The Great Gatsby review

The Great Gatsby has always been one of my favorite books. Top ten in fact. When I heard that they were doing another movie I was skeptical.

But I was wrong to be skeptical. I went to see it yesterday, and I've gotta say, Leo is a fantastic actor. He has really grown up since that hideous Titanic. I loved him in Django and in Gatsby he delivers a superb performance.

The movie does the the book great justice. Carraway is handled well. He fades into the background toward the middle of the movie as he should and sort of like he did in the book. As he states in the beginning, he is merely an observer who tells this tragic story. That was the main thing I was concerned about with this movie, but they handled it great.

I have never seen the old Gatsby. Now I plan on it. I may go rent the video soon. If you are a fan of literature, you must see the new film, though. It's great.

Butterfly: A short nonfiction piece - free to read

I wrote this piece in memory of my uncle. I did a lot of research on his life by interviewing his relatives. The names have not been changed. This is pure, raw literary nonfiction with no spin. Thanks to Undergroundvoices.com for publishing this first. I figured I'd share this. I hope you enjoy, and if you do, feel free to follow me! Oh, and please comment and let me know what you think.

BUTTERFLY

In loving memory of Donald Hammond

            Donald Hammond suffered from an invisible something. Growing up, he lived with his family on a farm outside of Clay Center, a dot on the map in northeastern Kansas with currently just under five thousand people, most of whom have sprouted gray hair. His room was off the kitchen. A double bed. A chest of drawers. Clothes on the floor. A window.

            Hammond pitched summer league baseball in high school. The early sixties. The diamond stretched between the public pool and the park. Packed stands climbed from the dirt as the sun struck the crowd. Chatter. Roaring. Clapping. The announcer buzzed. Balls slapped into gloves. "Steeeerriiike!" blasted the ears of the crowd frequently when Donald Hammond pitched. Scouts observed from the stands. His lifetime goal: to play Major League Baseball.

            Hammond mostly avoided people. He went to prom without a date, as he never dated in high school. When tugged into conversation, he'd struggle for words. He once told his sister's boyfriend, now husband, John that he didn't know what to say when talking to people, so he said nothing.

            After high school, Hammond attended a trade school in Beloit for shop classes. His pitfall was that his mind wandered when he performed tasks. He once crashed a tractor into a light post.  While burning brush on the farm, the flames ripped out of control and consumed the barn. At trade school, a fiber blade sliced through the tendons in his right arm. He couldn't grip a baseball anymore.

            Schizophrenia is a form of psychosis, a lost sense of reality. Schizo is split. Phrenia is mind. Both derive from Greek. Symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia include delusions of persecution and hallucinations of voices, smells, tastes, sexual touching, and visualizations on rare occasions. The cause is unknown, but prenatal illness may increase the chance of contracting schizophrenia. The illness tends to run in families and can be set off by the spurt of puberty or outside stresses.

            On a global scale, one million people commit suicide every year, one person every forty seconds. In his mid twenties, Hammond snapped after an argument with his parents. Screaming about suicide, he stormed out of the farmhouse and into his car. He sped to a pasture off Highway Eighty Two, west of Wakefield, and his parents followed him. His father jumped out of his car and into his son's, while his mother drove home. Hammond muttered more about killing himself to his father, and once back on the highway, he veered into the left lane and floored it toward an oncoming car. His father struggled for the wheel, but he was in his late fifties and recovering from an illness. At the last moment, the oncoming car swerved into the other lane to miss them. Days later, Hammond was institutionalized in Topeka for several months. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

            A fuzzy photograph of Donald Hammond taken in his mid to late thirties displayed a squinting face with a thick black mustache covering the top of an unwavering mouth. Brush and dead trees reached out of the ground behind him. Sturdy legs, hidden by dark blue jeans, rose from his black boots to a light leather belt with an elaborate design and a huge, oval buckle. A solid body filled a blue button up shirt with a collar. He leaned to his left, putting his weight on a rifle as if it were a cane, his hand around the barrel and the butt in the grass.

            Hammond had once been a date with a slender woman with shoulder length brown hair. For several weeks he courted her, buying gifts and taking her on dates. Then, for no reason, he delivered a break up speech, and all was done. Hammond's mother also tried to set him up with a young woman, whom she had over for dinner. He behaved as if she were invisible.

