Poem: Ideal Apparel for a Sign Language Interpreter (2012)

Because I recently shared this one with my coworkers, who got a kick out of it.

*          *          *

Ideal Apparel for a Sign Language Interpreter

Can you help me?

Well, I suppose you can try.

I’ve been pawing my way through your racks,

And I have yet to find

Anything dull enough

To suit my needs.

Understand, I professionally form words

On my fingers,

And for those whose eyes

Spend the day listening to them,

My shirt becomes the page

Those words are printed on.

Ah, something in white

With horizontal blue stripes

And a scarlet margin running down the left side;

Clever, I’ll admit,

And if I had a graphite complexion,

It’d be the interpreting answer to Vera Wang.

However, my handmade words

Are Caucasian-colored

And easy to lose on a backdrop

Of light fabric,

Like light-colored text that vanishes

In a lemon-tinted PowerPoint slide.

Pastels won’t do,

But on a canvas of black,

Brown, dark violet, or navy,

Pale, pinkish words

Can be seen without strain.

Solid tones only, please:

Wide swathes of skin-contrasting color

Unbroken by stripes,

Patterns, logos,

Or overly-showy buttons.

This plaid, for example, is far too busy –

I’d rather resemble a blackboard

Than a magic-eye puzzle.

Of course,

Color’s not my only concern;

A laundry list of further limitations

Will crop up when I finally hit

The fitting room.

Take care

That the neckline doesn’t bleed

Too far down the page –

Flesh against flesh

Is murder to read.

Not too tight across the chest –

Sentences written on the air

Require a full range of motion,

And kamikaze flying buttons

Pose a safety hazard.

Careful that the sleeves

Don’t hang too low or loose –

Acrobatically-spelling fingers

Are liable to get tangled up

In an ostentatious cuff.

See that the waist reaches down far enough –

Certain words call for

A somewhat higher elevation,

And I’d prefer not to bare my midriff

Whenever such subjects come up.

I guess what I’m really looking for

Is an ensemble that combines

The pizzazz of a ninja

With the flair of a monk

And the chicness of a makeup-free mime.

Could you kindly point me

Toward that department?

…Ah; I thought not.

No, it’s quite all right – I’ll soldier on by myself.

I’m used to forging my own wardrobe.

So I’ll sift through your spring-color collection,

Panning for the glimpses of charcoal or chocolate

Or, if I’m being especially adventurous,

Deep burgundy, that make the stage

On which my fingers dance

With semantic gymnastics,

And listening eyes can catch

The turn of every word.

Relationship Spotlight: Ichabod Crane & Lt. Abbie Mills (Sleepy Hollow)

Back when I started writing about Sleepy Hollow, I’d just caught up with the show’s first season, and I was in love with it, its lead characters, and the bond between them.  After that, season two happened, and I started cooling on the series.  I still liked Abbie and Crane, and at its core, I still liked what their relationship was about, but I feel the show lost its way somewhat when they tampered with the Crane-Abbie connection.  It’s not a dramatic shift but a subtle erosion, taking them further and further apart as another character monopolizes more of Crane’s time/interest and a wedge is slowly driven between him and Abbie.  However, monkeying even slightly with the show’s strongest quality was ill-advised, and I wasn’t a fan of the change or the reduced focus on Abbie.

Fast-forward to this week’s season finale, and I’ll cop to some internal Snoopy dances, because Crane and Abbie are definitely back.  They’re screen partners for the majority of the episode, and the show returns its attention to one of the finest demon-fighting duos ever.  Care is taken to address the damage and make amends for it, and in light of my high hopes for a restored dynamic in season three (if there is one!,) I’m finally doing a post on Team Witness.

In many ways, Abbie and Crane are cut from the same cloth a few hundred years apart.  Both are of course brave and dedicated, both are clever and observant, and both can kick some serious demon butt.  Upon learning of their role as witnesses, both go on separate journeys from skeptic to believer, stunned but ultimately pragmatic.  Additionally, both have a penchant for putting themselves in danger (I know they’ve signed up to do battle against the harbingers of the apocalypse, but even so.)  For both of them, their streaks incline towards recklessness, stubbornness, and adrenaline-junkiness.

