Visiting The Visitor

Saturday is Yoga Day, which means that I take Jenifer's Sweet & Slow class and someone takes Hawk for a walk about Phoenixville. Last Saturday, however, no grandparents were present for the Hawk Walk, so I wrapped the wee bairn on my chest for a stroll around town, planned some shots for the documentary (more on that later), and then settled in at Artisans. Here, in ordering my non-decaffeinated tea (Rooibos!), I had the good fortune to strike up a good and lasting conversation with the fellow next to me in line. This elegant African-American man was taken aback, in a good way, by this "Euro male" using an indigenous technology to transport his son.

Within minutes our conversation had expanded to cover our travels, heritage, the borrowing of tribal face paint in a spring fashion collection from a designer on the Iberian Peninsula, and the Mythopoetic Men's Movement. At some point we veered into our respective work, and I mentioned that I was considering attending a talk by actor/writer/director Tom McCarthy at Penn the following week.

It so happens that my friend works at Penn, near the Kelly Writers House where the event would be staged, and we arranged to meet beforehand.

Part of the aforementioned "considering" involved the fact that I typically don't go into Philadelphia more than a few times a year, a training excursion last fall being a rare and notable exception. It's not that I don't like the city (though I confess to grumbling about its dreariness, which Jenifer claims is my invention) but that I don't particularly like driving in/into/out of it.

In any case, on Wednesday afternoon I begin my journey. Soon I am motoring along the Schuylkill Express, a narrow strip of tar betwixt river and rock. It helps to imagine yourself doing a trench run on the Death Star, because that would be more fun and less stressful. If ever there was need for a monorail (or flying cars!), this would be it.

A roadside accident ensures my late arrival, but soon enough I'm past the mess and looking for the South Street exit. A well-placed sign, however, tells me the exit is gone, not there, destroyed by the Empire. It appears the bridge is out.

I phone my friend. He picks up and advises me to take the 30th Street exit. I do this, or do it as much as I can while remaining a dozen stuck cars back from the sign. I continue and, per his advice, check in every so often to update him on my progress.

I ring him again and tell him I've reached 30th Street. "Good," he says, "here's what you're going to do." His next bit of advice staggers me: "Now you will stop the car and ask someone on the street for the directions." What?!

I disregard this advice, not out of macho pride (as I later relate to him), but out of something else, whatever the opposite of macho pride must be. There is nowhere to stop, and cars are behind me, and the pedestrians are scattered and likely to regard my panicked look as indicative of something other than idle bemusement. No, I will not stop the car on 30th Street.

(I should point out that this portion of the trip was improved considerably by its being next to the train station, a monumental monolith so mindblowingly massive it recalls Jim Burns's vision of the Temple of St. Alia-of-the-Knife in Frank Herbert's Eye. I didn't know modern-day earth people made buildings this large.)

The rest of the drive goes without incident, as I orient myself on the grid that is the city's layout (a big shout-out to Ben Franklin here) and arrive safely in the parking garage. Soon I am in my friend's office, where he shares with me a sampling of the inspiring community outreach work he conducts for the university, and then we are off to the event. As we walk across the quad, my friend tells me that someone using the pedestrian portion of the South Street bridge apparently had the misfortune of putting their foot through it, and thence was it deemed in need of repair.

My friend drops me off at the Kelly Writers House, a really cool cottage, and I find a seat way up front, as the room is packed with Penn students. Within minutes Tom McCarthy is introduced by Penn's Kathy DeMarco Van Cleve, writing instructor, novelist, and writing partner of John Leguizamo.

Like most of the industry folks I've met, Tom is humble and witty, and his talk is a fun account of his journey as a writer and director, and how his training as an actor informs his writing. He's probably best-known for writing and directing a pair of critically acclaimed indie hits, The Station Agent and last year's The Visitor, starring Richard Jensen. I do not admit to being behind in my Netflix queue, but I am able to follow along all the same, and especially appreciate the anecdotes about the hilarious notes he's received from development executives.

I ask Tom about his writing process and whether he actually has a discernible method. He describes it as something like this:

You're going along and you think maybe you've missed your exit. But you're not quite sure and so you put on some speed, looking for it, looking for it, and then you finally acknowledge that in fact you did miss your exit and you have to go all the way back to the beginning and start over.

Hmm. Perhaps that is as good a method as any: create a plan, set out when you feel the time is right, anticipate the inevitable roadside construction, and keep on trucking. And don't get out of the car.

On the Move

This entry would have reached you sooner if I hadn't been accosted in Artisan’s Gallery and Café by a passionate Phoenixvillean who, having overheard my conversation on politics with Jenifer and her visiting parents, asked who we were going to vote for in the Presidential election. We made the mistake of eye contact and were soon regaled with a sweeping, epic tale of Saskatchewan agribusiness intrigue. Apparently, when the prospect of mad cow disease loomed large in Canada, the parliament cut federal subsidies to the railroad industry and forced our newfound companion to reroute her beef through Montana and USDA inspection prior to its return to Ottawa, and me to wonder how folks who come up with their best ideas while piloting freighters across the Siberian Sea end up in southeastern Pennsylvania.

