"Argumext"

An argument conducted via text messages.

Pity the Poor Zombie Actor

Next week The Walking Dead will open its new season. Now, for sure, I really thought the first season was pretty silly, pithy, full of bad lines and off-the-shelf stereotypes (even real rednecks aren't as rednecky as portrayed in this movie), and failing to rise to the level of a good B flick.

Having said that, I'll prolly watch as much as I can stand, most likely while spinning my bike on the trainer. (Hey, when your heart rate is high your brain can't be too heavily engaged!)

Also, I'll try to see what lows the show can reach in a genre that is already intrinsically hampered by an acting arena that is much more closely fenced in than other horror film types.

So, let's compare zombie, vampire, and werewolf films. Certainly, the dream horror flicks (Nightmare on Elm Street), the mutant flicks (The Hills Have Eyes), the sci-fi flicks (Alien), and others all horror films, but the three involving human transformation stand in a class of their own, and within them vampire/werewolf (henceforth, VW) stand on one side of a divider from zombie films, and actors who take on the role of the transformed also fall into clear divides: those you know and those you don't.

VW actors? Bela Lugosi-"Dracula", Kate Beckinsale-"Underworld", Wesley Snipes-"Blade", Michael J. Fox-in the laughable "Teen Wolf", David Naughton-"American Werewolf in London", Tom Cruise-yes, the considered-to-be miscast blonde vampire in "Interview With the Vampire". Hell, even Slim Pickens played a memorable role in "The Howling".

Zombie actors? ................ Anybody? Anybody?

And little wonder why there are no zombie actors. (Well, one could say that there ARE "zombie" actors whose names we know, but they weren't playing zombie roles!) Well, go figure. What can they do?

First of all, once the transformation takes places, that's it. There's no going back, no reverting to human form only to transform again as werewolves and vampires do. Thus, there's no waxing and waning of desire and regret. There's no pleas to help find a cure for the insatiable craving for blood or to chain the beast up until the full moon has passed through its phase. There's only mindless, soulless, and guiltless pursuit of raw human flesh. (Speaking of which, I've never figured this out: How can there be more than one or two zombies? Think about it. First, a person become a zombie and wants to eat someone. OK, so he starts eating. Then, what, he quits eating so the victim can become a zombie too? And then they go off in search of more victims. And, they find one and bite her, start to eat her. So, then what? Again, they quit eating so she can become zombie #3? Apparently, the zombies reach a tipping point where even a bite or two from each consumes the victim so there are no more zombies? Yeah, right?)

Second, zombie actors never really get to try out their dialogue skills. VW can plead, rationalize, express guilt and remorse, or describe the exquisite taste of blood or the thrill of the hunt and kill. Zombie can say only, "Brains! Brains!"

Third, zombies aren't loved, poor things. Even vampires and werewolves find lovers.

Fourth, zombies can't have sex. (Let's leave out the comments by some people that there partner is about as good as a zombie!) Lugosi feigned sex, admittedly, but he sure got to bite on a lot of beautiful necks. In "The Howling" there was a hot hot hot scene by the fireside in which a man and woman began to transform during foreplay and totally morphed into biting, clawing, scratching, and, of course, HOWLING! But zombies? Nope. So, even the last trick of bad actors--that of having sex on the screen--is denied to zombie actors.

By now, you get the picture, zombie roles are relegated to the stand-ins, the wanna-bees, the won't make its.

Having said that, herein lies an opportunity for a truly gifted screenplay writer, a brilliant actor, a visionary director, and a producer with some cojones. Do a truly ground-breaking film for zombies that will pull off a trick of making the zombie somehow more human, sympathetic, and appealing to watch for more than a few seconds. Have the zombie become a creature who has a life beyond walking the streets and looking for brains, brains, brains.

Mike Sledge

Vacuuming: Dirt Sensor vs. Judgment

OK, here's the deal. Sometimes I end up vacuuming my girlfriend's house. Don't get me wrong, we'd both like a good housekeeper but we've been striking out in this regard for some time. So, especially since we have dogs that track in as much dirt and dead grass as Pig-Pen in the Peanuts cartoon, we have to clean ourselves. And, since harmony to me is important, I suck it up and do my part...kinda sorta. So, I figured that vacuuming is better than cleaning the bathroom, right? Wrong! My GF has a Kenmore vacuum with the dirt-sensor technology. What is this? A dirt-sensor? Well, it's a little series of lights that turn from red (dirty) to green (clean) as the dirt is picked up. Sounds simple? Sounds easy? Sounds like a good idea? Wrong again! You see, for a guy I'm pretty clean, pretty neat. For a guy, I said. And, being a guy, I like to rely on my judgment. While I'm the first to use maps and GPS and stuff instead of wandering around for hours, there are some things I like to do by sense, and cooking and cleaning are two of them. I cook by smell and touch. And by appearance. Making pancakes means more or less following the instructions, cause while putting "one egg" in is pretty definite, the cup of milk and mix is a matter of judgment. Just like barbeque, where I cook by sound, touch, and smell. The same applies to cleaning: "Well, that looks clean to me!" But, not so quick. The light hasn't turned green yet! It's still sitting on red! What? It looks clean. It feels clean. So it must be clean. But the light is still red. Here's how that freakin' dirt sensor works:


