One Year After

The thought has been with me for a while--almost exactly a year, in fact--to write something about the events of 9/11/01. I've sat down to do it at least a dozen times, and I even have a partially completed draft of such sitting at home somewhere in the bowels of poor Polly Jean. But I've never finished it, much less posted it here.

Maybe it's because my account of that day is strictly peripheral--after all, I was in Chicago, where nothing really happened except the fear and panic and sadness that the rest of the nation felt. Maybe it's because there are so many other accounts that covered it better, most especially Sarah Bunting's tale of actually seeing the WTC come down in person. Or maybe I'm just too lazy to sit down and peck out what would surely be my longest essay to date.

And perhaps, some day, I will post that essay here, and you'll get to read about the uneasy feeling of trying to get out a crowded downtown with Red Secretary under an alarmingly clear blue sky; about the epic meeting between RS and my mom; about the fear of hearing planes overhead when none were supposed to flying anymore (turned out to be F-16s patrolling Chicago's airspace); about getting home and watching the footage of the attacks over and over again. But not this week, when everybody is doing some piece on 9/11. As if we could forget what happened. As if we ever will.

The Road More Traveled

It should come as no great surprise that I have a significant attachment to the city of Chicago. After all, I was born here, have lived here all my life and, barring something unforseen like landing a film critic position in Santa Fe or Seattle or some other town whose name begins with "S," will likely stay here for a good while longer.

But it will probably seem at least a little odd that I have an attachment to one particular street in my city. It's not a street I've ever lived on, though I've lived within easy walking distance of it my whole life. And it's not a "great street," as Sammy Cahn once dubbed a certain downtown thoroughfare, but it's a street of historical importance that bisects the city and runs from its northern edge to its southern border, cruising through just about every economic, social, political and ethnic stratum in between.

It's the longest uninterrupted street within a city's limits in the world. That's right--not just the state or the country, but the whole frickin' world.

It's Western Avenue.

It could be that I like Western Avenue so much because I know that its name comes from the fact that it used to be the western border of Chicago. So if you stand at the corner of North and Western, you get an idea of how small Chicago used to be. (Don't ask me why, if there's a North Avenue and a Western Avenue, there's no South Avenue. Maybe there was one, but its name was changed to honor some local political hack.) Or it could merely be familiarity: I've walked on, biked on, ridden by bus or car on Western Avenue all my years, including a four-year stretch in which I rode it to and from my high school, Lane Tech, just about every day; I was on a southbound Western Avenue bus when I heard that John Hinckley had tried to kill Ronald Reagan. Or maybe it's just cool to live near a street that has more used car lots and bars (a bad combo platter) on it than anywehere else on the planet.

But whatever the specific reason, Western Avenue has always played an important role in my life. Still does.

I grew up around Ukrainian Village on the Near West Side, and my mom still has a house in the area. I try to be a good son and visit once a week, and I usually take the Western Avenue bus back to my own neighborhood. Thus, I get a weekly tour of signposts from my younger days:

Like the Hi-Fi Video at Augusta, where I rented my first three videos when I got my first VCR: Day of the Dead (unspeakably awful flesh-eating zombie flick), The Hidden (passable sci-fi flick with lots of loud rock-n-roll on the soundtrack) and Sex Star (a, um, handlotionvideonasty);

Or Robert Clemente High School at Division, named for the Pittsburgh Pirates right fielder who, in addition to being a perennial All-Star with a Howitzer for a throwing arm, collected his 3,000th career hit in his last Major League at-bat (he died in a plane crash while on his way to help disaster victim right around Christmas 1972);

Or the El station at Milwaukee, which was recently rebuilt almost from scratch, only retaining the terra cotta Art Deco facade from the original station;

Or Margie's Candies at Armitage, where the Beatles came for sundaes when touring the U.S. in 1964--and where developed have tried to grab the land so they can build some fugly condo development (so far, they've failed);

Or the bank parking lot right across the street from Margie's, where the Oak Theatre, a family movie house in Mom's youth and a porno house where Marilyn Chambers danced in mine, once stood;

