The haul

STIPIMM: "Girl," by Beck

The Sopranos, Season 4 DVD set

A cool Timex to replace my old and busted Osama watch

Seven long-sleeved shirts

A 30-pack of individual Frito Lay chips bags

Two pairs of gloves

A set of socks meant for someone else in Bridget’s family

Two $50 giftcards to Best Buy

Two sets of thermal underwear

A T-shirt that says “Good grammar costs nothing!”

Mouse pad with an Arabian carpet design

Two pairs of pajama bottoms

A Dilbert tie with Christmas colors

“Un Chien Andalou” DVD

A tiny sea shell from Inishmore, Ireland


Shared with Bridget

Cool picnic/outing cooler/diningware set from the good folks at Williams-Sonoma

Holder family memory book

Peppermint bark

$275

Humidifier

Sweater drying rack

Basket of homemade candies

Set of homemade jellies

Potpourri

All is darkness

STIPIMM: “Let it Be,” by the Beatles

A good friend of ours passed away today; one of our best friends and one that’s stuck by me ever since he came into my life in five years ago. His passing was not unexpected; both Bridget and I had known for a few weeks that this was going to happen, but it doesn’t make the loss any less difficult.

His name: Standard Cable.

In some wicked bastardization of The Night Before Christmas, a jolly fat man in a suit came into our apartment complex, and instead of giving us toys and goodies, he brought only woe and despair as he switched off our digital cable service.

Yes, we asked for him to come. Yes, we wanted him to turn it off. But no, it does not make us happy, even knowing that we’ll save a lot of money on our monthly bills. Consequence #46 of living on a budget in Boston.

One of the more difficult things about all this is that I promised myself this would never happen. Back in the early days of this millennium, when I got cable in the first place, I was flush with money… well, not flush, but I was alone and bringing home a darn good paycheck every week. And so, I promised myself that I would never lose cable; it would be one of my priorities to maintain that primary font of news and entertainment.

I failed.

The fact is, we didn’t use most of the channels we had (we had the Premium Super Platinum Duplex Cable Package), and even paying for standard cable is too much of a burden on our wan budget. Bridget first suggested the idea months ago, but I fought it, going back to that promise I had made myself. But eventually, I did something that Congress can’t do: I realized that budget cuts would have to be made and that they would be painful.

Bridget’s original thought was to get rid of all the things which we relied on Comcast for, which included both cable and high-speed internet. One look at the fire that shot out of my eyes, and she realized that losing high-speed internet was a non-starter. The compromise was to go to Verizon DSL, which would have been an annoying transition with slightly slower speeds in the end, but significantly cheaper. Well, turns out Verizon doesn’t do DSL in our area, so we were stuck trying to figure out how to keep it with Comcast, and yet lose the cable without too much hassle.

Fortunately, Comcast, in its effort to get people on as many services as possible, makes it cheaper to get internet access if you’re a cable subscriber. The end result is that it was cheaper to keep basic (and I mean basic) cable and the internet than it would have been to eliminate all cable TV and keep the internet service. And so, we still have basic cable, allowing us to watch local channels and C-Span in crisp color. Whoo-hoo.

When Bridget called me today and let me know that the service had been switched over, I got a little melancholy. Not for too long, because I had a pile of forms on my desk to do, but for a little bit. What went through my mind were all the things Bridget and I were losing:

The Sopranos (new season in March)

CNN… CNN for fuck’s sake! This one will hurt the most when there’s a big breaking news story that’s not quite big enough for the big four networks to cover.

The 8,500 weekly episodes of Law and Order that we had access to. Now we only get three a week on NBC. What is this, the Dark Ages?

Deadwood

Huff (new season this spring)

The L-Word (Shane! Come back Shane!)

Entourage

Curb Your Enthusiasm

ESPN (ha! yeah, right. Like I give a damn.)

Bravo/Sundance/IFC/other snooty hip film channels

Comedy Central (sob!)

The Daily Show (sob! sob!)

VH1 and MTV (it pains me to say it, but I only really care about the former… age is a bitter mistress)

Did I mention CNN?

There is one net positive in this list: I will never have to be flipping through channels and see Faux News come up.

