"Nuke" LaLoosh and Me: The Myth of the Creative Process

Crash and Nuke

I love baseball. I also love baseball movies -- the greatest of all time being, of course, Field of Dreams. But one of my other favorites is the comedy Bull Durham. In he film, there is a young pitcher, "Nuke" LaLoosh (Tim Robbins), who is talented but...unfocused. (Okay -- he's an idiot.) Kevin Costner's "Crash" Davis and Susan Sarandon's Annie Savoy have the task of grooming Nuke for the majors. Crash takes the baseball experience approach, but Annie goes a more philosophical route.

When Nuke loses his control on the mound, Annie has him wear women's underwear ("Rose goes in the front, big guy.") and she tells him to breathe through his eyelids. In essence, what she gets him to do is to stop thinking about pitching and just "let it happen." This works for Nuke.

Kurt, the bassist in my band, used to look back at me when he made a mistake on stage and he would point to his head, implying that mistake came when he started thinking.

Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Excellent Movie for Those Who Really Know Tolkien

I saw Peter Jackson's The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey last night.  (We saw it in "IMAX" -- I'm not sure what people think that adds to the movie-watching experience, but...there it is.) I thought the movie was wonderful.

I know. I'm supposed to be disappointed that it wasn't exactly like the book. That's how we lit. nerds and those "fan-boys" are supposed to, as my brother-in-law recently pointed out in conversation, assert our ownership of the material. It is also very (nauseatingly) fashionable to be hard on "prequels" or follow-ups to beloved movies. George Lucas knows this all too well.

Well, I was not disappointed that the movie was different than the book. Jackson and his team did what they needed to do. Remember, please, that this is a statement made by a guy who credits Tolkien and his work with changing his life. Tolkien's works set me on a path I walk until this day.

The Chaos of Generosity

I was watching my kids open presents yesterday. We're not rich, by any stretch, but, holy schneikie -- kids get a lot of presents these days. I mean, a ridiculous amount; so many that they forget what they actually opened.

On Christmas Eve, we snuggled into the couch as a family to watch some of the classic Christmas shows: The Grinch, Rudolf and Frosty.

At the end of Rudolf, the elves were dropping presents with umbrella parachutes (which, by the way, goes a long way to adding plausibility to the Santa conundrum; it would add speed...).

Anyway, the implication was that one present went to each kid. I wonder if this was ever the case. I imagine, in the misty Christmases of the past, it might have been.

It would have been an interesting thing. Instead of the chaos of generosity, children would have awakened to find that one thing they wanted. So much changes as a result of that. For one thing, the way we do it now has to be a contributor to the lack of focus we always complain about in our kids.

What to we expect to happen? We bury them in toys; we feed them a regular diet of rapid-edit films; we let them watch those movies in the van on the way to the grocery store; we let them watch the movies instead of reading the books; we yell at them for sitting around and doing nothing; we enroll them is seventeen after-school programs.

Claus. Santa Claus.

The dude in the red suit. We saw him no less than seven-thousand times today. He was in the mall, on a big velvet chair, taking late orders from kids, until we got into line. Then, he needed a break. Half hour. (He's magic and he can make reindeer pull him [and enough toys for every child on the globe] through the cold stratosphere and deposit treats under billions of trees in, like, sixteen seconds, but he can't conjure up a sandwich for himself. His is not omnipotence -- it's potency with certain parameters.)

Always time for a quick Coke.

Still, he gets around.

He was on street corners, ringing bells, as we drove on a Christmastime trek. He walked through the restaurant in which we ate dinner and he patted my boys on the back, ho-ho-hoing all the time, completely un-fatigued and seemingly unconcerned about a particularly pressing deadline. He's all over TV, too. Local news asked him how things were going. "Ho-ho-ho. Fine. Just fine."

He's in every mall across the civilized world at the same time, every day from Thanksgiving to Christmas. (I don't know if he takes breaks at the same time in each mall, though.)

Scripted Sincerity

Welcome to The Borg Collective.

On the radio, this morning, I heard a guy explain, with no sense of outrage (or even mild, wistful amusement) that hospitals, in order to get higher customer satisfaction ratings, are "scripting" doctors and nurses. For instance, they are telling a nurse who is transferring a patient to say things like: "Oh, you are going to the third floor. You'll have so-and-so as a nurse. She's wonderful."

Isn't that heart-breakingly hilarious? They are scripting the personal touch.

One must, after all, impress the queen bee of the hive, right? Or, in this case, the "team" that heads the "team," which is composed of more "teams."

Now, people are being told what to say in a workplace that is supposed to be driven under the energy of compassion and a desire to help others to heal. In a hospital, for God's sake. This is fine with the general population, because it is good for the work community. And what is good for the community is all that is important, right?

And what do you say, as a nurse or doctor? Do you say, "No, I won't do this," and risk losing your job in a struggling economy? No. Of course you don't. It doesn't seem like such a great evil, when you look at it that way. But, splice all of these little evils end-to-end, and you have the road to Orwell's worst nightmare.

I didn't start writing this blog with an agenda in mind, but you will notice that I keep coming back to this theme of the not-so-slow death of the individual in an increasingly hive-minded society. It just keeps slapping me in the face.

Well, call me old-fashioned, but when I get hit, I tend to hit back.