Mr. Euless Goes To Lowe's!

My bedside lamp, the one by which I do my homework (with charcoal on the back of a shovel, just like young Abe Lincoln (Lincoln is known in some circles (i.e., mine, which has a very small radius (You may be wondering - will these silly digressions ever end? Will he ever get to the meat of the story? It's a post about a trip to Lowe's - how much meat are you expecting?)) as the Mr. Euless of the nineteenth century)), burned out recently. Which is why I found myself stumbling through Lowe's in the early hours of a recent Saturday afternoon, looking for a replacement bulb.

I got the feeling that Lowe's isn't very interested in selling light bulbs. They want to sell lighting fixtures, lighting systems, lighting displays; I think they'd just as soon leave the selling of the actual bulbs to Walmart or Target. Where I probably would have gone had I thought of it rather than subject myself to a Lowe's scavenger hunt for a 120-volt halogen bulb with kung-fu grip. Or something like that.

I thought there would be a light bulb section, one wall or aisle devoted to nothing but any light bulb you could possibly want, or even imagine. Instead they seemed to be scattered randomly throughout the lighting department, probably in accordance with some sociological theory about how to promote impulse buying, the frustrated focused consumer (which I flatter myself I am) be damned (which I also was). I had circumnavigated the department several times and had also explored the frontier to ensure that they didn't have their own department distinct from Lighting; I thought about admitting defeat and leaving but I wasn't quite ready to deal with the chirpy old guy at the door who would want to know, or at least pretend to want to know, if I found everything okay. I made one more pass through - which worked out well, since I actually found them this time, although I still think this whole ordeal (except for the driving to the store part and the trying not to get run down in the parking lot part) could have been avoided if they just put all the bulbs in one spot. But then what would I have to write about?

Paying for the bulb produced its own weirdness. Lowe's has self-service registers, which is nice. I was paying by credit card, so I scanned the item, indicated I was ready to pay, touched the screen to pay by credit card, and swiped the card. I was then prompted for the last four digits of my account number. I don't get this. It can't be a security thing, at least not an effective security thing, because the digits are embossed on the card I just swiped. I started to screw up - I was so sure it was asking for my zip code that I started punching that in before reading the instructions. Then I had to CLEAR (not CANCEL), pull the card back out of my wallet, and punch in the numbers it wanted. I guess maybe it could be that they transmit the credit card number without storing it and then want the last four digits to print on the receipt, but that seems like a bassackward way to do things. Which would kind of fit in with how they display their goods.

05/31/08: Mocktoberfest

Mr. Euless accepted a rare invitation to an exclusive north Dallas soiree this past Saturday evening and probably overstayed his welcome, as hicks from the sticks are wont to do, as he returned to the mundaneness of Tarrant County by the dawn's early light, long after the host had gone to bed and the hostesses had departed for parts unknown. But not before getting a glimpse of how the other side lives, and parties: the cool kids jamming out to "Rock Band" in the den, the players running game in the hot tub, the rambunctious kids chicken fighting in the swimming pool, the earnest kids arguing politics in the kitchen - God only knows what that scene will be like next year when Bush moves onto the block and demands to be invited - the horny dude trying to get at the psychodrama in the bedroom, and tons of other people on the sidelines, chatting, drinking beer, shooting jello, watching, and taking notes. Well, I guess that was just me taking notes but my memory isn't as good as most people's. Especially after shooting jello.

My drink of choice was Shiner Bock mixed with the occasional Blonde, but when the good stuff ran out in the wee hours of the morning - long past the legal limit for buying alcohol from your local convenience store - I was pouring into me anything I could get my grubby little mitts around. Miller Lite, Keystone Light, Michelob Ultra - does it really matter when it's your sixth beer of the evening and your taste buds have long since gone numb? I think not.

It was a good party in the sense that nothing got broken; it was a bad party in the sense that nothing got broken. we partied long, we partied hard, we partied with a sense of purpose, of a destiny to be fulfilled. People stopped by on their way home from club shows and other parties; eventually they left this party to, when they realized they couldn't keep up. Still we partied on, most of the hardcore now hanging out in the hot tub and pool, three guys for every girl which is a horrible ratio and was starting to put a damper on the festivities. Bachelorette Number Two started checking the time more frequently; she had to be at work by six and was long resigned to no longer having enough time between now and then for either sleeping or sobering up. C'est la vie.

My last conversation of the evening was with an attractive young lady half my age who had moments earlier been walking around in a white bra and black panties with a towel demurely wrapped around her, mostly, while she hunted for the rest of her clothes. She was now dressed in a gray t-shirt and blue jeans and we talked about work for a moment before walking outside into the gray early morning. I got into my car, once I found it, and started the long haul back to Euless. At every traffic light I was terrified I'd become another Dallas County carjack victim.