Or just off Western on McLean, where Grandma's cottage still stands, though not for long from the look of it--its windows are covered in plywood, and with the small properties tend to get swallowed up on the North Side, I fully expect to find some concrete-block monstrosity in its place sometime soon;

Or the Golden Nugget at the three-way intersection of Elston, Diversey and Western (an intersection with some of the worst traffic jams in all of creation), where my best friend from high school and I spent many a 3 a.m. solving the problems of the world over meat loaf and bottomless cups of coffee, and where my family and I went for dinner after my father's wake;

Or the police station at Belmont, which sits where Riverview Park used to stand;

Or the aforementioned Lane Technical High School at Addison, where four years of my life felt a lot more like ten;

Or the Penny Lane Lounge, where the CD box has lots of Beatles (duh) and the vodka-and-tonics keep coming at you till 4 a.m.;

Or Welles Park, where fun can be had on an August afternoon just by standing in the freshly minted gazebo (or is it a music pavilion? I'm not really sure) and watching the soccer boys bounce balls back and forth with their floppy-haired head while small children make the water fountains jet out endless streams of droplets onto the parched and dusty baseball diamonds.

Western Avenue runs for miles south and north of the section descibed above, of course, but this is the stretch I know the best. The one I've traveled most of my days. The one I remember the most about. The one that always leads me close to home, both then and now.

What's My Motivation in This Scene?

Okay. Yeah. I know. I haven't updated this site in a while. The last real "update" I wrote, in fact, was about my iMac, Polly Jean, blowing up on the 3rd of July. (The essay that followed it, Hot Child in the City, was a repost of something that was supposed to appear here the week before, but, for reasons that still escape me, didn't.)

But I can't blame my lack of attention here on poor PJ: she's been reasonably well behaved since she returned from the Apple Store, even though the scanner software is still fucked up and I can't find the CD so that I can reinstall it (hence the same picture of Lottie that adorned my last post here--get used to her, 'cause she may be there a while).

Nor can I blame the dust gathering here on the weather. Sure, it's been hot enough to fry eggs on the pavement (and some bacon and sausage to go with 'em), and I don't have AC. But neither do a lot of other people, and they still get their shit done.

The only excuse that comes close to being legit, in fact, is that it's been busy as hell at work of late, and that takes a lot of energy out of me. But when you get down to it, that's all it is--an excuse. These Web site updates aren't literary masterpieces; in most cases, they're an hour or two of solid typing, followed by a few minutes of HTML coding and a few more minutes of uploading (when I can concentrate long enough to actually get it right--I suspect "Hot Child in the City" was initially lost through my lack of uploading ability).

That's it. Really. Why do you think so many people have their own sites on the Web--sites that don't sell or buy or do any damned thing other than spit opinions into the great void?

So. Why, then, have I not gotten off of my ass (or, more literally, on it) to say something here?

Don't really have an answer for you. Emotional inertia. Mental calcification. Stuff. Pick one.

The point is, I've been lax in keeping this poor thing going, and "not feeling up to it" isn't much of an excuse. I'll try to be more diligent--and, one hopes, entertainingly so--in future.

That's all.

No. Really. That's it. That's all I have to say.

Really. I'm not kidding.

Why are you still here? Don't you have someplace to go? Something (or someone) to do?

What? You don't? Really? Huh.

Guess things could always be worse. I'd just rather not find out how.

Hot Child in the City

It's a sweltering July night in La Casa del Terror, and every fan I own is going--one ceiling fan in the kitchen; another in the living room; a box fan in the window above the futon I (try to) sleep on; and another moved to "the office" (a.k.a., "the place where I dump shit when company comes a-callin'") specifically so that I could write this update without turning into a puddle in my desk chair. (And considering that said desk chair has decided that it doesn't want its springs to cushion my overly ample backside anymore and would rather have said springs fly out in all directions from beneath the chair, rendering them a hazard to uncovered flesh, the chair has more than enough problems already.)