            After Hammond was released from the institution, his father retired from the farm, and he brought his wife and son to a house in Clay Center. Hammond lived in the basement. At night, he would pace the house, and the only way he could sleep was if his father sat in bed next to him with a hand on his chest to hold him down, which led to sleepless nights for them both, but when Hammond did sleep, he was capable of being out for up to fourteen hours.

            Donald Hammond was thought to be a possible threat after his parents died, when he quit his job and stopped taking his medication. He lived alone in a house in Clay Center, never cleaning anything and only leaving to eat at Wendy's or go to the grocery store.

            After pledging money toward the sheriff's department, Hammond received an honorary deputy card from the sheriff, which he thought gave him the right to carry a concealed weapon.  He found a waitress he liked at a bar in town, and he opened his jacket toward her, flashing the gun as he told her that he was an honorary deputy and was here to protect her. He followed her home on his motorcycle, and she called the police. On a chase, he led the police back to the farm where he grew up, owned at the time by his sister Shirley in Wichita. After the arrest, a psychological evaluation determined that Hammond was not a threat to anyone, so the police released him.

            Neighbors once spotted Hammond in his yard, in the snow, dressed in white underwear, rubber boots, and a Mickey Mouse hat with earflaps. He wielded a double-bladed axe over his shoulder while searching for brush to remove.

            Years later, Donald Hammond's neighbors reported a foul stench resonating from his house. No one had seen him for four days. His legal guardian and former high school classmate found him on the floor, sitting against the wall and decomposing in a mess of bodily fluids. The mortician covered Hammond with embalming powder and zipped him inside a body bag. The spot on the wooden floor where he died was several shades darker than the rest of the room, and in the days following, the house would smell of bleach, but the effort to eliminate the deathly odor failed, and the house had to be torn down. Due to decay, the cause of death could not be identified. It was summer, 2000.

            A few days later, clouds spread over Clay Center. Forty to fifty showed at the cemetery. White gravel roads traveled about the graves, which were grouped by family and covered by dark grass. Warm and humid air engulfed them. Six or seven rows of metal fold out chairs spread back from the closed coffin, but most had to stand.

            John and Shirley Browning sat directly before the coffin in the front row. They had driven from Wichita, almost three hours to the southwest, while most of the others were from Clay Center and knew, or knew of, Donald Hammond. A minister from the First United Methodist Church of Clay Center, the church John and Shirley were married in, began the service.

            Less than a minute later, a pink and black butterfly landed on the coffin directly in front of Shirley. Facing her, it folded its wings, unfolded and folded again. She noticed. John noticed.  It remained in the same spot for the entire eulogy, folding and unfolding its wings. The minister summarized Donald Hammond's life. Shirley dropped her head but didn't cry, the same reaction as everyone.

            The Greek word for butterfly is psyche, meaning soul. Aztecs also believed the dead return as butterflies or sometimes humming birds. While butterflies spend the summer in the United States and Canada, they travel south to Mexico in the autumn, and the locals believe they carry the spirits of lost relatives honored on El Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead). For Christians, the butterfly symbolizes resurrection. The caterpillar cocoons itself, appearing dead, and the butterfly rises.

            John and Shirley remained at the site for a half-hour and exchanged pleasantries. The butterfly returned. It hovered in front of John's face. He remarked that the butterfly was a pest. Then someone noted it had been on his shoulder since the sermon had ended.

Again, this was published in October 2012 in Underground voices. They have a kickass site. Check them out at www.undergroundvoices.com 

Any questions? Comments? 

I'm back! It's been a while, but it's good to be writing again. It's been a long hiatus due to my work schedule (teahing 5 classes). I would like to announce the publication of my short NONfiction piece titled "Butterfly" in Underground voices. The link can be found here -> http://www.undergroundvoices.com/UVBrowningDouglasOCTOBER2012.htm

This was in October, and I'm not sure why they published it under fiction rather than nonfiction.

As far as my book goes, I'm still working on getting an agent. I've had a few nibbles, but no bites. We'll see what becomes of it.

And since my work doesn't shy away from politics I have a few things to say about what's been going on with gun control. (Such a rapid change of subject, don't you think?) I've kept my lip sealed on this issue for a long time, but some of the crap I've been seeing on Facebook is starting to irritate me. (You know, those oh so brilliant arguments that take place on the web.)