4/12/08: The Upper Deck

After slugging my way through the morning, sleeping through the Camper Scamper 10K (technically, I didn’t really sleep through the race; I woke up, in Euless, ten minutes before the race started in Dallas) I planned on doing and then lounging around and watching a couple of DVDs (“Fast Food Nation” and “The Oh In Ohio”), I finally got my ass in gear and starting doing stuff on Saturday, namely getting something to eat (Bagelstein’s – Royal and Preston in Dallas), bumming around Border’s while digesting, and then running five miles on the Katy Trail. Which reignited my appetite and after cruising around Dallas trying to decide where to eat, I decided to delay the decision by driving back to the burbs. Which is how I eventually wound up at The Upper Deck, a sports bar on Trinity Boulevard in Ft. Worth, but that weird long arm of Ft. Worth that most people don’t think of as Ft. Worth, which is why a lot of people apparently think the place is in Euless.

The Upper Deck used to be O’Dwyers and then was closed for a time; it opened under new ownership and its new name sometime last spring or early summer, I think. They also built a deck overlooking Trinity Boulevard; I’m assuming this was done to allow them to handle larger crowds because I never heard of people gushing about how scenic Trinity Boulevard is and wondering where they could go to get a decent view. I’m not sure how long O’Dwyers was around but however long it was, I never went there and I had the same streak going with the Upper Deck until Saturday.

While there I had a burger, chili cheese tater tots, and three pints of Shiner Bock. The burger was pretty good and I like their pricing system – the burger is $6.95 and there are all sorts of things – cheese, mushrooms, onions – you can add on free although the more extravagent garnishes (i.e., bacon) cost extra.
The chili cheese tater tots were not that great mostly because of too much mediocre cheese but that was probably actually a good thing; the burger came with fries so as it was I had more food than I really needed.
The Shiner Bock was as tasty as Shiner Bock usually is, which is tasty enough to be my beer of choice when I’m having more than none and it’s available and I’m not trying something different just for the hell of it.

The ambience of the place was laid back wanna-be dive bar but to really be a dive bar you need to have some history, or at least furnishings that look like they might have seen some history. I was sitting in a room off to the side of the entrance; it had booths and tables, flat panel televisions showing the Rangers game, a couple of screens showing NTN trivia, and a couple of couches at one end. From where I was sitting I had a view of the bar, which is directly ahead when you walk through the door. The room I was in was off to the left; there was another room off to the right that I think was more of a game room, but I didn’t really check it out so I can’t say for sure.

AFI Dallas: Shorts Awards

For a short film to be taken seriously for awards at AFI Dallas, the evidence suggests that it’s best to be serious: the winners featured beatings, smuggling, a shooting, a stabbing, some dead and dismembered fairies, and, in the lightest piece, death by pie. Of course, the awards were purportedly difficult to decide because all the shorts were ‘amazing’; I saw nearly all the shorts in the festival and while I saw more amazing shorts than I did sucky ones, and while I wouldn’t put any of the winners in the sucky class, I’d put the vast majority of the shorts I saw, including all the ones included in the winners’ compilation, somewhere between those two extremes. Then again, none of the ones I thought were amazing won anything and all the ones that won I thought were good but not great (I didn’t think any were the best in their respective programs) so what the hell do I know?

The Grand Jury winner was “The Second Line” which was one dude’s crappy day – crappier than usual, even – in a Katrina FEMA camp and a flood-ravaged New Orleans neighborhood. Honorable mention went to “A Catalog of Anticipation,” about a girl whose collection of dead things comes to include the aforementioned fairies. Two other shorts, “Bongo Bong” and “The Object”, received a special directing mention. “The Object” was most notable for being in English, with English subtitles – and they were helpful. Both these shorts were not shown in the winners’ compilation which was too bad, because I liked them better than any of the ones they did show. Which isn’t meant to be a knock on the shorts that were shown – both of these were inventively entertaining.

The student award went to “The Vulnerable Ones”, which is about a father-and-son relationship but whose plot seems to involve smuggling. In Africa. But with little violence – the son gets slapped near the beginning of the film and the father gets slapped near the end. “A Day’s Work”, about the eventually violent interactions between three immigrant day laborers and the family that hires them to help them move, won honorable mention and also won the audience award.

I liked the various shorts programs, and I saw all but the documentaries and the Booker T. Washington showcase, but I was disappointed by the winners. I thought they were all safe choices – earnest, serious projects carefully snipped from today’s headlines. Well, that last part was mostly true of “The Second Line” and “A Day’s Work” but none of the winners really rocked the screen. At best, they folkrocked the screen but really they were more like early seventies singer-songwriters of shorts. More John Prine, say, than John Denver but still.

One baseless fear I had was that this would be a tough ticket. Turns out, not so much – the theater was the smaller of the two they had at the Angelika and it wasn’t full. I’d say it was maybe two-thirds full although that was partially because all of the winning filmmakers had already left town.

