Michael's Diary -- 2001-2003 Archive

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1.18.2002
Today, a quasi-productive day. Got the aforementioned late start but went dowtown to Perry's Deli and had an Earnest's Xtasy sandwich (turkey salad, cole slaw, munster cheese and bacon on rye with Russian), some potato chips and macaroni salad for breakfast/lunch. Perry's makes the best sandwiches I've had since the days of Joe's Deli in Albany (later reincarnated as the equally nice Michael's Deli before it was turned into a horrible, horrible college bar). No real surprise: Perry knew Joe, and as it turns out uses his famous Russian Dressing recipe. And man, are those sandwiches good.

Then, it was off to Borders for a bit of browsing. Picked up the recent Disney re-issue of Snow White on DVD. My understanding is that this is the first in a complete revamp of special editions of Disney flicks (except for Fantasia, which already came in a massive three-disc set that's fantastic). The nice, yet multiply pierced young lady at the counter expressed her mother's dread of the wicked Queen, so powerful Mom cannot watch the film to this day, while her own terror is of Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. She had bad dreams after seeing it as a kid and watching it again as a (very young) adult she had the same nightmares! "I'm taking a class this semester called 'Deconstructing Disney,'" she said. "That's nice," I replied.

Time for a little soapboxing: why the hell does everybody who fancies himself an intellectual despise Disney? Sure, Disney is at a point where they have a little too much concentration of media in their grasp. But take, for example, this month's cover of Wired: "Disney, Invader," it reads, and the article grimly warns of new Disney parks in Hong Kong and Japan. Disney is perceived by all the earnest white liberals (or EWLs) I know as some kind of horrible viral infection that insidiously controls the minds of the unwilling. Many of these EWLs (if they haven't entirely lost touch with their sense of humor, their grip seems to be loosening at way too young an age) don't seem to notice or understand that for the vast majority of people, Disney parks are FUN. In fact, that is why they were built in the first place.

Walt Disney himself did not set out to create a huge empire -- in fact his continuing quest for creating places where families could go and have FUN continually bankrupted the Disney corporation, or at best put them in enormous debt to the Bank of America for half a century, to his businesslike brother Roy's chagrin. People don't realise the genesis of Disneyland, the first Disney park, was Walt visiting amusement parks with his daughters each weekend and seeing how filthy and often how dangerous and unsafe they were for kids and even adults. Maybe, he thought, there could be a safe, clean place dedicated to making (in Walt's words) "people, and especially children, happy." Obviously there was a demand for such a place.

The infuriating thing is the attitude that Disney is some nebulous, cultural-imperialist construct operating in some kind of vacuum whence it wields otherworldly powers to enslave human imagination everywhere. I have researched the subject a lot, and one thing I can tell you is that Walt Disney was a hell of a lot more motivated by his own innate curiosity and childlike imagination (the man had a huge toy train he rode around his own backyard, for cryin' out loud) than he was by any kind of desire to rule the world. His parks are fun places to go, with great rides, great attention to detail, great service. His own films were not about "making a zillion dollars" either. They too put the studio in serious hock for many years because Walt had a vision. Snow White, for example, is full of amazing innovations (some still in use today) for its time and it still looks like a million bucks 65 years after it was made -- but it cost a fortune to make it the way Walt envisioned. Fantasia Walt imagined as a new way for people to spend an evening out enjoying music. He designed, essentially, the first surround-sound system and developed a handsome roadshow presentation to make for an elegant evening out. It was a financial failure, but Walt again followed his vision. And his many innovations in animation and cinema were important and valuable and helped shape the forms media take today.

Anyway. I just get sick of the Disney-hatred I see so often. Sure, Walt's heirs have not always done the right thing. Sure, they have overreached. And these "sequels" to Walt's original hits make me sick. But the truth is, Disney succeeds not because of some evil plan but because people have FUN with their products. Sometimes I think the sourest of the EWLs secretly resent that on some level. OK, soapbox off.

Anyway, it's an awesome package with hours of extras (click here to find out more) which I am psyched to check out.

One of my very earliest childhood memories is seeing Snow White on the big screen at the main Hellman's Theater in Albany with my Mom. Back in those days, the screen was really big and the theaters were deluxe. Crappy, I suppose, compared to the movie palaces of old, but awesome to me. The screens were gigantic by comparison with many of today's. I loved all the Hellman Theaters. I saw Jaws 13 times at the Hellman Towne Theater in Latham, on that massive screen. I don't even know if they exist anymore. (I did a quick search on Google hoping to find some photos or websites about these theaters. No such luck.) Fortunately, there seems to be a lot of improvement in screen size even at multiplexes

Anyway, it's quite a childhood memory. The part where Snow White gets lost in the woods and the trees become very anthropomorphic and menacing scared me. I can still remember seeing the dwarves march along and I liked that a lot. The colors made me feel warm somehow. I wonder if my Mom remembers seeing this movie with me. Was my sister Maura with us? I wonder. Anyway it made a huge impression on me. It may well be the very first movie I ever saw. (A quick check on IMDB reveals that it was rereleased in 1967 theatrically, which would make me probably three or four years old at the time. I think that would make Maura too little to have gone. How weird to have memories from that age.)

