More Human Than Human

In a world where the dead are returning to life, the word “trouble” loses much of its meaning.

--Dennis Hopper as Kaufman, Land of the Dead

I love zombie movies. I might be the world’s greatest zombie movie fan (although if Rob Zombie wants the title, I’ll let him have it). Even goofy zombie movies like the Return of the Living Dead series (which are collectively just a big pile of dumb fun) turn me on. But above all other zombie movies, and in fact above all horror movies period, stand George A. Romero’s classics, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead.

I’ve waited twenty years for a fourth movie from Romero, and on Friday I finally got it. If you haven’t seen Land of the Dead yet, you might wanna skip this post, ‘cause I’m gonna talk about it at great length and I don’t want to spoil it for you; and I promise there will be spoilers. I guess this might turn out as sort of a review of the movie, as a matter of fact. ‘Cause I’ve got a lot to say about this film.

First of all, I love the tie-ins between the cast of this movie and other zombie pictures. And I’m gonna list the ones I caught. If anyone noticed any others, please let me know.

• Tom Savini, who did the effects for the first three films and appeared as a machete-wielding biker in Dawn, makes a brief appearance as a machete-wielding biker zombie in this one (although he didn’t participate in the production in any other way). He’s only in for a second, but for fans of the series, it’s a GREAT BIG second; the theater erupted when he showed up, and I’m proud to say that I led the charge. A gratuitous but entirely satisfying moment.
• Greg Nicotero, who helped with effects on Day and played the soldier who gets his throat ripped out by the “housewife” zombie in that film, plays the zombie drawbridge-keeper in this one (and was the makeup supervisor as well). Comes to a bad end, which seems to be his lot in life.
• The zombie with the butcher knife is played by Boyd Banks, who was Tucker in the 2004 remake of Dawn. You remember Tucker; he was the one who was getting dragged through the sewers and finally had to beg CJ to shoot him because he’d been bitten.
• Romero loved Shaun of the Dead, and decided to include a reference to that wonderful movie in his new one. If you watch, when Riley and Charlie walk into the zombie-themed nightclub, there are two zombies chained just inside the entrance for tourists to take photographs with. Those zombies are played by Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright, the writers of Shaun, where Pegg was the star and Wright the director. Incidentally, I said of Pegg while watching Shaun, while he was doing the fake-zombie scene, that he was imitating Bub from Day. He does it so well, apparently, that when I first saw him in this one I thought he was actually Howard Sherman (the guy who played Bub), and had to check the credits to realize my mistake. I really regret, incidentally, that Nick Frost couldn’t have found a place in this film. He was so wonderful as Ed.
• Asia Argento. She's here in part as a nod to her old man, I expect. Dario Argento was the greatest of the Italian filmmakers that started doing spaghetti horror movies when the craze for spaghetti westerns faded. Suspiria, Inferno, Opera, and Tenebre make him one of the most accomplished directors in the genre. Plus, of course, he worked with Romero on Two Evil Eyes and co-produced Romero’s original Dawn. Romero’s known his daughter Asia since she was in diapers. Anyway, including Asia really seemed like an acknowledgement of Italian horror, and I thought it was great. And, although I always loved her for her daddy’s sake, I’ve become quite fond of her in her own right over the past couple of years, as well (if you’ve seen The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, you’ll be with me there; she’s wonderful in a non-horror role). Hell, she even made xXx almost worth watching. And she’s very good in this one, too.

Okay, now that the obligatory references are out of the way, let’s get started on analyzing this movie. Because of course, I have my complaints. And number one on the list is, way too many people survive this movie.

I mean, seriously. In Night, no one lives. Period, straight-up, seven people go into the farmhouse, all seven die. Clean, simple, memorable. In Dawn, only two people survive, and odds are they aren't gonna get far. In Day, we're up to three survivors. Still, I went to see this movie thinking that THIS would be the end-of-the-world movie that we’ve been expecting since the series began. But no…at least thirty or forty people survive this one. Way too many, especially if you’re expecting there to be no humans left after it’s done.

I always refer to the coming of the living dead as the Zombie Apocalypse (and, being me, I really believe it’s gonna happen). Apparently, Romero and I have different feelings about this, because his movie is as un-apocalyptic as it can be, given the rather extreme circumstances.