I'm stripped down to my burgundy boxers as I write this, and I wouldn't even be wearing those if not for the possibility, however remote, that one of my neighbors in the apartment building across the street might strain to look through the locust trees, catch a glimpse of a Fully Monty me and call the proper authorities (most likely the EPA). I'm dabbing the sweat Niagaraing my forehead with a dishtowel, and my hair has gone Greg Brady on me and will not be tamed by anything short of a chainsaw.

The Girlish Girls have, very sensibly, made themselves scarce: Lottie is sprawled on the relatively cool bathroom tile floor (I'm considering joining her there), and Ms. Christopher has crawled beneath one of the living room couches, probably to commune with the leftover Christmas cards and dust bunnies the size of boulders under there. They know enough not to cling to me in this heat, unlike Sars's demented felines, who either are too dim to realize that cuddling and flopping about on their owner could bring about her demise, or they're actively attempting to assassinate Ms. Bunting and therefore are diabolically clever.

That I feel like I should be served up with butter sauce and a wedge of lemon is, when you get down to it, my own damn fault. I didn't have to move out of Mom's house, which normally has substantial air conditioning going in the summer--a fact she reminds me of regularly, when she's not expressing the wish that I "find someone" because she wants me "to be happy" or urging me to be "less nice" to women so that "they'll like you more." (She means well. Really.) I could also spring for my own AC unit, but I doubt that the ancient wiring of my apartment could stand the strain. Hell, I can't run the coffee maker and the microwave at the same time without blowing the circuit, so I could just imagine the cloth-encrusted copper wires just laughing till they spew at the thought of something that energy-draining being hooked up to them for even a few seconds, much less for days on end. Other tenants in my building have AC units hooked up, though, so maybe it's not a hopeless cause. Maybe I should pry the wallet open, slouch down to the nearest Circuit City and do what must be done.

For the moment, though, I fight the heat however I can. The fans turn furiously. The dishtowel soaks up another torrent from my forehead. The ice in the green tumbler resting on the Tiki coaster on my SuperDisk drive shrink with every passing minute like friendly faces receding into darkness as the car pulls out of the drive (where the car is going, I have no idea--it's just a fucked-up metaphor). And once I finish typing this page, maybe I'll pull on some pants, refill the tumbler with some fresh ice and filtered water (which I drink because the water that comes out of my faucets is usually tinted orange or brown), and head out onto the back porch for a few minutes.

Maybe I'll smoke a cig from the pack of Camel Ultra Lights I've been working through slowly but surely for the last month, if only so that the searing of my lungs will make me momentarily forget all that brings discomfort to body and mind. Maybe I'll look for a star peeking through the haze hanging over the city. And, if I find one, maybe I'll make a wish on it.

More likely, though, I'll just give up entirely: kill the lights and the ceiling fans, toss the burgundy boxers into the pile of undone laundry beside the desk, drag the office fan back out into the living room, flop down on the futon, spritz myself with the water bottle once used to keep the Girls from clawing the furniture, and sacrifice myself on the alter of air, hoping that sleep will come quickly and without dreams, but knowing full well that such is unlikely.

Not in Chicago in July.

Not in La Casa del Terror.

Not this night.

Vanishing Chicago: Ghosts Along the Midway

If you stand on the northwest corner of the intersection of Irving Park Road and Western Avenue and look directly north, you'll see a bar sign. The bar beneath it is no longer of consequence; it closed a while ago, and the building that houses it has been on the market for some time. And for most people who walk under the sign itself, it would have no significance whatsoever unless it broke free from the thin chains holding it aloft and clocked them in the noggin. But for the few "in the know," this particular bar sign is a sad, dirtied reminder of what once was and is no more.

The name of the bar, the Riverview Bar & Grille (I would point out that "Grille" is actually a misspelling and would be most proper without the "e" at the end, but I would surely be accused, by certain individuals, of being a "smitty" yet again, and therefore I'll let it go), very probably goes without remark from anyone who'd bother to look at it at all, except, perhaps, to note that the bar has no view of the Chicago River at all. For that, you'd need to trek west down Irving Park Road for a couple of blocks, where you'll find a bridge passing over the spot where ducks feed (on what, I'm not sure), debris floats by at a remarkable pace and the occasional dead body washes up. Even the roller coaster shape of the faded red lettering on the sign wouldn't mean much to most wandering up Western--unless, of course, you knew that, just about six blocks south of that sign, there used to be one of the largest amusement parks in the world: Riverview Park.

