retro movie review: Asylum

I first heard of the horror anthology film Asylum while reading the Halloween issue of The Onion's non-satirical entertainment section, "The A.V. Club." The Onion was interviewing filmmaker Edgar Wright about his favorite horror movies, and his description of Asylum was so intriguing, I had to Netflix the movie as soon as I got home.

The set-up: Robert Powell stars as Doctor Martin, a young psychiatrist who travels to a remote mental hospital to interview for the newly vacant job as head of operations. Dr. Martin immediately clashes with the interim head psychiatrist conducting the interview, Dr. Rutherford, when the idealistic Martin advocates continued treatment while the cynical Rutherford insists that the patients there are "incurably insane" and can only be imprisoned, but never effectively treated.

Rutherford, who hints that he is about to retire, reveals that he has no interest to head operations at the asylum, and only inherited the role because the previous head of operations, Dr. Starr, has himself gone insane, developed an entirely new personality, and become a patient at his own asylum. Rutherford tells Dr. Martin that if he can figure out which of the patients is the former head of operations, the job is his for the taking. As Dr. Martin interviews the patients one by one, they each tell Dr. Martin how they came to be viewed as "insane" and thus imprisoned in an asylum. Each of their stories are told in flashback sequences based on short stories by screenwriter Robert Bloch (he of Psycho fame).

As with many (but not all) anthologies, the quality and even the style of Asylum varies with each story. I don't want to give away any endings, but I will, briefly, describe the basic plot concepts of each story:

The first story, "Frozen Fear," stars Barbara Perkins and Richard Todd as two lovers conspiring to murder Todd's wife. Because the outcome of such a murder is predictable to anyone who has ever seen a horror movie, whether you enjoy this particular tale depends not so much on the "twist" ending, but instead on how much suspense director Roy Ward Baker can milk out of the situation -- and the answer to that question is probably different for every viewer. My guess is that most viewers my age and younger would be bored by the slow pace, while older or more patient viewers, who are more used to films that take their time to build suspense, might enjoy this segment more. Call it "horror for the Matlock crowd." You might also want to think of this segment as a morality tale -- if you can consider "don't murder your wife" as a morality lesson that isn't already obvious.

The second segment, the misleadingly titled "The Weird Tailor," is easily the best of the four, and stars Barry Morse in a brilliant performance a million miles removed from his familiar role as Lt. Gerard in The Fugitive. Morse stars as Bruno, a German immigrant tailor whose business is failing despite his talents and good reputation. Broke, behind on his rent, and about to be evicted, Bruno seems to get the answer to all his prayers when he is approached by Smith, played with class and dignity by the late, great Peter Cushing. Mr. Smith has a "special order" for Bruno, and although the tailor is bewildered by Mr. Smith's mysterious specifications for exactly how the suit should be made, the oddity of it all seems harmless enough, and besides, Mr. Smith is willing to pay a lot of money.

As with "Frozen Fear," the final twist of "The Weird Tailor" is a bit predictable, but there are some minor surprises along the way, and both Cushing and Morse are at the top of their craft. Director Baker pays much more attention to atmosphere in this segment than in the others, as if the talented thespians in front of the camera inspired him to bring his A-game; although the events presumably take place in modern day (since the frame story takes place in modern day, and Bruno is currently one of the patients at the asylum), the setting has a kind of timeless quality that could take place now, or in the 70s, or in the 20s, for that matter.

"Lucy Comes to Stay" is by far the blandest of all four tales, a 70s soap opera that will challenge your ability to stay away from the fast forward button. Charlotte Rampling stars as a former mental patient who returns home to be cared for by her brother, only to immediately reunite with her best friend, the "bad influence" Lucy. Until the final few moments of this segment, Lucy's "bad influence" behavior is so tame that you'll spend much of the segment wondering what the big deal is. The ending is done pretty well, although it's really not worth the journey.

The final segment, "Mannikins of Horror,", which is intertwined with the framing story, benefits from the presence of the always effective Herbert Lom, but is hindered by Bloch's genre intentions, which are all over the map. Despite an intelligent and intriguing opening, in which Dr. Byron and Dr. Martin discuss the relationship between philosophy and psychiatry, the story quickly deteriorates into an unintentionally silly melding of fantasy, gore, horror, and Frankensteinian science fiction.