Also, I feel that Kaufman (Dennis Hopper’s character) has far too merciful a death. I’m thinking of Captain Rhodes in Day, how he was hunted by Bub, gunned down, and finally ripped to pieces by the zombie horde. Now, that’s how a bad guy dies in a zombie picture. Kaufman just gets blown up ‘cause he’s standing too close to his car. Where’s the justice in that?

Kaufman is the über-capitalist in this film, too. He’s the guy who’s found a way to make the Zombie Apocalypse work in his favor. He’s set Fiddler’s Green, the high-rise that approximates the luxury of pre-zombie days, up as an oasis, with a city full of human refuse surrounding it, and then the zombies fenced out beyond them. You want Kaufman to suffer. You want the rich fuckers who live in his place to suffer, too…and yeah, they all die, but there’s none of the evisceration that characterized Dawn and Day here. The zombies just catch rich folks, and then the camera moves away before they get what’s coming to them. Not a single rich person gets torn up in this movie, and goddamnit, that’s criminal. That’s what I was there to see. Maybe there will be an unrated DVD version.

Finally, I’ve got a logistical complaint. When Riley and his troupe set off in search of a new life in Dead Reckoning (the armored truck they drive, which draws its name, I assume, from the fact that Romero briefly considered calling this movie by that name), it doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that this vehicle can get maybe five miles to the gallon. I mean, it’s huge, it’s carrying six people, a mess of armor plate, a couple of cannon, and (presumably) a lot of ammunition. How many times will they have to stop for gas? Hope they’re well-armed, ‘cause this looks like a long and eventful trip.

I wonder, too, about having “name” actors in this movie. I mean, Asia Argento I can understand, because no one in America knows her anyway. But Dennis Hopper and John Leguizamo? That’s a little too big-time for these pictures. Maybe, Romero having more money to do this than he usually does got him to break with his own conventions. And I'm not saying that they weren't good in the picture; I'm just not used to seeing people I know in these damn things.

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“Mass hysteria?” What do they think, we’re imagining all this?

--Karl Hardman as Harry Cooper, Night of the Living Dead

Okay, all that being said, I still loved this movie.

The main thing I enjoyed was that Romero finally got to do the movie he wanted to do with Day of the Dead. I don’t know if you’ve ever read the original script. If you haven’t, you can download it in Word format from the Homepage of the Dead. Just hit “films” on your menu, then “Day of the Dead,” and you’ll see “Original Script” come up on the menu on the right-hand side.

Anyway, Romero wrote a very involved script for Day, more of an epic than Dawn was. But he couldn’t get funding, because the big studios were afraid of the project. They knew it would get a bad rating (Night of the Living Dead got an X, if you can believe that), and Romero was honest about not changing the script so that it would get a more acceptable rating. So, he was out of luck. This has happened to him repeatedly; the studios are afraid they'll lose money, though every single one of these movies has become a cult classic and grossed eight- and nine-figure profits. Hollywood's got no balls, though, and apparently never learns its lesson.

In the original Day script, several of the zombies were experiencing the awakening that Bub did in the version that actually got made. Instead of a tunnel complex in Florida, it was supposed to take place in a survivalist compound on some island. The zombies were becoming self-aware, and human society was on the verge of breaking down. But, Romero had to tone it down because he had no money; and the breakdown of society had to be expressed by twelve people trapped in a bunker.

But Day was still a brilliant movie. In a sense, it was fortunate that he couldn’t do the movie he’d wanted to, because we got to know the characters so much better than we would have if the original script had been used. And the toned-down script allowed Bub, the greatest zombie ever, to come to the forefront. The zombies in Land of the Dead don’t seem too strange to us (in spite of using guns and knives) because we remember Bub. Thus, Land is much better as a fourth movie than the original Day would have would have been as a third movie. So, all in all I guess it was a good thing that Romero had to wait twenty years to make this film.

There were plenty of great zombie-violence moments, though the movie was not as gory as its predecessors. For example, I love the bit with the zombie priest, whose head flips over his shoulders to attack the commando. That’s a nice touch.

I like the politics of it, that a small cadre of wealthy people have separated themselves from the rest of humanity. Even though “money” as we know it is essentially worthless, the rich still find ways to exclude the rest of us. ‘Twas ever thus; if all paper currency became worthless tomorrow and rich folks discovered that they all had a lot of clam shells, then the next day clam shells would be the new currency. That’s just the way it is. They know each other, they’re comfortable with each other, and they keep the rest of us outside.

