Me and Gru

 

A strange thing happened to me last night. I wound up watching the computer-animated kids movie Minions: The Rise of Gru, all by myself, alone, in a 500-seat movie theater blasting the film at 120 decibels.

How did I get here, I wondered, stretching out and reclining in my seat.

Well, a little backstory.

My daughters are separated by four years, born in 2004 and 2008. The oldest, known as Little One in these pages, graduated from high school in May and is now about six weeks in to her college education. She lives on a campus about a 40 minute drive from my home. Far enough but not too far. She’s been home three times, but we expect the times we see her to shrink in frequency as she makes new friends at her school and stays more and more weekends there.

All fine and good. We encourage her social development as well as her intellectual, physical, and spiritual. It does, however, have a negative impact. Her younger sister, just starting to navigate the hell that is high school as a lowly freshman, misses her terribly and facetimes her just about every night.

Now, Patch, as my youngest is known here, keeps herself busy. She has a couple of challenging AP classes. She also works two part time jobs: She referees U10 soccer games (boys and girls) on Saturdays, generally 11:30-3, and she is becoming a more and more in-demand baby sitter. I think she’s pulled down something like $400 since the end of summer doing these things.

So she’s busy, but she’s lonely. She does make friends easily, but finds so many of her classmates flakey. There’s a girl a few blocks away that she hangs with, maybe every other weekend, and they go thrifting, go to the mall, things like that. But she misses the constant constant of her life, her big sister.

I have been consciously trying to bridge this gap in her life. I’m her study buddy for algebra and biology. We plan on walking together evenings when the thermometer dips below 80. We started a new tradition: Thursday night movies, her choice. And what she chose to begin with is the animated series Despicable Me and its sequels, as kind of a comforting bit of nostalgia from her younger years.

Which I found I enjoy. I’m a big Steve Carrell fan, and I like the whole Bond supervillain aspect of the films. We both chuckle at the minions. I bought her a stuffed “Bob the Minion” for her birthday two weeks ago. We sat in the upstairs apartment of our home watching Despicable Me, Despicable Me 2, Despicable Me 3, and our favorite, Minions. Last week we settled back and prepared to watch the final installment to date, Minions: The Rise of Gru.

To our horror it was not available to rent! On all these damn apps I have on my TV – Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Hulu, you name it, none streamed this film for rent. Sure, being a 2022 release, you could buy it for $20. But I don’t like buying these streaming movies, because unless you have a physical item in your hand, you don’t really own it. So we exclusively rent the flicks we watch.

Patch was heartbroken. Instead we decided to start on the next sequence of films, her Halloween animated series selections, and we watched Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride. But the unfinished minion business sat heavy on her heart.

The Mrs., not ever wanting anything to sit heavy on her daughter’s heart, did some research, and she located a theater twelve miles away that was still showing the film. She immediately bought tickets for Patch and me for our next Thursday night movie night, which was yesterday.

So she was excited all day. I was working at home, all caught up as the month ended, and she was studying all day for Friday tests. I made us some scrambled eggs for dinner and then we headed off. Found the theater with plenty of time to spare. These theaters today! There was a bar in the lobby, and in the theater itself the big fat chairs reclined, a big red button on each you could press for food service.

Anyway, since Minions: The Rise of Gru was released nearly three months ago, July 1, we didn’t expect a packed theater. However, once we walked in and went to our center seats, we realized that we were absolutely alone! I did a quick calculation – 25 rows with 20 seats in a row – and realized that we had a 500-seat theater to ourselves. So exclusive! Never had this happen to me before, and I’ve been to at least a hundred movies in my life. We kicked back, made bad loud jokes, booed most of the trailers, and then settled in to the main event.

Halfway through, Patch had to use the rest rooms. So she took off, leaving me there in the cavernous darkness, assaulted by the A.D.D.-tinged visuals and booming sound effects. To be honest, she left during the funniest part of the film. I was laughing out loud.

I realized what a crazy, strange world I live in. I would never, ever, ever have told you a few weeks ago that I’d be by myself (even if for only ten minutes), alone in a movie theater, riveted to a movie screen and giggling with childlike innocence.

Such is the state of my existence halfway through my sixth decade of life.

 

Book Review: The Ghost from the Grand Banks

 

© 1990 by Arthur C. Clarke

 

MAJOR SPOILERS!

 

I have mixed feelings towards Arthur C. Clarke. As a third-grader, I fondly remember buying 2001: A Space Odyssey from the Bookmobile for a few dollars and being absolutely in love with it. I vividly recall the first time I watched the Kubrick version, late at night by myself one summer night early sometime in high school. But since then, it’s been a mixed bag. Liked some short stories, dislike others. Didn’t like Childhood’s End, but kinda liked Fountains of Paradise. And still have a love-hate relationship with his Rama books.

So why the ambivalence?

Bottom line, for me at least, is his characters. They all have nondescript names, nondescript personalities, and nonexistent story arcs. I could not name a single character from the Rama books. I know of 2001’s Astronauts Poole and Bowman, but that’s from the movie. And of Childhood’s End, the only characters I remember are the demonesque aliens, and though I don’t recall their names, I know that they were at least interesting to a logophile like myself.

