Feature Stories
Spring was always an evocative time for me during my school days. I could walk to school almost every day and enjoy the new warmth. The maple trees would be shedding their maple squirts which some of us kids used to stick between our teeth to make funny insect-like sounds, and girls were easy to notice again since the season of bundling up in warm layers had passed. I remember getting very restless, though, as I had dreams of going on nature jaunts, family trips and whatever other non-school activities I might anticipate. I couldn’t wait for the summer to come.
I remember those sweet, sweaty summer days when I’d grab my board and grease the pavement with my crusted wheels listening to Pharcyde and Tribe, Black Flag and Circle Jerks, feeling free and feeling invincible. I followed a strict schedule: hit up Burger King, fuck around over at my local 7-11, then return home, sopped and stoked from the mid-day melt. And at the end of the day, I’d always, without fail, crash in my basement to watch some classic Bones Brigade flix whilst drowning myself in liters of Mountain Dew, nearly falling asleep from pure exhaustion. To any young punk, it was the closest you could get to absolute bliss living in the ‘burbs. It was a fun, if lonely, time in my life.
What is the truth about the romantic, swashbuckling sea captain who haunts Gull Cottage in the classic 1947 film The Ghost and Mrs. Muir? Like the most compelling ghost stories, there’s more than one answer, and it took me years to reach my own conclusions. You could say I’ve been haunted by this movie for a long time, in the best way.
Plenty of movies we watch throughout our lives make a lasting impression, becoming associated with memories we recall fondly, changes in how we perceive our personal journey, or by simply telling a story that deeply resonates with who we are in our core values. But I think it’s quite rare that a movie literally changes someone’s life. That’s a tall order for a piece of celluloid. And yet, I’m here right now to tell you about a movie that did just that for me. The film was Jason Reitman’s Oscar-nominated 2009 opus UP IN THE AIR, an eerily timed examination of the previous year’s economic downturn and how three egocentric characters are caught up in different aspects of it. My life these days can be divided into “before UP IN THE AIR” and “after UP IN THE AIR.” An overly dramatic statement? Nope, not really.
I’m absolutely no expert, but I’ve certainly developed an appreciation of the cultural charm and infinite tasting universe of wine. Many years ago, I had a chance to visit some wineries in the Napa Valley in California on a solo excursion. More recently, my brother and I had an idyllic period when we visited wineries together in the Augusta and Hermann area of Missouri (the most popular wine-producing region in the state) whenever he visited from New York. It didn’t take me long to discover that wine could be a key ingredient at a sophisticated dinner gathering with friends and family or on a date with a woman.
One crisp, cool evening (the kind we used to call “jean-jacket weather”) in the autumn of 1975, when I was fourteen, a buddy and I walked through the woods behind my house and down to the local movie theatre with hopes to somehow sneak into the “R” rated film we were too young to see legally. We wouldn’t be able to buy tickets at the box office—we would have to find another way in.
I’m not sure exactly when I stopped believing in a supreme being or Deity. Maybe it came from reading too much about war and injustice in the world in my post-college years and not getting my many questions answered, maybe it was the cruel death of my mother just over a decade ago, when I practically begged God to let her live as she struggled from injuries incurred in an accident (God was apparently busy that day), or maybe it was just the inevitable result of years of soul searching.
So, I’ll say it like this: Viggo Mortensen was instrumental in helping me weather the miserable pandemic of 2020. No, I don’t know the man, and it wasn’t a particular thing he said or DID that helped me get through. But he went from being merely a “favorite actor” to unquestionably a “personal hero” during the plague, and that had a definite impact. I became a major league “Viggo-phile.” But let’s back up a little bit.
In the summer of 1969, when I was 8 years old, my dad, mom, sister, and I drove from St. Louis to Colorado Springs to spend a couple weeks with my Aunt Ginger and her kids. Memories from that trip, now over fifty years ago, persist like blurry polaroids—reading Mad magazines, playing with the Lite-Brite toy in the dark, burying a deceased pet parakeet in the back yard, crawling on red rocks at the Garden of the Gods. And, oh yeah! Watching Neil and Buzz land on the moon.
I transitioned from opinionated film buff to suddenly-not-so-smug “professional” film critic in November 1991, ostensibly because I was 1) semi-reliable at delivering copy on time, and 2) willing to accept my compensation in weed. A regional Midwest music magazine to which I was contributing the odd album, concert, or book review had secured advertising from one of the major theater chains (AMC if memory serves) and needed a regular film column to dress up their new client’s page and hopefully keep an eye on the ads. I readily agreed when they asked, not because of the special remuneration (though it was certainly welcome at the time), but because my band had recently broken up and I had no idea what to do next with my life.