I love Cholo’s attitude, too. I’ve always wondered about people from the first three films who know they’re gonna die and beg to be put away with a bullet to the brain. I always thought the way Cholo (John Leguizamo) does: fuck shooting me in the head; put me in the middle of a bunch of people I don’t like and let me RAMPAGE. I was proud of him for that. Go get the bastards, Cholo.

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The people of 107 will do what you wish now. Many have died, last week, on these streets. In the basement of this building, you will find them. I have given them the last rites, now, you do what you will. You are stronger than us... But soon, I think they be stronger than you.

--Jesse Del Gre as the old priest, Dawn of the Dead

The big thing, though, is the evolution of the zombies (if evolution is the right word). A running theme in all these movies has been that we are more dangerous to each other than the zombies are to us. Friction in the farmhouse leads to disaster in Night of the Living Dead. Peter, Stephen, Fran, and Roger decide to stay in the mall in Dawn of the Dead because they’re afraid of what the authorities will do when they (the authorities) discover that our heroes have stolen a helicopter; and later, their consumerist fortress is destroyed not by the living dead but by a roving army of bikers looking for loot. In Day of the Dead, the tension between the various humans is so profound that the zombies, outside of Bub, are an afterthought.

In Land of the Dead, we’re still our own worst enemies, but the zombies are moving up the list. Suddenly, our pat defenses don’t work against them like they used to. The zombies aren’t stupid anymore. Well, most of them are, but they have a few leaders who have begun to develop a rudimentary intelligence, especially Big Daddy, the former gas station attendant. He’s begun to form a tactical intellect, and the other zombies follow him, to the sorrow of most of Pittsburgh. He’s a continuation of the gradual move, on the part of the living dead, towards intelligence.

More than that, though, he’s becoming human. Not just intelligent, but human. This, too, is the culmination of a theme through the earlier movies. In Night, the zombies are animals looking for food. In Dawn, they’re still animals, but they’re beginning to see beyond food; they want to be in the mall, not because there’s food there, but just because they want to be there. It used to be important to them, they used to be happy there, and they want in. They don’t know why, but they’re compelled to get into the mall.

In Day, of course, we see the rudiments of learning. The zombies are afraid of their human captors. They are reluctant to approach the gate where the soldiers catch them for experimentation. They cry when they’re left in the dark. Bub dramatizes this so well that we forget the behavior of the other zombies. The great scene from Day is when Bub sees Captain Rhodes, recognizes his uniform, and salutes. Rhodes, of course, does not return the salute (bet he wished later that he had). Then, when Logan hands Bub an unloaded pistol, reasoning that he might have been in the military, Bub tries to shoot Rhodes. Anger…for the first time, we see a zombie expressing an emotion.

When the gun doesn’t go off, Rhodes aims his weapon at Bub, and Bub cringes away from him. Again, this is new: zombies fear fire, but beyond that they appear to have no regard for their own well-being. Bub knows that Rhodes can kill him, and he cowers away until Logan intervenes. Fear is the second emotion we see him experience.

When Bub accidentally frees himself at the end of the movie, does he set off to wreak mayhem? No, he goes in search of Logan. And when he finds Logan’s corpse, he grieves for him. In its way, this scene is as powerful as Sarah’s famous breakdown, after she saves Miguel from his bite and then fends off the soldiers who’ve come to kill him. Bub reacts with the sort of limitless emotion any of us might feel on the death of a father. He feels great sadness, and a lust for revenge. And he goes looking for it. There is no doubt in Bub’s mind that Rhodes is guilty, and he hunts him down and…shoots him! He doesn’t eat him, as zombies generally do. He shoots him, gives him a mock salute, and walks away, leaving his corpse to the other zombies. He is, in a sense, emotionally complete.

In other words, Bub has not only begun to think, he has begun to feel. He has developed the rudiments of compassion. And compassion is a theme in Land of the Dead. Humans, for the most part, seem to have lost their capacity for it. Riley is an exception, as seen in the way he keeps Charlie around, or brings medicine to a sick kid, or the way he rescues Slack from the zombie cage. But mostly, we seem to have lost the ability to feel anything for our fellow man. The rich folks, secure in Fiddler’s Green, don’t care much what happens to the poor folks out on the streets; and to be fair the poor folks on the streets don’t seem to care much what happens to their own kind (as evidenced by the enthusiasm when Slack gets put in the cage in the first place).

