Book 20 of 2011

My wife and I decided to read while listening to last.fm, which allowed me to finish this on a very peaceful Memorial Day weekend.

20) Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story by Christopher Moore
Because meetings are often boring wastes of time, I usually try to take a book with me on the off-chance I might be able to get away with surreptitiously reading a few pages here or there.  A few coworkers gave me a People's Eyebrow when they saw the title of this book, assuming I somehow got roped into the recent young adult fiction craze that Stephenie Meyer has popularized so well. I immediately felt the need to defend myself with a short, "It was published in 1995!" While I only managed to will myself through about 80 pages of the first Twilight book before throwing it against the wall, it's clear that Christopher Moore's novel about a codependent woman thrust into the throes of vampirism and the arms of a naive young writer is not the standard Edward and Bella-style romance novel aimed at teen girls.

Top Numbered Somethings - UPCOMING SUMMER MOVIES! And shouting.

Summer time means that it's blockbuster season at the movies, where stories take a back seat to special effects, spinning cameras and explosions...so many explosions. I'm a big a fan of loud, stupid movies as anyone, so here's a list of movies I plan on definitely seeing, in order of their release date, along with how horrible I imagine they will be.

The Hangover: Part II - Let's be perfectly honest: this looks terrible. Everything about the trailers suggest that it is the exact same movie as the first one with an added layer of Asian racism since it takes place in Thailand as opposed to Las Vegas. I hope that my low expectations mean that it's better than my initial impression, but there's nothing I have other than hope to back that up. Alan will be weird, Stu will scream and Bradley Cooper will try to play it cool. Meanwhile, the characters should probably be dead or destitute, if any of these events actually happened.

X-Men: First Class - Here we have an X-Men film set in the 1960s with mutants in their original blue and yellow superhero outfits and a Magneto that uses his powers in a tremendously original and awesome way, judging by the trailer. For a comic fan like me, it's like the producers consulted me on how to approach the X-Men correctly. At first, it sounded so weird and out there that I couldn't help but predict doom and gloom for it because of the track record for the previous two films. Wolverine and X-Men: Last Stand were just so awful that another trip to the well, and a prequel at that, felt wrong. However, each trailer and clip released online look pretty cool and the reviews coming in have been positive, comparing the film to the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek. Overall, I'm tentatively excited for this one and think it might be the dark horse movie of the summer.

Super 8 - Speaking of J.J. Abrams, his latest film looks to be what would happen if the alien from E.T. was a monster and the dad from Friday Night Lights along with his kids have to fight it. Abrams channels Spielberg in terms of look and tone and possibly Cloverfield in terms of story. The secrecy surrounding the plot has made the hype for this one out of control, and I wonder if it can deliver. So it might be horrible. Or it might be awe-inspiring. 

Green Lantern - The first trailer made this movie about a guy that gets a power ring that can make anything he can imagine look way too much like Iron Man, and Ryan Reynolds, while a good actor who gets way too much heat from most people for being a 2011 Ben Affleck, is no Robert Downey Jr. Fortunately, every single piece of footage since that initial trailer has allayed all of my fears because this looks like one of the top two movies to beat. In fact, it feels like this one might be too faithful to the source material, and the big problem appears to be that it's stuffed to the gills with all of the weirdness that took the comic 45 years to accumulate. I'm hoping that it's an accessible movie for those not in the know about the history of the Green Lanterns, but even if it isn't, it'll still be enjoyable to me. And ultimately, I am the only person that matters.

Captain America: The First Avenger - Here's my number one because everything I love about America can be summed up in this character. Plus, Marvel Studios have done a great job so far of creating the kind of expanded film universe that people never thought they'd be able to see accomplished on screen. It's a Captain America movie that takes place in World War II! That is amazing. Go back in time and tell 16 year old me after having suffered through things like Steel and Batman & Robin that Marvel movies like this would exist but also be quality popcorn flicks and I would have been amazed that you used the ability to go back in time to tell me about trivial Hollywood news, but I also would not have believed you.

Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon - And now we've come to the Michael Bay portion of the show. All indicators point to the fact that this will be the worst of the Transformers movies and they've all been awful. Michael Bay is good at two things: spinning the camera around and blowing stuff up. He's also good at disregarding anything that would make sense in a film and taking something that seems relatively simple (robots turn into cars and fight each other) and convoluting it with wacky human hijinks that involve Shia The Beef.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 - Considering all that's left in terms of the story of the final Harry Potter book is a gigantic battle at Hogwarts, I don't think this will be bad. The last film saw my wife and I fall asleep in the theatre, but it seemed to cover all of the parts of book seven that I hated anyway: namely, the 250 pages of pointless camping that JK Rowling insisted was so important to the development of the characters even though it was completely unnecessary. But I don't think of raucous battle scenes when I think of Harry Potter movies, so I'm tentative to think this will be great.

Cowboys & Aliens - Jon Favreau has earned enough credit from me as a director that I'll follow him into something new like this, and it's got a title that can't be beat. I hope that if sequels ever arrive that they just keep adding to the title with some new group: robots, astronauts, zombies, cavemen. It would be pretty tremendous and the cast is pretty awesome, too.


Frosh
The final week before, well, finals was focused mostly on you finishing your Score TKAM assignment. Monday and Wednesday were devoted to work days in your groups where you should have spent time justifying five of the ten song choices you matched with the scenes provided along with a justification for the cover your group created. I'm writing this now after having collected the assignment, and it seems that a few groups only heard what they wanted to hear based off some of the justification papers I see. That's too bad because you earn a majority of the points based off those justifications.

Tuesday, you took the final on To Kill a Mockingbird.

Thursday and Friday were spent watching the film version of To Kill a Mockingbird. Despite the numerous plot changes, its 50 year pedigree and being in black and white, it's a film that manages to stand up today compared to many other film adaptations of novels. In fact, I'm surprised that Harper Lee's novel hasn't received the remake treatment, but I think that's more of a testament to Gregory Peck's performance. There isn't an actor alive today that could pull off Atticus Finch in such a distinctive and convincing fashion. Perhaps George Clooney might be able to do it, but, knowing how Hollywood operates, it'd probably go to Matthew McConaughey or Sam Worthington.

And then you took your department final and turned in your Score TKAM project on your respective final day.

Seniors
On the last regular Monday of your high school career, you turned in your Table of Contents assignment and took your Cuckoo's Nest final.

Tuesday, you turned in all of your Cuckoo Final Project components. You also presented that day and on Wednesday. The presentations varied, but some of the originality the groups displayed really impressed me. From singing to sort-of puppet shows to metaphorical recreations of the ward to quarter hour long multimedia lectures, there was a width and breadth to the proceedings that I hadn't seen before. Good job, overall, and I look forward to using some of what you folks did as examples next year.

Thursday and Friday were the final days of class. We watched Milos Forman's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and signed some yearbooks.

And that's that with that. You're done. There will be an entry devoted to the idea of "done" later since I don't want it to get bogged down by including it with my usual account of the day-to-day happenings in class.

Randy "Macho Man" Savage

Picture courtesy of Rob Bricken

This morning, Randy "Macho Man" Savage died in a car accident. He's most well-known as a former WWF Champion (back when that used to mean something) and a huge wrestling star of the 1980's.

Wrestling, specifically the WWF, was a huge part of my formative years. I'm old enough to remember the The Main Event, the NBC special where Hulk Hogan lost the WWF Championship to Andre the Giant who subsequently gave the belt up when he tried to sell it to the "Million Dollar Man" Ted Dibiase. This vacated the belt, which was then up for grabs in a tournament at Wrestlemania IV. While I didn't get to see that on pay per view, there wasn't an Internet to speak of to find out the results, so I went out of my way to find out that Macho Man came out the winner.

It was during his first reign as WWF Champion that my life long relationship with pro wrestling came to fruition. A few months after he won, the Mega Powers exploded.

Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage were best friends so they formed a tag team called the Mega Powers. Most tag teams of convenience like this one are created just for the sole purpose of them breaking up and eventually feuding, but at 8 years old, I didn't know that. I still thought wrestling was real and it was awesome. Much like the comic books I was so enamored with, these guys in the squared circle were larger than life, real superheroes who settled their grievances with fisticuffs, sometimes fighting for the honor of the ladies they loved. When the Mega Powers teamed up to take on the Big Bossman and Akeem, collectively known as the Twin Towers, Randy Savage was thrown into his manager, the lovely Miss Elizabeth. Hulk Hogan tended to her by taking her to the back so she could get the proper medical attention, leaving Savage alone with the giant monsters. When Hogan returned, Savage slapped Hogan and left him to fend for himself

I've watched a lot of wrestling and nowadays it blends together each week because very few memorable things happen, but every moment of that Main Event special where Randy Savage stormed into the back to yell at Hulk Hogan for having abandoned him in the match is etched into my brain and probably will be for the rest of my life. The melee was tremendous because Randy Savage had established himself as a jealous, possessive borderline insane dude who didn't trust anybody, even his best friend, with Elizabeth, so it made sense why he got so angry. And Hulk Hogan was only doing what he thought was right, so it made sense why he tried to take care of his best friend's girl.

But at 8 years old, all I knew was that I would do anything to watch Wrestlemania V, subtitled "The Mega Powers EXPLODE!" When my uncle offered to get it in exchange for mowing his lawn for two months, I jumped at the opportunity.

And while I was a dyed in the wool Hulkamaniac at the time, it wasn't until years later that I realized how much of my dedication to that feud and to wrestling in general was due to the talents of Macho Man. He was the most three dimensional character in wrestling and the Mega Powers' destruction wasn't even his most crowning achievement. If I were to name my top ten favorite moments in wrestling, five of them would involve Randy Savage (and the rest would probably involve The Rock and a few others would have Stone Cold Steve Austin and one would have D'Lo Brown; there's more than ten moments in my top ten is what I'm saying).

In a business where it's hard to be a fan without feeling insulted or embarrassed and where it's hard to feel phased by yet another death in a long string of them, Randy Savage is a guy that can allow any fan, current or former, loudly proclaim that he was one of the best. Oh, yeah. You can dig it.

The Mighty...?

As you can see, I was Thor before being Thor was cool.
(Halloween, 2008)

As is my wont, I saw Thor last weekend and decided to write a little bit about it since I like comics and I like movies and so I expect way too much out of comic book movies despite being easily impressed with them whenever they don't feature extended jazz dance scenes. I'm looking at you, Spider-Man 3.


Thor is a great movie. There are no two ways around it.

So much of a high-concept popcorn flick like this really depends on quality performances and Chris Hemsworth stands head and shoulders above the rest. He’s tremendous in a way that will be hard for Chris Evans or Ryan Reynolds to top this summer. He’s so outrageously charming playing this brash, privileged, spoiled dude who’s just as talented as he thinks he is, but that also has to learn humility and sacrifice. This is also due in no small part to Natalie Portman, Stellan Skaarsgard and Kat Dennings treating Hemsworth like, well, a god, but Hemsworth’s performance is what makes it work. There’s so much complexity in what could be a role that many would play as one-note.

Tom Hiddleston’s turn as Loki should also be noted, and I think he’s going to get a lot of notice once people view the movie a second or third time if they’re unfamiliar with Loki’s character. It’s clear to see how he sets events in motion and works as a master manipulator.

Most of all, Kenneth Branaugh adds a grandeur and gravitas to Asgard that is on par with just about any other fantasy movie epic. He takes something that really shouldn’t work in the scope of what the Marvel Movie Universe has established and makes it fit without appearing hokey or out-of-place.

Really, the only complaint I had was that Volstagg should be way fatter.


Frosh
Monday, May 2, was Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's birthday, but it was also notable because we continued through the trial of Tom Robinson. This continued Tuesday and Wednesday, culminating in a quiz covering chapters 17-21 of To Kill a Mockingbird on Thursday. During the reading, you kept track of the facts presented by the four witnesses of the trial (Heck Tate, Bob Ewell, Mayella Ewell and Tom Robinson) based on what Mr. Gilmer or Atticus asked them.

