The Decline of Western Civilization…One Manicured Nail at a Time

I live in an apartment building that has retail space on the ground floor.  It’s a new building, so the retail space has been empty until recently.  Lo and behold, one of the shops we are getting is a nail salon and spa — about the 700th one of these establishments that has opened over the past few years in and around the town where I live. 

Want evidence that we’ve been living in a bubble?  Don’t look at Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, my friends.  Think French tips and hot stone massages. 

Who ARE these people, anyway, who need their nails done so often?  I have nails, too, you know.  I clip them once a week or so, nibble on them occasionally, and they look just fine.  

And how is it that people who have the time and money to get their nails done so frequently are also so stressed out that they require massages?  Do their shoulder muscles get tight holding their hands out under those dryer-offer machines?  Do their leg muscles tense up as they try to resist the urge to yank their ticklish foot away from the sweet Asian lady painting their toenails?

The party is over, folks.  Paint your own goddamn toenails.  And then go paint a house.

The Greatest Movies of All Time

Last night, I was channel surfing and stumbled upon “Some Like It Hot,” which is one of my favorite movies of all time.  Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play two musicians running from the mob.  They go into hiding by dressing in drag and joining an all-girl band fronted by Marilyn Monroe.  Hilarity ensues. 

When I was a teenager, I was HUGE Marilyn fan.  I had Marilyn posters, clocks, thermometers, you name it, I had it.  She’s terrific in “Some Like It Hot,” but Lemmon walks away with the movie in my book.  I especially love the scene where Marilyn visits him late at night in his sleeping berth on board the train taking the band to Florida.  He is dressed as “Daphne,” but makes a series of references to the “surprise” he has in store for Marilyn, since, like any respectable man, he wants to bang her.   She drinks some smuggled hooch from a paper cup and says, “Well, that’ll put hair on your chest,” and he immediately shoots back, “No fair guessing!” 

Here are a few more movies that I absolutely love:

“Jaws” — I love sharks, so this one is a slam dunk.  It truly is a terrifying movie , but not without its moments of humor, like when Roy Scheider first catches sight of the shark and declares to Robert Shaw, “You’re gonna’ need a bigger boat.”  What I love in this scene is that he says “YOU’RE gonna’ need a bigger boat,” not “WE’RE gonna’ need a bigger boat” — as though he is somehow exempt from what’s going on.  You wish, Roy!

“A Fish Called Wanda” — From the moment Kevin Kline mercilessly mocks Michael Palin’s stutter about ten minutes into this movie, I just started laughing and never stopped until it was over.  Kline steals the show here and I especially love the scene where he practices apologizing to Palin, but can’t quite get the words out: “I’m so… I’m sorr.. FUCK YOU!”

“E.T.” — OK, I am a giant sap on this one, but c’mon, it is an absolutely amazing movie and one that I loved as a boy and then fell in love with 25 years later when I watched it again with my daughter, Madeleine.   When Elliot says goodbye to the dying E.T., man, you better have a family-size box of tissues close at hand because you WILL weep.  “I’ll remember you for the rest of my life,” he says to E.T. (or something to that effect).  Isn’t that what you’d want to hear on your deathbed, too?  That even just one person in the world will remember you forever?

“Heat” — I was a big fan of “Miami Vice” growing up and “Heat” is directed by the creator of that show, Michael Mann.  Al Pacino plays a cop trying to take down a gang of highly sophisticated bank robbers, led by Robert DeNiro.  I am not a huge Pacino fan, but his performance in this movie is so over the top that it somehow works for me.  DeNiro is just the opposite of Pacino here… understated, calm, modest.  It all works brilliantly and, as an added bonus, you get this amazing scene where DeNiro and his band of thieves try to shoot their way out of a botched bank robbery on the streets of Los Angeles.  Val Kilmer fires off about eight million rounds of ammunition during this scene and looks totally cool doing it. 

“Gladiator” — Who wouldn’t want to be Russell Crowe, kicking the shit out of everyone in the middle of the Coliseum?  Sign me up.