Compassion in this movie is experienced mostly by the zombies themselves. As a small example, there’s a young couple (or, at least, what had been a young couple before they got zombified) that spends the entire movie side-by-side, walking and hunting together. It's as if their affection for each other did not end at their deaths. But the best example is Big Daddy, the leader of the zombies. On two occasions, he takes it upon himself to destroy zombies that have been too badly damaged by humans to continue. Each time, he lets out a scream of sorrow and rage. This is telling, but less so than an early scene in the movie, where the human raiders, looking for food, have set off fireworks (which the zombies can’t ignore, for whatever reason; they stand helpless, staring at the "skyflowers," while the humans go about their looting). Big Daddy is immune to the fireworks, and sees his zombies, who are staring at the sky like turkeys in a thunderstorm, being mowed down by random fire from the raiders. He runs along the line of them, and I've heard people saying he was trying to rally them to a counterattack, but I don't think that's so. I think he was trying to get their heads down, trying to save them from the bullets of the mercenaries. He tries to save his people, with no thought for himself. Humanity has settled nicely back into its old groove of “I’ve got mine, you get yours.” Meanwhile, the zombies are learning to care about and depend upon each other.

I think this is where these movies are going, what they’re trying to say. And if there’s a fifth movie in the series, I think I can promise what its theme will be: the zombies have become more human than the humans themselves. They’ll inherit the earth, not because they’re stronger, but because they deserve it.

Some Quiet Time to Myself

Okay, once again I’ve been gone for a while, but I have two excellent excuses. First, I had to travel to Virginia to visit my grandmother’s deathbed; and second, I got arrested and spent some time in jail. If those aren’t good enough to excuse me, I don’t know what’s gonna be.

The trouble was that the bus driver (I went Greyhound) and I weren’t getting along. That was okay, as far as it went; until he decided that he was gonna put me off the bus after a particular stop. This freaked me out, because I was hurrying to see Gramma before she died. I’ve been under a lot of pressure recently, and I guess this pushed me over the edge; I suppose I was a little unreasonable, though not violent. Anyway, the driver called the cops, and they came and locked me up.

I don’t know how many of you have spent time in Virginia, but it is a police state. The cops in Virginia are essentially above the law; there is no accountability in any town in the Commonwealth. I grew up in Richmond, of course, so I already knew this. But Richmond cops, dangerous as they are (and I have personally witnessed the shooting of an unarmed man by the Richmond PD) have real crimes to worry about, so as long as you aren’t too crazy they’ll mostly let you alone. They’ve got more important things to deal with.

This isn’t true in the smaller towns, especially out west. Cops there don’t have a lot to occupy their time when they aren’t setting speed traps, so anything remotely like a crime really gets their blood flowing; and if they decide they don’t like you, you’re in real trouble.

The cops who arrested me definitely weren’t feeling too warmly towards me. They roughed me up a bit (not a Rodney King thing, but it did hurt), and by the time I got into my cell I was covered with bruises and thought my left wrist was fractured. However, the bruises have faded and the wrist, though stiff and sore, seems to be working okay, so I guess all’s well.

It wasn’t so much getting beat up as just the way they took me to the jail. They carted me around for a while in chains, which was fun. The chains have a belt, and your hands are cuffed to chains attached to this belt which allow just enough play for your fingers barely to touch (and the cuffs, incidentally, were applied bone-crushingly tight). Then there’s another chain rising from the belt which goes around your neck and prevents you from standing or sitting up straight. Finally, there’s another chain which falls between your feet and connects your ankles so that you can only take extremely short steps and can’t straighten your legs out.

In other words, you walk hunched over for a few hours like Mr. Johnson’s butler in Arthur, taking very small steps and unable to catch yourself if you should fall. This happens a lot if, say, the cop escorting you decides it would be fun to give you a playful shove. When that happens, you just gotta kinda roll as you fall so as to land on your shoulder instead of your face. I did manage to go head first into an outside corner, which opened a cut on my scalp, but really my shoulders were bruised worse than anything but my wrists. Of course, when you ride in the back of a van in this getup, chained by your wrists (which are now behind your back) to the cage in the van, off and on for three hours, along rough back-country roads with no way to stabilize yourself, so that you're constantly being thrown against the cuffs and your wrists are supporting all of your weight, you can expect some bruises, cuts, and fractures.