But overall, it’s going to be rough. Part of our compromise budget cut was resubscribing to Netflix, which has already started. It feels good to be back on that gravy train.

But I’m going to miss cable. God damn, am I ever going to miss cable.

Everyone chill the fuck out

Deep breath, everyone.

I think we’re all realizing that this is, in the end, a tempest in a teapot that came from poor communication. I think we’re all in agreement that Andrew should have let us know before now that he and Marianne weren’t coming. I sympathize with Mams’ plight here; I’m likewise one to procrastinate in the sharing of bad news, and it’s gotten me in trouble more than once in my life. The thing that finally sank in after years and years of making people angry: the consequences of delay always worsen the negative impact you were fearing in the first place.

Both Bridget and I understand the predicament that Marianne finds herself in with regards to work, and no one blames her for not wanting to travel umpteen hours for a couple of hours holiday, only to have to turn right back around.

Please understand that Bridget’s getting upset is not because she feels that Andrew or Marianne meant to snub us or anything. She’s more upset with how it affects her family; now that she’s had the evening to sleep over it, she realizes that the real impact of this whole shenanigan on her family is negligible, and her attitude has been tempered by this. As for me, I’m sorry that I dragged Mom into this, but as I pointed out to her, I have no ability to bring my brothers to task for anything, and I would have certainly crumbled from hearing Andrew’s helplessness had I called to relate our grievance (I don’t miss the irony, by the way, that I was unwilling to make a potentially difficult phone call…we McKenzies are all the same).

Invitations will continue to be given to family events; Andrew and Marianne should know that they’ll always be welcome regardless of circumstance.

Please note that the reason this whole thing bothered us wasn’t because they couldn’t come; that happens, especially among those of us who struggle paycheck to paycheck. What bothers us is that we didn’t know about it ‘til now. That’s all—and in the end, we know it’s not much. We have no intention of tearing Andrew away from Marianne this Christmas; it would completely ruin the point of inviting them to have them separated on the holiday—it’s not what we want. Please, please, please, stay in Amherst.

Let’s please just get past this, because it’s not really worth the bother it’s causing. We’ve all vented in our various forums, and so now let's just shrug our shoulders and have a Merry Christmas.

Please?

The critics have spoken

STIPIMM: “I Like Mike,” by Jay Spears

It’s been a nerve-wracking couple of days for Ian Allen (the director of Trapped by the Mormons) and me; tonight, the film opens for a week-long run in New York City, which earns it the cred to get reviewed by the big boys. And so, we’ve been waiting anxiously for those reviews.

The anxiousness came not from the need for validation. Ian has the thickest skin of anyone I know, which came from years of enduring the barbs of the Washington, D.C., press. As for me, having been a movie reviewer myself, I know how these things work, and I can easily take whatever they say about my work with a big grain of salt. What we were anxious about was the potential impact these reviews would have on the audiences. A good review in a prestigious publication can bring lots of people into the theatre. A bad review can shy people away, but that’s only a net negative if your movie was well known to begin with. In our case, even a horrible review is still publicity our movie wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. Still, good reviews are better, of course.

They started trickling in on Tuesday. They were all good, but none of them were effusive with praise. The Village Voice was certainly the most interesting, including the line, “…this must be the first movie in which an LDS pamphlet is used as a masturbation aid.”

Then, late Tuesday, came surprise word that the New Yorker magazine (of the snooty commercial: “the best magazine in the world… probably the best magazine that ever was”) had put a paragraph review of the film in its calendar section. Huge and unexpected. What was even better was what they said:

This silent film tells the cautionary tale of Nora (Emily Riehl-Bedford), a dutiful young Englishwoman who jilts her officer fiancé for Isoldi Keane (Johnny Kat), a Mormon proselytizer who is also a hypnotist and a vampire. The film is a conceptual gag (the director Ian Allen based it on a 1922 silent film of the same title and substance); if it occasionally falls flat, it nonetheless plays for high artistic stakes—for who has not at some time been possessed by love, religion, or some other passionate delusion? Allen and his D.C.-based theatre company, Cherry Red, prove that the silent cinema derives its deepest inspiration from the dance: the startling gesture repertoire with which Allen invests his performers makes even a faked resurrection seem true to life.—R.B. (Pioneer Theatre.)