Thursday, you had a work day.

We read through chapter 25 on Friday and discussed the symbolism of both the roly-poly and mockingbirds. That symbolism will be important and can serve as the basis for a really great thesis statement.

Monday, you turned in your character chart and themes worksheets for chapters 12-21. We read through chapter 27, which set up Bob Ewell's half-hearted rampage through Maycomb County. The guy gets fired from the WPA (Works Progress Administration, a jobs program enacted during FDR's New Deal) for laziness and then he's too much of a coward to follow through on any of his threats. Not that following through on them would have made him a better person or a better character in the book, mind you, but it's still the principle of the thing.

On Tuesday, you received the guidelines for the Score TKAM assignment and determined your groups. Your group will receive one jewel case from me, but anything beyond that is your responsibility should that one become lost or damaged.

Yesterday and today we finished To Kill a Mockingbird in class. The final two chapters are easy to read and short, but I'm selfish in that I love reading them in class together because they're just so touching. Boo Radley is one of the most affecting and effective characters in literature, especially given how little time the reader gets to spend with the real character as opposed to the perception of him. After finishing the book today, the plan is to revise some of your thesis statements since that assignment is due Monday, May 16.

Seniors
Last Monday, May 2, we read the critical essay I affectionately call Cartoons & Cuckoos. This is an excellent example of analysis that takes one aspect of a story and thoroughly picks it apart to study its effectiveness. Plus, it's fun. I think we may lose sight of the fact that, ideally, reading is fun and discussing and writing about it shouldn't be a chore but should be an enjoyable thing to do. Your results may vary, of course, but there's no harm in enjoying the literature you read and possibly making connections between it and, say, the cartoons you enjoy, which is what Natsu did in his essay.

On Tuesday, May 3, you received the guidelines for what amounts to your semester final in the Cuckoo Final Project that is due Tuesday, May 17. The presentations begin that day, too, and I'm hoping that everyone gets really creative with how they decide to relay their work.

Wednesday and Thursday were spent working on the project in class. Wednesday, you signed up for presentation times, and Thursday you received the questions I collected yesterday for bonus.

Friday was devoted to taking the quiz dealing with chapters 15-25.

Monday and Tuesday of this week (along with this week's Thursday and Friday) were also work days for the project. Hopefully, everyone is taking full advantage of the class time they are receiving.

Yesterday was all about discussion of chapters 15 through 27, a large chunk of the book. Days like this are why I dig my job. The highlight of fifth period involved the class making analogies between baseball and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the benefit of one particular student. Unfortunately, said student hasn't been reading, but everyone else seemed to enjoy debating whether or not Nurse Ratched is the pitcher or the umpire in this scenario. Sixth period's discussion lead to the idea that normal doesn't exist. There's a societal perception of normal, but no one ever really fits into it given their own personal life story and history. Recognizing this as a theme for Kesey's book as well as universal truth for life is what makes teaching English enjoyable for me. I hope you get something out of it as well.

Remembrances of Comic Cons Past

Those weren't the droids I was
looking for.

Back in those woebegone days when I was a teenager, before the invention of sand when everything was in black and white, my family used to make an annual trip to San Diego for Comic Con. This was before it turned into a haven for Hollywood movies to whet the appetite of the viewing public and instead focused on the thing that was in the name: comics.

That's not a knock on what the San Diego Comic Con has become, mind you. Over the last five years, especially, the number of movie studios appearing in San Diego has grown by leaps and bounds, all hoping to get some buzz going for their movies that are often a year away from premiering. Accordingly, the number of attendees and vendors has also grown, but, in doing so, it's squeezed out many of the longtime comic book aficionados in favor of Twilight or other flavor of the month fans hoping to get a glimpse of Robert Pattinson sitting at a table on a stage a football field away from them. That growth, while seemingly good for the properties I have an affinity for (*), has made it difficult to take part in what was once a hallmark of my youth. 

