The Last Candle

Well, let’s see what’s big and historical on May 31st since the dawn of history (or interesting history, at least).

• In 1279 BC, Rameses II The Great is deemed pharaoh of Egypt.
• Japanese shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu died in 1408 after a long life of 50 years.
• Famed Austrian composer Joseph Haydn also passed on this day, 199 years ago.
• Walt Whitman, American poet and greater lover of insects, was born in 1819.
• One of the most bloody battles of the American Civil War broke in central Virginia as the Battle of Cold Harbor during 1864.
• The R.M.S Titantic was launched in 1911. (Note: the actual maiden voyage — the one that didn’t end so well — didn’t occur until April 1912.)
• Two years after the launch and undersea voyage of the Titanic, the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution was declared in effect.
• 1927: The last Model T is produced and rolls off Ford’s assembly line. Beep beep!
• The trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed in 1977.
• German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder celebrated his 1945 birthday until his death in 1982.
• R.I.P Spuds Mackenzie, a fine dog-shaped advertisement who died on this day in 1993.
• Clint Eastwood celebrates his birthday today since 1930, as does Joe Namath since 1943.
• Corey Hart, Brooke Shields, Peter Yarrow (from Peter, Paul and Mary), Run-DMC and Colin Farrell also call today their birthday, as did Wesley Willis until his 2003 death.
• Christian McBride, the great jazz bassist, also celebrates a birthday on this day.
• In 1982, McCartney and Wonder’s Ebony and Ivory was the top hit in the United States. I prefer Australia’s number-one single: Joan Jett and the Blackheart’s I Love Rock and Roll.
• The Visitation is observed today, as is World No Tobacco Day.

Coincidentally (wink, wink), I was born on this day in 1982. I think May 31st is just plain fabulous.

Being a person who spends his time sweating at the office while my co-workers complain about at the chill while pulling on multiple sweaters, Michigan summers in all of their thick humidity and miserable heat are firmly and easily last as my favorite time of the year. Similarly, winter used to be favorable, but busy season, missed holidays and the unrelenting snow of the past couple of years have reduced my appreciation for winter from bronze to tied with summer for fourth place. (I am accepting applications for any and all seasons who deem themselves eligible for the now-vacant third-place rank.)

But then again, only summer brings the Michigan Theater’s Summer Classic Film Series, three months of great movies at a great (and air-conditioned) theater. The first film I caught as part of the Classic series was coincidentally the Kurosawa-great Yojimbo; that was two years ago, and out of the twenty-five or so films shown during that and subsequent summers I’ve only missed a few showings.

Last year’s series was particularly memorable: the kick-off showing was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which has become a personal favorite; other greats included The Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup, which is the funniest movie ever made, Sidney Poitier’s A Raisin in the Sun, Astair’s dashing Top Hat, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, The Thin Man, The Little Fugitive in all of its gorgeous indy glory and a nearly-religious presentation of Harold Lloyd’s silent Safety Last! that was backed by a live organist who could’ve beaten any full-fledged John Williams soundtrack.

Now that this summer’s schedule has been revealed, let me take a look to find how the Michigan Theater will save summer once again.

Huzzah! It’s the List

• The Black Pirate, starring Douglas Fairbanks, a silent with live organ!
• Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean
• High Noon, starring the Coop
• Roman Holiday, starring Greg Peck and Audrey Hepburn
• The Muppets Take Manhattan, starring a bunch of awesome puppets
• Jailhouse Rock, starring a pair of sideburns and a couple tunes
• Fritz Lang’s M
• After the Thin Man
• Five Easy Pieces
• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, starring international Once a Thief star Chow Yun-Fat
• Hitchcock’s Dial M For Murder (in 3-D!)
• Easy Rider
• Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, with Steve Martin
• Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin, the classic of classics, and again with live organ!
• Casablanca, which needs no additional detail for all the right reasons

Last year’s schedule (which is, oddly, still on the Michigan Theater’s site) was great, but this year’s lineup is absolutely fantastic.

Starting off the season, we get another undoubtably-fantastic silent with live organ, this time starring renown swashbuckler Douglas Fairbanks. Subsequent weeks follow-up with a cavalcade of great actors: Dean, Cooper, Peck and A. Hepburn. One-third of the way through the season the Muppets appear to break up any tension; Elvis Presley jams and struts about after that, succeeded by Fritz Lang’s (auteur of Metropolis, another personal favorite) magnum opus M.

The line-up for the second half of the series is no less exciting. After all, what’s not to love and adore about having Powell and Loy on-screen again in the sequel to The Thin Man, Jack Nicholson, a gimmicked Hitchcock presented in Warnercolor 3D, and a Steve Martin show that’s wearing a dark suit and a clown wig?

And then there’s Sergei Eisenstein’s incredibly inspired, deft and influential movie about the uprising on a Russian battleship, which also includes live organ. This Eisenstein presentation alone piles on the greatness so heavily that I might pass out in the box office line, swooning over the prospect of the impending magnificent show. Finishing off the series is Casablanca, and then I’ll get to see one of my favorite actors — Bogart, of course — and one of the great classics out of ‘em all.