I also have many fond memories of drive-ins. I think we saw one of the Bond double-feature rereleases they used to run in the sixties -- Goldfinger was rereleased with several Connery Bonds as part of a double feature and I remember seeing that at a drive-in. Pretty racy stuff for those days.

After Borders I went to the store to pick up a snow scraper for G, and tried to get reservations for the catered French dinner preceding a showing of Jean Cocteau's luminescent Beauty and the Beast, if not the most lovely film ever made then a top contender. I first saw some of this in high school and almost fell off my chair in admiration of the lighting and composition. It's part of a neat event called Culture Club Dinner and a Movie at the Chicago Cultural Center. I am REALLY looking forward to their May screening of Kurosawa's Yojimbo, prefaced by a Japanese dinner, in May.

Alas, the dinner tickets were sold out but the film is still free, so G and I will go, maybe with friends, and then have a little French fare afterward.

Then it was a long El trip back home -- long because someone on the train ahead of us apparently had a medical problem necessitating paramedics -- and some lasagna for dinner which tasted great but had both of our stomachs a little topsy-turvy. And now, to bed at a "reasonable hour" -- ha!
1:27 AM

1.17.2002
Slept in late again this a.m. -- oh, the glory of sleeping late without feeling guilty ("I should be looking for a job, I should be looking for a job, I should be looking for a job . . ."). My theory is that the frequent headaches I began experiencing (droning, sometimes excrutiating, always distracting headaches from when I awoke to early evening) just when my former employer started having problems, precipitating my unemployment and the last Year From Hell, shall diminish as well (true enough so far).

The roller coaster game is cool. Alas one can only ride 3 completed coasters in the demo version -- which is cool enough, but it seems hard to follow what's happening on the more complex ones; I expect the real fun of this game is building them.

Now, to collect the laundry and get the hell out of the house for the day. Off to Perry's for a big ol' sandwich.
11:34 AM

A nice enough evening tonight. Lord, I forgot to get my laundry from next door. (We don't have laundry in our building, alas -- the landlord is supposed to make it so but we're still waiting, so we have to use the facilities in the building next door, which he also owns.)

After my last post I put the rest of my day's laundry in and shovelled the front and back walks -- we got an inch or so of wet, fat snow today. More vigorous exercise than I've had in a while -- all the more reason to start the diet n' exercise plan G and I are beginning starting Monday. Came back in and promptly blew my almost-done download of the roller coaster game by firing up my webcam. For some reason, if I haven't used it recently and I don't unplug the USB cable and plug it back in before starting the webcam software, my PC spontaneously reboots. That's what happened and boy, was it aggravating. The long-planned call to Earthlink to get the wheels rolling on DSL came moments later.

G came home with some groceries. I made us some yummy pork schnitzel with some Swiss Rosti potatoes, caramelized onions and some leftover reduction from Trotter's To Go. Good snowy-night food. The we caught Denis Leary on The Job, G nipped off for an early night's sleep and I watched Blade Runner. I'm starting a film studies course I found materials for online, and even without the benefit of a teacher, I'm definitely learning new ways of looking at film. I was able to find the text from the class on Amazon, used for only 10 bucks (for a $50 text, not bad). The first lesson involves looking at mise-en-scene in Blade Runner, so I ran it tonight and will review some of it tomorrow as well.

Now, the roller coaster game will be left to download overnight. And I will be off to bed. Not as reasonable an hour as I had planned but better than last night/morning's 3 am.
12:52 AM

1.16.2002
Just back from a late lunch followed by some grocery shopping. Slept really, gloriously, comfortably late today after staying up late-night last night messing about on the web. Got to get to sleep at a reasonable hour tonight!

