Up In The Air

I watched the Academy Awards the other weekend. It was the first awards show I have watched in six years. I was at my neighbors’ place eating Sunday dinner and it was on so we decided to watch it. The Sunday Dinner has become a pretty regular occurrence and gives me a regular television fix. It also hasn’t helped me get in shape because they cook big, elaborate and delicious meals. Being televisionless means I get all my news from newspapers and radio. Often that news is about things or events on television so I know the stories and history of things without ever actually seeing the event (the internet here is too slow to stream video). When I actually get to see the event, it gives me a tickle.

This is probably also the first time I have seen the big movies of the night that had been written about in the seemingly never-ending lead up to the Oscars – Avatar and The Hurt Locker. I’m not one who rushes to the theatre to see a blockbuster. The Hurt Locker I “borrowed” from the internet back in Anchorage and the tiny theatre in Nome, whose lobby is also the Subway store, got Avatar and some friends were going to see it so I tagged along. The Hurt Locker was alright. Kathryn Bigelow makes decent adrenaline junkie, modern cowboy tales. Point Break holds a special place in my heart. Still, The Hurt Locker just didn’t blow my mind. I think being a huge fan of the HBO mini series Generation Kill has ruined Iraq movies for me. They just don’t compare to an accurate and real life account like it was. It is like watching some WWII shoot ‘em up after seeing Band of Brothers.

Avatar just sucked. It was a waste of 2 ½ hours of my life. It was special f/x pornography. If I’m going to watch pornography, it better have bush and cock making friends with each other, not glowing, floating dandelion seeds and Elphanrhinosaurs’ attacks. The plot appeared to have been written by a pimple-faced Star Wars fanboy as an Earth Day project. The dialogue was as engaging and clever as the manual for my Ford Ranger. Unobtanium? Really? Reeaaaaallly? Why not just name the CEO of the mining company Cash McGreedy and the army guy Captain Bigot?

Anyhow, The Hurt Locker won a lot of awards. The point of all this is that the next day I went online and looked at all the less written about nominees and queued them up in Netflix. First on my list was Up In the Air. I didn’t really know much about it going in. I just saw George Clooney and thought let’s go for it. I like George Clooney. His modern day Cary Grant has not grown old to me yet. Plus he likes South Park and has a pet pig.

I really enjoyed Up In the Air – interesting plot and dialogue, a nice mix of humor and drama, visually pleasant and a brief shot of bare ass. It is a good Saturday night popcorn movie. I also enjoyed it because parts of it hit a little close to home.

The plot is a bit complex. George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a corporate axe-man for hire, meaning companies hire him to fire people for them. He is a suave and polished “two Bobs” from Office Space. He spends his life flying around the United States firing people. 322 days of the year he is flying. He has a barren apartment in Omaha where the company he works for is located, but his real home is in airports, on airplanes and in hotel rooms. He also occasionally gives motivational speeches called “what’s in your backpack.” He preaches a philosophy of life with no personal, emotional or physical attachments to hold one down. He says at one speaking engagement,

“The slower we move the faster we die. Make no mistake, moving is living. Some animals were meant to carry each other to live symbiotically over a lifetime. Star crossed lovers, monogamous swans. We are not swans. We are sharks.”

It is never revealed whether he adapted the lifestyle for the job or took the job to suit his lifestyle. The movie leaves that chicken and the egg problem for the audience to decide.

Clooney is the best at his job and able to communicate with people in their most vulnerable state and convince them that the firing/lay-off is just a new start (and also prevent them from going postal). As his personal life is filled with short interactions and friends who only last only as long as a flight, it is a natural fit for any deep, emotional encounters to come from the short interaction with those being fired. A young upstart Natalie, played by Anna Kendrick, decides to change the industry by firing people via video chat and thus confining Clooney to an office in Omaha. He is left with one last chance to hit the road while both showing Natalie the ropes and trying to save his gallivanting lifestyle by convincing her of the personal interaction needed in the profession.

The story doesn’t stop there because, well, because being single and moving isn’t the American way. It doesn’t sell houses and useless shit to decorate those houses. Apparently all of us single vagabonds are miserable and don’t know it. Thus, we get Vera Farmiga playing Alex, a fellow traveler and Clooney’s love interest. She was excellent and was equal to, if not better than Clooney in much of the movie. Anyhow, Clooney, partly through Natalie’s nagging, realizes he has feelings for Alex, or thinks he does, or we think he does, or we think he should. I’m not sure which, but the movie tries really hard to make us realize that no man is an island and we all need to settle down.