For those who aren't yiffy for Chicago history, a quick history lesson: Riverview Park sat on Chicago's Northwest Side, bordered by Belmont, Western, the south end of Lane Tech High School's parking lot and the river (hence, the name of the park) from 1904 until it closed in the fall of 1967. In the intervening years, Riverview delighted millions of patrons with its funhouse, its games and its numerous thrill rides, from the gentle glide of the Velvet Coaster to the wet wonder of the Chutes to the abrupt twists, turns, dips and dives of the famous (or, more appropriately, infamous) Bobs, which many a loving bruise on many a wooden roller coaster aficionado.

I was just three when Riverview closed and just shy of my fourth birthday when demolition began, so I never got to go there. My brother, however, still likes to tell stories about riding the rides and walking the brightly lit midway, even though he's only three years my senior. (And yes, I burn with envy every time he brings it up.) Nobody seems to know the "real" reason Riverview closed, though: Some say the park was closed due to recurring safety code violations (though its owners vehemently denied this); others claim that a land deal was worked with political insiders with ties to Mayor Richard J. Daley (also known as "Richard the First," in order to distinguish him from the current mayor, Richard M. Daley, also known as "Richard the Second"); still others maintain that racial tensions (black youths coming in numbers into an overwhelmingly white neighborhood on hot summer nights) caused the demise of Riverview.

Whatever the cause, the park was closed, razed and replaced by various facilities: A senior citizens' apartment complex; a Devry Institute of Technology campus; a police station; and a shopping mall named for the amusement park that once stood on site (whether that qualifies as a tribute or an insult is up to you). No signs of an amusement park at all.

Unless, of course, you know where to look.

It really should have occurred to me sometime during my four years of attending Lane Tech. I may never have gone to Riverview, but I knew that it had been there: I'd seen old 16mm films taken by teachers during football games at Lane Tech stadium that showed rides just beyond the southern end zone--one of my teachers told me that faculty would, during graduation ceremonies, place bets on which one of the Pair-O-Chutes would make it to the ground first; and I saw the vacant land that would eventually become the shopping mall in my freshman year.

But I was an English major, not a math whiz--two plus two doesn't always equal four in my tangled brain. So it never occurred to me to wander through the small parcel of undeveloped land adjacent to a ribbon of park land that hugs the river between Belmont and Addison to look for signs of Chicago past. And it wasn't until I watched an episode of Chicago Stories, a terrific documentary series produced by one of the local public television stations, that I found out that hidden in that thicket were the remnants of Riverview Park.

It's not a very big plot of land--no more than a couple of ratty acres, probably--but it's been overtaken by trees, bushes and trash in the 30-plus years since Riverview fought the wrecking ball and lost. Beer cans and water bottles litter the plot. An impromptu camping ground shows signs of having been inhabited recently--probably a few of the homeless chased out of Downtown by the City. I even ran across a skull lying in the brush--too large to be a cat, but about right for a medium-sized dog. (I know little about animal forensics--anyone able to identify the subject of the picture at the left is free to do so.) As I wandered the area that day, I ran across that skull several times. I guess it wanted its picture taken. So I pointed, I clicked, and I stumbled on to other things. I never saw that skull again.

There are few obvious indications of what had been there--you won't come across any toppled roller coaster supports or signs lying in the soil. I once met a couple of men--father and son, I think--who, after having seen the same episode of Chicago Stories that I had, were looking for souvenirs with a metal detector: A token for an arcade game, maybe, or some little prize with the Riverview name stenciled on it. I wished them well and we went our separate ways, but I doubted then (and doubt now) that they found what they were looking for; after so much time had elapsed, I imagine that the site has been picked pretty clean of anything readily identifiable.

