Walker Percy: The Movie

Just in time for my annual re-reading of Walker Percy's The Moviegoer comes news, from Commonweal Magazine's blog, of a new documentary film about Percy by Win Riley. The trailer includes bits of interviews with Richard Ford, Robert Coles and Jay Tolson.

Bear Anniversary

At last, the day we've all had marked on our calendars for so long. Today is the 24th anniversary of the Chicago Bears 46-10 victory over the New England Patriots in Super Bowl XX. If you're still looking for the perfect Bear anniversary gift for that certain someone, may I suggest a link to my groundbreaking GQ oral history of the 1985 Bears. Among the things I learned reporting this story: That Mike Ditka's wife calls him "Coach;" that William "the Refrigerator" Perry likes to conduct phone interviews at 5 a.m.; and that few former professional athletes ever tire of talking about themselves.

Shrinking the Martini

Back in the days when I was spending my disposable income on things like vintage barware (and not, as I do today, on instantly obsolete youth sporting goods) I bought a set of four mid-century-or-so Martini glasses. They might be the most gorgeous things I own: Somewhere between a coupe and a straight flared Martini glass, they’re nicely balanced and tiny, with decorative six-pointed stars etched into the glass. They hold about three ounces, with just enough room left over for olives or onions. (We like our Gibsons here at Catapult world headquarters.) As fond as I’ve always been of my glasses, I sometimes worry that pouring such a small drink might mark me as a lightweight--or worse, as less than generous. In a lot of taverns, you’ll get your Martini in a ten- or twenty-ounce glass that could double as a fishbowl. But I’ve always liked the idea of a sharp little cocktail that doesn’t take half the night to drink. And, yes, the Gibson that Cary Grant orders in “North by Northwest” comes in a glass more like mine than the modern Supersize models. So, there.

Now comes yet more vindication, in the form of this piece by Wayne Curtis in The Atlantic about the “small-cocktail revival.” Martinis, he points out, should stay chilled from beginning to end, but that’s a hard trick to pull off if your glass is so deep that it takes forever to touch bottom. So Curtis applauds a few smart cocktail lounges that are pouring smaller, chillier, better drinks.

Curtis: “Cocktails should be like tapas: intense hits of complex, well-balanced flavors in small portions that leave one wanting more.”

For the record, I also own a few king-size Martini glasses—but we mostly serve dessert in them. Godzilla-sized desserts I have no problem with.

Pursuing Happiness

I wrote a piece about, of all things, happiness. It's online now at Notre Dame Magazine.

Smoking 2.0

I spent a lot of my holiday break watching old movies ("The Thin Man," "Philadelphia Story," "The Big Sleep") which means I also spent a lot of time watching people smoke cigarettes. Let me say right from the beginning that I’m no fan of cigarettes. They helped kill my father. I remember finding, not long after his death, a filter from one of his Kents lying in the grass of my parents’ back yard, where he must have discarded it some time before, and where I was now doing some weeding for my mother. It was a hell of a thing to be reminded that the butts of his cigarettes were still around even after he’d gone.

And yet, is it possible to watch one of those old movies and not admire the way William Powell or Humphrey Bogart handled a cigarette? Smoking, as they did it, seemed less an activity than a gesture. There was a time when I aspired to smoke with that much style. Is there a better moment in movies than the first time we see Bogie in “Casablanca,” in his dinner jacket, dragging on a cigarette? Did these people have a talent for smoking, in the way they had a talent for acting? (Or was their smoking part of the act?) Now I sometimes see people standing in the cold outside the revolving door of downtown office buildings, dragging on cigarettes. There is nothing Bogart-cool about them. They look dreary and sad. Do they just lack the talent for smoking? Maybe the surgeon general’s warning on cigarette packs should advise people against smoking unless they are film stars of the black-and-white era.

Of course, today’s smokers are standing out in the cold because we’re in a period of antismoking repression. Now, instead of smoking at the roulette table in Rick’s Café, you do it, furtively, in the alley. Is it my imagination or did public opinion swing against smoking at around the same time we all started migrating to the Internet? I ask the question because if anything has replaced smoking in bars and clubs and parties (just once I’d like to throw a classic Christmas blowout like the one in “The Thin Man”) it is playing with information technology. Instead of smoking in social situations, we text and tweet and take pictures of each other with our phones. It’s no longer enough to throw a party or attend a party or enjoy a party. The party must be commented upon, documented as it happens. Even more remarkable, the traditional responsibilities of the partygoer—talking, laughing, trying to say something smart or funny—have been outsourced to the Web. Not long ago, I was at a party where one of the guests pulled out his smart phone and began reading aloud, at no one’s urging, the latest Southeast Conference football scores. Ask yourself: What would William Powell have done?

In his book, “Cigarettes are Sublime,” Richard Klein writes that the history of “antitabagism” goes back centuries, but that the historical cycle always swings back from repression to the return of the smoker. But is it more likely that smoking will one day make a comeback, or that one day we will come to ostracize social networkers and tweeters and people who can’t put away their Blackberries even at the dinner table? Will they have to do their thing as smokers do now, furtively, in alleys?

It's the Most Fault-Finding Time of the Year

“In the spirit of Christmas grumpiness,” The Times Online asked a bunch of arts-and-letters types to complain about the putative classics that they secretly despise. There were some outstanding nominations: Romeo and Juliet, Charles Dickens, Monty Python. On the whole, though, the contributors set their sights too low, I think. Tom Waits? Oasis? I’d argue that since neither of these acts qualify as classics, they don’t even deserve our secret disdain. I think most of us have been happy to scoff openly at Oasis for some time now.

I would save my spite for Moby Dick. Or the faux-populist preener Bruce Springsteen. Or the insistently hardboiled David Mamet. Or soccer. Lumps of coal all around, if you ask me.

But to friends of Catapult, and especially to everyone who talked back this year: Have yourselves some merry little Christmases.

Downhill Fast

Spent part of yesterday sliding down a hill on my ass. This is one of the blessings of fatherhood: the license to act like an eight-year old. My boy and his friends were sledding on the hill down the street, and I walked up there under the pretext of calling them home for dinner. While I was there, I took the chance to make a few runs down the hill myself.

I once believed that fatherhood would transform me in some profound way, make me wiser, more mature, more of a man. What it has really done is give me an excuse to play with sleds.

The boys had built a little packed-snow ramp at the bottom of the hill that sends you—if you hit it just right—airborne and over a little stream that winds around the bottom of the hill. So it was me and a bunch of third-graders in the fading light, taking turns sliding and flying. It was so much fun that I’m afraid I might have hogged the best sled.

Tomorrow: Nerf basketball in the family room?