In praise of Gladys Kravitz

Before there was Lenny Kravitz, before there was even The Jeffersons, on which Lenny Kravitz's mom appeared, thus providing me with a halfarsed link between this pointless allusion and the wonderful world of situation comedies, there was the archetypal meddling neighbor Gladys Kravitz. I just watched Bewitched for the first time in many years (not counting the terrible movie of the same name a few years back), and I have a few words to say about Gladys Kravitz.

First of all, who are we talking about when we speak of Gladys? People always want to argue about which Dick they prefer, York or Sargent, but fewer people will debate the relative merits of the two Kravoi, Alice Pearce and Sandra Gould. Pearce's Kravitz was brilliant and unproblematical in my opinion ... she was just a nosey, shrill, hysterical proto-Furley. The archetypal Gladys. Gould, who Kravitzed the episode I just watched, is different. Strangely attractive when she's not overshadowed by Elizabeth Montgomery, and not blessed with the hilarious facial expressions and brilliant slapstick timing of her predecessor, she brings another layer to the character.

With the first Gladys, we feel somewhat bad for husband Abner, even though he's a loser, just because his wife is so annoying. With the second, though, Abner's sterotypical long-suffering husband schtick crosses right over into verbal abuse, and the smirking Stevens' mock-innocent shrugging as Gladys "Cassandra" Kravitz tries to blow the whistle on their satanic hijinks smacks of cruelty.

Because, of course, she's right. Samantha is a witch, and her family is a whole pack of witches, (a coven if you will). Admittedly, as a former wacky neighbor myself, I have more than average sympathy for my fellow WNs ... but I think Gladys's reputation is undeserved. What if your next door neighbor were a witch? Wouldn't you try to tell people about it? I say Gladys is a hero!

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Back when I was teaching, I was once talking about witches in connection with "Young Goodman Brown" and a student announced that his sister-in-law was a witch. "There's no such thing as witches," I replied. "I mean, can she fly?" If you're a wiccan, earth goddess worshipper, etc., more power to you, but if you can't fly, you ain't a witch in my book.

Of course, this was at the same university where I once drew the five pointed star, the "sign of Solomon" from Sir Gawain's shield, on the blackboard, and a student in the front row flinched--actually flinched. I said, "Did you think I was going to summon forth a demon from the blackboard? Really? Do you think that if I could summon demons out of the blackboard, there wouldn't be demons running all over this place by now?"

No sense of humor, some of these people. Maybe they should watch some sitcoms.

Even my nightmares are stupid

Well, you know you're out of stuff to talk about when you start talking about your dreams. So here goes.

Last night--early this morning, probably--I dreamed I was in one of these stupid Saw-type horror movies where you have to do all of this weird crap or else something bad will happen to you or a loved one or a puppy or something. Along with several other people (none of whom, oddly enough, I knew, either in the dream or in real life), I was being held captive in a house by a psychotic guy.

How were we held captive? That's the thing. We knew we were being held captive, and there was some vague threat about leaving. But this guy was nonchalant enough about the whole business that at first I kept thinking, "Why the hell don't we just gang up on him and kill him?"

Alas, none of my colleagues could be talked into it. So then I thought, "Why don't I kill him myself?" I'd like to think it was because at no point during the entire dream did the psychopathic villain harm anybody. But in fact I was probably afraid of ludicrously complex booby traps or something. What a stupid nightmare.

To be fair, he did keep the mummified remains of his mother (golly, how original) stashed under his bed. But these were cool, interesting remains ... a hardened, resinous boglady type mummy, not a nasty drippy dead body. I remember thinking, "That's really cool ... I wonder how he did that."

Still, there's this vague sense of dread. When he takes a nap (yes, the psychopath(et)ic villain naps daily), I broach the subject of murdering him, but by this point, my heart isn't in it. Instead, a bunch of us apparently go out to a SCHOOL BOARD MEETING. At which point, my unconscious's voluntary suspension of disbelief comes to a screeching end. What a stupid, stupid nightmare.

If you only click one of these links, please make it the "puppy" link above! Oh, and "house." You won't be sorry.

Hey, Christian Bale!

