11: The Partly Cloudy Patriot, Sarah Vowell

Blah, blah, blah. This isn't nearly as good as Assassination Vacation. Sarah's patriotism is tiresome, though her writing's still good:

At the Witch Dungeon Museum, a place about as dignified as it sounds, there is the fun kind of bad actress in a period costume emoting through a reenactment of Elizabeth Proctor's with trial, "I am not a witch! I am innocent!" There's a colorful old guy walking-tour guide named Bob who must not be a member of the chamber of commerce because he says things like "They hung dogs for being witches, that's how stupid these people were."

[...]

There's an old cemetery so archetypal it looks as though a child has drawn it as a decoration for Halloween.

[...]

And there are a few yellowing historical documents to look at in the Peabody Essex Museum so that I don't feel like a total cheeseball, even though I just bought a whiskey glass emblazoned with a little yellow highway sign with a silhouette of a hag on a broomstick that says, "Witch XING."

See? She writes really well.

When I was growing up in Bozeman, Montana, I got all my ideas about going to the movies in New York City from the Woody Allen oeuvre. [...] In Woody Allen movies, people stood in line for Ingmar Bergman films or holocaust documentaries, talking up media theory to pass the time. At sixteen, that was my idea of fun. Now that I live in New York I can tell you that people lined up for tickets don't debate theory; they talk about cute guys at the gym or whether or not they live within walking distance of a Krispy Kreme.

[...]

My hometown is a college town populated by a minority of city-slickers who taught Western kids Western civ. Marooned at cow college, these humanities types pined for pretense. So they organized a weekly film festival, slanted heavily toward foreign product. I remember one night so cold the cars wouldn't start, moviegoers sprinting in the forty-degrees-below-zero cold to watch something Danish. And I remember I once overheard a teenager telling her mother after the actually entertaining Wings of Desire that Wim Wenders had "sold out". See, we were mad for the New German Cinema [...] Like, people in Bozeman would do impressions of characters from Volker Schlöndorff films, walking up behind you and screaming at the top of their lungs, then asking, "Who am I? Who am I?" and you'd say, "Duh. Oskar from The Tin Drum."

See? See? Hella funny. Also, it should make you want to watch The Tin Drum, even though it has, indeed, mad screaming (and drumming). Also, it has an 11-year old actor pretending to have oral sex with a 24-year old actress, which got it banned from Canada, Oklahoma, and other random places.

The chapter about Al Gore made me mad about that twit Bush and the retarded nature of the American electorate again.

Random factoids of interest to West Wing watchers who don't give a hoot about real-world politics:

• the "Bob Russell's so boring his secret service code name is Bob Russell" joke is an Al Gore quotation
  
• North Dakota really did want to change its name to "Dakota" for tourism reasons
  

There's one moment of personal interest to me that may leave most readers cold. After a friend says that some days he just wants "to move to Mexico and learn how to make clothes out of the dirt around my house" Sarah replies:

"I know what you mean," I say. "Only I don't want to move to Mexico and play in the dirt. It's more like I want to want that. I like how things are, so I worry that I'm not aiming high enough. i worry that I'm too complacent. I worry that I'm perfectly happy sitting in my leather chair watching HBO."

And I worry, too. Except some days I'm miserable and don't like how things are at all, so at least that's something.