The Only Thing To Carry Openly In Starbucks Should Be Coffee

A text message from a friend of mine today at lunch: "Here's awesome: campus just got off lock down cause there's an armed somebody. Now just one dorm is in lockdown." Yeah, that's always good for the mood, someone walking around a college campus with a firearm, who clearly should not have had access to said firearm.

I don't care what tragedies the gunman may have borne, if it was in fact anything more than a false alarm from someone talking big. Campuses must take these incidents seriously, because bringing a gun to school, regardless of your motivations or rationalizations, is a virus of evil actions. Classic example of that Christian theme "Love the sinner, hate the sin."

Guns in society = bad. So then, why do certain people always think that more guns > fewer guns and = better for society?

It seems to me that if you want to reduce gun violence, you reduce the access to guns. Also, it just seems tacky for people to wander about suburban America packing guns. How serious can you get about your double tall quintuple lattes with an extra shot of caffeine? Are you worried someone is going to beat you to the last bearclaw or blueberry muffin?

Other than hunting, or locked up in a cabinet at home for self-defense, which are two reasons which I will accept, the former less grudgingly than the latter, I can't accept the necessity of guns in our every day life. I don't accept the rationale that we should accept these open carry proponents swaggering around with big guns on their hips. This isn't the Wild West.

They talk about the Second Amendment and a well-regulated militia and the right to bear arms. Fine. I've encountered so-called citizen militias in the Bitterroot Valley. They were bullies, who tried to intimidate the lawfully elected representatives of local government. You want to be in a well-regulated militia? Join the National Guard or the Army Reserves.

Carrying around guns as a political statement is way more aggressive than this country needs. There is a quote that caught my attention from one of the open-carry advocates: "There's this assumption that everyone in open carry is a crazy redneck in a pickup. But look at me - I drive a Prius, and I'm gay."

Faulty reasoning: there is nothing inherent to driving a Prius and being gay that means you can't be a crazy redneck. This is the land of equal opportunity, after all. The only thing in his argument that works is that he can't be in a pickup if he drives a Prius.

When you look at the tragedies of school shootings, you have to realize there is too much at stake to not support further restrictions on guns, stronger gun-control laws. Every gun that can be restricted is one less gun that could be accessed by someone with emotional issues.

Scenes From An Urban Street: Redemption For $1

1) The sky is that odd mix of sun and rain, where you think you should be able to see a rainbow somewhere, but it must be blocked by the towering blocks of concrete and glass. The sidewalks are damp, the tiles of Powell Street seeming to float. The line for the cable cars is empty this evening.

2) A bundle of human desolation sits on the sidewalk, asks, "Does anyone have any change?" He says it into the teeth of a flood of conversation, cell phones, car engines, and it is lost.

You cannot expect to move the homeless and the panhandlers away from the tourist areas. When you live upon the charity/pity/guilt of others, you go where there are people. Basic survival law: if you need to acquire resources, you go where the resources are.

They are loafing along the sidewalks, long rail-thin pieces of humanity. I don't often give, because I don't want to. The signs that say "Why lie? It's for beer" are no longer funny, nor are they original. It is a low-percentage game for them, sifting through the crowds of people who are tired and want to go home, trying to latch onto those who have the emotional energy to make contact and give them money. But it is the only game they seem to have going.

Unless, of course, they are lying, and the money they get they put into a mutual fund. That would be disappointing.

You think I'm joking, and I probably am, but not entirely. I have heard reports of wealthy Marin County teens who drive into the city to play at panhandling on Haight Street.

I'll buy Street Sheet now and then. When I can, and when I want to. I'm more apt to give to musicians.

3) Speaking of, there is a cellist at the 24th Street Bart Station, exploiting the musical properties of tunnels. His music crests and drops like a wave at low tide, mellow and slow, a pleasant transition on the escalator up into the Mission Street twilight. I give him money, because it feels pleasant to listen to his music.

I wonder if the panhandlers get annoyed when there are musicians around. Maybe the panhandlers should unionize to protect their territory.

I give the cellist a dollar, which makes me feel all better for not having given a dollar to the people selling Street Sheet at Powell Street.

Vision of The Future

I bought new glasses last week and picked them up on Saturday. I had to take advantage of my vision benefits, because the new coverage year begins in June, and who knows if the benefits will be as strong? Also, Marina no longer was buying my claim that my old glasses were designed to protect my eyes from the sun with a protective layer of dirt and scratches.

We picked out a nice and dignified pair of glasses with a plastic frame at Through The Hayes optometry, and I like them. They make me feel like a cross between Clark Kent and Ira Glass, only shorter and with more disreputable hair.

Walking out of the store, trying on the new glasses for the first time, was literally a trippy experience. All of a sudden, I felt much taller, not in an improved-self-esteem way, but more in the sense that the ground looked much further away, and I kept misjudging the curb, stumbling slightly in crossing the street. Still, I've adjusted now, and I like it. Now I have new hats, new glasses, and I've figured out how to use an electric razor without inflicting catastrophe upon myself.

I've also started thinking again, which is nice. I attribute this to reading Jonathan Lethem's new novel, Chronic City. The main character reminds me a bit of Will in Nick Hornby's About A Boy, but the main thing is that it is absorbing me and making me think about the structure of writing a story.

So for a variety of factors, I've started thinking about making a plan. It is a multi-faceted plan with an objective as yet unclear, but I thought I would share it:

1) WRITING

a) Within the next six months, I will take a class on technical writing or copy-editing.
b) I will write two short stories within the next two months.
c) I will continue to maintain topic-focused blogs at least every other day.
d) I will research careers in editing and publishing.