I will grant that he sprinkles his books with excellent ideas. That’s the main reason I’ll read them. In the case of The Ghost of the Grand Banks, the technology proposed deals with raising the Titanic from the ocean floor in the far-flung future of 2012. Now, the Titanic sits at the bottom of the North Atlantic in two halves (in an area called, obviously enough, the Grand Banks), as we all saw in the Cameron movie. One group of scientist entrepreneurs in the novel wants to raise their half by injecting billions and billions of water-resistant microspheres into the ship and lifting it with the additional aid of thirty 10,000-ton strength cables. Hmm. Interesting

Even more interesting is the idea of a second group of characters to raise their half: using the latest in electromagnetic superconducting cooling technology, they’ll bring the near-freezing water around the Titanic to just below freezing, cold enough to where a massive block of ice will form around the hull at the bottom of the sea. Ice cubes in a glass of water rise to the surface. So, as is stated in the novel, an iceberg sunk the Titanic, and another will lift her. Definitely intriguing.

But Clarke doesn’t really explore the technology. You don’t see it developed, or being installed around the sunken vessel. You don’t sweat out bugs and problems. There’s no tension, no uncertainty, no insight. It’s like I read an article about it in Scientific American (that is, before the magazine tanked into utter and insipid wokeness).

So what do we get?

Well, and here’s the big spoiler: The Titanic doesn’t get raised. The deus ex machina of all seafaring science fiction movies and books, the superstorm, comes into play. Only it’s not a hurricane but an underwater earthquake that causes a landslide buries the Titanic forever, hours before she is to leave her ocean floor grave.

Blech.

It is, however, redeemed in the epilogue: a couple million years in the future, long after man has left the solar system, as the rings of Saturn dim and Mercury is an over-mined shell of itself, an alien probe floats in and orbits Earth. Soon into its study of this third planet, it scans a mass of strange metal, a metallic alloy not normally found in nature, buried deep inside a mountain, and it decides further investigation is needed. Care to venture what that metal in the mountain is?

The epilogue increased my grade of The Ghost of the Grand Banks from a C to a B-minus.

Other Good:

- References to Project Jennifer in the opening pages.

- References to Raise the Titanic! by Clive Cussler, one of the earliest non-children’s book I read as a kid.

- A very brief primer on the mathematical oddity known as the Mandelbrot Set.

Other Bad:

- Tired cliché of the brilliant female mathematician.

- Really tired cliché of the brilliant mathematician daughter of the brilliant female mathematician.

- The actual Titanic was only the subject of 20 or 30 pages; the rest of the novel circled around five or six one-dimensional characters.

- Two main characters die with zero emotional impact

- Censoring old films by digitally editing out any references to cigarette smoking seen as an unequivocal good.

And we’re teased that the Mandelbrot Set will play a pivotal role in the book! It doesn’t (save for a minor, peripheral, weird way), but do yourself a favor and go to Youtube and watch a video on it. I did, and I think I’m not too obsessed. Really. Not obsessed at all.

Patch gets an A for effort picking this out for me. While the review sounds a tad too overtly negative, it was a page turner and I did finish it in a couple of days without putting it down. I just think of it as a wasted opportunity. What magnum opus could someone produce, someone like, say, Neal Stephenson, with Clarke’s notes for this book!

YMMV.

A Proustian Exercise

 

As a young man I struggled once to claim my earliest memories, and after more than a little bit of thought, I arrived at two. Interestingly, they do not involve people. They are primarily visual and interior. And they happened a long, long time ago. By my reckoning the Beatles had just broken up. Nixon was still unfamiliar with the word, “Watergate.” We were at Half Time of the Vietnam War. The AFL had just merged with the NFL.

In the first memory, which I think is the oldest, I am lying in a crib looking up at the night sky and I see a bright shooting star flashing overhead. Long, slow, with sparkling contrails. That’s my initial feeling, but it is plausible I am a toddler on the balcony of the apartment my parents rented and I could have been watching fireworks.

In the second, I am leaning against the bottom part of a wooden fence, the kind made by laying horizontal beams into slots in the horizontal posts, and before me is a massive field of wheat grain, blowing gently yet very sublimely in the wind. It’s a gray day and this field seems to stretch onwards forever, the ground undulating as it fades into the distance. I recall myself fascinated with this scene. But it could have only been three- or four-year-old me at the fence enclosing our small, weed-infested backyard at same apartment complex.

I dunno.

Anyway, there is a famous French writer name of Marcel Proust. Famous in literary circles, that is. He is primarily known for writing a multi-volume “biography” entitled In Search of Lost Time, in some translations. The style of these books was very unique up to that point: extremely centered on self, on his feelings and impressions, very, very focused on minutiae in a grasping attempt to get at something beyond normal, everyday experience. Something kind of like all of us being sleepers sleeping through life, and such a Proustian examination is meant to create a change in our consciousness of experience.

Or something like that. I’m far from being an expert on Proust. More of a novice’s novice.

I do know he spends inordinate amounts of time and pages on simple, singular experiences. Ten or twelve pages on how he sleeps opens the first volume. Then, later on, he devotes another eight or ten on trying to get a kiss from his mother as a young boy before bed. A hyperslow approach to reality that is at complete odds with current, contemporary, twenty-first century life. (And that appeals oh so much to me.)

Anyway, I thought it would be an interesting idea to try to apply such a Proustian approach to these two early memories. Really, really delve into them: what was I seeing, thinking, feeling? Why sight, but no sound? What were the pinpoint details that have eluded me this past half century? What is the meaning behind – and beyond – these memories? Why them? What was the feel of the wood of that fence? What was the temperature of the air? Why did I believe I was lying in a crib? Was that firework – or meteor – so bright and so yellow and so close to me I felt that I could reach up and touch it? And by all this, come to excavate what they have done to me and for me, stretching out an echoing across the decades, me as an adult?

I’m thinking this would be a good warm-up to my Grand Project. I beginning outlines after compiling pages and pages of notes and plan on starting writing January 1st (to follow a similar pattern to the first book I wrote). If anything good comes from it, who knows? I might publish an excerpt from it here at the Hopper.