However, Crane and Abbie are also quite different people – and I mean beyond the obvious, like the fact that she’s not afraid of the Internet and he’s a former pal of George Washington.  Though both wear a number of hats in carrying out their mission, they often come at it from different angles.  Abbie is a true-blue cop, probing a scene for clues and picking out the telling details.  She approaches things more practically and, on an unrelated note, doesn’t take herself nearly as seriously as Crane.  She takes her work seriously, of course, but she’s a lot more likely to own up to her flaws and make a joke at her expense.  Meanwhile, although Crane has loosened up a fair amount under Abbie’s influence, he’s still awfully buttoned-up and doesn’t always appreciate Abbie’s affectionate ribbing.  When it comes to the mission, he tends to use the combined tactics of research and memory.  He loves old books, old maps, old artifacts, and old recollections from his 18^th-century days.  This is understandable, given his history, but he’s not inexorably tied to the past; he’ll even brave Google for the sake of the cause.  Between our two heroes, these separate strengths are vital.  They make one another better, each complementing the other’s aptitudes and backing up the other whenever they need it.

Finally, at their best, these two will do anything for each other.  That penchant for putting themselves in danger gets cranked up to a near-biological imperative when one of them is in peril.  Though they disagree about things and sometimes opt for different battle plans, their general state is trust each other when it really counts, and they know each other well enough that they can pretty much instantly sense when something’s amiss.  Abbie-Crane for the win!

Insurgent (2012)

The second book in the Divergent series improves on its predecessor in some places and stumbles in others.  Overall, it’s a strong follow-up; it builds on the setup from Divergent and prepares us for the big finale of Allegiant.  As I was reading, I came across plenty of scenes that made me pretty excited for the upcoming movie.  (Spoilers for both Divergent and Insurgent are unavoidable.)

After the events of the first book, both of Tris’s lives – the simple one she lived with her family in Abnegation and the thrilling new one she forged for herself in Dauntless – are gone.  The surviving Abnegation members hide out as refugees, and Dauntless members who haven’t joined forces with the despotic Erudite are on the run.  Tris’s world has been teetering on the brink of revolution, and it’s finally hit.  Her life is now a war:  for survival, for retribution, for truth, and for liberation.  This war takes her all over the city, into and out of different factions as she searches for allies and answers.

The biggest plus of Insurgent is the expanded view we get of the world of the series.  We follow Tris into all the different faction communities and learn a lot more about how each one functions.  We see the various factions’ values, customs, and dangers, and it’s really interesting to explore the peculiarities that crop up when an entire subsection of society devotes itself to a single virtue.  Additionally, more is revealed about Divergence, the world at large, and the secrets at the center of everything.

I also really like the way Tris’s experiences in Divergent continue to resonate throughout Insurgent.  They influence her choices and the way she looks at people, and she reconciles everything she thought she knew with what she’s learned.  Although she’s undoubtedly brave and determined, she’s been traumatized as well, and she can’t just brush that off.  Her damage paralyzes her at critical moments and keeps her up at night turning over what she should have done differently.  The book does a nice job showing how, despite powering through and forcing herself to keep fighting, the things she’s had to do are massive, and they have a major effect on her.

Plot-wise, I feel like Insurgent isn’t quite as tight as book one.  It feels a little more aimless, spinning its wheels from time to time.  A good chunk of that is intentional, since Tris and many of the other characters are at a loss and trying to regain their bearings – I mean, come on, their entire society is going up in smoke.  However, it still results in some uneventful time-killing that’s a bit tedious to get through.  Plus, it might just be me, but the way certain characters handle the big secrets in the series are flat-out insufferable.  It’s that infuriating situation where a character says, “I have so much important information that people are willing to kill for and nothing is more important than getting this information out and your life will never be the same after learning this information!!!  But I can’t tell you the information.”  Talk about a prick-tease; I didn’t know how long I could take that.

I will say that we (finally!) get to the big reveal by the end of the book, and while it still seems unfair to keep us on the hook for so long, it doesn’t come off as anticlimactic.  My foremost thought when I finished reading was, “Allegiant is gonna be insane!”

Agent Carter (2015-Present)

Oh, I needed this show.  From the moment I heard of its impending existence, I needed it to be amazing.  While Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has smoothed out some of the bumps from its rocky first season, it’s still not everything an Avengersverse TV series could be, and Captain America’s sterling Peggy Carter deserves nothing but the best.  Well, the season just wrapped up, and I couldn’t be happier with the show – I’m only disappointed that it’s over so soon, and I’m desperately hoping ABC/Marvel give us more Agent Carter next year.