Still, there is evidence, slight as it might be, of what once was. My favorite time to go to this patch of woods is in the spring, when the trees have just begun to bud and sunlight streams down onto the site, where what's left of the midway peeks out from beneath the dirt and fallen leaves, where various phantoms of structures remain (a foundation here, a post there, an enormous chunk of concrete that belonged to...what?), where pleasant memories murmur through the branches above. The carousel has long since departed--for, of all places, Six Flags Over Georgia (why it didn't land closer to home--say, at Six Flags Great America in Gurnee or Navy Pier, which has its own old-fashioned carousel--I'll never know)--but the circular sidewalk surrounding its former location can still be clearly seen.

It's a melancholy place, this graveyard of gaity past. That anything remains here at all is something of a minor miracle. That this is all that remains of such a place is a major disappointment. (I was going to say "tragedy," but with so many actual tragedies happening on our violent little planet--and so many so uncomfortably close to home--the loss of an amusement park, sad though it might be, just didn't seem to measure up.) And yet, as I walk along the fractured asphalt or run soft fingers along the rough, lone post or straddle the dueling, grafitti-marked foundations closest to the river (leftovers from the Chutes, perhaps?), I can't help but smile. Great times were had on these now-disheveled grounds. Fun was had here for years.

And, in an odd way, fun is still had here. On the northern end of the plot, mounds of dirt have been constructed by BMX biker riders around a tree that looks to be either dead or drying--its twisted limbs and its open maw of a trunk suggest something out of a H.P. Lovecraft story. The BMX bikers spend their afternoons--or, on weekends, whole days--jumping the mounds. Flipping. Falling. Getting back up for more. They ride their thick-tired bikes over the mounds at shocking speeds until they no longer have the light to so so--and then they probably pedal for a while after that. Their adreneline pumps madly. They're enjoying the ride.

I have little doubt that these bike riders are entirely clueless regarding the history of the place where they play. But I wonder sometimes if, on some level, they hear the whispers of the ghosts along the midway. I wonder if that's why they come back for more, day in and day out. I wonder if they are cognizant at all of the tradition that, in their own fashion, they carry on.

There are still thrills to be had at old Riverview Park, apparently. And, somehow, that seems just about right.

Of Possums and Procrastinators

Anyone who has visited this site on even a most casual basis has probably figured out that I like taking pictures. How and why I started carrying a Canon AE-1 everywhere I go and snapping shots of whatever grabbed my eye at any given moment is not the story I tell today--some other time, maybe. No, today's story has more to do with what I don't do and should do than with what I actually do.

Because even though I love taking pictures and showing them off like a mother putting her newborn on display for the cooing masses, I'm lazy as hell when it comes to getting my film developed. This, I fear, is because, as a college student and, subsequently and presumably, an adult, I was and am a master procrastinator. If it can be put off, it will be. I once wrote three term papers in one night, turned them in to the respective instructors the following day, turned right around and went back home, where I slept for about 18 hours. So it has always been, and though I'm not nearly as bad as I used to be (in a lot of respects, not just this one), the habit still manifests itself in various forms--like stockpiling rolls of film like I plan on erecting a pyramid of them in my living room. (Bet that cats would just love that.)

So it came to pass that I'd managed to accumulate more than a dozen rolls of film on the small ledge beneath my living room video collection. This is, by no means, a record for me; I've gotten up to a couple dozen full rolls patiently waiting their turns to reveal their wonders--or horrors--to my sometimes-brown eyes. And I must admit, this process (if you can even call it a "process," since that word implies something structured or planned or even regulated in some half-assed way) can be a kick. Grabbing a handful of rolls--and my hands are pretty damn big, so that can mean a lot pictures and, consequently, money--and getting developed can yield great surprises, usually of the "Oh man, I don't even fucking remember taking this shot!" variety.

Once, while cleaning one of my closets--okay, I wasn't actually cleaning it, unless you want to define "cleaning" loosely enough to include digging through the heaps of action figures, video tapes and long-fallen wire hangers to find one particular thing that, more than likely, I never found anyway--I ran across my first camera, a boxy little Kodak that took 126 film, which came in bulky, awkward cartridges and which, to my knowledge, isn't even manufactured anymore (though the smaller, similar 110 film can still be found in most drugstores). I'd finished the roll, set the camera aside--and forgotten it completely. I wasn't even sure I could get the damn thing developed. But I took it to Osco and, sure enough, they were able to process the film and return to me a set of prints. The pictures weren't of anything extraordinary and would likely have just been looked at once, shrugged over and shoved in a drawer, never to be contemplated again.