2) TRAVEL

a) I will set up a separate savings account for travel, into which I will put 1/2 of all my deposits to savings accounts.
b) I will travel to Mexico this year.
c) I will travel to Toronto this year.
d) I will travel to New York City in the next three years.
e) I will go back to Europe in the next five years.

So that's about the extent of my plan for now. Looking at it in retrospect, I'm not sure if it is plausible, but what is life without something to aim for, right?

The Elephant In The Room

We all drank gin and tonics in a jazz club on Ellis, listening to the piano player, talking about Jack Kerouac, the brilliance of On The Road, which I haven't finished, and The Dharma Bums, which I have, ignoring the elephant in the room.

I was thinking today about how we can be so convinced that we are right about something that we can't even conceive of how someone might think differently. Ironically, I boarded this train of thought from a platform of indignation over the memory of how a former friend treated me in what I regarded as an unfair manner. Naturally, it kind of boomeranged around to hit me in the face (here I've switched from a train metaphor to a boomerang metaphor, because a boomerang would be much less painful on the face than a train, or so I would assume).

It was a random memory that caught me off guard. A couple years ago, I ate dinner at John's Grill on Ellis Street, famous for the Maltese Falcon/Dashiell Hammett connection, with a friend of mine, her friend Charlie, and his boyfriend. During the dinner, the boyfriend was talking about his hunting trips to Africa, where he shot at elephants. This made for an uncomfortable conversation, as you might imagine; hence the gin and tonics at the jazz club afterwards.

I admit it. I was thinking to myself, "Hey, you're gay! How can you possibly think it is okay to shoot elephants?"

Well, naturally. If you're gay, I support your rights. I'm on your team. That means you should be on my team. And how could you be on my team if you think it is okay to shoot elephants? Come on, people, don't be crazy.

The human mind is a funny thing. Scary, too, but funny when you look at it objectively. That's where comedy is, maybe, the blind spots in our psychology, the disconnect between our perception and reality.

But I see where I went wrong in my thinking. Gays are totally equal to the rest of us. They are just as capable of shooting elephants as anyone. I'm so sorry for doubting that.

The lesson here is never assume that anyone, not even yourself, is incapable of being a stupid jerk.

New Blog!

In an ongoing effort to practice focused writing, I've set up a third blog about cooking and eating in San Francisco without knowing anything about food.

It's called, appropriately enough, Writing About Food, Knowing Nothing About It, and can be found at www.amateurfoodlover.blogspot.com.

Reading Between The Lines Of Movie Adaptations

We headed west last Friday night, out to the far reaches of Balboa, to the Balboa Theater to watch the Swedish film based on Stieg Larsson's novel The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. You would think that being that close to the Pacific, and planning on watching a movie like this, the weather would have given us fog, a brooding noir atmosphere, even though I didn't have my fedora with me. But instead, the weather was clear and cool, so we had to watch the movie without a background atmosphere.

The novel was strong, filled with a vague sense of menace without giving too much away, and cultivating a strong sense of place--it was also a page-turner in that Marina made me put aside my other books and magazines in order to read this quickly, because she was impatient to see the movie (I finished the book earlier on Friday, which was the day the movie opened at the Balboa).

The movie kept me on the edge of my seat, partly due to the fact that the Balboa, while charmingly independent, does not exactly have the most comfortable seats, but also because the movie certainly captured the dark mood of the book.

I'm not going to spoil anything about Dragon but I have to say, I enjoyed watching The Ghost Writer more. In part, this is because they are both mysteries/thrillers, and I already knew the course of events in Dragon. That tends to drain some of the fun out of a thriller when you know what thrills are about to happen.

Dragon had a lot going for it. It caught the tone of the novel quite well. But I struggled the whole time with comparing the movie version of the story with the original novel.

This is always a problem. I think it is commonly accepted as a mathematical constant that the novel will always be better than the movie adaptation (conversely, the novelization of a movie always comes off as lame and cheap, but that's not the purpose of this blog). The exception is High Fidelity, where the movie is strong in its own right.

Here's the difference. High Fidelity has a storyline that is fairly simple and mostly character-driven. Therefore, it can be translated into a movie without sacrificing too much.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, like, for example, The Da Vinci Code, is primarily plot-driven, a puzzle, with twists and turns and subplots. Unlike Dan Brown, however, Stieg Larsson can actually create some depth in his characters so that they are more than just ciphers or a plot device; nevertheless, in trying to capture even 65% of the plot from the novel, the movie has to let a lot of character development fall by the wayside. Blomkvist, the main character, who is fairly interesting in the book, is a bland figure in the movie, swept aside behind the plot.

The other problem in making a movie from a novel like this is choosing which sub-plots to include, which to conflate, and which to drop all together. If you don't choose the right threads, to someone who has read the book there will be glaring omissions or things that seem unreal, at least. And sometimes, it is possible to refer to something in the novel and then not connect it to the rest of the movie, so it is left hanging.

Obviously to include everything from the novel would make for a stupefyingly long film. But I have a hard time separating the novel from the movie, and I'm not sure if that is fair to the hard work done in producing the movie. However, it really is impossible to not bring the novel to the movie, as it were, once you've read the novel. Unless you are lucky enough to have short-term memory loss, of course.

What do you think? What are the most successful adaptations of novels into movies? What made them successful? Should and can a novel and the film be considered entirely separately?