So man's ability to circumnavigate the vast oceans of the world using only a sense of wind direction and tides is tossed aside? His sense of direction in pitch black darkness is discounted?

Oh, wait, I forgot! These damn cleaners were designed with women in mind. They need "proof" that they've done a good job.

Hmm. Or, there's another thought: these damn, infernal light things were put there for the women to check if their men did a good job!

Mike S.

Marijuana Kills...Redux

I first published this post in 2009 and recent killings in Mexico make a case for me to post again.


LOL! Yeah, haven't we all seen the film Reefer Madness?

Lately, the anti-marijuana ads have gotten a little more, well, hip.

However, both of these films miss the point, because whether grass is a gateway drug or a harmless pasttime, and whether it should be illegal or treated just the same as alcohol are all academic exercises or merely simply excuses to continue current behavior because, save for medical purposes in a few places, marijuana is illegal and, as such, the use of it promotes criminal behavior. (Note: I said "criminal" behavior not "deviant" behavior and not "shiftless" behavior.)

With Sec. of State Clinton, now and for the first time I am aware of, shouldering part of the blame for the criminal insurgent activity in Mexico, one of our sister countries, we see that we are, indeed, our brother's keeper and our desire for illegal drugs has spawned a spree of killing on a scale that greatly exceeds even that of the days of Prohibition.

It is important to note that not all of the killings are "bad on bad." Honest policemen, journalists, judges, and politicians have been brutally murdered, sometimes in front of their families.

Illegal drugs are, in many ways, a commodity. They will be supplied at whatever cost the traffic will bear. Sadly, this cost comes not only in the loss of lives and law and order south of the border, it is increasingly clear that it will also carry a greater human cost in our own country. The last, that we will suffer the results of our demand for illegal drugs, does not supercede the first, the pain and misery to our neighbor.

I'm sure there are those who will say, "Hey! MY grass comes from California. I'M not contributing to the killing. However, again, it is clear that the drug cartels are also shouldering their way onto our native soil in areas of production, as well as distribution.

There are others who will say that there is no need for them to put down their favorite vehicle of escape because there are far worse drugs coming across the border and that we need to deal with those serious drugs first. They are absolutely right...in that there are far worse drugs. They are wrong in that there is no need for them to change. If they can justify their behavior with an illegal, non-addictive drug, how can they expect others who are actually addicted to more serious drugs to quit.

I'm no prude. I know, personally, the pleasurable effects of marijuana, having experimented with it many, many years ago. However, my break with it came because I work up one morning, way before the making of the movie Traffic and other films in which the world behind-the-scenes of drugs was illuminated, with an epiphany that my money spent for my fun fostered evilness.

Ultimately, especially during the moment of a relaxing, completely enjoyable, shared high, a look around the circle of close acquaintances tells you how happy you are for such company. At that same moment, in another place of the world not far away, there are those who look around their circle of teary-eyed friends and they are thankful for their support during the mourning for their dead son, father, brother, cousin who lost his life while trying to maintain some sense of law and order in a world gone crazy.

Push for all the legislation you wish to legalize marijuana, but in the meantime think of John Donne, whose message in MEDITATION XVII I shall rephrase to say...any man's loss is our loss.

Mike Sledge

On Same Sex Marriage, A New Thought

Caveat: That the author has not seen this suggestion made certainly does not imply it hasn't been made; education about such a previous proposal is certainly welcome.

Any informed person has seen the arguments for and against same sex marriage. Recently, President Obama has publicly stated his "conflicted" position. That is to say, he completely believes that same sex couples should be accorded all the legal rights due those in opposite sex marriages, yet he is troubled with the idea of same sex partners committing themselves to a "marriage". Vice President Biden is on record stating that same sex marriages is "an inevitability."

Straights will say, "Why are you [homosexuals] pushing into our sanctified turf of marriage when you can have the same rights we do?"

Homosexuals will say, "We won't be fully accepted until we can marry."

I say there is a different approach.

My thought centers on the background for the institution of marriage.

