Stuff I Like

Now that I have bored you with my list of current pet peeves, I will bore you with some things that currently please me. Now I’m going to avoid the obvious stuff like The Muse, Mermaid, Enthusio, chocolate ice cream and vacations. So here goes:

(1) Tennis on TV. Every year around this time, I get into Wimbledon. The setting is awesome, like they’re playing tennis in Fenway Park. And the grass court surface lends itself to really great tennis where the players are flying around and, in particular, playing some serve-and-volley tennis where someone is right up at the net hitting pure reaction shots. Even more impressive is when someone is rushing up to the net and the other player whacks the ball right at the on-rushing player’s feet and he or she chips it back on the run (which I believe is called a half-volley). The athleticism involved there is something else, kind of like a point guard throwing a wicked behind-the-back pass on the dead run on a fast break. Moreover, tennis just fits beautifully on a TV screen. You pretty much can see all of the action in one steady shot. There really isn’t any other sport that I can think of that works that well on TV. Basketball is pretty good, but the TV only really covers half the court and you can’t keep your eye on every player all the time. So, anyway pretty much every early July, I get into tennis, watch the Wimbledon finals, then watch some of the U.S. Open in August and September and then forget that tennis exists until the next July.

(2) Pixar movies. The kids and I just went to see Cars the other day, after many requests by Enthusio. We had to go to Maryland (from Delaware). The kids thought that was kind of weird, to go to another state to see a movie. Hey, man, you know what they say: variety is the spice of life. But, anyway, I pretty much consider Pixar’s collection of movies to be one of the great cultural achievements of the last 25 years or so. What you are talking about is the marriage of really fabulous technology – I don’t think that there had been anything like the first Toy Story before it came out and the technology has gotten better and better over the years – with great storytelling. To me, three of the Pixar movies are flat-out great Films: (1) Toy Story; (2) Toy Story 2; and (3) The Incredibles (my personal favorite). Two are, to my mind, Film Minuses: (1) Monsters, Inc.; and (2) Finding Nemo. The last two, Cars and A Bug’s Life, are Movies. Not one stinking Doogal or Shark’s Tale in the bunch. Not one where I walked out thinking, “There’s 90 minutes of my life I won’t get back.” Among other computer-animated movies, only the two Shrek movies are comparable and even that is giving a break to Shrek 2 by letting really excessive pop culture references slide (Princess Fiona’s Matrix fighting in the first Shrek was funny, incorporating Starbucks as a major plot device in Shrek 2 was a bit much). So, Steve Jobs and John Lassetter, I salute you.

(3) Trees. It is very easy to take trees for granted. They’re there. They’re frequently green. In places that I have never lived, they turn colors in the fall (the second most common complaint about California from non-Californians – other than “there’s earthquakes there” – seems to be “the trees don’t turn in the fall” – yes, but you can frequently wear shorts until Thanksgiving). I often hit them with misstruck golf balls. Nonetheless, you can’t do without them, either physiologically or aesthetically. In the Central Valley, they are essential for shade in the summer (the Sacramento area supposedly has the world’s second-largest urban forest after Paris). My sister TFON once sent me one of those e-mail lists that, in this case, was entitled “You Might Have Grown Up In The Central Valley If:” and one of the two items that I remember was: “You believe that shade is the world’s most precious natural resource.” True that. (The other item that I remember on the list was “You always keep a pair of oven mitts in your car in the summer so you can touch the steering wheel.” Double true.) More than that, though, trees really almost make a city themselves. When the Muse and I were moving back to where we now live after an absence of several years, the thing that struck us both was how pretty the streets with overhanging trees are. During the years that we were gone, the dominant image that always arose in my mind about the place was driving down one particular street with overhanging trees. We just stayed in Maryland for a few days and the biggest thing that struck was how trees were everywhere. It was quite pretty. Trees, they’re good.

(4) Henry Winkler. Sitting here working on this post on American Airlines, looking up at the little tiny TV screens on which they play only CBS material, I see that the show that had Henry Winkler on it this last year is on. (They were promising me Letterman and then only showed a Top Ten List. It was a funny one, but that was bad form.) This show had a good cast: Mr Winkler, the lovely Paula Marshall, the amazing Stockard Channing (who still appears to be in her mid-30’s, just like she did in 1978 in Grease) and this pretty good actor whose name I don’t know who used to be the Ducky-type guy on this show “Popular” that The Muse used to watch. Despite the good case, the show apparently stunk, badly, and was cancelled. Nonetheless, seeing it reminded me how much I like Henry Winkler. Now here is a guy who is an icon to people my age – he was The Fonz. The coolest guy, possibly ever. Turned on the jukebox by smacking it just right. Said “ehhhhh” all the time. Immortalized in Pulp Fiction’s climatic scene. (“Do you know Fonzie? Yeah, I know Fonzie. And what was Fonzie? He was cool. That’s right Fonzie was cool, so we’re gonna be just like Fonzie and be cool.”) Now, given Mr. Winkler’s status as an icon, he easily could have slipped into a career of only wanting to be the coolest guy in everything. You know, sort of the way that Michael Douglas apparently views himself as the put-on American male – despite his having grown up the child of a Hollywood star and having been given the money to produce One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at about 13 – and will only play that part now. But, no, the Fonz is willing to play all kinds of things and he does it really well. He was pretty brilliant in Night Shift as the put-on schlub who finds his spine. He was quite brilliant as the totally incompetent, more than a little weird family attorney on Arrested Development. And we saw him as a recurring character on The Practice as a guy with a bug crush fetish that eventually resulted in his son killing someone, but he confessed to doing it and went to prison. So you have to give it up for Henry Winkler. He could have been David Caruso. Thank God he’s not.