G.W. Clift entertainments log from Manhattan, Kansas, written December 19, 2008

I'm going to London next month. So I wanted to order tickets for plays, and to do this I had to deal with Ticketmaster UK. This took literally hours, in part because someone at MasterCard had, without consulting me, signed me up for some sort of third level of security coding. Then I tried to download an audio book from Audio, Amazon's underling that used to be Books on Tape. I've tried this before. Apparently it can't be done. I tried it at home. I tried it at a public access computer. I went up on campus and had a Help Desk department head help me. She couldn't download it either. I spent four hours on this. Figuring my time at my lawyer's rate, this means the audio download I didn't get cost me over $800. And those Theater tickets--one of them later canceled when the performance was called off--cost perhaps $150 each.

Today I took Johnny to lunch at a chain barbecue place he likes. The waitress interrupted us in mid-sentence on six separate occasions. Almost every time we saw her, she barged right through our conversation as if we were the recorded music played while someone is on "hold" on the telephone. I can't speak for John, but I'm tired of working for the people I'm paying, of doing things their way and not mine. I can't figure a way around Ticketmaster, but I'm through with Audible. And the young woman waiting on us got half a tip.

So you can see what sort of mood I'm in. Bah, humbug. Certainly I feel that way about a couple of books I've been reading. Nick Hornby (http://www.penguin.co.uk/nickhornby ) wrote Fever Pitch, About a Boy, and High Fidelity. I was Excited that he had a new novel out. But Slam turned out to be a boy's book. And then I went forty pages in it without discovering a complication. Usually one can depend on Children's lit for story because kids aren't sophisticated enough to be the sort of phonies who think they are too good for plot but who are dumb enough to read soapy character stuff. In Slam, the sixteen-year-old has a dishy girlfriend who practically forces sex on him. He's got a chance to go to art school. He gets along with his mother. And he likes to skateboard. Is this a novel, or a fantasy? Given Hornby's loose, loping prose, a reader could get far into this before realizing he was only going through the motions and not really Reading.

Nor am I just fed up with novels. I recently dug out my copy of City Walks: London by Craig Taylor, a boxed set of cards, each describing sites along a different half mile or so walk. I didn't really learn all that much about the neighborhoods I know. For example, Card 32, "South Bank" (http://www.southbanklondon.com/), begins at Embankment tube station and goes across the Hungerford foot bridge, along the Thames to Millennium foot bridge (right out front of the new Tate) and then on up hill to St. Paul's Cathedral and the Underground station there. Noted along the way are the Festival Hall, QE Hall, National Film Theater, National Theater, Gabriel's Wharf (a shopping precinct), Studio Six (a restaurant), Oxo Tower Restaurant, The Founders (a chain pub), the Tate, and the new Globe. He could at least have noted the South Bank skateboarding and graffiti site, which is the most famous business on the whole of the route. But the cards might be useful in a strange area. I think I bought the set at Acme Gifts.

Some Americans have re-printed Colin Watson's first "Flaxborough" detective story, Coffin, Scarcely Used, and I enjoyed reading their friendly if not scholarly introduction. The mystery is pretty good if the title doesn't give too much away. The story follows what happens in polite Inspector Purbright begins to investigate what happened to leave the local newspaper's publisher electrocuted in his nightwear, his mouth full of marshmallows, lying on the other side of a barbed-wire topped fence across the street from his house. Watson always manages to work some suggestion of sex into these detective stories, and he has a sense of humor. This 1958 book seems a good way to begin the eleven novel series.

I again dipped into S. Schoenbaum's 1991 Shakespeare's Lives, a great and entertaining historiography study of the different biographies of the Bard and the origins of anecdotes and details they included (http://www.nybooks.com/authors/3041 ). I was interested in Freud's Oxfordianism. This should have been a tip off to everyone in the early twentieth century who got carried away with enthusiasm for psychological therapy and the social sciences. Apparently Freud, who embraced the snob appeal theories of the well-named Looney, kept his loopy faddish superstition from his British readers. Ignore Freud and read Schoenbaum, who begins the book with a decent summary of everything we actually do know about the man from Stratford. This is a great book.