Actually, the cell itself was worse than the beating and the transport. They didn’t leave me at the local jail; instead, they took me to regional so they could lock me in an isolation chamber. This is a particularly ugly fate, even if it doesn’t last very long; and it’s usually reserved only for very dangerous prisoners or those who are charged with particularly vicious crimes. Neither of these was true in my case, but as I say, the arresting officers didn’t seem to be terribly fond of me. I’ve always had good luck with judges and bad luck with cops.

Anyway, some of you may never have been in an isolation cell (it's different from and worse than any other experience you have in jail, and I've been in lots of 'em), so let me tell you about it. The cell is tiny, about the size of the bathroom in my little efficiency apartment. There’s a combination toilet/water fountain, which is charming; and there’s no hot water and no soap. You just straight up don’t get to bathe, or even wash your hands before you eat or after you shit.

The only other thing in the room is a mortared cinderblock pile in the corner, about two and a half feet high and probably three feet to a side on top, covered with some kind of tile. This functions as a table, a chair, and a bed. It is, of course, too small to stretch out on, or for that matter to curl up on. You could, I suppose, sleep on the floor between the toilet and the furniture (there was just enough room to stretch out if you did it diagonally), but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was extremely dirty in general and (as you might expect) a bit wet immediately around the toilet; and you couldn’t get far enough away from the toilet because of the size of the room. Anyway, it’s a cement floor, offering neither comfort nor warmth.

And warmth is a serious concern. It would be very difficult to sleep in these cells anyway, even if there was a cot. They keep them freezing cold, and blankets aren’t allowed (nor pillows, but I can live without those); the jailor told me they never give blankets out to people on that block, because the inmates might use them to attempt suicide. Of course, there’s nothing in the cell to loop the blanket around, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred to them.

The young woman around the way from me did manage to do some damage to herself, but that was by hitting herself and slamming herself into the walls of her cell. I couldn’t see any of this; the cell has no windows and doesn’t allow a view of any kind. But I could hear it, and I heard the officers talking about it after. Isolation cellblocks, of course, can be co-ed, because you have no access to the other prisoners. You can’t even see them, as I mentioned.

Anyway, they led me to this room, and I went in thinking it was an interview room or a holding cell. They showed me in (A11, the room number was) and slammed the door behind me, and that was when I realized where I was. And there I stayed; the door didn’t open again for twenty-four hours. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. There was no clock. When they let me out to do my paperwork preparatory to my release, they led me to room that had a clock. It said 8:00. I asked, “AM or PM?” and then followed up with, “Of which day?” I genuinely had no idea.

In a room with no natural light and no clock, and absolutely nothing to do, it is almost impossible to keep track of time. But a bigger concern was that I wasn’t allowed a phone call or a lawyer. They just threw me in that hole and left me there. No one on Earth knew what had happened to me or where I was, and there was really no way for them to find out (this happened halfway to Gramma’s, in a little town in western Virginia). I had, to all intents and purposes, vanished. It occurred to me after I’d been there a few hours that, really, they didn’t have to ever let me out.

Anyway, they did let me out at 8:00 to do my paperwork, and the nice lady at the front desk told me they’d have me out and back at the bus stop by noon. Then they locked me back in the cell. They didn’t actually let me out again ‘til 12:30, but that was still okay. They only needed to do a little paperwork on the stuff I’d had on me when I was arrested, and do the same thing for a couple of other people, and then I could go.

But, my goodness, I’ve never seen any people in any line of work do anything more slowly or inefficiently than those deputies getting us ready to go. And in the end it turned out that only one other guy was actually being released with me; they were just doing all the paperwork for everyone at once. All in all, I had the definite feeling I was being taught a lesson, which would have been okay under other circumstances, but every minute was precious, ‘cause Gramma was fading fast. They managed to take three hours to get me out, though (all told I was in isolation for about 30 hours), and I ended up missing my bus by fifteen minutes. The next one was two hours late; and I missed seeing Gramma alive by about four hours; if I’d caught the early bus I would’ve made it.