I don’t buy it. It wasn’t until I started moving around that I became truly happy. I live out of a U-haul and pick-up instead of a carry-on, but the core principles of moving and staying unattached are the same. Seeing new things and meeting new people are what life is about. Sure, as the movie states, your best memories are with somebody else, but why does that have to be the same person? Why shouldn’t we follow our goal to see the world or in Clooney’s case earn 10 million airline miles?

When animals are forced together and over populated they die of disease and starvation if not outright killing each other. We live in a world of 6 billion people and projected to be 9 billion within 40 years. Who wants to settle down into that? I don’t want to volunteer for being in the cage. Maybe I am full of youthful idealistic wanderlust. Maybe when I hit forty I will have some epiphany and crave a home with a garage and a backyard that little kids can play in. Until that time comes, I will keep moving.

For all my fellow travelers, couchsurfers, vagabonds, hobos, drifters and tramps I highly recommend Up In the Air. If is a very good movie that weaves travel, relationships, the shitty economy and the effects of modern technology on jobs into one beautifully shot (have to give a shout out for the cinematography – actually shot on scene in real airports, hotels and lounges) and acted movie. It may change your mind or may not. It will at least highly entertain you for an hour and half.

The Red Lantern is in.

It’s all over. Iditarod has come and gone. I watched mushers come in at 2 a.m. I cheered for wet boobs and buns. I did irreparable damage to my liver. In sum, I experienced Iditarod. My last post concluded on Wednesday. In an effort to save time, here is what happened in the remaining days: I drank. Wednesday I drank green St. Patty’s day beer. Thursday I partied at my neighbors and avoided the bars. Friday and Saturday I hit up the town with a couple of couchsurfers from Anchorage. Sunday was the banquet at the Rec Center complete with a giant spread of food and $3 beers.

Now I am recovering. A week of late nights and smoky bars has destroyed my immune system so that I am writing this with some weird cold or flu. My body aches and I spent most of last night waking up every 20 minutes in a cold sweat. Lovely.

Aside from turning my usually healthy liver into a shrunken, yellow mess of dying cells, Iditarod finally made me feel like a real resident of Nome. Despite my lack of snowmachine riding and muskox hunting and general introverted apartment dwelling art making, I have made enough acquaintances that I always knew somebody out on the town. Also, with the two couchsurfers staying with me, I got to be a tour guide for the weekend. It is fun to be a “local” and show people the cool, not in the tourbook, things to do such as hikes up Anvil Mountain to see the White Alice antennae and muskox herds and then get live crab from Norton Sound Seafood for dinner.

Let me take the time to endorse couchsurfing.org for any readers who do not know of the website. It is a social networking site with the sole purpose of providing free places to sleep to poor vagabonds like me who don’t mind sleeping on a couch or a mattress in the corner of the room. You join and make a profile with pictures of all your travels and descriptions of your accommodations. Other users can then search in a town or geographic areas for other members. Exchange a few emails to make sure the person is available and not an ax murderer and just like that you saved yourself $120 on a hotel room. It is self-regulating so people who have stayed with you can leave comments about you and you can leave comments about them (If I have learned anything during my 30 years on this Earth it is that pictures of you on top of a mountain or biking across the United States usually means you a decent person). The best part is that you get to stay with a friendly local who can give you advice and show you things that a hotel concierge never could. It actually uses social networking in a communal and productive way instead of just updating former high school classmates with fishing for sympathy status updates.

I have used the site quite a few times now. When I drove across the country from San Francisco back to law school with my buddy, we stayed with three different people, all great experiences. I hosted a group of guys in Anchorage and now have hosted in Nome. You might think that such a website would draw mostly a dreadlocked hippie crowd, but it is quite diverse. Through the site I have met a plethora of people from military guys to oil rig workers to dreadlocked hippies to college “dudes.” All were great people who love traveling, meeting people, sharing their own experiences and wanting a more authentic experience of wherever they visit. I highly recommend trying it on your next trip.