So, as I said, uneven. Would I recommend this film? I'd answer with a cautious yes, but a yes nonetheless. Some of the stories may struggle with pacing and predictability, but the great thing about anthology films that you can skip past the boring parts without missing any important plot points about the better segments. With that in mind, the "Weird Tailor" segment stands on its own as an atmospheric, well-crafted, old-fashioned horror tale, and the frame story (notwithstanding its connection to the dreadful "Mannikins of Horror") has an intriguing premise, interesting characters, and a satisfying ending. This may not be the kind of movie you'll want to watch with a bunch of your friends on a Saturday night, but it's perfect for a dark and rainy afternoon.

movie review: The Orson Welles "War of the Worlds" Scandal

John Ross

On October 30, 1938, Orson Welles terrified audiences with a radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds that was so realistic that people mistook it for an actual news story. Believing that Martians really were invading, people panicked. Highways were clogged with fleeting motorists. Stores were looted. And some people disappeared for days after fleeing into the wilderness to hide from the Martians, inadvertently cutting themselves off from the very sources that could have revealed to them that the whole thing was a hoax.

All of the above is not only a true story, but also one that should fascinate anyone interested in this particular time period, the general history of mass media, or the career of Orson Welles himself. Documentarian John Ross is one such person who is fascinated by the story, but his fascination, and therefore his film about the subject, is remarkably unfocused. Ross serves as the documentary’s director, narrator, producer, and writer, so his is really the sole creative voice behind the film. As a result, there’s no one to check his own obsessions.

The film's biggest problem is that it goes off on so many tangents. Some of these tangents are appropriate. Others are not. For example, The War of the Worlds is science fiction, so Ross starts talking about the history of cinematic science fiction – but then he gets distracted and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. After a while, it becomes clear that Ross likes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon and was just looking for an excuse to start talking about them.

And if that excuse seems thin, here’s an even thinner one: Ross mentions, more or less in passing, that people were “horrified” by the events depicted in The War of the Worlds – a segue that exists for no reason other than to serve as a transition into a brief discussion of the history of horror films. And this in turn segues into a discussion of the movie Nosferatu. But what the heck does Nosferatu have to do with The War of the Worlds? And what do Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, each of whom get an entire section of the film have to do with The War of the Worlds? Answer: Nothing. Ross doesn’t even try to make much of a connection.

Another, much more relevant tangent is Ross’s discussion of Orson Welles’s life and career. Ross discusses Welles’s childhood, his stage production of Macbeth, Citizen Kane and the resulting feud with William Randolph Hearst, and Welles’s gradual decline as a Hollywood presence. In fact, Ross delves so deeply into the life and career of Welles that Welles often becomes the primary subject. At least this tangent provides an appropriate, relevant context to the War of the Worlds broadcast, but if this is Ross's intention, why does Ross's bio of Welles pay so very little attention to Welles's radio career? Ross easily spends more time on Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon than he devotes to Welles's non- War of the Worlds radio productions.

I think the answer to this question is that Ross clearly thinks of the War of the Worlds radio broadcast in cinematic terms. This is a unique and potentially intriguing approach, but Ross never bothers to explain the reasoning behind this interpretation; I'm not even sure if Ross himself is aware of the fact that he's treating a radio broadcast more like a movie than like an entirely different type of art form.

There's even an auteurist quality to Ross's cinematic approach to radio criticism; the Auteur Theory states that, despite the necessarily collaborative nature of filmmaking, the director of a movie is the film's primary author. Along these lines, Ross devotes plenty of time to the life and career of director Orson Welles, but pays distressingly little attention to the writers. Very little attention to the writers. H.G. Wells, who wrote the novel that The War of the Worlds is based on, gets only a parenthetical, passing reference, while Howard Koch, who brilliantly adapted the novel into a faux news broadcast, isn't mention at all! Considering how much time Ross devotes to completely irrelevant topics, it seems a gross oversight to overlook the writers so completely.

Ross even fails as a narrator, alternately delivering the exposition with a flat monotone, and a false exuberance that is often staggeringly inappropriate. The most blatant example of Ross's failure to grasp the significance of his own narration: a cheerful voice declaring, "the Nazis had just invaded Czechoslovakia!"

