Little Man Tate

Casemiro is the world’s MVP of soccer. Let me explain.

When I was in high school, our team gave out two awards: Best-All-Around Player and Most Valuable Player. Following that model, Lionel Messi is the world’s Best-All-Around Player. Casemiro, the workhorse midfielder at Real Madrid, is the world’s Most Valuable Player – the one who contributes the most to his teams’ successes. (Cristiano Ronaldo, who recently won UEFA’s Best Player in Europe award, is Real Madrid’s seventh-most valuable player, after Casemiro, Toni Kroos, Sergio Ramos, Luka Modric, Keylor Navas, and Marcelo.)

But back to Casemiro. On Thursday, along with arch-twerp Neymar, he’ll lead the already-qualified Brazilians against Ecuador. I expect the Ecuadorians to continue their sad tailspin. But I hope and pray for their resurgence.

This article details the Ecuador/Brazil rivalry.

I’m not sure I’ll be able to watch this game. Sheer dread.

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For the first time in well over a decade, I watched one of my favorite movies: Jodie Foster’s Little Man Tate. I remembered every line. This time, I especially noticed its echoes of Woody Allen – its jazz soundtrack and its casting of Dianne Wiest.

Of course, the movie is winsome because of little Fred (Adam Hann-Byrd). To win viewers over to his side, and to show his genius, the movie employs something like a reverse caricature. It allows Fred to speak with disarming naturalness. Usually, he speaks just one simple sentence at a time; and when he gives longer speeches, his sentences, to borrow a line from Malcolm Gladwell, “come marching out one after another, polished and crisp like soldiers on a parade ground.” Meanwhile, the movie has its other “geniuses” strain their language ever so slightly.

The result is that Fred, by comparison, seems utterly pure – Fred and his good mother, who also uses artless language.

The chicken

In the car on the way to the ice-cream stand, I put on a catchy song: “El pollito, pío,” i.e., “The Chick [Goes] Chirp” (whose YouTube video has one billion views). Then, when we arrived, lo and behold, a live chicken was tranquilly perched outside the building.

Karin photographed it.

It was a friendly chicken. The ice-cream vendors said it just showed up. It was very interested in all the people.

Celebrating Ziva

Little Ziva has lived with us for a whole year. Yesterday, to celebrate, we gave her tuna.

We also gave some to Jasper. He ate his own tuna, and then he finished Ziva’s.

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I saw the sun’s (partial) eclipse, just a few minutes ago, at a viewing station at IUSB. Many people were staring directly at the sun. More interesting than the eclipse itself was the daylight. It darkened, of course; and then it turned a lovely, golden color.

The LimeBike

As Borat says, “In my country, there is problem / And that problem is transport.”

Well, South Bend has joined in an experiment to make transport better, or, at least, more hip. It has adopted the LimeBike system.

Behold these young Seattleites riding LimeBikes.

The system works like this. Garish green bikes are planted all over the city. When you find one, you scan its QR code with your phone. This allows you to ride for up to 30 minutes.

$1 is charged to your tab.

Afterward, you leave the bike in any accessible, unobtrusive place (e.g., on the grass next to a public sidewalk).

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I strongly disapprove of car transport, and so you’d think I’d have high hopes for the LimeBike.

Alas, I don’t.

I don’t think the LimeBike ever will become popular enough to significantly change the transport system. South Benders will continue to drive.

If I recall correctly, that’s what’s happened in the Netherlands. For many years, the Dutch have had a generous bike-sharing system. And many Dutch do use it: cycling is an important part of their culture. But few Dutch commuters switch over from driving cars.

My conjecture is that no matter what country you go to, introducing more bikes won’t change the overall transport preferences.

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But suppose that LimeBikes were to become popular in South Bend, or were perceived to be popular. That would be dangerous, lest support be withdrawn from public bussing.

Mass transit is what really matters to poor people. No one too poor to own a car would wish to depend on some dumb bike. Especially not in snow or rain. And not in old age or illness or affliction.

For the occasional light errand, the LimeBike is OK. Though it isn’t cheaper than riding the bus, in some circumstances it’s more practical. But as a significant influence upon transit patterns, it’s less likely to help than to hurt.

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Also, the LimeBike reminds me of Dr. Seuss’s Pale Green Pants. I keep seeing it in strange places, as if it were following me.

This week, there’s been a LimeBike in my parking lot. Every day, the thing has moved a little closer to my building. Now it’s sitting on my front porch.

It creeps me out.

In Seattle, the LimeBike has taken to hanging from the trees.

And in South Bend, it keeps on appearing in the river, as if it were Ophelia.