But now, years after they'd been taken, these shots, mundane as they were, fascinated me. The pictures on this roll had been taken about five years earlier, when I was still living with my parents in Ukrainian Village. Damn. I had taken these shots, packed the camera with me when I moved, thrown the camera in the closet and forgotten all about it. But now the square little color shots were in my hands, recalling a a time in my life that wasn't necessarily better or worse than my life was the day I got the pictures back, but somehow remote, alien...just different. Some of the occasions portrayed were obvious--a chocolate cake, a stiff-backed pose and a glazed, reluctant smile I'd seen staring back at me from countless photographs could only have been from some past birthday. Other shots were more difficult to place in the timestream: kitties who'd long since passed away; roses in my mother's garden; the vivid hues of a now-forgotten sunset. It was like I was looking at someone else's life, even though the signposts of my past were visible all over these shots and I must have been the one who'd taken most of them (except for the birthday shots--only my mother could coax that particular fixed stare onto my face).

So, with the intent of, at the very least, culling the herd, I took six rolls to a camera shop downtown and dropped them off for pickup the next day at the same time. None of these rolls were nearly as ancient as the roll described above--the oldest couldn't have dated further back than, say, last September. But the fact that I'd accumulated that many rolls over such a span of time sent my imagination off and running. What would I find in the pictures I got back? Christmas decorations along Michigan Avenue? A sojourn among the ruins of Riverview Park? Lottie and Ms. Christopher contorted into seemingly impossible shapes? Some bizarre self-portrait?

At this point, allow me to direct your attention to the upper left-hand corner of this page, just in case you hadn't already glance up there and recoiled in horror. You know, the place where you'd usually find a cute kitty picture or a kitchy bar sign or a seasonal trifle. Go on. Take a look. What do you see?

That's right. It's an opossum, or "possum" for shory. A particularly pissed-off possum at that.

I'd just about forgotten this scary fucker. I had other pictures of him (her? it?) taken with a 110 camera Mom had given me one Christmas when I unwisely requested a simple point-and-click camera that I could pull out of my pocket and use anywhere, anytime, and thus wound up with this clunky little thing that was, maybe, one step removed from that Kodak 126 she'd bought me 25 years earlier. But I'd forgotten about the black-and-white shots I'd taken right afterwards, getting as close to the critter as I felt I safely could without risking having it charge me in a fit of camera flash-induced rage. (I had no idea how fast possums could really move, but I had no burning desire to find out.)

It was just before Halloween (which I know only because some shots from my apartment decorations for the annual Halloween Movie Bash JB and I usually host, like the nearly life-sized Bruce Campbell action figure at the right, were on the same roll), and the particular possum had trundled all the way up my back stairs and was rooting around on my porch. Now, this was unusual, but not unheard of--my neighborhood is host to various creatures one would not think of as being urban dwellers, like raccoons, rabbits and, obviously, possums.

But it was quite a surprise to find one of the little buggers making the substantial effort to walk up three stories just to find nothing of interest. It moved slowly, but quietly--I'd never have know it was there at all if not for the fact that the Girlish Girls, both of whom are relatively placid, relatively lazy balls of fur, transformed into tumbleweeds of rage, their tails inflated to several times their normal size as if someone had hooked the Girls up to jumper cables and switched on the juice. Oh, that and the fact that their loud, yowling protests against the invader on their porch made a sound similar to what I imagine World War III will sound like when it finally breaks out.

So there it was. A possum. On my top step. Checking out the view. And Lottie and Ms. Christopher were charging the door and making remarkably effective attempts to launch themselves at the screen door in an effort to defend their turf. Eventually, either one of them would succeed and wind up tangling with a wild animal that could have any number of diseases or, more likely, they'd wind up hurting themselves or getting splinters or ripping down the screen or some such thing. So the possum had to go. Um, right. Like, exactly how?