This is not to say that the movie is all bad. The subject matter, even when presented in such a flawed manner, is a truly interesting story, and Ross deserves credit for so expertly editing together stock footage to make a series of unrelated clips appear to tell a visual story of people listening and reacting to the Welles broadcast.

But this movie simply fails to satisfy because of so many unanswered questions -- questions not about The War of the Worlds, but about this documentary itself. Why narrate the movie yourself, if you don't seem to understand the implication behind your own words? Why praise the writing without mentioning the actual writers? Why treat a radio broadcast like a movie? And most of all, why devote so much time to subjects so completely unrelated to the movie's central topic? I personally find a frustrating irony in the fact that Welles -- one of the greatest filmmakers, and one of the greatest narrators, of all time, is the subject of a film made by a man who clearly doesn't have the slightest knowledge of how to narrate or make films.

Better to See Pitch Black Than Ultraviolet

I just watched a sci-fi action double feature. Both movies are set at indeterminate points in the future, and, oddly, both movies feature titles that indicate they can't really be seen; "pitch black" is the absence of all light, while "ultraviolet" is a color beyond the visible spectrum.

Still, if you must watch a movie based on a state of light that can't be seen -- a dilemma I'm sure happens to us all on occasion -- I whole-heartedly suggest Pitch Black over Ultraviolet.

Director/ writer David N. Twohy's Pitch Black -- a blend of action, horror, and science fiction -- tells the story of a sleeper ship that crash-lands on a distant planet. The survivors of the crash at first think that they are on a planet completely devoid of life, but they soon discover that a human settlement was once here, not too long ago. But where did all of the settlers go?

To their dismay, they find out. Terrible, horrifying creatures live under the planet's surface. These creatures fear and are hurt by daylight (I know how you feel, little guys!) but come safety of the nightfall, they swarm the planet's surface, to devour all other life -- which now includes our hapless shipwreckees.

At first, all the passengers look for leadership from the sole surviving crew member, the reluctant first officer (now captain) Carolyn Fry (Radha Mitchell). However, as it becomes apparent that the creatures only live and attack in the dark, leadership gradually shifts to Richard B. Riddick (Vin Diesel), who has the helpful ability to see in the dark. The only problem with this arrangement: Riddick is a sociopathic convict who has the potential to, at any time, turn on the very people who need to trust him with their lives.

This is a very good movie. The astronomy and related sciences surely don't hold up under scrutiny (the planet is so close to its neighboring body that the gravitational stress would surely make it unlivable) but the story is entertaining enough.

It's interesting to note how many horror movies make stabs at thoughtful discussions about belief in God. Some of these movies -- exorcist movies, for example -- even make belief in God a part of the plot. But other horror movies take a stab at it too, from Taste the Blood of Dracula to Dusk Till Dawn. Pitch Black is no exception, and I like how the movie -- without making a big deal about it -- lets God's spokesman be a Muslim for a change, instead of the stereotypical Christian bugging the protagonist about whether or not he's found Jesus.

I do have one nitpick about the movie. Please don't let it dissuade you from seeing the movie, as it has very little bearing on whether or not this is a decent flick.

Here's the nitpick: There's a lot of talk about the planet's unique astronomy. Specifically, it has three suns, so it almost never experiences nightfall. Investigating at the abandoned settlement, the shipwreck survivors find a planetarium that reveals that, once every 21 years, the suns line up, and are blocked by the larger neighboring planet in a tri-solar eclipse. The event plunges the entire planet into roughly twelve hours of darkness (although, just at the crucial moment when they are planning their strategy to escape from the night creatures, everyone inconveniently forgets how long the night lasts, since it didn't seem important when they were first learning it).

Okay, here's my question: Why bother with all this stuff about three suns, almost eternal daytime, and solar eclipses, if none of it turns out to be relevant? Why not just say, "the creatures come out at night," and be done with it? Maybe I missed something, but the astronomy, for all the talk that went into it, never seemed important to the fact that it's night time, and now it's dangerous.

Still, this is a good little action flick. The characters are interesting, the dialogue intelligent, the action exciting, the horror scary. The tone of the film was reminiscent of one of the science fiction greats, Ridley Scott's Alien.