Wow! The most intellectual mainstream magazine in America not only took our film seriously on its own terms, but gave it its approval. We were bowled over with glee.

The glee got diffused a bit the next evening when the New York Times review went online. Let’s just say it was… negative:

These are (for some reason) vampire Mormons whose baptismal ritual transforms nice English girls into furious face-eating zombies. No, it doesn't make sense. And no, it isn't as fun as it sounds.

I actually surprised myself in my reaction to reading the review. I wasn’t sad, morose, self-defeatist, deflated, whatever… in fact, it made me laugh in a morbid sort of way. I shook my head and thought, “Man, you just don’t get it, do you?” In contrast to the reviewer from the New Yorker, the Times’ reviewer had taken it seriously for about five seconds, formed an opinion early on, and let the rest of the movie inform that opinion. It’s how it works, for both positive and negative reviews – you don’t know what side of subjectivity you’re going to get.

The only thing that bothered Ian and me, and indeed the only reason I would be mentioning it, is the fact that it is the New York Times, the paper of record and the cultural touchstone for the city. All the other reviews could have been negative, but if the Times had come through, we would have been dancing. As it was, the Times was the only negative review (unless you count the New York Sun, which I don’t; long story why), and that significantly dilutes the positive effect of all the other reviews in the public eye.

But, like I said before, it’s still a review in the paper of record. For that reason, I’ve still been trumpeting the review to everyone I know. “Look, the Times hates us! Isn’t it awesome!” And the review fulfilled a long-time fame fantasy I've had (along with winning an Oscar and bagging Kate Winslet): it referred to me as "Mr. McKenzie." It's a silly little thing, but it's the Times' unique policy to call people by a formal title on the second reference to them in a story, and it's kind of a snooty "I've arrived" thing for me to see myself referred to in that way by the Times.

Today, however, came an even bigger surprise than all the rest of them. We got reviewed on Salon.com, which is a nationwide daily Internet publication, one that I and lots of people I know have read for years. It was part of their weekly “Beyond the Multiplex” feature, and was very positive. A sample:

Director Ian Allen (a longtime playwright and stage director) has lovingly re-created the look and indeed narrative style of silent film -- and he's from Salt Lake City, so if he says Mormons are vampires with hypnotic powers, who am I to argue? I suppose this is a one-note joke, more in the style of '70s avant-garde camp than anything else. But, hey, at least it's a funny joke.

And so, with the exception of the New York Times, our movie has been “hailed by critics” (if you will). Go to our pages on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic and you’ll see the way the reviews are leaning. And if you want to read the reviews themselves, here are some helpful links:

New Yorker (only good ‘til Tuesday the 20th)

New York Times

Salon.com (scroll down to the bottom of page 4 [you may have to watch an ad to see this])

TV Guide Online (huh? really?)

New York Post

Village Voice

FilmThreat.com

Wicked cold

STIPIMM: “Exquisite Dead Guy,” by They Might Be Giants

It got cold last week. And not in that sissy, shut down every school in Oklahoma kind of cold. It was Boston cold. Sub-freezing highs, bitterly sharp winds, bundled up to the point of immobility. In other words, a typical New England winter day.

And did I, the boy who hates winter, who dreaded moving north because of this weather, complain? No. I wrapped myself in layers of cloth and sucked it up like the rest of the city. When I had to stand at a T or bus stop for up to 15 minutes in that frigid environment, did I gripe? Pfft! You call this cold? Did I whine and moan when the shower didn’t have any hot water in the morning because all the radiators and the morning shower-takers in the building had used it all? Well, yes, a little, but then I moved on and starting taking showers at night.

Indeed, Bridget, the proud New Englander, did more complaining about the cold than I did, and the entirety of her complaining consisted of one utterance: “Brrr! It’s cold out there!” And when Bridget complains like that, bundled up in her scarf and big red coat, it’s just cute, so calling it a complaint doesn’t do it justice.