Getting back to Iditarod, I have to say that being here for the entire week was unforgettable (The amazing weather the tourists brought helped as well.). Seeing the town swell with people in celebration makes you excited and happy. It is a weeklong good-time feedback loop in a town where depression and melancholy can easily set in. It was tough Monday morning not hearing sirens go off and the loud speakers in town giving race updates. When the initial idea to move to Alaska was presented to me on the back porch of Crossroads Bar & Grill in South Royalton, Vermont sometime in March of 2009, I was hesitant until I quickly realized that the idea was so crazy I had to do it. I figured that the worst possible outcome is that I end up leaving the Great White North with some good stories to tell. Well, witnessing the full onslaught of Iditarod in Nome, Alaska is definitely a hell of a story to tell. Thank you Nome and thank you Iditarod.

Dog mushing and wet boobs.

Dogs, boobs, pho

[In an effort to not forget and accurately report I am writing this as I have time so excuse me if I switch tenses or if there are continuity problems.]

It is Iditarod time in town. Nome’s most famous cultural event, the yearly 1100+ mile dogsled race from Willow to Nome commemorating the 1925 diphtheria serum run to stop an outbreak, is underway. It is also one hell of a party. The town swells in size as tourists flock in. People rent out rooms in their house for $180 a night. The bars are packed, well more packed than usual. They are also open until 5 a.m.

The race itself couldn’t be better timed. The sun has left its seemingly permanent fixture at 10 degrees above the horizon and is high up in the sky glaring off the snow. The town has been cooped up for a long time and it is time to let loose and do what Nome does best - party until your liver hurts to the touch. Starting on Monday, the fire alarm sounds, loud speakers give color commentary and Nomeites and tourists stumble out of the bars to greet incoming mushers and then return to their stool to warm up in preparation for the next one.

The race technically has a winner by Tuesday when the first musher crosses, but in a race this long, large gaps are built so mushers keep coming throughout the week. This year, Lance Mackey won his forth straight Iditarod coming in at just under 9 days. It is amazing to live in a place where dog mushers are as highly regarded as, if not more highly regarded than, any “outside” professional athlete. Lance Mackey is cool too. He is 39 years old, has long stringy hair he keeps in pony tail, sports a goatee and is a throat cancer survivor. Until this year when they started drug testing mushers (a controversy all its own), he would smoke medicinal marijuana on the trail. There is basically no way you can be as cool or hard as this guy but he still has that down to Earth, drink a beer with vibe.

Speaking of mushers, this is a tough group of athletes. Nine days on the trail in desolate Alaska is hard. I built snowcaves for 24 hours outside and by the end I was a cold and pissy little bitch who wanted nothing more than to be back at my apartment drinking hot coffee and watching a Netflix. Yet, they have a warm caring quality because they work with dogs. Scratch that, they work for the dogs. They love these animals and deeply care for them. Mushers heat their food up in the dogs’ water. They sew booties for them. It is all about the dogs. That feeling of compassion doesn’t exist in most professional sports. It is lovely.

But enough with the dogs, let’s get to the events. There are a lot of them. There are art shows and craft fairs. There is snow sculpting, a snowmachine race, dog fur spinning, basketball tournaments, poker tournaments, and chili cook-offs. There are also lots of parties at the bars. They are a sight to be seen.

I started off my Iditarod experience by watching the start of the Nome-Golovin Snowmachine Race. It is a 200 mile round trip race held every year and the winner qualifies for the Iron Dog. It is a full on sprint. The guys and girls blast off the line and pound their way out and back banging up their machines and even flying off of them. A fittingly balls out event for a balls out week.
There are also more than a few parties throughout the week. Let’s pause and list some of these parties (these are lifted alphabetically from the Nome Convention and Visitors Bureau schedule I got in my PO Box): Alaskan Beers & Jack Daniels, Beer Tasting Extravaganza, Hula Girls, Husky Hoe Down, Idita-After Pary, Idita Mardi Gras, Karaoke, Make You Own Bikini, Safe Sex, Singles Night, St. Patrick’s Day, Wet Bun’s and Wet T-shirt.

In case you only skimmed that list, I will highlight some: MAKE YOUR OWN BIKINI, WET BUNS and WET T-SHIRT. These are advertised by the town. Outside of Sturgis, Bike Week and the Testicle Festival, where do you get that type state sponsored debauchery?

Monday, Nome sets the tone of the week with the Wet Buns’ competition. Who doesn’t love grizzled Alaskan buns? Nome isn’t Miami beach. Hell, by lower 48 standards, it is downright ugly. As an average looking guy, I love it. Modern technology allows humans to live a relatively sedentary lifestyle up here during the nine months of snow. We just ended four months of 20 hours of darkness. People are thick and, unless you have some Native blood in you, white – pasty white.