And of course, since I hadn’t been allowed to use a phone, a lot of people were worried about me. I’d gotten on a bus in Huntington at 7:25 and was supposed to get off another one at 6:30 in Lynchburg, which is as close as Greyhound goes to Gramma’s house in Appomattox. When I didn’t show up, no one had any idea what had happened to me, and once they realized I wasn’t answering my cell phone, folks got a little frantic. Greyhound was no help, incidentally; they told my mom when she called that I’d never even gotten on the bus, which is kinda bizarre, but reinforces my point that, if the cops had decided to keep me, no one would ever have known what became of me. I had a whole lot of progressively more anxious messages on my voicemail when I finally got out.

Speaking of which, I do want to thank Christy and Beth Anne for their concern while all this was going on, along with various family members. It’s always good to know that you’re loved and that people worry about you when you aren’t around.

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I was gonna write a bit about my Gramma when I got back, not about her death but as a celebration of her life; but I didn’t like to put those good memories in the same post with all this complaining. Anyway, I’d like to clarify what I want to say in my head for one more night. I just wrote this 1) to bitch for a bit, and 2) so you wouldn’t think I’d died, or forgotten all of you. Ciao; will write more tomorrow.

Brooke Gets Her Way

Two weeks ago, Brooke asked me why she hasn’t been on the weblog yet. I told her, “Brooke, all you have to do is get drunk and do something stupid, and I’ll have your story on there the next day.”

It's funny that, on the one hand, several people are mad at me about this blog, while others are bugging me to find out why I haven't mentioned them yet. I do have several friends here who check up on it regularly; they think the posts are fun and want to be part of the whole thing.

Of course, I haven't been writing as much the last two weeks. Been a lot going on, what with looking for work and some illnesses in the family. I've been doing pretty well at catching up on my reading, though. I’ve been re-reading Poe the last few days. Last night I read, among other things, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Decent story. Arthur Conan Doyle certainly cribbed from it, though he went out of his way to have Sherlock Holmes put Dupin down in a couple of stories.

There was something I’d forgotten in the years since I’d last read it. At the beginning, Poe (through his Watson-like narrator) attempts to discredit chess as an intellectual exercise, finding it inferior to card games. He says:

...the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood...the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by all the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex, is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed, resulting in injury or defeat.

He says further (and I paraphrase, for Poe, as always, goes on at tremendous length) that whist, which nobody ever plays anymore, is favored by men of the highest intellect while "eschewing chess as frivolous." A great card player has to understand everything, while a great chess player apparently does not; and one who is proficient in cards should be good at everything that requires intellectual rigor, while a great chess player is frequently only that. A chess player doesn't need to understand the person he's playing against; he doesn't have to think, doesn't have to have any particular skills; he only has to pay attention.

I've got to disagree with this. Poe's is an extremely narrow view of the skills involved in playing chess well. I’ve heard a similar argument from Erik, Hank’s resident professional card player. I have no real idea what’s involved in being a good card player (though Erik thinks I would be a good one if I tried), but I know intimately what’s involved in playing good chess. I’m not a professional-quality player, of course, but I’m a damn good bar player; I’m not likely to meet anyone in my everyday life who can beat me consistently.

Chess certainly requires an awareness of what’s happening on the board, just as whist (I had to look up the rules online) requires one to remember what cards have already been played, and therefore to know which are still waiting in the opponents’ hands. I submit that an activity that increases awareness is, by definition, an intellectual exercise.

Saying that something is intellectual means that it relates to, or appeals to and engages, the intellect, which is pretty straightforward. What is the intellect? According to Dictionary.com, it is the ability to learn and reason; the capacity for knowledge and understanding; the ability to think abstractly or profoundly. What is chess if it doesn't fit this definition?

Learning and reasoning are the very heart of chess. Recognizing a situation that you've been in before, knowing that you came badly out of it last time, and searching for a new response; isn't that learning? Reasoning is very much sharpened by chess specifically because the consequences of faulty reasoning are immediately and inarguably displayed (which, let's face it, doesn't happen often enough in real life, or someone else would be President), and rewards for proper reasoning are correspondingly great.

But most important, the capacity for abstract thought is the single ability that sets good players apart from bad ones. Someone once proved that, after each player has had his first ten moves, there are something like TEN MILLION different postions that could have been reached on a chess board. Whatever Poe might think, no one can be aware of all those positions. A player must be able to look at the board and see what is likely to happen over the next few moves, certainly; he must see which attacks are likely to succeed or fail before the positions that make them possible arise; but mere awareness of the board won't help him. There are simply too many possibilities. He has to be able to adapt himself to conditions that can change with breathtaking speed. He has to be aware of the potential of each piece, singly and in conjunction with its brothers, and he must be prepared to move fluidly from attack to defense, from one wing to the other, or to the center. He has to see the whole board and be ready for anything. If that isn't abstract thinking, I don't know what the hell is.