(*) There's a Thor movie coming out this week. This is madness considering that the highest profile superhero movie from my teenage years, Batman & Robin, effectively killed and salted the earth of the genre for over half a decade. I can't understate enough how amazing it is that we're staring down the  barrel of a Green Lantern, Thor and Captain America summer.

From the ages of 11 to 17, I attended Comic Con in San Diego every year with my folks and brother for vacation. Then from 19 to 25, I made a point to travel down there for at least one of the four days, if not more. Since then, hotels have been harder to come by and days for the event have actually sold out. That never used to happen. Heck, my wife and I were going to make a point of actually planning our full-fledged vacation for a Comic Con trip this summer when every single ticket, one day passes and four day passes both, sold out inside of 15 minutes of the on-sale.

Comic Con in San Diego got away from the comics, which is one of those "get off my lawn" statements I never saw myself prone to making before. However, over the weekend, I decided to try out a smaller scale convention over in Orange County called the Anaheim Comic Con. This was the kind of event I remembered from that first time I attended San Diego and contained everything I like about it: people dressed in weird costumes, artists plying their trade at rows of picnic tables, and lots of great deals. The rising cost of life has prevented me from regularly buying single issues of comics, so I tend to catch up on things by purchasing larger collections, or trade paperbacks. At shows like this, they're usually priced more reasonably than one can find at Barnes & Noble or Amazon, so I wound up getting about nine of them, all for half-price. 

It was impossible, though, to escape the convention's need for some mainstream attention as there were some D-list celebrities in attendance, charging way too much for autographs, 8x10 head shots and "photo opportunities." This is the kind of thing my wife, who is not a comics fan, would normally enjoy. When I started walking down the tumbleweed lane that was the celebrity row, I sent her a text message that Steve Sanders from Beverly Hills 90210 was in attendance. "GET ME HIS AUTOGRAPH!," she replied. I responded, "It's $20 bucks for just his autograph."Her reply was succinct, "Ew...don't get me his autograph." While Ian Ziering wasn't the most obvious sore thumb in the pack of what usually amounted to a large grouping of genre related character actors, he was pretty close.

Ultimately, it was nice just to soak in the ambience a place like a comic convention provides. I wasn't made to feel weird spending an hour looking through 15 long boxes to find the right collection of Ultimate Spider-Man or stopping to snap a photo of a procession of Star Wars droids. And that's the way I like things to be.

Here's the part where I discuss what went on in class, but since I'm behind, I'm going to split the catch up portion into a few different posts.

Book 19 of 2011

After devoting a good portion to reading on Sunday, I finished this today during SSR.

19) Animal Farm by George Orwell

It's an old, allegorical story that many people know by now: animals rise up against their human oppressors with the goal of establishing equality for all except that things don't quite work out that way.

My goal in rereading this was to annotate a new copy. Ms. Windt and I will be taking over the Frosh Honors classes next year, which provided us with a great opportunity to change some of the curriculum around. Instead of having students read Lord of the Flies, we opted for Orwell's tale of revolution gone horribly wrong, which will dovetail nicely into our first semester reading of Fahrenheit 451. This is a book that I could finish in an afternoon, but I was laser focused on making sure to highlight the important lines and note the thematic elements throughout, so it took me three days instead. Also, if you're into that sort of annotating thing, this is a great edition for it. The margins are wide and the print is even spaced out well to allow for liberal handwriting and underlining.


The essay at the beginning of this edition stands out and makes some excellent points about Mollie, a character I tend to forget about when I get to the later chapters. As for the book itself, I'm torn as to how to properly discuss it here, since I plan to go over it with next year's freshman. To overly analyze it may unduly influence them into parroting my views as opposed to coming up with their own take. Also, that might just be my own arrogance coming into play. I'm torn, you see, since I've never taught an honors class before and my biggest goal is to not completely screw it all up.

I will say this, though: my biggest complaint is that the book is very on the nose. But don't we need some things to be on the nose? There's very little one can mistake about the book: the roles everyone plays are very clear and the allegory for the Russian Revolution even moreso if anyone has a bit of history under their belt. I'm looking forward to teaching this and I hope the students really take the time to give it a proper read because it's probably the easiest book they'll be assigned all year.