Boston cold is, yes, bad, and last week was, yes, miserable. Not a complaint, just the truth. But Friday was the icing on a week of bad weather. The winter storm that dumped feet of snow on the northern U.S. finally showed up in New England, and we got our fair share of the white stuff. This isn’t the first time that snow has fallen here this season; indeed, we got over an inch on Oct. 29, the record for the earliest snowfall ever in Boston. But Friday left all that behind; the day was just snow, snow, snow and more snow. It started in the early morning and by the time the city was waking up, it was causing problems with traffic, both car and foot. Even the T was affected (though that doesn’t take much); one stop on our line had to be abandoned because it was on an incline the trolley couldn’t stop there without slipping.

But of course, this is Boston, and if there’s one thing Boston (the city) handles well, it’s snow. In Washington, D.C., heads rolled in city government a couple of years back because officials in the snow removal department didn’t do their jobs well. When a city gets shut down by snow, the citizens are very vocal about their anger toward local officials. Getting to work on Friday, I got the feeling that any such citizen discontent got into the system and ironed out in Boston years ago; if Boston’s municipal crews did a poor job of clearing the snow, one could imagine an angry (but progressive) mob storming City Hall and lynching the head of the roads department. As a result, snow removal is a high priority, and it shows. By the time I headed to work, around 8 a.m., most of the major streets were already well plowed, and every smaller street had gotten at least one pass. When I got to Harvard Square, the snow was still coming down strong, but traffic wasn’t nearly as snarled as it would have been in D.C. in the same conditions; people were moving slower, but they were still moving steadily. Indeed, so together was Cambridge’s public works that they were plowing the sidewalks by the time I was there. Ask D.C. to plow a sidewalk and they’d just tell you to buy yourself a shovel.

Once inside the warm confines of my office, I was able to watch the continuing blizzard in comfort. And continue it did, well into the afternoon. And then, something happened to endanger the warm confines I was in: the power went out in my office around 2 p.m. It was Friday in a blizzard, so not many people had come into work in the first place (“working from home,” my ass), and most of those who had come in left after the outage prevented any work from happening. I, an hourly worker, had no choice but to stick around and wait until my eight hours were through (if I wanted to get paid for them). And so I sat and read, and talked to Bridget on the phone, and read some more. The power did come back on after a couple of hours, but by then, who really wants to work? So, I diddles around for another hour and left to meet Bridget to see “The Tempest” (which in D.C., given the same conditions, would have been cancelled).

By the time our wintry tempest was all said and done, it dumped 8.6 inches of snow on the city, which is a record for that date in Boston. It left the city cold, but beautiful, pretty much how I expected it would be.

A tree grows in Brighton

Our new tree
The 2005 ornament
(we couldn't find cute animals)

O Tannenbaum, where art thou?

STIPIMM: “O Canada,” the Canadian national anthem

It’s December, and in the McKenzie household, that means the apartment gets decked in all sorts of Christmas paraphernalia. Trinkets, hangings, lights, ornaments, all brought out from storage to make their annual showing. It’s mostly Bridget’s doing; she’s got a stronger sense of personal holiday tradition than I do. So last week, when all the decorations went up, it was mainly Bridget who did most of the hanging. That doesn’t seem to bother her too much, but then, she could be hiding a simmering rage.

One tradition that Bridget and I have that we will duplicate again this year is buying a dated tree ornament, i.e., a cute decoration that has the year prominently stamped on it. It started when we bought a “Our First Christmas together, 2003” ornament with two cute mice cuddling together on it. And since then, it’s something we’ve just decided to continue, going to Target and getting a nice dated ornament. We haven’t made the trip this year yet, but we’ll probably do it this weekend.

However, once we get the ornament, we have a larger problem that will have to be overcome: we don’t have a Christmas tree. Both years we’ve been together, we got a live tree down the street from where we lived in Silver Spring. Now, we want another live tree to put in our living room, but unfortunately, there aren’t the abundance of Christmas tree vendors that we had in Washington, D.C. The main reason, of course, is that in D.C., we lived in a suburb, where there was actually room for small vendors; in Boston, temporary retail space is harder to come by.