You can see why a story like this could hold a person up, and I’m skipping the parts about guerrilla grain trading in Russia and the revolutionary role of beef futures in the rodeo circuit. True, afterwards I did also grab a burrito at Qdoba, see Baby Mama at the multiplex, and pick up a handful of items at the supermarket, including a watermelon I attempted to hold in my lap while driving home until Jenifer pointed out that it had made the journey from Honduras just fine and wouldn’t mind rolling around on the floor of the Prius.

That all these happenings found their way inside an otherwise ordinary five-hour stint on an average Saturday may give you an idea of the fullness of the past month. It may also give you the idea that I’m suffering from schizophrenia, but I assure you that upon learning—on this same Saturday—of the plot of the fanciful and apparently unendurable musical Carousel and quickly deducing that its thematic point of view is best described as “there’s always a carny in heaven looking out for you,” I think my emotional state compares quite favorably, thank you. Besides, this April was no August, to be sure, but then that may be due to a new and welcome prevailing sense of calm. A breakdown, then, of recent mentionables:

1. I ran the Cherry Blossom. On my first day in Marketing, I was asked if I would join the crew on its annual pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. CUT TO: me running the Credit Union Cherry Blossom 5K. This event is really a sideshow to the world-famous Ten Mile Run, but was much better suited to my minimal and lately erratic cardio training. I told myself I would just “have fun” (code for “don’t be so hard on yourself”), but then the old instincts kicked in and I ended up placing seventh with a time of 22:22. The Wraith of my college distance-running days was long gone, but for a Clydesdale I did okay. All things considered, I pretty much rule.

2. We toured historic Philadelphia. This, in itself, is nothing particularly noteworthy, of course. However, in Washington, Jenifer and I made a new friend from corporate who would be in Philadelphia the following weekend in preparation for the company’s annual spring conference. Dan wanted to see the city from the ground. After a day of viewing important artifacts including the Liberty Bell, a statue of Robert Morris (who at the age of twenty-two was wealthy enough to fund the Revolutionary War), and several of Benjamin Franklin’s privies, we made one of our last stops at the historic City Tavern. Here Dan and I imbibed a sampler consisting of the home brews of Messrs. Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, as well as an ale of the era. I finished perhaps only 9/16ths of the assortment before feeling quite liberated. In some respects, I am still very much a lightweight.

3. I successfully discharged my civic duty. The very week of the aforementioned spring conference, I was also scheduled for jury duty selection. I was happy to participate in this aspect of government, and even happier to receive $9 for reading First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently. Good book, that.

4. I delved deeper into the Norse epic. There will come a day when I report the triumphant conclusion of this effort, but for now I am content not to concern myself with such mundane notions as time and progress and to remind myself, as I did in D.C., to have fun. What were once delays are now fruit, and they are free to roll wherever they want.

An Evening With Black Sheep

Last Friday a gang of us ventured into center-city Philadelphia for the opening show of writer-director Jonathan King's Black Sheep. I'd been jonesing to see the movie since we met Jonathan in Wellington two months before; now, it was finally here and we were going to witness the fruits of his labor.

With Tom and Jessica in front, and Jenifer, the Ray Gun Kid, and I huddled in back, we passed through a sunny, jogger-filled Fairmount Park, where I pointed out a surprising monument in Boathouse Row: Einar Jónsson’s elegant statue of Viking explorer Thorfinn Karlsefni.

After parking and pictures by the poster, we walked through Philadelphia's Old City, a livable, historic downtown that was closer in atmosphere to the international capitals I'd visited in the last two years than I thought possible for an American city. We slipped into El Fuego, purveyor of California-style burritos, minutes before closing. I placed our order before experiencing my second non-near-death experience in a year, managing to lock myself in the lavatory. Honestly, I don't know how this happened. (The other fun time involved a kayak in three feet of water.)

My companions are downing their food under the digital thunder and blare of Entourage and I’m screaming futilely for help from within the claustrophobic and very, very orange confines of a chamber of doom the size of a telephone booth. Praying for someone to display the temerity to take a leak before the restaurant closes for the night, I finally jigger the malevolent locking mechanism and stagger back through the dark industrial recesses to our table. I’m momentarily shaken, and wonder if this is the appropriate frame of mind for contending with the horror of a flock of genetically altered zombie sheep.

Afterwards we pause for the sake of digestion and the automated lightshow at Independence Hall before making our way to the theater, the Ritz at the Bourse. This is the kind of place that displays slides of paintings by local artists before the show rather than the typical Sturm und Drang of a Regal Cinema FirstLook infomercial. And then, the film.

Black Sheep is being billed as a horror-comedy. I'm not especially a horror fan, never have been, and until gaining more sense as an adult was not much of a comedy aficionado, either, subjecting my junior-high-school crew to such snappy, light fare as Dune and Firefox. (And no, I still haven't seen—just for example—Caddy Shack or Police Academy—not that I’m equating them, mind you.) So, the category of horror-comedy is not one in which I’m well versed, the only example I’ve seen being Shaun of the Dead.

Black Sheep is a lot of fun. It’s a real crowd-pleaser, funnier than it is horrific, and features solid performances by Nathan Meister as Henry, the jittery co-inheritor of a sheep farm, and Danielle Mason as Experience, an activist turned sheep fighter, as well as cool and creepy special effects by Weta Workshop. And there was something else that was quite unexpected for a genre movie grounded in gore: it’s really charming.

Black Sheep is in limited release, so check for U.S. locations here (it opens in Australia in August and the U.K. in October).