Specifically, marriage is a social arrangment that is secularly sanctioned and temporally blessed. Clearly, a union of some sort has benefits to a society as a whole, but being married also entitles the man and woman to a kind of spiritual/religious moral entitlement while a civil union provides only parity that is codified in the pages of a dry and crusty legal text.

Now, for straights who are of a nature that does not ascribe to a particular religious point of view, they can be married by a justice of the peace or other legal person so appointed with said power. Thus, straights have the ability to take either track, religious or secular.

Homosexuals, without marriage, are entitled to only the secular route.

Conservatives, particulary those of a specially religious nature (they are often one and the same), will argue that our country is a secular society, governed by laws and not religious texts. (Herein lie the recent arguments about how our society should accomodate those whose moral viewpoint is shaped by religions: i.e., it is ok to beat one's wife because one's religions provides for it.)

However, what these supposedly secular proponents are really saying is, "We approve of secularism so long as it stems from the roots of a religious system to which we ascribe."

Therefore, I say let's completely separate marriage and civil unions. Churches can do marriages and the law can provide only legal civil unions. In this way, straights who oppose the religious schemata of marriage can have the civil union. Straights who wnat a marriage can have the church unite them in such but they must also have the civil union if they want legal rights associated with such a pairing. Homosexuals can have the civil union and, if their church approves, also have the marriage.

Instead of trying to force a square peg into a round hole (or vice versa as some say), let's separate the pegs and holes.

Mike Sledge

The "SPAM CRUISE"...Please Forgive Me!

Or not!

I'm sorry, but I can't help it. News of the Carnival Splendor becoming disabled have prodded the Imp of the Perverse in me.

If you've been too busy worrying/cheering about the most recent overhaul of Congress (less anyone think that the nation has reverted back to its supposedly conservative roots, keep in mind that Americans tend to move away from extremes and towards the middle time after time), then you may not be up on the news regarding the fire and subsequent disabling of a veritable "floating city" of 4,500.

The Splendor, a California-based cruise ship over three football fields long has floated listlessly, sans power, lights, and, gulp, toilets, off the coast of Mexico for something like three days.

The culprit is a fire in the engine room.

Thank God no one was hurt!

But, let's see...no power means no way to cook food. But, no worry...the U.S. Navy has come to the rescue...with SPAM and POP TARTS. Hmmm...and WHAT are cruises famous for! Yep! Food and people who over indulge, at times grossly so, in food!



Now that we know everyone is safe and sound, I can schadenfreude all I like. Imagine that! Cruise line passengers eating spam and pop tarts.

It's just too fucking funny.

Mike Sledge

PS
Oh, and the passengers say they are bored because ther is nothing to do and they just sit around. Duh! You're on a ship! If they were on a LifeStyle cruise at least they could find another way to occupy their time.

"Mom Died About a Week Ago"

These were the words my sister said to me over the phone almost five years ago. She had prefaced them with, "I guess there's really no easy way to tell you this, but..."

My mother, born November 30, 1923, was one four children born to Joe Powalski and Lela Sanders. Two of her sisters, Agnes and Alice, predeceased her; her brother, Joe, was alive and well at the time of her succumbing to congestive heart failure.

"About a week ago." I was silent. Truth was, I really wasn't surprised--I had felt a disturbance of the force for "about a week" and had been trying to call my mother and sister to check in on them, only to reach an answering machine--but to hear it belatedly this way?

Mom didn't describe her childhood in pleasant terms. I don't know about her cousins, if she had any. I don't know where she went to grade school. In fact, my memory of her earliest days (I later figured out that she hoarded information, dealing it out parsimoniously.) came from the time when we were crossing the old Huey P. Long bridge into Baton Rouge. (If you ever made this trip back before the U.S. began to clean up its air and water, the stink from the noxious clouds pouring from the oil refining and aluminum smelting smokestacks comes quickly and easily from your memory, and you can still see the vaporous draping casting an umber pall over the plants and the surrounding communities. Hell, even then, I thought, "This can't be good for you.")



As we passed crossed the Mississippi, a river Styx into itself, into the miasma of toxins, Mom looked at the ALCOA plant and said, "I used to work there." I asked her about what she did; her answer was "Secretarial work."

"About a week ago I'm asking myself?" While I'm silent on the phone, my mind is yelling, "What the FUCK do you mean, about a week ago?" Such a contrast to the clinical terms and exact dates on a death certificate.