Probably I think every WinterDance is one of the best I've seen. These Fall semester recitals of the K-State Dance program are always staged on the thrust surface at Nichols Theater, so one sits above and near the action, and I think one actually sees the dancing better this way. The program this year was almost all Modern. Even the ballet and jazz used the vocabulary and had the intellectual application of Modern. Altogether we saw about sixty dancers in about a dozen different pieces. The most memorable of these may not have been the best of them, but Prof. Yagerline's chance piece, which actually began with a couple of rolls of the dice to determine music and lighting schemes, and Prof. Ollington's entry which repeated the same sequences of movements from different orientations--these were the dances I'll remember from this show and will continue to think about. It was a long WinterDance--more than two hours. But it was a lot of fun to watch. And it is nice to think that academic dance like academic creative writing continues to slug on at K-State. Similar programs died years ago at a lot of universities.

Probably the best movie I saw the last couple of weeks was Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800076523 ) which sneaked into town for a week at the twelve-plex. This is a straight character movie. The plot matters very little. What story there is concerns a habitually optimistic London elementary school teacher nearing thirty, learning to drive, and giggling even when she gets what should be painful physical therapy. Viewers will like Poppy. She means well, even if she is generally ineffectual. She and her odd friends make the film worth seeking out.

Compare that to the dreadful (if visually energetic) Punisher 2: War Zone. Here the comic book hero feels so guilty about having killed an undercover FBI man that he sets himself up as protector of the dead man's family. The last Punisher movie was some fun. This one is not.

In fact I preferred Delgo, a sort of routine fantasy animated feature. It didn't look exactly like any other computer generated animation, probably because it was made by guys who aren't in the Hollywood loop for this sort of thing. But it looked pretty good. And the story, once it got past its philosophy stage, was a pretty decent excuse for some imaginative action sequences. I don't seek out cartoon movies, but this one wasn't as predictable as they usually are.

Much worse was the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still. The idea here is that humans are somehow destroying the world. When the original came out, people were realistically afraid of atomic war and radiation. This version of the film can't seem to come up with a parallel way in which we evil people are endanger the planet. We just are. Aliens who haven't previously warned us have decided to eradicate us to save Earth, apparently for themselves. But then when one of them--in a clone of Keanu Reeve's body--sees humans being sad, he figures we are worth saving. You see? The moviemakers think we should be sad, should feel guilty about something, even if they can't think of what it is. What a drag this movie is. What a drag this reactionary attitude is. Let's get some new ideas.

Paul Rodriguez and Alfred Molina (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000547/) headline the cast of Christmas Nothing Like the Holidays, the Spanish-surname version of This Christmas, which was the African-American version of The Family Stone. The plot is a soap opera plot, which means each character has his own problem which will be resolved to fit the general timing formula. Nothing about this is surprising or amusing. But at least the cast is better than it was in the earlier films.

The agent who booked our flights and hotel rooms (in the Strand Palace) sent the packets to us via Fed Ex. This meant I had to be at home to sign for them. The day they were to be delivered, I called the Fed Ex office and asked when they would arrive at my house. They couldn't say. Nor, for some reason, could they get ahold of the delivery driver to ask him. So I waited at home for four hours, waiting for the delivery. That's $800 in lawyer billing time. Will Fed Ex and the travel agent pay me? Nope. To them I'm not just the customer. I'm also a captive to be imposed upon. .

Check back in two weeks and see who else I'm paying to make me do their work. I'll still be here, three blocks west of Aggieville, waiting for something I've already paid for to be delivered.                                                                                 

I'm working till 7 pm tonight so I can be at home Friday for Sears appliance delivery, which has hit a new high in customer torture by scheduling it for 10:30/2:30. I live an hour roundtrip from work so it's not worth going in in the morning and if they tend toward the later time, not worth going in after. Bad enough to miss half a day for their ballpark estimate but they've devised a way to potentially blow the entire day!

Dear Scrooge (aka G. W. Clift)-- Our definitions of poor customer service differ! Servers don't usually have the luxury of waiting for you to inhale when cruising around checking on tables. In a chain bbq joint, I can probably safely assume that the server was responsible for several other tables besides your own. Think of it this way. Perhaps someone else's food was sitting on the warm table ready to serve to another table when she paused on her way and interrupted your conversation--but rather than let you go without something you needed, like more sauce, etc--she had the consideration to see if she could bring something on her return trip that you desired. Serving tables is a fairly thankless task in general. Having done this myself in college, most people (me included) get upset over not getting ENOUGH attention. Your blog is proof of my father's mantra that "you can keep some of the people happy some of the time".