AFI Dallas: Fat Wan Walking

Steve Vaught is a mess. His thirteen-month walk across the United States was also a mess. It would be a rare filmmaker who could sculpt a coherent tale out of the diverse, sometimes conflicting stories Vaught and his odyssey encompass; unfortunately for Vaught and for us neither P.J. Bagley nor David Mollering are that filmmaker, and as a result “Fat Man Walking” is also a mess.

My uneducated guess is that the filmmakers suffered from three main problems: too little money, too little experience, and too much material. Steve Vaught is a morbidly obese, clinically depressed dude from San Diego who starts walking across the country with an 85-pound backpack and a plethora of personal issues, such as uncontrollable anger and guilt from having killed two elderly pedestrians in an automobile accident. Before setting out he sets up a website and finagles free gear from local stores in exchange for website ads. Over the course of his journey, which will take over a year partially because of trips back to California and breakdowns enroute, he becomes a minor media sensation with appearances on “Today” and “Oprah”. He doesn’t always seem too pleased by all this attention, particularly when the attention turns critical or hostile. He also gets a lucrative book deal but that creates its own problems; his ghostwriter says Vaught’s journal entries are ‘boring’ and ‘pedantic’, and Vaught tells his ghostwriter, “It’s a good thing you’re not within choking distance.”

During the course of the film we see Steve hanging out in hotel rooms more than we actually see him walking. Apparently he tended to walk less when the film crew was around because he had people to hang out with; when he was by himself there was nothing to do but walk. The documentary dudes began to suspect that Steve was fudging the miles he was reporting when they weren’t around – he walked eighteen miles in one day just to prove that he could do it. We don’t see one of the crucial events of the journey – Steve throwing his antidepression medicine down a storm drain – but we do see what is probably one of the results of that decision – Steve exploding in anger and throwing his cell phone against the wall when P. J. Bagley asks him if he ever sees the glass as half full.

It’s a redeeming moment in the film, a sign that, despite the glare-filled camera shots and misspelled titles and underdeveloped themes, these guys are not talentless hacks, that they are capable of asking insightful questions and eliciting a visceral response. These moments are rare, though; I felt like I had a better grasp of the facts of the journey before seeing the film than I did afterward. I think that if if someone who had never heard of the Fat Wan Walking saw the movie, they’d walk out feeling like they had just sat through a stranger’s home movies, too many of which were shot by the drunk guy at the party. They’d also come out with at least one question for Steve Vaught: Do you ever see the glass as half full?

AFI Dallas Opening Weekend: Thompson Twins Edition

Because of the AFI Film Festival I spent a lot of time in Dallas this weekend yet I wasn’t robbed, raped, or murdered even once, nor was my car broken into or carsonized. It probably helps that I drive a ’98 Galant and I was cruising around streets populated by shiny new Lexi and Benzes and Escalades – if anybody picked my car to break into out of that crowd, I’d assume it was just for the practice. I was more worried about wandering into Highland Park and getting pulled over for Driving While Poor.

The movies I saw this weekend included “Gonzo: The Life and Work of Hunter S. Thompson” and “Assassination of a High School President”, both of which I saw at the Magnolia, both of which I brought two bottles of Shiner Bock into, and both of which saw me kick an empty bottle of Shiner over in the middle of the movie but, hey, at least they were empty bottles of Shiner. No beer abuse here!

“Gonzo” was mostly good – entertaining and informative – review of Hunter Thompson’s dirty life and times featuring a lot of songs, some good and some not so good of the late sixties and seventies. Jann Wenner, founder and editor of Rolling Stone, was a prominent on-screen contributor; the documentary didn’t go into much detail about Thompson’s falling out with the magazine in the late seventies. The film also didn’t pay much attention to his life before writing “Hell’s Angels” or after about 1976 or so, and several classic Thompson stories were omitted, like his ride to the airport with presidential candidate Richard M. Nixon in 1968. Or maybe that was in there – I can’t remember now.

Incidentally, I think I saw Gordon Keith, the King of All (Dallas) Media, in the audience for this. I don’t think he kicked over any beer bottles.

“The Assassination of a High School President” was much funnier than I was expecting, although it wasn’t a comedy the way, say, “Dumb and Dumber” or "Old School" is a comedy. It’s a story first and then it’s a comedy; that is, as much attention is paid to the plot and characters as to the jokes. Afterwards three of the featured actors – Mischa Barton, Reece Daniel Thompson, and Gabrielle Brennan – did a Q-and-A about the film and its shooting, and it was nice to see the older actors steer some of the questions to Gabrielle Brennan, who’s eleven years old and was hesitant to insert herself into the conversation. So she could have wound up standing there the entire time saying nothing; it was generous of her co-stars to make she was included.

This theater was totally packed for this movie – they even brought in some extra chairs to squeeze a few more people in. As a rule, AFI programs tend to start late and the bigger the deal or larger the crowd, the later they tend to start. This was a very big deal and a very large crowd so it started pretty late but they put a lot of padding into their schedule so delays don’t tend to snowball.