Mom was a very conflicted character. She could express love that came from an unfathomable source and she could flash into anger faster than potassium exposed to water. She spanked and slapped us. Once, she stood in a kitchen with a bread knife (I vividly recall the serrated edges) held toward me and said, "I just want to cut your stomach out with this." Yet, it was this same mother who first taught me how to unchain my imagination and then gave me freedom to express myself outside the first or second standard deviations for "normal behavior." She hosted fabulous sleep-overs for my friends, engaging us in all sorts of outrageous behavior, such as totally sudsing ourselves up and then combing our hair into the now in-style, hogsback peaks in the middle of the top of our heads. (My friends would, upon hearing that another had stayed over with me, ask them, "What did his mom do with you?")

And she was foresighted, perhaps even ahead of her time in many regards. She foresaw the need for healthy, nutritious meals, once cooking roast beef--complete with potatoes, carrots, and onions--for breakfast. She knew that we were responsible for our environment, encouraging us to consider our footprint on the earth. She could have started her own chain of nontraditional schools (consider, for example, Montessori), given her creative bent. (Lord, how she could cajole/lead kids into non-linear thinking and how she planned stimulating projects for them to do. Once, we had no money for Halloween, so we sat down and make our own decorations and costumes out of whatever we had on hand. Once particularly memorable creation was a white, oddly-shaped ghost fashioned from sheets, pillows, and twine that hung from the top of a door at just the right height that as you passed under its loose ends would brush over you in the way that a spectral visitor touches the back of your neck.

Mom had drilled a sense of gentlemanness toward women into me. I hold doors for women, help them off with their coat, and walk between my female companion and the curb. Thus, I only asked, "What did you do with her body? Was she buried?"

Mom worked hard to raise my sister and me. Money was always tight, although at that tender age I really couldn't have known how tight. I remember going with her to a job where, on her knees, she scrubbed floors and I, all of five years old, did the same with my own small spot, probably making more of a mess than being of assistance.

Over the years, Mom and I, scrubmates that we were, had drifted apart, especially after the death of her sister from whom she had inherited a small fortune of Piccadilly Cafeteria stock. After the stock entered a death spiral and was eventually worthless, Mom send me a fax asking me to pay her back for the money she spent raising me.

My sister's answer to my question about whether Mom was buried or not followed the vein of her informing me of her death: "She wanted to be cremated and I scattered her ashes in places that she was close to."

Mom must have had some kind of kink formed early in her way of relating to men. I know that her dealings with me underwent a dramatic transformation when I reached puberty. This change was clearly manifested when, I think I was about thirteen, Mom went to slap me and I caught her by the wrist and held her hand suspended midway between her and my face. Her eyes went savage and her lips tightened. In that one moment I had passed from being her little boy child she could control to becoming a member of her worst kind of enemy, a man.

But, as I said earlier, she was confliced. One time, it must have been my senior year in high school, Mom and I were sitting around and talking and--even at the time I was taken with the girlishness lilt to her voice--she told me about her first marriage...the marraige BEFORE the one with my father. I was dumbstruck at this revelation, but not upset...I wanted to hear more. She almost whimsically told me more: He was a big man (she later gave me his red silk robe that she had saved over the years, and it hung loosely on my shoulders) and she had married him right after high school. I think she may have even met him at the ALCOA plant; perhaps he was a salesman. But, even though he may have been her ticket out of an unhappy home with her father (her mother had died shortly before I was born), I detected in her voice, still after almost four decades after their still-born marriage and subsequent divorce, a soft side toward men (or at least, toward a certain kind of man) that had rarely been expressed by her before.

"Where? What places?" I asked. My sister's answer was vague and nondescript. I guess "here and there was about as good as "about a week ago."




I was a small child in kindergarden, maybe even a daycare, four years old at most. We were making hand prints in a plaster of paris type mixture. I did mine three or four times because I wasn't happy with the way it looked. Finally, I had the impression I was satisfied with and anxiously waited for the next day for it to dry so I could paint it. I choose red, and when the paint, too, had dried, proudly gave it to my mother. Years later, I made her a man-size cast, painted it red, and gave it to her to match the first made over thirty years ago. Soon afterwards, she gave them both back to me, saying that she didn't need to keep them anymore.

I had a paper route. On 10th Street, a busy thoroughfare. No other boys wanted it. Sometimes it was dark when I finished throwing folded up newspapers into driveways and onto porches. I always passed a gift shop on the way back, and there, spotlighted on the glass shelves, stood a lion, flowing mane and all, carved out of stone. I saved and saved and bought it for Mom. Years later, I glued its broken leg back together. Years after that, Mom gave it back to me, too.

The lion fell beside the wayside somewhere. I still have the little hand. And I think that, when it's all said and done, there's a little boy in me somewhere who sorrows over the loss of his mom.

Mike Sledge