There has to be a Boyzone.
Any list will always have a Boyzone in it. The nature of Freaky Trigger lists is that by the time you get to the top most people have run out of their favourite items, and everyone gets much more competitive. So to get in it has to be well known, well liked and not particularly controversial. Not the most recent film on this list (Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King got that honour) but certainly one which most people shrugged their shoulders and said: yep, its pretty good. And some people wanted to go home.
None of which should be seen as criticisms of this film, which I think would probably turn up if this list was done in twenty years time. For all its faults (it is far too long for instance) it contains moments of pure genius. Most of those come from Johnny Depp, who was robbed for the Oscar. This is proper acting, proper showboating and no matter how silly this tale of pirates, skelingtons and daring on the high seas gets, Depp can always make it sillier. Perhaps pirates were flamboyant dandies (there certainly was a high instance of homosexuality in pirate circles) but Jack Sparrow is a creation borne out of no-one seeing a pirate film for twenty years. Even when Depp showed his hand and said it was based of Keef Richards, it still impressed. Keef has never been quite this entertaining.
It is also of course a triumph of cross-pollination. Adaptations come and go, and are often seen as either cinema dumbing-down or cheapening the original in some way. When your film is based on a fairground ride this is not such a problem. There is probably little that is seen as culturally worthless than summer blockbusters after all, even theme-park rides*. And in a genre trawl why limit yourself either to the dull truth of actual pirates (who tend to die at the end) or the penny pulps of much pirate fiction. In blending pirates with zombies you do get some remarkable synergies – and it works well as a kiddie scarer. It can also work well as a kiddie borer, as the film is a good forty minutes to long. But in championing the underdog, fulfilling curses and being remarkably old fashioned, Pirates Of The Caribbean dazzles.
And there has to be a Boyzone.
*This is incorrect. Both summer blockbuster and theme-park rides are expressions of the pinnacle of human achievement: for better or worse.
Pete Baran in Do You See /FT • No Comments
THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1973
L-R: Tommy, Bobby
It’s a pretty safe bet that everything you see in this photo is probably in a landfill somewhere.’
OK, now that I’ve gotten the sweeping statement out of the way, it’s fun to quantify (and qualify) the fates of our possessions as they sailed off towards eternity like the souls at the end of Herman Broch’s The Death of Virgil. Almost all of the toys were destroyed or given away within a few years — while I can’t speak for my brother’s toys, by my estimates, the inch-worm (upper left-hand corner) wins the 1973 toy longevity game. I’ve got a clear recollection of trying to play with it during the Bicentennial party two-and-a-half years later, then watching snow fall on it in the yard one night, probably during the next winter, where I imagine it stayed until it was thrown out, water- damaged and insecty. The all-time oldest toy of mine I have any trace of: the Fisher-Price Play Family Castle (it seems appropriate to italicize it, like it was a work of art). I sold it off for mere dimes in a garage sale in 1977, 1978 or so; sometime before the family quit the North Bellmore house for good in 1992, I ran my fingers underneath the radiators in my room and found this little survivor. I also own the family’s Atari cartridges from ’78-’83 and a Woodstock doll with a gnawed arm that I should take to the New York Doll Hospital one day, to say nothing of the LEGO sets I still have. There was a very odd Christmas special back in ’78 or so where a magician or a scientist (what’s the diff in these things?) misguidedly tried to encase all the world’s toys in Lucite cubes so that kids can have them around forever and ever. Raggedy Ann & Andy would have none of that, leading us to the Heartwarming Lesson: the whole point of a toy is to love it — in other, more Marxian words, to use it up and then buy another one. (Bet it was sponsored by Toys “R” Us.) The Lucite option actually sounded pretty attractive to me, as I never liked how my attentions would make toys increasingly crippled, yes crippled, as I was an animist at heart and treated almost everything around me as having some kind of soul that I had some responsibility for. Surfaces scratched, pieces lost, the dog ate the New York puzzle piece again, BAD GIRL: these were little injuries and deaths. The not-so-faint traces of that attitude later inform my understanding of economics and ecology, teaching me you don’t waste stuff. Toys that lost their usefulness would not get completely discarded, instead they’d “go to charity” — that is, get thrown into these large dumpster-like metal boxes you’d see in suburban parking lots, set up by a local Catholic church usually, thereby postponing the landfill-fate for at least a few more years. Unless my grandfather simply ditched them in a dumpster somewhere, which I wouldn’t hold past him.’Right after I got rid of most of my early toys this way it occurred to me that there was still something perverse and wasteful about sloughing off the old only to make room for new in endless cycles, and, perhaps not coincidentally, the spell of toys had over my imagination started breaking.’