“Philadelphia” — The first two hours of this movie are perfectly fine, but it is the last two minutes that just knocked me on my ass.  Tom Hanks has died of AIDS and his friends and family are gathered at his apartment to celebrate his life.  The camera moves around the room and you eventually see a TV set in the background that is playing an old home movie.  The camera gets closer and you see that it is a home movie of Hanks from when he was boy.  He is horsing around, having fun, mugging for the camera.  The camera moves in closer still and eventually the screen is filled entirely with this grainy home movie.   It is so incredibly heartbreaking and beautiful that I broke down into genuine sobs when I first saw it.

“Terminator 2″ — I saw this movie on its opening night in New York City (sitting in the front row, no less) and I’ve seen it about a dozen times since.  The action sequences are incredible, but it is also a reasonably smart movie, with all of its talk about changing the future by eliminating someone from the present.  Linda Hamilton’s muscles are almost as big as Arnold’s, which is fabulous, but I really love Robert Patrick as the “new and improved” terminator who is sent back in time to kill the boy who will eventually lead the human race in its battle against the robots and computers.  The scenes where he morphs his liquid metal body into different people are cool, but there are also a few scenes where he simply runs really fucking fast and those are even better because it looks COMPLETELY real. 

“Citizen Kane” — Actually, I’ve never seen this movie.  So there.

V Is for Video Games

I was something of a video-game nerd growing up.  We had Pong, the original home video game, and I also had the first Atari home gaming system. 

Pong was elegant in its simplicity.  You hit a “ball” (a little white square) with your “rackets” (white vertical lines on the far left and right of the screen).  The ball bounced back and forth, sometimes ricocheting off the walls of the “court” (the top and bottom of the screen).  I can still remember the thrilling sounds of the action — little “beeps” and “bee-doops” every time the ball was struck or bounced off the wall.   

The Atari system was a quantuum leap forward.  Their big selling point was that they offered home versions of the most popular arcade games — Asteroids, Space Invaders, Pac-Man, etc.  This was very cool, even though the home games never came close to matching the graphics of the original arcade games.   The big breakthrough game on the Atari system was Pitfall, in which you were an Indiana Jones-esque character running through the jungle, jumping over boulders, and swinging on vines over crocodile-infested waters all in an attempt to gather treasure.  The graphics were remarkably sophisticated at the time and I played it for hours on end.  I especially remember the sound the game made when you would swing on a vine — an electronic variation of Tarzan’s famous yell.  

I took my two kids to visit my parents earlier this week and — since they never, ever throw anything away — there in my old room was my old Vectrex video game system.  The Vectrex system was self-contained — you didn’t need to hook it to a television.  Many of the games were knock-offs of popular arcade games, including Minestorm, a total Asteroids rip-off that  came pre-loaded on the machine.  We cranked up the Vectrex and I wondered what my kids would make of it since there is probably more computing power in a doorbell today than there was in the entire Vectrex system in 1982, when it was first released. 

They loved it.

There is something very elemental — and timeless, I suppose — about Asteroids.  Your space ship is in the middle of the screen.  Asteroids fly through space and your job is to shoot them before they crash into you.  Trouble is that when you shoot an asteroid, it splits into two smaller asteroids and so on and so on until your tiny little ship is surrounded by a shitload of little asteroids, which are just as deadly as the big ones.  Oh, and every once in a while, an enemy space ship comes out of nowhere and tries to kill you, too.  If you happen to make it through one asteroid field, your reward is an uglier asteroid field, where the action is even more frenetic.

My three-year-old son grasped the basics of the game in about two minutes — and played it for about two hours.  The only concept he seemed to struggle with was ”hyperspace” — the ability to get out of a jam by hitting a button that instantly teleports you to a different, and presumably safer, part of the screen.

How great would it be to have a hyperspace button in real life?  The boss comes looking for you, the annoying neighbor sees you getting out of your car, the kids think it’s time that you wake up from your nap on the couch. 

Blip… You’re gone.