One of the truly wonderful things about living in the neighborhood of Lincoln Square here in Chicago is the presence of many fine shops right at our doorstep. (Well, half a block away, but you get the idea.) So, a lunch of fresh chowder and a croque monsieur sandwich while the fat snowflakes fall outside the window of the Cafe Selamarie at the corner can be followed by a purchase of freshly baked bread from the cafe, a stroll to the pharmacy down the block, a stop at the incredible Delicatessen Meyer on the way back for cold cuts and German delicacies, a quick peek in the neighborhood record shop, and a stop at the corner meat market for fresh pork cutlets and onions for supper. All within about fifty yards of each other and about six houses away from where I'm sitting. The wonderful, small pleasures of living in this quaintly European section of town are easy to take for granted.

Right now I'm downloading the massive demo of Disney Imagineering's Ultimate Ride roller coaster game. It's been getting great reviews and G and I have enjoyed Roller Coaster Tycoon so much I'm dying to try it. Those who know me know of my total and complete love of the Disney parks and Imagineering's work so this sounds like the ultimate game for me. Gotta get that DSL hookup soon -- these damn 56K downloads are a killer.
5:31 PM

1.15.2002
No entry yesterday due to momentous news. Catching up:

Doc Films at University of Chicago is a super bargain. 3 bucks! What a deal. On Sunday, I saw Apocalypse Now Redux while G headed for the library to study. I enjoyed the film, as I always have, but I felt the "new" material added in by Coppola and Walter Murch -- they essentially re-edited the picture from scratch -- added little to the film and slowed the narrative down significantly. An expanded sequence with Playboy Bunnies helps lend some motivation to a bloody scene which follows, but the latter scene worked just as well without it. A longish sequence involving a French family holding on to their plantation in the midst of the jungle seemed so bizarre and dreamlike I'm not quite sure what to make of it -- but again it doesn't seem to serve the film that well. That said, the colors in the new dye-transfer prints look great, although the element used by the people at Doc seemed to have suffered some bad projection-room splices and more than its share of scratches. This same cinema has a good Kubrick program going on at present as well as several Kuwosawa flicks coming up, so I am psyched to check it out some more.

Afterwards, G and I wanted a bite to eat. "How about some chili?" I had a yen for it, and I had heard about a new(ish) restaurant called the Chicago Firehouse. Logical, I thought, to think they served chili, no? Well, no, as it turns out -- it's a fine dining establishment, very beautifully done inside. We decided to stay and have a nice meal as we hadn't just gone out for a nice dinner, the two of us, since our anniversary dinner at Charlie Trotter's. I had a bleu cheese-topped steak and G chose a garlic and herb-stuffed sea bass. For dessert, peanut butter and chocolate potstickers! Really yummy, a bit pricey, but thoroughly enjoyed.

Thus stuffed, we headed home and got to bed later than planned (we were feeling pretty full).

Yesterday morning I had a final interview with the Geek Squad, a crack on-call computer repair outfit operating out of Minneapolis with "special agents" (check out the web page) in LA, San Fran, and now, Chicago. Yes, that's right -- I got the job, after a long and frustrating several months without a position. A cool job, with a cool company and I get a VW bug!

Needless to say the celebratory festivities commenced almost immediately. I was joined by my lovely and long-suffering wife as well as many friends at the German bar around the corner. Several hours were spent enjoying German beers and apple schnaaps. The evening concluded with a merry bonfire of my job-search paperwork in the backyard grill. Needless to say I am extremely excited about working for this very cool and very successful company and will be devoting tremendous effort to making it a huge hit here in Chicago.

Also needless to say I slept a little late today . . . threw in some laundry, then went out for some bacon & eggs, and picked up something new to use with the webcam. Check it out!

Now, to clean up the residue of yesterday's festivities.
5:11 PM

1.13.2002
Yesterday, a long day. I stayed up so late the night before that getting up at 8:00 am was a brutal experience. Then, off on the El to the memorial service for my friend's Dad. A nice service with some good eulogizing by my friend and his dad's good pal. Afterwards, there was a luncheon. We stayed the duration, ate some food, and then got together afterwards with D and his girlfriend (S for the sake of this diary) and came over to our place to watch football, drink a little beer, eat pizza, and basically decompress. S got sleepy and so did I! Her sister was coming into town, so they had to split around 7.

I took a nap for a couple of hours and woke up feeling that "took an evening nap" kind of bleariness. We went down the street to a pub we hadn't been to for chicken wings (me), chicken fingers (G), and french fries. Really good chicken wings, maybe especially so because I specified extra-crispy (the way they are supposed to be, dammit). Came home and tried to make head or tail of the Sims computer game for a while, while G played Roller Coaster Tycoon (the heroin of computer games).

Then to bed, not too late. Read a little of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad to warm up for today's viewing of Apocalypse Now Redux.

Got up around 10 today, and now I am going to hop in the shower. We're gonna head down to the U of C today together. G is gonna study in the library while I watch the film.
11:16 AM