News of Charlottesville

Since our return from the church camp, Karin & I have learned what happened at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

At the camp, the news didn’t reach us.

We didn’t hear it from the pulpit.

We didn’t hear it from the other campers.

Nor did we hear it on the Internet, our access to which was quite limited. (I paid $7.99 to use just 6 MB, and so I browsed very little.)

It’s possible that the event was mentioned during the Sunday morning service, which we didn’t attend.

It certainly wasn’t mentioned during Saturday night’s sermon, which ended forty-five minutes late. (That sermon was about Satanic rock music and “crossing the line.”)

On Friday morning, that same preacher had spoken rather well about the willful neglect of the truth. And so I’m puzzled why, on Saturday night, he didn’t mention what’s clearly a national crisis. Instead, in his preliminary remarks, he talked about how the camp had erected a shrine to his dead cat.

Maybe, like Karin & me, he simply was cut off from the rest of the world.

And once more to the apartment

… much to the kitties’ delight. Our reunion with them was most tender.

Here is my summary of the last three days at the camp.

It rained often, and so the paths were muddy.

We went to church twice each day. The sermon that I discussed in the previous entry was the best one by far. The others all went on longer than their allotted times, and they rehashed these points:

(1) The importance of the U.S. armed forces.

(2) The importance of the church elders (Michigan district).

(3) The importance of camp, for training the youth.

(4) Dangers that beset the youth. In this last category:

(4a) Satanism in rock music.

(4b) Activities that steer the youth away from camp.

(4c) Homosexuality.

(4d) Disney World – not explicitly named, but inferable from certain mentions of (4b) and (4c).

And lastly:

(4e) Unmanliness in various guises: being an absent father, selling one’s spiritual “birthright,” and failing to “cross the line.” (Julius Caesar, one speaker told us, heroically “crossed the line” when he crossed the Rubicon. The speaker himself had “crossed the line” many times, breaking rules at the mental health center where he worked, so that he could lead a teenager away from Devil worship.)

Yesterday, between services, Karin & I and Karin’s friend, Shad, traveled to the touristic town of Frankenmuth. Much of the town is German-themed. It’s also the site of Bronner’s, “the world’s largest Christmas store.” Like the House on the Rock, the store displays a staggering number of knickknacks. It also has a small chapel.

We returned to the camp. That night was the best night of the trip. We took lawn chairs out into a dark field and watched a meteorite shower. It was lovely, except when other campers drove near to us in their rented golf carts, blinding us with their headlights. “You’re ruining the meteorite shower!” I called out to them.

This morning, Brianna and her retinue tromped into our cabin and woke us up. We packed up our car and drove home, skipping the sermon of the denomination’s president. I plan to listen to the sermon on YouTube.

Once more to the camp

With stops, our drive to the “thumb” of Michigan took six hours. It was quite tiring – we’d stayed awake late the previous night, due to Barcelona’s victory over Palmeiras in the Copa Libertadores – and when we arrived at the camp, we wished to rest. Alas, our cabin was filled with Brianna and her noisy teenaged retinue.

One grubby youngster, Noah, unknown to us, is Brianna’s new boyfriend of some few days. The other teenagers look ganglier and greasier than last year.

“Let’s turn around and leave,” said Karin.

“Yes! Yes!” I agreed.

But we didn’t.

Instead, we went to the church service. The speaker posited a “social trinitarian” conception of the Godhead, on the basis of which he argued for the value of community – and, by extension, against leaving the church. He showed Andrei Rublev’s famous painting of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit seated together at a table. “This is a picture of God,” he said.

I was glad to view that lovely painting. But I recalled that other pictures show the Godhead as one person with three faces. The “social” doctrine isn’t the only account of the Trinity.

(Not that the speaker needed that doctrine to make his point. Community can be important even if it doesn’t exist within the Godhead.)

After church, everyone lined up for ice-cream, which was served in heaping portions. This photo shows me eating a “single.”

Illness; my mom’s birthday; libraries; Norman Podhoretz; Napoleon; the famous Danish book about traveling to Yemen

Jasper is over his gingivitis (but not the disease that caused it). He’s also past the sneezing and eye-running that plagued him last week. Now Ziva has both of those ailments. To my knowledge, this is her first illness.

Yesterday, she huddled miserably in remote corners of the apartment. Tonight, she’s more active – but no less afflicted.

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My mom’s birthday was today. I gave her some leftover pork that Karin cooked awhile ago. Then my mom asked for the recipe, and so I typed it up on LaTeX and sent it to her as a PDF.