To start out with, I have to say I believe in the 2nd amendment. People should be allowed to carry guns as our founding fathers supposedly wanted. Being in the very red state of Kansas, I guess I can drink to that. But here is my issue: when the founding fathers came up with that amendment, did they have assault rifles in mind? At the time the main firearms were single shot muskets.

Democrats are not trying to take all of your guns away; this is a clear exaggeration by the far right (just to get you a little scared). It should also be noted that there is a huge difference between owning an assault rifle and a standard rifle used to hunt deer. My question is this: is it really necessary to own a gun with a clip of 30? What else could this be used for other than mowing people down? It's your constitutional right to own a firearm, yes, but is it a constitutional right to own something that poses a danger to those around you? It has been proven that countries with stricter gun control laws than the United States have less violent crime. Would it be so bad to give up the 30 round clips and submit to deeper background checks?

Just my thoughts.

-db

My review of Ted

I've been looking forward to this one. For a long time. Since the rumored Family Guy movie, I've been hoping MacFarlane would be successful in his film endeavors. I went to the first possible showing: 12:35 Friday afternoon at the west Warren Theater. A good sized crowd got to see the movie; it was a very good sized crowd for the early afternoon. We were in store for a profane but touching comedy.

I'll start out by saying I'll try not to spoil the party too much by giving anything away. I can tell you that Seth MacFarlane's comic genius in Family Guy, American Dad, and The Cleveland Show surges through to his movie writing/directing. A lot of profane and drug related humor made me laugh, and the rest of the audience laughed too.

So, the jokes are there, and the movie is downright hilarious, but it goes beyond that too. Mila Kunis and Mark Wahlberg are great. Mark Wahlberg's role could have easily destroyed the movie had someone lesser taken the character. I could see someone overacting in some of the humorous parts, but Wahlberg does great. The "Thunder Buddy" song as shown in the red movie trailer is an example of something that could have been ruined by overacting. But no. And MacFarlane was enjoyable too. His voice sounded a bit like Peter Griffin's at times, but that's to be expected.

The plot is simple, but it works for this kind of a movie. Wahlberg has been wasting time, smoking weed and shooting the shit with his Teddy bear while Mila Kunis tries to get him to move forward in various places in life. The job, the romance; they suffer.

I  won't say any more than that because many of you haven't had the chance to see it yet. I will say that this film is not for children and definitely deserves it's R rating. And I will also say that Seth MacFarlane is a comic genius.

New house, New life

Things have been swarming in love and life. I bought a house. Yes. I bought a house. How about that? And I love the house too. I built a theater in the basement complete with an HD projector and a 7.1 surround sound system. That's my real pride of the house.

And of course August will be huge for me. I'm getting married. Also, I'm going to be teaching five classes at Cowley. That's a butt-load. So new house, a soon-to-be wife, and a job. Right now I have nothing to complain about.

The thing that has eluded me this summer has been updating this blog. I've decided I will update things at least a few times a week. I haven't been able to update due to my constant moving. From parents house to crummy apartment to parents house to new house. I'm finally settled, and I hope to add some followers soon.

Yes, while I am an angry liberal, I promise not to turn this into a political blog. There are enough of those out there, and many of them are full of...well...shit. I'm not going to sink that far down. Although...this will be used to discuss current events, film, literature, sports and the like.

I just got back from the movies. Ted was fun. There are hints of Family Guy throughout, and Mila Kunis is as beautiful as always. This is the story of a foul mouthed Teddy bear and his friend. I'm not going to go into depth about it much, but it is definitely worth seeing.

Other films I've seen recently that are worth seeing:

The Raven
Prometheus 3D
Avengers
21 Jump Street
Men in Black 3
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
Fido


I may end up watching Real Steel tonight.

Again, I am currently in search of followers. Feel free to comment, and I will continue to update.

Go Jayhawks

Bird feeding your child

To get this blog entry, you gotta read this: http://marquee.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/29/alicia-silverstones-feeding-technique-raises-questions-2/

Now I am not a parent, and I don't plan to be anytime in the future. So, maybe I'm wrong on this. And I must also say I'm an open minded person.

But this is pretty gross. I can argue that there are probably toxins in baby food, just as there are with all foods we eat, but seriously, get a food processor. They're fifty dollars at Target. We are not birds. We are humans, and SUPPOSEDLY, superior to animals; at least that's what people say, although sometimes I don't necessarily believe it.

Any thoughts on this? Am I wrong in calling this gross?