Set in 1946, several years after the events of the first Captain America film, the show finds Peggy still working for the Strategic Scientific Reserve (the SSR, a precursor to SHIELD that oversaw the super-soldier project that gave us Cap.)  The days of working alongside Cap and the Howling Commandos on highly-classified, larger-than-life missions are long over, however – the war is over, the world is moving on, and women are expected to quietly bow out of the workforce (it’s like The Bletchley Circle, but with comic-book technology.)  Though Peggy is an agent, she’s treated instead like a secretary who’s there to file reports and fetch coffee for the male agents doing the real work.  Her coworkers, whose only knowledge of her war history is that she was Captain America’s girlfriend, disregard her ideas, mock her abilities, and scrutinize her body.

It’s in this crucible of frustration and indignity that Howard Stark, one of Peggy’s old-days friends, becomes the target of an SSR investigation after a number of his deadliest inventions show up on the foreign markets.  Unable to convince the agency that Howard isn’t the culprit, she sets out on her own mission to learn the truth, recover the weapons, and exonerate her friend.  She’s helped by Edwin Jarvis, Howard’s butler on loan, who is entirely new to the spy game but eager to do his part.  It’s been too long since Peggy worked with someone who recognizes her competence, and while trust is slow to develop, Jarvis soon becomes an invaluable ally.  Also, Russian assassins and comic-book explosions and female boarding houses, oh my!

It’s a terrific series through and through.  The period setting feels sleek and stylish, and the story highlights the sexism and inequality of the era in a way that feels genuine, never preachy.  With one main arc for its eight-episode season, the narrative builds and crescendos almost like a movie.  There are one-off side plots (chasing down specific Stark Industries McGuffins, a splendid appearance by another Captain America familiar face, etc.,) but each episode also makes progress on the central arc and ramps up the tension.  Can Peggy stop the bad guys?  Where will she the proof she needs?  Will the SSR discover she’s working at cross purposes with them?  It’s been such a treat to watch that the hardest part of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s winter hiatus is that it’s coming back next week because this one is done.

As Peggy, Hayley Atwell is predictably sublime – tough, sincere, clever, and badass (she staples a guy in the face!)  Even when the show’s plot has comic proportions, she’s an eternally humanizing presence.  Dominic Cooper makes recurring return appearances as Howard, and James D’Arcy is both amusing and affecting as Jarvis.  Additionally, we get the incredible Enver Gjokaj (Victor from Dollhouse) as a fellow SSR agent – the only coworker who seems to value Peggy’s work – and a very funny Lyndsy Fonseca (Alex from Nikita) as a non-work chum of Peggy’s.

2015 Oscar Awards

I had a tricky time of it this season.  I saw six of the eight best picture nominees, plus Into the Woods, Foxcatcher, and Gone Girl, but in my top ten categories, six awards went to films I haven’t seen yet.  As such, it’s hard to say too much about a number of the big wins.  Still, I can scrounge up a few cents to put in.

It’s interesting that each best picture nominee got at least one award.  In the recent supersized-category years, that hasn’t always been the case – there are usually a few that get the courtesy nods, acknowledgment as great films but no prizes to take home.  Not the case this year.  Sure, not all those awards were heavy hitters (American Sniper’s one trophy was for sound editing,) but there was a good deal of love spread around.  Even Selma, with only two nods, took home the non-best-picture award it was up for: best original song (well-deserved, in my opinion, and I appreciated the umbrage host Neil Patrick Harris took at its relative lack of accolades.)

It makes sense that The Grand Budapest Hotel swept the design categories, snagging best production design, costumes, and makeup, and best score to boot.  It looks and sounds amazing in a fastidiously-whimsical way, really creating its own world.  If I were giving out kudos, those are probably the awards I’d pick for it.  Meanwhile, I had qualms about The Imitation Game’s sole win for best adapted screenplay.  As I said in my review, the structure is disjointed, not entirely cohesive.  What’s more, this is an adapted screenplay based on a biography, and I don’t feel it did a good job adapting the story it sought to tell (I’m still reading the book, so I haven’t gotten into the dramatic licenses yet, but they’re legion.)  When Graham Moore waxed lyrically about Alan Turing in his acceptance speech, I couldn’t help but think that, if he wanted to honor the man, he could’ve written a movie that felt truer to Turing’s life and character.