My first thought had some logic to it. The Girls hated getting shot with the water bottle; that usually made them run for the figurative hills. So why wouldn't the possum react the same way? Maybe because it's a possum, not a cat: it blinked at the first shot and the second, but stood there resolutely as I pumped what must have been twenty shots of water at the hearty, determined little beasty. Okay, that was a huge success, not. So what next? Where logic failed, perhaps technology might succeed. That's where the cameras came it. I mean, people who actually pose for pictures don't like flashes directed at them, so why would the possum?

Obviously, it didn't care for the flash one bit. After a couple of shots, its mouth opened into the soundless hiss you see above and started to turn--toward me, not away. I backed up the stairs slowly. It didn't follow, but it didn't leave, either. Sometimes, it takes doing something--or several somethings--stupid to get around to doing something smart. Why had the possum climbed three flights of stairs? To play with my shamrocks? To piss off my cats? To help me set up Halloween decorations? To be a Halloween decoration? No. It was just hungry. I threw it the ends of a loaf of Brownberry Oatnut Bread and closed the inside door. When I checked again about half an hour later, there was no possum--and no bread. Not a single crumb. The porch had been licked clean.

The possum hasn't come back since. And, considering the, um, hospitality I showed it upon its last visit, I can't say I blame it. But I'll always have the shot you see above. I'll always have that moment, frozen in time, and all of the ridiculous memories and emotions that the shot recalls. And most of the shots you see on this site carry similar loads. Each one has a story, a memory, a set of memories, a smile or a wince of recognition. And I still have pile of rolls--smaller than before, but still more substantial than it ought to be. More smiles and winces to come.

I can't wait.

Review: Scooby-Doo (2002)

When I was very young, my favorite Saturday morning cartoon show was Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? Sure, the animation was limited, with the same sequences repeating frequently, and the plots were simple to the point of being simplistic--if you hadn't figured out who was smuggling the gold/stealing the jewels/scaring everyone off the unexpectedly valuable property by the first commercial break, you really weren't paying enough attention. And the overall concept had its flaws: What were these kids (Teenagers? College students? We were never sure) doing just cruising around the country in a van? Didn't they have jobs? Where were their parents? Why were Shaggy and Scooby always so hungry? (Insert drug usage rumor here.) Were Fred and Daphne getting it on? And what was the deal with Velma? (Insert ambiguous sexuality rumor here.)

But Scooby-Doo still had its merits: the monsters were usually cool and just scary enough to make the five-year-olds (the very age I was at when the show premiered on CBS in 1969) watching over breakfast duck behind their cereal bowls; the antics of Shaggy and Scooby were amusing enough; and the mystery was almost always solved by Velma, the brainy, nerdy girl with the thick glasses.

Scooby-Doo survived through various incarnations in subsequent years, like when Scooby and the gang had an odd combination of real guest stars (Don Knotts, Mama Cass, Sonny & Cher) and fictional characters (Batman & Robin, Josie & the Pussycats), or when Scooby's nephew Scrappy-Doo (who was roughly as enjoyable as listening to a garden rake being dragged across a chalkboard over and over and over again), or, most recently, as a series of made-for-video movies.

Which brings us to the current incarnation, the big-screen, mostly live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo, a project that lingered "in development" for years, with the most persistent rumor involving Mike Myers writing the script and playing Shaggy. The limbo state of Scooby-Doo shouldn't surprise anyone. The cartoon-to-live-action subgenre is littered with megabombs from The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle to Josie & the Pussycats to the two--count 'em, two--Flintstones flicks; hell, even Robert Altman couldn't make Popeye work right. But considering that what actually made it to the local multiplex is so uncertain about what audience it's trying to play to and what tone to approach its material with, maybe Scooby-Doo would have been better off remaining "in development" indefinitely.

