In which I am not creepy

In what sounds to modern ears vaguely pedophilic, yet was in reality as wholesome as this balanced breakfast, I totally evangelized a 6-year-old boy into liking pinball.

I was playing the new-ish Transformers machine at the local sports-themed family watering hole that is the closest thing to a bar that exists within walking distance of my apartment and the lad was completely transfixed. His brother and sister were climbing all over the Cruisin' USA thing next to us, but he was pulling his head up over the side so he could see the playfield. "It's like it's on fire!" were his exact and awesome words.

For my part, I had just gotten a high score (first person on the machine, in fact), was having a great ball one, and tend to avoid this place precisely because it's always crawling with goddamned offspring. Pinball is serious business, and should be left to grownups. But I felt a duty to the future. If I didn't show this kid how rad pinball is, who knows? He slinks back to Mom's iPad, settles for playing Angry Birds, and ends up being one of those mopes who's always texting people? I couldn't have that shit on my conscience.

Pinball, you see, actually matters. To the extent that it's not doing your homework, raising children or, I don't know, crocheting hats for famine victims, well, sure, it's all quite frivolous. But we're increasingly screen-time zombies, and pinball has the virtue of actually taking place in the real world. You are being challenged to control the movement of an actual, physical thing. It can't be replicated digitally, and its physical presence makes it inherently social. There's no hiding in the corner playing pinball--that fucker's loud. You can't play pinball sitting in your living room and shouting "Fag!" at some anonymous Cheeto-covered basement-dweller you just fragged on XBox Live. You have to put on pants, go out and play it in public.

Now, here's why this kid matters: the pinball industry almost died a few years ago. There is currently one (1) manufacturer of pinball machines left in America--Stern--and they barely survived. They release about three games a year, generally themed to a big summer movie, and thanks to a recent upswing in popularity (good job, Portland!) business is all right. But the industry is kind of perpetually lurching towards destruction, and it's important for its survival that kids not get pulled away by stupid shit on screens. 

About 5 million points into a 12 million ball (for those of you keeping score at home) his kid sister piped up and said "What's that?" I gave the lad a second to see if he knew, and then I said, "It's pinball! And it's way better than video games!"

Part of the reason I don't like kids is because I never know what to say to them. I know they're just thinking about when they might next get candy and aren't particularly concerned with whether or not we have any common ground, but damned if my interactions with them don't usually end up with me saying, "huh," in a resigned manner, unable to feign interest in this fellow who lives in a pineapple under the sea, and staring off in the direction of someone who might remove this bundle of joy from my vicinity.

Turns out, however, that it is in no way necessary to talk to kids while playing pinball. His brother called to him to see if he wanted to use his quarters on Cruisin' USA, but he responded that wanted to play pinball. "Darn right you do," I said, censoring myself in his presence because cursing is for pedarasts. "Want next game?" I asked, but he demurred.

Finally, after an absolutely breathtaking display of skill on my part, ball one drained. Simultaneously patting myself on the back for my generosity and reminding myself to go to a real bar next time, I told the kid it was his turn. I showed him how to use the flippers and told him to pull the plunger. He got it right away. Did a lot of two-handed arbitrary banging for the excitement of seeing the flippers move, but totally concentrated and made some shots. Got a multiball, too, which sort of blew his mind.

Naturally, he thought when the ball drained the game was over, but was damned happy to hear that he had another one, which drained, well, almost immediately. His brother again asked if he wanted to play Cruisin' USA.

"Um..." said the lad, whom I had taken to calling Little Buddy. He was vacillating. "Hey, check this out," I said, leaning in conspiratorially as I put on my jacket and pointed to the Start button. "Whenever you see this button lit up, it means there's money in there. You've got a credit, Little Buddy--play it."

I walked off, finishing my beer as his brother orbited him enviously. Little Buddy hit Start, launched the ball and flippered away.

Post Secret in a Hotel Lobby

When my dad was in town, he stayed at a place downtown called the Ace Hotel. Old place scrubbed up, funky rooms, maps for wallpaper, that kind of thing. In their lobby (I suppose in their mezzanine, really) they have a huge, old, wooden, I dunno, filing-cabinet-bureau thing—it must have 100 little drawers in it. There's a bunch of pencils and pads of paper on the desk in front of it, and each drawer is stuffed with little notes. Some funny, some sad; some, "We had a great time in Portland," some, "I'm here cheating on my wife with my best friend's border collie."

We must have spent an hour looking through all the drawers, passing the notes back and forth for a laugh or a grimace, and just imagining all the different lives that had passed through that hotel. I didn't leave one: I figured as a resident I can go back and leave something if this blog ever stops fulfilling my void-hollering needs. I wonder if he did.

Anyway, I took pictures of some of the more memorable ones that passed through my hands.

It's Fear and Smoking, in: The Twilight Zone

I was thinking back to that famous episode of The Twilight Zone, with Burgess Meredith’s mousy little hen-pecked man whose only pleasure in life is to read during his lunchbreak in the vault of the bank where he works. One day [spoiler alert, although I think this is just Cultural Literacy 101 at this point] a nuclear bomb goes off, leaving only him alive—ensconced as he was in the vault, with his book. He stumbles around for a bit, taken aback but realizing he wasn’t going to miss most of what was gone. But the library! It survived! And he finally has time to read all these books without his shrew of a wife or soulless co-workers berating him for being a bookish little dweeb.