Personally, I would exchange Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and all of its fantasy pretension for a Kurosawa — all too obviously, my pick would have to be Kurosawa — but several years have passed since I caught Crouching Tiger in theater, and it is a pretty gorgeous piece of film in several ways. I’ll be there, crouching and hiding and all that, and I’ll probably come out of the theater liking it a lot more than I do now.

This summer’s series of classics is truly no filler, all killer, as the kids like to say. I’ve only seen three films out of the bunch, so this series will be a particularly strong and memorable parade. Thanks to the Michigan Theater, summer’s not only tolerable but the best season of ‘em all.

After four unsuccessful attempts over the past two years at starting up a character in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the most detailed and ambient single-player computer RPG in recent years (since Morrowind, Oblivion’s predecessor), I thought fortune was smiling on me: I thought I had escaped the grasp of this game and its immersive, engaging, and (above all) time-consuming reputation. In both Morrowind and Daggerfall, the latter being Oblivion’s great-grandfather, a couple hundred hours were spent within the game-realm of Tamriel, the world of The Elder Scrolls.

A couple hundred hours?! Yeesh! These days, I don’t have time for games that span tens of hours, let alone the hundred that could easily be adventured out of Oblivion. I mean, I play guitar. I code. I take a lot of photos. I plot out crappy vector drawings. I catch up on the past four months of Scientific American. I bake bread and make yogurt. I keep the city kids off the streets. I sleep a couple hours. I walk a few miles. I have stuff to do.

Oh, but not after this weekend — the weekend that Oblivion finally caught me. Drat!

I suspect that the previous character of formula of the bristled, Nordic warrior-barbarian was the only thing that kept this latest squeeze at bay. The barbarian was my default choice for the previous games and my character for the first several attempts at Oblivion because, hey, the way of a warrior was an easy choice.

Warrior-types kill a lot of creatures and people, loot the bodies, and make a lot of cash selling the booty of the dead. Warriors can dash into vampire covens and dank grottos and all kinds of havens of the unsavory, confident of success due to an arsenal of bulging thews, vitality that could outlast Methusalah twice over, and a double-bladed axe that could slice through a sequoia trunk like it was made of salmon mousse. Life for warriors is straight-forward, bloody, and profitable.

And warriors have it boring too, I decided. There have been many warrior characters among the multiple play-throughs of Daggerfall (where the class and character distinctions were hardly noticeable), Morrowind, and early Oblivion games, and I’m guessing that the constant single-character narrative had run too thin. Smashy-smashy is good fun and all, but even the most sociopathic barbarian comes home after a long day of vigorous, wanton slaughter and serves himself a raspberry popover.

This weekend, having completed Far Cry and needing another PC game, I decided to give Oblivion one last go, but not as a brutish man-killer from the North. Far from it: this time, I’m playing a female High-Elf thief. How’s that for a career change?

Previous run-throughs of the opening (and typical) sewers dungeon have always ended up the same way: a long trail of dead bodies, and my character gaining enough experience and sellable loot to raise a couple levels and afford himself a full set of lovely fur armor.

As a thief, the sewers progressed very differently: instead of a trail of dead bodies, I was chased out of the ducts and muck-filled cisterns by a trail of very much alive bodies. My character, a master at sweet-talk and sneakery but coming up a little short on the blade and bow side of things, could hardly take up the offensive to a sick rat, let alone square off against goblin mage or the rare crusading skooma-struck madman. Instead of the previous barbarian tactic of hack-slash-repeat, my character dashed won first place in the Imperial Sewers 500 (reward: her bloody life).

(On one occasion, after I was out of the sewers, a female warrior killed my character with a single blow. This immediate death occurred after I’d plunged approximately a dozen arrows into the offender’s body. The bandits in the hills of Oblivion-country are mighty, mighty tough.)

But playing as a thief has turned out to be a completely different experience compared to the kill-and-loot strategy of the warrior’s life, not surprisingly. The free-form, choose-your-own-adventure design of these games has been ignored by me until this current play-though, and now that I’ve exchange axes for arrows, slaughter for speech-craft, and lock-picking instead of looting, my own little plot has been almost entirely different.

For one, my character spends a lot of time running backwards, firing arrows and fireballs at pursuing warriors. After the magic stores run dry and the opponent is bristling with every arrow I once owned, my character, fleeing for her pointy-eared life, dashes off into the scenic hills.

These frequent trips into the wooded areas of Cyrodill are partially fueled by an intrinsic appreciation for the beautiful trees, flowers, and the occasional Nirnroot of the countryside; the other, dominant part of my frenzied wanderlust is fueled by a desire to avoid being cut in half length-wise by a psychotic, blood-thirsty Imperial cave-dweller who’s hungry to add the head of a hot young Elf to his skull collection. Sometimes during these flora-heavy chase sequences I feel like Thoreau, at peace and introspective, but instead of speculating about ants I’m sitting on top of a motorbike, hauling ass and screaming my way through Walden.

It is a lot of fun. And I also hate warriors now.