Also, it's ridiculous to say that a chess player doesn't have to know anything about human nature to succeed. I know, for example, when I play Ace, that he fears knights; so I goad him into exchanging them in ways that improve my overall position. Some people are tactically strong but strategically weak; you distract them with bells and whistles while the telling attack is brewing somewhere else. I know that some people are uncomfortable playing without queens; some can't navigate a crowded position; some lose control in an open position. I learn these things about people, and it makes them easier to beat.

My strategy is determined by what I know about my opponent; will this person be so enamored of his attack that his king will be open to a subtle thrust? Will he ignore the danger of a queen-side pawn majority too long? Will he get so caught up by activity in front of the castled position that, with a quick shift of queen and/or bishop, a weakside attack can be mounted that he can't meet? I'll know these things, or similar weaknesses, fairly early in the first game; I'll know them all after a full game. Don't tell me a good chess player can't read his opponent.

As to whether any of this is profound or not, well, I'll leave that to you to decide. Whatever profundity it has, however, was apparently lost on Poe. He was aware of the profound in beauty and in horror; perhaps he should have stuck to writing about what he knew.

* * * * * * *

Last Saturday, Brooke told me, “Look, I want to be on the blog, but I don’t want to be on there for doing something stupid. Katy’s on there, and you don’t talk about her being stupid.”
“Well, Brooke, Katy works here. If you worked here, you’d already be on the blog, too.”

You don't actually have be drunk and stupid to get on the blog, but it helps. There are other ways; being around when I myself do something stupid that I'll write about is useful, of course, but there's no way to count on that.

The principal thing is to be in my head when I write these things. Right now my head is mostly full of my Gramma, who isn't supposed to last the night. I didn't realize she was that sick (though I knew she was in bad shape) until a couple of days ago. I don't drive, so I couldn't get down there. I called and spoke to her. She can't reply, but they held the phone to her ear, and my uncle said her face lit up when she heard my voice. That might just be him talking, of course, but I've decided to believe it.

My cousin Jacob went down to see her. He lives in Columbus, which puts me on his way down; I wish he'd called and asked if I wanted to go. It would have been nice to see her once more. But there's nothing to be done about it now. Gramma is 75, I believe, which seems like a ripe old age, but her mother and grandmother both lived to be 100 or thereabouts. I actually have memories of my great-great-grandmother, who didn't die 'til I was around five. How many people can say that?

Anyway, yeah, I figured Gramma had another twenty years or so. Frankly, I thought she'd outlive me...men in my family die young, but the women go on forever. I never expected this, really. But, she's buried her husband, one of her sons (my dad), and one of her grandsons (my cousin Eddie), and maybe she's just tired of burying people. I can relate to that.

Another person who’s been on my mind recently is my friend Bill, for kind of an odd reason. I rented Shaun of the Dead from the video store last week. Loved it. I’ve watched it like fifteen times now. And Shaun kinda reminds me of Bill. Doesn’t look much like him, really, but some of his mannerisms were dead-on. The best was in Liz’s apartment, where Shaun is trying to give Liz some flowers he bought for his mother (with what I thought was a wonderful cover story referring back to their conversation of the night before; at least she knows he listens to her). The look he gets when Liz says, “They’re for your mum, aren’t they?” and he says, “Yeah,” that’s Bill all over. There were a few more instances, too, but that’s the one that sticks in my memory.

The movie, as I say, I loved. I’m a huge zombie movie fan (as you’ll notice from my masthead). The film was funny, though how funny it would be to someone who doesn’t get into zombie movies, I can’t say. Part of the fun was watching for references to the old Romero films. There were several, some very obvious (the “We’re coming to get you, Barbara” line, for example) and some a bit more subtle. They used a lot of the music from both Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead, which was a nice touch. Seven people trying to get to the pub kind of mirrored the seven people trapped in the farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead, too, though one of them dying en route shoots that a bit to hell. And I like to think that the whole idea of their attempt to cover the last hundred yards to the pub by pretending to be zombies was an homage to Redneck Zombies, a trash classic of the genre (serious props to ANYONE who has ANY idea what I'm talking about here). There were other references, too, but not as many as I thought there would be. I was expecting a kind of zombie movie trivia game, but it was mostly just a good, fun film.