I only caught half of the winning performances, since I’ve yet to see J.K. Simmons in Whiplash for supporting actor, and while I’d heard that Julianne Moore was the lead actress to beat, I didn’t prioritize Still Alice.  Patricia Arquette’s supporting actress win, the only award for Boyhood, surprised me.  I don’t know – it’s not to do with her performance, I just didn’t think there was enough to the role.  Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, however, was basically a lock for lead actor.  How very Hollywood that both the winning lead performances were for characters with degenerative diseases/disabilities, ALS for Redmayne and Alzheimer’s for Moore.  I don’t deny that Redmayne did some magnificent acting (as, I assume, did Moore,) but as I’ve said, it still rubs me the wrong way that able-bodied actors are so often lauded for playing disabled characters, especially when disabled actors rarely get to play these roles.

That leaves Birdman to scoop up four of my top ten categories:  best picture, direction, original screenplay, and cinematography.  I’ll admit, I didn’t follow much pre-Oscar buzz, but I was pleased to see it take home so many awards.  Though I still haven’t seen it, it strikes me as a creative-little-oddity nomination, this year’s Her, Juno, or Little Miss Sunshine.  Such movies usually pick up best original screenplay, and maybe an acting or technical/design award, but get passed over on the big-ticket items; as such, I loved seeing Birdman win big.  Also, while I’ve only seen one of the nominees for best cinematography, I gladly cheered when Emmanuel Lubezki won for this film.  I love his work so much, and I’m thrilled that his long-overdue and much-deserved recognition for last year’s Gravity wasn’t just a one-shot deal.

Next Five Independent Shorts: Buster Keaton

I’ve reviewed my top five classic Buster Keaton shorts, but there are too many to only highlight five.  I don’t know what has more laughs per minute than Buster’s silent shorts, so we’re looking at more today.  They’re not necessarily my next five favorites, but they’re another five I love.

The Haunted House (1921)

A counterfeiting ring disguises their hideout as a haunted house, and it’s up to Buster, a young bank clerk, to figure out their tricks, bring the crooks to justice, and – of course – save the girl.  It’s noteworthy for some great disappearing-stair gags (Buster sure knew how to get his comic money’s worth out of a set piece) and a wonderful sequence in which Buster, working at the teller window, accidentally gets glue on his hands and everything else and is generally hilarious.

The ‘High Sign’ (1921)

Buster gets a job at a shooting gallery and inadvertently joins the notorious Blinking Buzzards.  He’s sent to kill a rich man who, coincidentally, has just hired Buster as his bodyguard.  A house plays a big role here, too – the tycoon Buster protects has rigged his home with trap doors and hidden escapes, which Buster puts to excellent use during the chases.  The real highlight, though, is Buster’s clever way of posing as a crack shot:  imaginative, industrious, and very funny.

The Paleface (1922)

Buster is a hapless lepidopterist who befriends a Native American community.  After a disastrous beginning, he helps them outsmart the white developers trying to take their land.  It gets a little White Savior in places and the use of redface is unfortunate, but it’s ultimately a well-meaning little yarn.  The gags come fast and furious; Buster makes an asbestos suit, conducts a war dance, and “scalps” a man’s toupee.  Also, he literally falls 85 feet – amazing.

The Electric House (1922)

Rounding off the “crazy house” collection, Buster is mistaken for an electrician (I know; if I had a nickel for every time that happened to me) and hired to electrify a family home.  This being Buster, we’re not talking light switches.  No, we get escalators, assembly-line dishwashers, a pool table that sets games by itself, and a bathtub that meets you at your bed.  Things go haywire when the real electrician sabotages Buster’s work, and the creative machine gags are superb. 

The Frozen North (1922)

Since this one parodies a silent melodrama star I’ve never heard of, it took a few viewings to see how funny it is.  Buster is pretty out-of-character here, satirizing William S. Hart’s morally-shifty antihero.  It’s still Buster, though, so we get an inventive bent on the tropes – most memorably, he shoots his wife and her lover in a fit of righteous indignation, only to discover he’s in the wrong house.  He also has fun with the frozen North locale, giving us a nattily-decorated igloo, great ice-fishing gags, and acoustic guitar snowshoes.  Some terrific stuff here.