Later, we held a supper for my mom, and Mary asked: “Mother, how does it feel to have all your children with you?” (In fact, David wasn’t there.) After the supper, we had a dessert, and after the dessert, Karin & I went to Walmart to buy medicine for the kitties.

It appears that Walmart sells The Oxford Handbook of Value Theory:

“Only 1 left!”

Even reduced by thirty dollars, the price isn’t nearly in reach. Nor does the Indiana University library system own a printed copy of the book. Nor can the e-book be accessed at my campus.

This leaves Interlibrary Loan. Thankfully, ILL is a marvel, a privilege that exceeds what any person could deserve, a manifestation of the grace of God and Caesar.

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I’m also using the library system to haul in old copies of three books recently re-released by NYRB. The first is Making It by Norman Podhoretz. A comprehensive review by Louis Menand is here.

The book itself is naturally witty, but also incorrigibly grasping. However, the author faces up to this problem rather well:

A critic with a very good pair of ears once wrote that he could hear in some of my essays “the tones of a young man who expects others to be just a little too pleased with his early eminence.”

Indeed. Podhoretz also observes shrewdly the guiding myths of Brooklyn Judaism, of the universities of Columbia and Cambridge (England), and – I haven’t quite got to it yet – of the New York magazine scene.

Still to come from the library: The Death of Napoleon, a short novel by Simon Leys, whose essays collected in The Hall of Uselessness are elegant, empathetic, and astute; and Thorkild Hansen’s Arabia Felix, about an eighteenth-century expedition of Danes to what is now Yemen. The Danes did not get on with one another. I hope to read about the details at this year’s church camp, to which, on Thursday, Karin & I will travel.

The naked prey

He doesn’t enjoy taking his medicine or having his teeth brushed, but, on the whole, Jasper seems less frantic than a week ago. One good sign is that he’s accepting his stricter diet. (The vet insisted we trim away some of his 13 lbs.) He begs less piteously over our meals – unless, that is, we’re having tuna or chicken.

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Last night, Karin & I watched Cornel Wilde’s opus from 1965. I’d seen it in the summer of 2000, late one night on AMC, after a grueling McDonald’s shift.

Here is the summary from AllMovie:

In the bush country of South Africa in the late 19th century … [a] hunting party are captured by … tribesmen and grotesquely tortured to death. The only white man spared is safari-guide Cornel Wilde. … Stripping him naked and giving him a knife to defend himself, [the tribesmen] set Wilde free in the jungle, in preparation of hunting him down like a lion. … The rest of this thrill-a-minute film follows Wilde into the underbrush in his desperate, resourceful flight for life. Cornel Wilde’s The Naked Prey was filmed entirely on location under circumstances nearly as dangerous as the plight of its protagonist.

Roger Ebert makes scathing criticisms, all of them just. I find the movie interesting for comparative reasons.

Jean-Luc Godard famously said: “In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie.” I wonder if Nicolas Roeg had The Naked Prey in mind when he made Walkabout (1971). Roeg seems to have appropriated the most striking features of the earlier movie.

Both movies are lushly colored. Both are about wandering on foot through untamed land.

There are frequent digressions from the main story to show “nature red in tooth and claw.” When the protagonists sleep, creatures crawl and slither near them. Vegetation is photographed so as to resemble the human body.

Still, Roeg performs some critical reversals.

There is the theme of black and white people together in nature. In Wilde’s story, they fight; in Roeg’s, they cooperate. The failure of that cooperation is far more ironic, far bitterer, than anything in The Naked Prey.

There are scenes of hunting in which animals are really killed. Wilde has his hunter-actors throw their spears, and then he cuts to show the speared animals collapsing. Roeg casts an authentic hunter who, in one take, chases down his prey and spears it.

And then there is the titular nudity. Both movies show some natives naked. Wilde’s look like they’re from National Geographic; Roeg’s look … indecent. When Wilde’s protagonist is made to disrobe, the foliage preserves his modesty. When Roeg’s protagonists are naked … wow.

I could go on. In Wilde’s movie, the key figures are adults. In Roeg’s, they aren’t yet fully grown: in their Edenic setting, they have all the more innocence to lose.

Wilde’s characters travel across the screen from left to right. In Walkabout, the traveling is mostly opposite: perverse, confused. In Wilde’s movie, civilization, when it appears, is a haven. In Roeg’s, it’s as unwelcoming as nature.

So: Walkabout is much, much better. But The Naked Prey is watchable. Its ingredients are distinctive and exquisite, if not so compellingly arranged. There haven’t been many other movies like it, before or since.

Little Ziva surely enjoyed it: she perched on her hind legs, her face in front of the TV.