The story, in keeping with the TV show, is simple to the point of being simplistic: The Scooby gang--Freddie Prinze Jr. as Fred, Sarah Michelle Gellar as Daphne, Linda Cardellini as Velma and Matthew Lillard as Shaggy--crack yet another case, but then crack themselves under the weight of Fred's ego, which requires him to take solo credit for the work of the gang (okay, mostly Velma). Velma walks, immediately followed by Daphne and Fred himself, leaving only Shaggy and the title great dane himself to tool around in the gang's van, the Mystery Machine, and hang out at the beach for cookouts. But the gang is soon reunited by an invitation from the mysterious Mr. Mondavarious, played by Rowan Atkinson as if medicated into a stupor. (Or perhaps he was just depressed because he'd just taken a peak at his listing on the Internet Movie Database and realized that he's on quite a cinematic losing streak, what with Bean, Rat Race and now this mess--please, Rowan, go back to doing brilliant TV shows in the UK and leave the crappy supporting roles in stinky American movies to other, less talented, less funny individuals--you know, like Billy Crystal.) Mondavarious runs an amusement park called Spooky Island, where the spring break crowd comes ready to party hard, but leaves mesmerized and talking incomprehensible Gen Y slang. Reluctantly, the gang dives in, facing death traps, possessed partygoers, exploding demons and, of course, a fiend intent on taking over the world.

It's not as if there isn't any fun to be had with this scenario--there are, in fact, quite a few moments to keep the kids giggling (like the farting contest between Shaggy and Scooby), while others are aimed squarely at their adult escorts (like the fact that nearly every female character in the movie is required to wear at least one outfit with a plunging neckline--yes, even Velma). And it's this uncertainty in tone that is the most insurmountable barrier to enjoying Scooby-Doo. Is this movie supposed to be a staightforward adaptation of the beloved cartoon, or is it supposed to be a self-parody along the lines of Back to the Beach or the Brady Bunch movies? Because director Raja Gosnell and his screenwriters can't decide what audience they want to aim for, they try to throw out something for everyone--and, thus, satisfy no one. Scooby-Doo isn't cartoonish enough to keep the little ones engaged isn't nearly snarky enough to keep their parents awake.

The performances don't help much, either. While Lillard is about as perfect a live-action Shaggy as you could hope for--managing to not only match his character's scruffy, lanky physical presence, but also to come close to the vocal style of voiceover veteran Casey Kasem, who has been Shaggy's cartoon voice from the very start--and Cardellini has her moments as Velma, Prinze and Gellar are painfully miscast as the lunkheaded Fred and pretty-but-vacant Daphne, respectively. Neither one of them ever gets a handle on the scattershot approach of the direction and script and just wind up standing around looking confused. Was the audience supposed to take the casting as some kind of inside joke--you know, Gellar and Prinze are engaged in real life and are playing a couple on the big screen, get it? And on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gellar's on-screen cohorts are known as "The Scooby Gang." Get it? Um, no. It also might have been better for all of the lead actors if less cash had been dropped on the CGI and more had been spent on hairpieces--everybody looks like they're wearing a bad wig, perhaps because they are.

And then there's the matter of the title character himself, poor old Scooby-Doo. The filmmakers could have chosen a 3D animated style for Scooby like what was employed for Who Framed Roger Rabbit? or Space Jam, but instead opted for a more realistic style that nonetheless shows that Scooby is clearly animated, not real. The choice is disasterous: Scooby winds up looking like some horrible visual merging of a real great dane with the much-reviled Jar-Jar Binks. Scooby deserved better. Hell, we all did.

It's obvious that the folks behind Scooby-Doo have at least watched the cartoons and have affection for them--the way Velma loses her glasses only to recover them in time to see something scary is just about right, as is Scooby's obliviousness to danger when there's food to be had. While it's probably impossible to totally hate a movie that manages to include a segue from the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" to a scene of Scrappy-Doo abuse, it's just as impossible to recommend a movie so uncertain in presentation and execution. Scooby-Doo isn't nearly as bad as it could have been (or as terrible as some critics have labelled it). But when the kindest comment one can muster for a movie is, "It could have been worse," you're really better off not saying anything at all and just moving up the multiplex in the hopes that the next "kids" movie you encounter is made with just a little more care than Scooby-Doo.