My favorite reference was the name of the store Shaun worked in: FOREE ELECTRONICS (you can see it best when he takes off his name tag and throws it on the sink). Ken Foree, of course, was the actor who played Peter, the hero of Dawn of the Dead. I was very pleased when I spotted that.

But as I say, it was more than a collection of references. It had some great moments all its own, like when Barbara and Di are watching Shaun, Liz, and Ed try to destroy the corpse of John, the pub owner, and are bopping along with the Queen song playing on the jukebox in the background; that'll be parodied in future films itself. It's awesome, too, in a John Waters kinda way, when Philip’s zombie turns off the stereo in the Jaguar. Good stuff.

When I lived in Dayton, my place was directly across the street from a huge cemetery. My friend Justin came over one night and we got really drunk and I made him watch all three of the original Romero movies, and then he had to walk home past the cemetery at four in the morning. He told me that he got stopped on the way home walking down the middle of the road; he couldn’t bring himself to walk on the cemetery side, which was clear, and he was afraid to walk down the sidewalk on my side ‘cause all the trees gave the zombies too many places to hide.

Incidentally, nowhere in any of the original three movies does any character refer to the zombies as “zombies.” I wonder if that was what these filmmakers were thinking when they had Shaun upbraid Ed for calling them zombies: “It just sounds so…ridiculous!”

* * * * * * *

Last Wednesday, Brooke asked me, “What time did you leave the other night?”
“Not too late, I don’t think,” I answered. “Why?”
“Oh, I just wanted to see if you were still here when I got drunk and stupid.”
“No, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I missed that.”
Later that night, though, she had a few drinks and made a confession. I always enjoy confessional drunks. “Ah hah,” I teased her, “you’ve finally made the blog with that one.”
She was horrified. “You won’t really put that on there, will you?”
“I don’t know, Brooke,” I said. “We’ll have to see what happens.”

I won't, though; that would be pretty mean of me. Not that I'm not mean, but tonight isn't a mean night. Maybe some other time. If I was feeling mean, this would be a good time for it; there's some college student behind me trying to sort out some sort of financial trouble over her cell phone. I've already heard her Marshall username and password, her credit card number, her password into an internet course she's taking, and her full name. Someday a less honest person will find this young one to be a virtual gold mine. But for tonight, at least, she's safe.

I had wanted to write something beautiful tonight. I’ve been walking around, digging the night and thinking, and I know there’s something beautiful in there, but it won’t come out. It’s possible that I’ve drowned it; an awful lot of whiskey made that trip with me, and not much of it made it back.

I’d hoped to write something like John Steinbeck’s description of the Salinas Valley that starts East of Eden, but I’m not feeling it. I might be able to manage something beautiful and terribly sad, like the last two paragraphs of The Big Sleep, but no one wants to read that tonight, least of all me.

I wanted something that would cause my spirit to rise on the wind and float away, something that would make you, dear reader, feel like your heart had gotten too big for your chest. I think that, for tonight at least, I am destined to be disappointed in that. I can’t seem to get a grip on whatever beauty I’ve got in me (which is, after all, ephemeral at the best of times).

Frankly, there doesn't seem to be a lot of beauty in the world to work with, just right at the moment. I expect that's just my mood. Tomorrow, maybe, I'll write more about Gramma; and that might be beautiful, and I promise it won't be sad.

Might write some more about zombie movies, too...been watching 'em an awful lot lately. Might even check out Redneck Zombies, if they've got it, to refresh my memory. I'm spreading the gospel of bad horror movies; everybody jump on the train!

Basically, I have no idea what I'll write about. I'll discuss it with everyone at Trivia Night, and we'll make an informed decision sometime around three o'clock, when everyone's ass-wasted (Trivia Night is the one night I know I'm gonna get wasted in a bar). My next post might not even be in anything that could justifiably be called English, so prepare yourself.

* * * * * * *

This past Saturday, Brooke said, “You didn’t really put that thing on your blog, did you? I’ve been afraid to check.”
“No, Brooke, I wouldn’t do that. You are gonna be on the next post, though.”
“For what?”
“Oh, I’m using you to divide the sections. You’re gonna be a literary device!”
“Cool. I like that.”
“Yes, sweetheart; I thought that would make you happy.”
And I hope it has.