And as he’s sitting down on the stairs of the library to read, as happy as a nerd at the apocalypse, his glasses, without which he can’t see his own dick*, much less read, fall off his face and shatter. He breaks down, a man, alone, without even his books to see him through. Rod Serling walks by, smoking a cigarette while intoning somberly about irony, and you’ve got a damn fine half-hour of classic American television. I love it: it’s a clever story, well-told, that plays beautifully on the issues of its time, and it’s awesome for all the reasons that Twilight Zone episodes often are.

It’s also interesting as a guide to a different mindset, one both more hysterical than our current attitude toward terrorism and more grounded in reality. I’m putting aside nit-picky points like,

a) He’d be dying of radiation sickness by now anyway—forget books, this guy’s going to be keeled over vomiting his balls out within a day anyway.

b) Where did Rod Serling come from anyways, if everyone is dead?

and

c) Is Rod Serling immune to the radiation because he smokes so many cigarettes? Probably.

No, what’s interesting is that for this to actually be tragic, you have to to assume that the whole damn world was destroyed, or at least the whole United States. If just one bomb went off, there would be rescue crews there within days—unless they were busy judging Arabian horses, or whatever FEMA did during the Bush administration, in which case maybe it would be more like a month, but still.

No, for this to register you have to believe that basically everything is gone, and that’s not a mentality that we have anymore. We think our airplanes and malls might blow up, and maybe in 200 years everyone will have to learn to swim, but really, despite the Bush Administration’s best efforts, the net amount of fear in the world, as measured by

        (number of people afraid of some catastrophic thing) x (severity of that thing)

is actually lower than it was for a good chunk of the twentieth century. Fear is as politically useful as ever, of course, but the stakes keep shifting around. So, ether, what’s the next big thing that we’re going to be asked to be afraid of, after they’ve wrung all the juice out of terrorists**? What’s the next thing we should actually be afraid of?

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*I’m pretty sure that’s the example they used
**Which they actually did at Guantanamo.

Chief Barack of the Americans

Hopefomercials

Thesis: The Obama administration* should run half hour infomercials explaining their agenda.

Entertaining, you know. Get someone fun to host (Oprah!) and just lay it out. Explain the reasoning. Make it substantive, but make it fun. We’re asking people to engage in a higher level of discussion with a more mature, more difficult-to-explain set of values, and they mostly hear it thirty seconds at a time and then Bill O’Reilly yells about it. People have an appetite for politics as entertainment, and no one in the world has more star power right now than Barack Obama.

Bush’s people were right: the media is a filter, and it benefits an administration to bypass it as much as possible. But they was wrong, as in so many things, in the approach. (They had the beginning of the idea with their obsessive branding, but ultimately that’s not a great way to communicate.) You don’t get around them by not talking to them, you just want to control as much as possible what the conversation is about. Politics 101, right?

But the assumption has always been that people find policy boring, and have to have it distilled into talking points—I think the problem is that policy has just never been properly presented. No administration has ever tried explaining their IDEAS in long-form television, as opposed to campaigning two years out of every four with thirty-second distillations.

This is frustrating, because I think that most progressive ideas benefit from longer explanations, from firmer rational foundations, from logical drilling-back. To think, rather than bellyfeel. The opposite of what Stephen Colbert knows in his heart. The opposite, moreover, of what O’Reilly and his ilk claim to think in what they claim are their brains.

But people have to be led to it. The short-attenion-span crowd still drives the agenda in this country, and Obama won by having the sizzle to go with his steak. This election showed that the assholes are not invincible (partly because the left has finally had some success co-opting their tactics, Keith Olbermann), but they still have sway. The game was still played on their field—they just lost because they committed the ultimate own-goal of nearly ruining the country.

But! More people watched Obama’s ad than watched the last (albeit truncated) game of the World Series, and the campaign can’t possibly have spent all its money. There’s always been some (understandable) aversion to presenting policy in infomercial form: it feels like it cheapens it somehow, that advertisement is for campaigning rather than for governing. But television is not an inherently vapid medium, it just gets used that way. To govern, you need to drive an agenda, and to do that you need to talk to people wherever they’re paying attention, and that’s still TV. It’s the Internet, too, and there’s a whole vast wonderland of things to do there, but really, it’s TV.

John McCain said it: Obama is the biggest celebrity in the world—and that’s a fine thing. Get Aaron Sorkin on board, have Spielberg direct. Have George Clooney explain the finer points of tax credits for solar panels!

Barack Obama has a unique opportunity to talk to the country on his own terms, and it won’t last long. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em.

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* That’s awfully nice to write

Benito Santiago will fucking cut you, mang

Obama declares self President. I'm basically OK with that

Clever bit of mindcraft by Obama’s ad people at the end of this one. If the last stumbling block for a lot of people is not what he proposes, but who he is, then this is a subtle way of getting at that part of the brain. Two minutes of fairly safe policy proposals, and then, at the end, as he’s approving the message and asking for your vote, the words

Barack Obama
President

appear on the screen. Makes sense: he’s asking for your vote for President. But the effect is to apply that title to him as though he already had the job, after priming you with a bunch of reasonable-sounding things. It’s like they’re saying, “See, that doesn’t look so crazy, now, does it?” It’s not “Barack Obama for President” or “Vote for Barack Obama.” It’s the foregone conclusion: Barack Obama. President.

Has quite a nice ring to it, actually.