This makes for a great slate of contestants. The key to any good nudity based event is the pool that you get contestants from. Like Girls Gone Wild, the point is watching normal people go wild and not already wild people being wild. As Mac said on It’s Always Sunny, “We don't want wild girls. We want good girls gone wild. It's important to see the transition, watch the process...” Nome has lots of good average people willing to “go wild.”

I head over to Wet Bun’s, get inside, find some friends and realize I need to drink for this. A few beers in and I realized I needed to drink a lot more and started double fisting. The actual competition is preceded by an auction of t-shirts, hats, other booze related schwag and five front stage seats complete with water bottles for wetting things up. I am not sure if any of this money is donated to a cause or if it all goes to the winners. The auction takes a while so I am pretty gone by the time it starts. After it finally started I found out that the women of Nome are as crazy horny as the men. The crowd erupted. I have never heard more cheers and whistles for average physiques with bad tattoos. Awesome. I’m not really a fan of man-ass so luckily the drunkenness made the competition go quickly. Long story short, I make it home and pass out around 3 a.m.

I trained for Iditarod week. Last week I stayed up late every night and went to the bar for a few beers during the week, which I never do. I knew what my body was in for so I wanted to warm it up to the booze and lack of sleep so I didn’t miss anything. It worked. Tuesday morning I was hurting, but functional. My big life saver: pho. Pho, the delicious brothy and slightly spicy Vietnamese soup full of cilantro, green onions, rice noodles, and thin pieces of beef that I became addicted to in D.C. Twin Dragon in town has it and it is the best cure for hangovers in the world. It fills you up and gets your deprived body nutrients, but unlike greasy breakfasts it doesn’t sit in your stomach. Totally refreshing. A big bowl of that for lunch and I was on the way to full recovery. A post-work power nap later and I was ready for boobs.

I was cautiously optimistic about the Wet T-Shirt contest. I had heard stories of past events that included full frontal nudity and beer bottles in certain unmentionable places, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up only to have them dashed. I grew up on internet pron, hung out at hockey team parties in undergrad and rugby parties at law school and have been to many local, small town strip clubs, so I am no stranger to uncomfortable nudity. The shit I have seen, you can’t unsee. Two Girls One Cup, while gross as hell, is safe because you are watching it on a screen. When the stripper in front of you has track marks, it makes you question existence.

However, tits are tits, so off I went to Polaris. The place was butts to nuts packed. The night before the auctioneers had trouble auctioning off all the gear. Tonight, there was no such trouble. The money that drops at Iditarod is staggering. When a cheap beer like Miller costs you $5, things add up. Pregaming is a good strategy. With the goods gone, the contestants are called on stage and shit got real.

The contestants ranged from two perky and fit young girls to slightly hardened middle age women to big old drunken tundra mommas. Fantastic. Queue the music and let’s get this started.

Another insight into Nome is that it doesn’t seem to have a history of dancing. Traditional Native dancing is big up here, but let’s face it, a form of dance that portrays seal hunts is not going sexy. Erotic gyrations are not common place. Thankfully, the younger contestants seem to have spent some time at the bars in Anchorage and were able to muster some crowd please moves.

There were nine contestants to start. They all danced, then left stage and came back individually for their “routine.” There was then a vote by cheer, three were eliminated and the process begins again narrowing it down to the final three. Did I mention one contestant eliminated herself by passing out backstage after the first round of voting? That happened.

The final three, to nobody’s surprise consisted of the three youngest contestants: Lola – a thicker girl with bigguns; Lil’ Shorty – a cute and fit little girl who was the best dancer and stripped down to her saucy little panties; and Andrea, Azlea or some other A name I can’t really remember – cute but didn’t have the stage presence that the other two did. Lola, the crowd favorite of the entire night, won $1700. As far as I am concerned Lil’ Shorty was robbed. She took 2nd place winning $1000, but deserved first. She had moves and didn't even hesitate on the chant of “skin to win”.

Unlike the previous night, the contest was over early. I was successfully pacing myself so headed down to Breakers to finish off. Bedtime, after late night grub and gatoraide, was around 3:00 a.m.

Wednesday morning I actually felt alright, albeit a little tired. An easy day of work, another round of pho, and a five mile run and I was ready to pretend to be Irish.

To be continued...

The metal train keeps rolling...

