seeing it for the first time as an adult? As a thirty-four year-old man who grew up loving those movies, I really couldn't. So I asked my wife to watch them with me again, and she begrudgingly agreed. She liked them all much better the second time, but couldn't get excited about the Princess Leia The Slut or Frumpy Leia The Choir Member costumes we were able to find online.

As I was pondering these costumes and enjoying my old trilogy again, I came across this fantastic Gary Kurtz article in the L.A. Times, which confirms many things that many of us thirty-something fans have long suspected. Kurtz produced Star Wars (IV) and Empire (V) and thus worked very closely with George Lucas until they parted ways for Jedi (VI). Kurtz says Lucas wanted to sell plastic toys, and thus sold us all out, starting down a path to the dark side that began with the Ewoks and Kurtz's departure and continued through the next three movies that don't really deserve any discussion here at all.

But the greatest injustice does not relate to Return of the Jedi, which I still manage to love despite the Ewoks. It is not even the embarrassing cringe-fest that the next three films became. The real tragedy is the fact that the original trilogy has been stolen from us. What have we done, Mr. Lucas, other than love your first three kick ass movies? The latest news that your original trilogy will be released yet again in theatres, this time following the prequels, not only with all the crap you added in decades later, but this time in 3D. There is a great disturbance in the force.

In the 90s, Mr. Lucas, you re-released your original trilogy in theatres and on DVD. You added a bunch of garbage, like making Greedo shoot at Han and miss terribly from two feet away, so that Han appears to kill the bounty hunter in self defense. Well it was self defense when he shot first, man. You went on to add a bunch a cartoon animated crap, like a truly terrible, digital Jabba The Hutt scene in Star Wars, a cartoon dance number in Jabba's palace in Jedi that could have been a commercial for Mr. Potato Head, a fancy new Ewok song and some crappy actors from the newer movies who were pasted on the sidelines. Why?

Again, why? Much has been written about the wisdom of these decisions, but I--like so many young men of my generation--just want my godddamn trilogy back.

Why steal it from us? Why finally release the movies on blu-ray but omit the untouched originals? Have you ever even looked at Amazon? Thousands of us plead with you to do just this, including a Mr. Jonathan Mankuta, who argues that you should

"take the original three films . . . do NOT change the story at all . . . don't add in new footage, cut old footage, change any story elements . . . don't make Greedo shoot first, Luke scream, Yoda dress in drag, Threepio with a gold metal boner, Jawas dancing around a campfire as they cook s'mores, Wampa enhancements, CGI-ing a Colt-45 bottle into Lando's hand, putting Jabbas' fat sister in the same sexy outfit as Slave Leia, or ANYTHING other than what folks actually saw in the theatres the first time the films were released."

Why is it that in order to see these movies the way we like them (untouched) we have to watch them on VHS tape or with crappy DVD transfers from our VCRs? You officially license and sell every other piece of shit that possibly comes to mind, don't you? Why not sell us the untouched originals on blu-ray with great sound and picture but without all the fucking crap you added in later? Why?

Well I'm glad I'm not the only one who is angry, and I can't wait to see The People Versus George Lucas. But yeah, I'm still dressing like old Ben Kenobi for Halloween this year, you asshole.