Anyway…the carpet and wallpaper disappear by the late eighties; the furniture gets thrown out once we leave North Bellmore. The glass credenzas (upper-right corner), after spending some time in my apartment, are now in an unloved corner of my mom’s basement; the green glass globe (also upper-right corner) is also in the basement; the glass ash-tray (on the side table) is…somewhere, while the porcelain bowl with a lid is in privileged space in keepsake cabinet. The boys are still around, if irretrievably grown-up. The house itself still stands, now occupied by another family.
Michael in Blog 7 • No Comments
THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1972
L-R: Bobby, Dad
Dad is thirty-two here, a year younger than I am now, yet eternally a leap ahead of me. However old I get, I will always look at this photo and see someone my senior. Other photos, from his teen years or early twenties, don’t have this problem. He seems young there. But then he seems like someone else entirely. The first time I saw a picture of him from his early twenties I burst out with “he looks like Ricky Ricardo!” Now this was when I was maybe six or seven and still pretty naive about the markers of ethnicity; still, not entirely ridiculous, as the Daddinos trace their bloodlines not just through Italy but Morocco and Brazil (though not Cuba, far as I know). But in slightly later photos, when he starts losing the callowness in his face — when he starts looking like the man who raised me — he may be twenty-five or thirty, the same age as any random Williamsburgher dork on Friendster, yet completely incommensurable with them in terms of…a lot.
In light of this time dilation, it’s ironic that he’s sharing with my brother one of the childhood passions that lingered all the way through his adulthood: model trains. We bonded, in our way, over them. As a very young child he’d tote me along, spending many longueurs (meaning maybe only an efficient ten minutes a time, still very boring for a child) in the number of the hobby stores on the Island; while I have only one clear memory of going with him to Trainland, a specialty store in Lynbrook, every time I passed by it while commuting on the Long Island Rail Road, I’d think of that moment, very brief but full of light (was a sunny day). One time the family went to a train show somewhere on Long Island: the only thing I remember was the charging sound of trains that seemed to come from everywhere yet nowhere yet behind a very large curtain yet um maybe not. He’d often spend his weekend in the den or butcher-block kitchen table, quietly assembling wooden train cars via x-acto knife and mitre box, balsa wood and a Diet Pepsi to the side. I never thought it odd that an adult took toys seriously, which is possibly a root reason why I still have dozens of old LEGO sets from the eighties…and it never occurred to me until just now that Dad and I shared a passion for lording over miniature worlds, systems you could enclose in a wide hug, smaller versions of larger things. Mine: LEGO sets, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, Fisher-Price play-sets, dolls and dollhouses, maps, models esp. Visible Mans and Womens, Build Your Own Books, my own electric set, at five and a half…
Also, photography (the “smaller versions of larger things” thing, again). Dad gave me my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic, around 1981, a completely spur of the moment gift (which at the time was completely unlike him). He was the family photographer, more likely to be behind the camera than in front of it. Some fragmentary evidence: out of the over nine hundred 35mm slides our family had developed from 1970 to 1974, my dad appears in less than five of them; of our Christmas photos from 1982 and 1983, the last two Christmases prior to the divorce, he isn’t even in a single shot.’So photos of him are hen’s teeth rare. But the lion’s share of the pictures you’ll see this month are his.’
Michael in Blog 7 • No Comments