That said, we were finally able to find a nearby vendor, but only through some Internet sleuthing. Now, there’s another problem. We don’t have a car here in Boston. My car, Phoebe, is vacationing up in New Hampshire until her parents can afford to have her in the city. Bridget had dreams of carrying our tree home ourselves, like they did in “When Harry Met Sally.” But, the nearest Christmas tree seller to our house is over a mile away, and the idea of hauling a tree that distance in the blistering cold we’ve been having this week quickly extinguished that dream.

So, for the past week and a half, the area we cleared in our living room for our Christmas tree has remained woefully empty. There is a light at the end of the tunnel, however; Bridget will be going home to New Hampshire this weekend and bringing Phoebe back with her for a few days, so we’ll be able to cart the tree home that way. And then, once we decorate the tree with ornaments new and old, it will truly feel like Christmastime has really arrived once again at the McKenzie home.

These are her stories

STIPIMM: “Knights of the Round Table,” by Monty Python

This July, when Bridget and I did Day-Old Plays with Cherry Red Productions in D.C., Bridget was assigned to a play that was a parody of Law & Order, focused on the Michael Jackson case -- two subjects that are ripe for ridicule. But after all was said and done, and we were talking about the creation of our separate projects, Bridget confessed to me that she had to have her cast explain to her the significance of the show’s “chung-chung” sound (which, of course, was featured prominently in the play). Here was Bridget being asked to direct a Law & Order parody with only a passing knowledge of the show she was targeting. Granted, she still did a great job with sub-par material, but it was still a surprise to learn that she didn’t much about what is (whether we realize it or not) one of the cultural institutions of our time.

My oh my, how that has changed.

Bridget has become a Law & Order addict. She watches it whenever she can, which, because of the ubiquity of the show in syndication, is essentially any time she is home. I don’t know when it started, but it has been a slow transformation. At first, she only watched it when she happened upon it while flipping channels. Now, at least twice in a TV-watching evening, she will cruise over the on-screen guide, looking for when and where Law & Order will be on. And it’s not just the original Law & Order. She’s checking for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And since there doesn’t seem to be an hour of the day when there isn’t some version of Law & Order on TV (be it on NBC, Bravo, USA or TNT), her wishes are often fulfilled. (For the record: her favorite of the three is Criminal Intent, but she enjoys all of them.)

I’ve never been a Law & Order “fan,” per se. I sometimes will catch the show by accident if the storyline catches my interest (usually some hot chick has to get murdered or be the lead suspect). But it has never been must-see TV for me, and Law & Order has never been the anchor to any night of TV. Now that Bridget’s taken a strong interest in the show, I find myself watching it with her, and enjoying it quite a bit.

But even before Bridget’s foray into watching the series, I knew quite a bit about it through osmosis, and the episodes I had watched. I could talk along with the opening monologue (“In the criminal justice system,…”) years ago, and (like so many people) instinctively knew the plot formula that typifies the original series (murder, investigation, focus on suspect, arrest, arraignment, haggling, trial [sometimes], resolution). Now it’s getting a little deeper than that, and I’m sure Bridget’s getting it too; as time goes on, you start to realize that you’re developing a keen sense of the Law & Order universe: criminals from past shows; long-departed detectives; ongoing plotlines; etc.

Of course, Bridget has a thing about discovering shows, devouring them in the span of a few weeks (thanks to OnDemand), and then throwing the carcass into an ever-growing pile of shows (Sex and the City, Huff, the L-Word…), waiting for the next season to start, if any. Law & Order is a completely different animal than these other shows, however. It’s been around for 15 long years, each of which had a full season of about 22 shows, for a grand total mid-way through the 16th season of 360 shows. And that’s just the regular Law & Order. Law & Order: SVU has 153 episodes, Criminal Intent has 98. Needless to say, even if Bridget had access to all 611 episodes, and watched three episodes a day, it would be almost seven months before she had finished the Law & Order canon. Of course, in those seven months, there probably would have been 30 new episodes made… Needless to say, Law & Order is an elephant compared to the turkeys of other shows whose bones Bridget has picked through. Of course, how do you eat an elephant? One episode at a time.