Hey, Christian Bale! Where can I buy me one o' them fat-tired motorcycles that you can't lay down? Gotham Moto Mart maybe? I guess I need to buy one in case there's a robot apocalypse.

Seriously ... how many movies does something have to appear in before it's a cliche? Just saw a trailer for Terminator: Put Us Out of Our Misery, and here we go with these batcycle-style toy motorcycles again. I don't care if do they exist in real life (because I'm sure somebody is itching to tell me allllll about them) ... I don't believe in them. I don't find them credible. I deny their existence. And I don't want to see a movie full of them, any more than I want to see a movie where an annoying boy races an absurd flying chariot through the desert against a collection of malignant muppets. Where's that big old sandworm when you need one?

Back to the trailer. Did you catch that one giant robot that looks like a large version of the buffoonish Spy Vs. Spy robots from "Episode 1" of the Star Wars debacle? Seriously, if you're making a Terminator movie and can aim no higher than pretend motorcycles The Phantom Menace, the mindless soulless robots have already won. They're here already! You're next!



Remember The Road Warrior? That was a good movie. Muppet-free as I recall, and the vehicles, though fanciful, were real.

I guess I'm just tired of watching cartoons ... but if the director is named McG, I guess you have to be prepared.

Q: What might have saved Star Wars I - III?

A: Basically, an elite group wearing these.

INcidentally, at some point in the movie I insist on calling Star Wars, because that's what it was called, Darth Vader is addressed (by Peter Cushing, I think? Or Obi-Juan?) as "Darth."

Implying that it was his name, not his title. I'm just saying.

I know Star Wars wasn't that good to begin with, but Lucas's retrobuggering of Star Wars just ... bugs me.

Sorry, fandroids, but I'm not quite willing to believe that this line of Darth Vader's dialogue from "A New Hope" wound up on the cutting room floor:

"What the hell? I think I built that f---ing robot."

Penultimate night

I love the word "penultimate," because people misuse it, thinking that it means "more ultimate than ultimate." I really love the word "antepenultimate," just because I think it's weird that we need a word for "the one before the one before the last one." It's a hopeful word, and a word with a lot of syllables.

So ... today was spent in meetings, which was actually kind of relaxing after hiking all the f--- over Petra yesterday. Thing is, you can't stop. Everywhere you look, it's "Holy crap! Can you believe that? Can you believe that something like that actually exists?" And then, when you start thinking about the technology that went into it, it's really pretty unimaginable.

Also unimaginable is that up until pretty recently, people still lived in those caves ... and in fact, it looked to me like a lot of the vendors lived in there even now. Or at least they stay there a lot.

I'll post some pictures when I can, for those who are interested. In the meantime, this.

The highlights of the day for me were two: first, a conversation with a guy selling jewelry who told us a lot about the economy of the place, and claimed to have been raised in the ancient city. About that, I don't know. But he proved the gems were real and not plastic by holding them over a lighter flame, which I thought was pretty cool. When I looked at one item, he said, "Don't buy that; it's a fake."

Then, much later, when we were climbing the mountain path to an unspeakably spectacular view, a young woman called to me to come behind her table to look up because it was safer (I was backing up while looking up the mountain, and she thought I was going to step too far back, I guess). This was the only traditionally dressed woman to talk to me, and she did it without any self-consciousness at all, even though her mom was glaring. She asked me if I had kids, and I told her about them, and it turned out she's right between them in age: seventeen. This might explain her more outgoing attitude, as opposed to the older women, whose sales pitch is limited to "One dinar! One dinar!"

On my way back down she sold me a couple of necklaces made out of camel bone. She said, "Good, you came back. I've been waiting--it's time to go home. It's a long walk with my baby." Like an idiot I looked around for the baby, but he/she hasn't been born yet. If I'm being romantic, I'm thinking that kid is going to have an amazing life, living close to the land in one of the most beautiful places on the planet. If I'm being cynical, I'm wondering what opportunities the kid will have for education, etc.

If I'm being honest, I'm somewhere in the middle. I'll tell you this, though ... these people have some amazing eyes. I felt like Muad'Dib or something. Especially when Sting attacked me in his jock strap. Wait, that wasn't me.