I am in a metal mood. After watching the Metalocolypse series, Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey arrived in my mailbox. What a documentary. I don’t know how this escaped me for three years. Sam Dunn outdid himself in offering up a very comprehensive history of metal. Starting from the grandfathers of metal of the late 60’s, he works his way up to the present covering everything from 80’s glam to Swedish black metal church burnings. If your first interview is Geddy Lee, you are on the right track.

In A Headbanger’s Journey, Dunn takes the time to explain heavy metal in musical terms showing its many similarities to classical music such as Wagner’s use of bass in the orchestra to metal’s pounding double kick drums and how the sustain of a distorted electric guitar shares many qualities of a violin section (I’m glad to hear somebody else echo this. I have always though the warm growl of Marshall stacks sounded like violins).

Dunn loves Iron Maiden and makes no bones about it. In fact he later went on to make Iron Maiden Flight 666, a travel documentary on Maiden’s “Somewhere Back in Time” tour. (Flight 666 is an amazing look at possibly the greatest, most hardworking and amazingly independent band ever.) So of course when Dunn wants to get the low down on comparisons to the classics, he goes to the man with the greatest operatic voice in metal, Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson. Dickinson gives the best interview of the film describing his job of filling the entire venue with his voice in an effort to shrink the audience so that it is like Maiden is playing to each and every person. You can tell from the short interview that Dickinson loves his fans and works his butt off to please them. There is no pretentious rockstar persona attached at all and a completely down to Earth working class guy, another topic covered in the film.

The personal and community aspect that Bruce talked about was explored with a trip to Wacken Open Air, a giant, 70,000 person, outdoor metal festival in Germany every year. I now have a new vacation goal. The place looks absolutely amazing. Metalheads in tents drinking beer and eating German food, who could ask for more in life? It was refreshing to see metalheads in their natural element of drinking and headbanging without any trace of violence or hysteria like some U.S. rock n roll festivals have become famous for. Aside from all the black leather and spikes, Wacken looked like a hippie jazz-fusion festival, full of long hair, sleeping bags, making friends and little showering.

A Headbanger’s Journey also looks at the life-long love of metal. Metalheads seemingly never grow out of it, nor should they. The first band I really got into was in fact Iron Maiden. Everything about them was cool, especially to a kid in eighth grade. The album art, WWII lyrics, and ridiculous guitars riffs all blew me away. I still rock out to Maiden. As I grew into a rebellious teenager, I discovered the sister subculture to metal – punk. Just like I still love metal, punk has never left me either. I still want to fight the man and listen to Minor Threat and The Clash. I never intend on stopping. The music and the culture are part of me and I am part of it. As Mos Def said about hip-hop, “People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant living in the hillside coming down to visit the townspeople. We are Hip-Hop. Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop.” Well, we are metal.

Anybody who has a metalhead friend who they just don’t understand should rent this movie. It will give you a whole new insight into a misjudged and stereotyped subculture. I’ll leave with a quote by Dunn himself, “Ever since I was 12 years old I had to defend my love for heavy metal against those who say it's a less valid form of music. My answer now is that you either feel it or you don't. If metal doesn't give that overwhelming surge of power that make the hair stand up at the back of your neck, you might never get it, and you know what? That's okay, because judging by the 40,000 metalheads around me we're doing just fine without you.”

Metal: Hail the Horns.

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Back again. At least for a short time.

This is now my fourth or fifth attempt at keeping a blog. Each time if fizzles off or the idea for a theme loses steam after a few posts. I have the attention span of an 8 year old. I can’t watch movies that are longer than two hours without taking my own intermission to make tea, eat food, play guitar, go the gym, stare at a wall, and make number two. Forget about books over 500 pages (I’m looking at you Ayn Rand). If you haven’t given me the moral of the story by page 499, I’m not going to get it.

The old saying is to “write what you.” The problem is, I don’t know anything. Really, I don’t. It relates to the short attention span. I have a lunatic mind that hops from subject to subject and my ever-changing projects and obsessions only last a few weeks. This can be witnessed by all the former blog attempts: Washington DC and the EPA, Alaska and movies.

With this all in mind, I am presenting the new and improved The Rambles of Homer Lee. This blog will be an outlet for whatever crazy thoughts are currently in my brain and won’t get me fired or blacklisted for posting. I recognize that a random, scattershot blog with no story or driving force does not score you a book deal or readership for that matter, but I figure it can’t be any worse than reality television. Enjoy my three readers. Enjoy.