Then I watched Ultraviolet, and my good mood immediately faded.

First problem, right off the bat: too much exposition. Voice-over narration fills the first several minutes -- quite simply too long -- describing the fictional world of the movie and its main character. Within this one, extended monologue, the voice of Violet (Milla Jovovich) redundantly describes the future as "a world you might not understand" not once, but twice. (She later repeats this claim a third time in the epilogue's narration as well.) The primary thing to remember from all of this talk is that an epidemic of vampirism (or, more specifically, a disease that mimics vampirism) has swept the land, and there is now a power struggle between humans and vampires that is in danger of turning into all-out war.

We then meet Violet face to face. In an extended action sequence, Violet breaks into a high-tech facility, steals an alleged "briefcase" which actually has no resemblance to an actual briefcase (but, you see, it's a science fiction briefcase), breaks back out of the facility, killing dozens of guards in the process, and then engages in a chase scene as she escapes on a motorcycle that can travel on vertical surfaces as easily as horizontal surfaces.

So, to review: We've got the break-in, the fight over the briefcase, the escape, and the chase scene. That's, by my count, four action scenes back to back, and yet despite the mountain of exposition that had preceded all of this, we don't yet know what's going on, who anyone is, or why we should care about what's happening on the screen. This is an increasing problem with action films today: Filmmakers are so eager to wow audiences from the git-go, that they forget to first make us care about the people in the scene. Without any context to go on, I really don't give a damn if they catch Violet or not.

When the movie finally takes a moment to rest, and stop bludgeoning us over the head with action, action, ACTION!, Violet pauses to have a holographic conversation with her boss and lover Nerva, who had sent her to steal the briefcase in the first place. Nerva informs her that the briefcase's contents include a bomb which she can somehow activate without opening the case, and instructs her to detonate the bomb if it looks like the original owners might succeed in re-obtaining it from Violet. Violet objects to detonating the bomb, because, she argues, "there's no reason for all of those humans" in the blast radius to die. Okay, except, just a few minutes ago, Violet's voice-over narration explained that she "hates humans and is determined to kill as many as I can -- to kill them all." And now, just a few minutes later, she's objecting to killing humans? It's bad enough that director/ writer Kurt Wimmer clearly wasn't expecting his audience to pay attention -- but apparently he wasn't paying attention to his own movie either!

I won't get too much into the rest of the plot, which somehow manages to be convoluted and simplistic at the same time. Suffice it to say that Violet, despite her claimed hatred for humanity, finds herself having to protect a young human boy from both the human and vampire factions in the war; something about the boy's blood being able to cure all vampires, or kill all vampires, or kill all humans (the script keeps changing which it is). Rather than delve into the intricacies of plot, let's explore some random observations about the movie:

1. In the future, characters can change their appearance at will. Eye color, hair color, clothing color, even clothing style, changes before your eyes. The movie never explains what kind of technology this is. Holographic technology? Some kind of mind-over-matter telepathic projection device? Who knows. I do wonder, however, why people in the future change their appearance so often? I mean, I can understand that, if changing your outfit was as simple as thinking about it, then it would happen all the time, but I noticed that people tend to change their clothes, hair, etc. especially when they are about to go into battle. Even taking into account how easy changing clothes may be, if a bunch of people were about to try to kill you, and you knew it, would you really take a moment to say to yourself, "hm, I think I might look better in red in this light"?

2. Another example of improbable technology: Combatants can generate guns and swords out of thin air, just by thinking about it -- perhaps an extension of that whole "magically changed my clothes, so why not my arsenal?" technology. Question: If you can instantly generate an automatic weapon in your hands -- as characters repeatedly do in this film -- why do people so often fight with swords? I mean, I know sword fights look cool in a movie, but if people were trying to kill you, and you had the choice between a sword and an automatic weapon, which would you choose pretty much every time?

3. Every shot in this movie looks extremely artificial and two-dimensional. The budget for the movie is clearly a high one, so the special effects team, with today's movie technology, clearly had the option to make everything look realistic. But they chose to make it look like a video game. Now, because the opening credits include a lot of comic book covers (to establish the tone of the movie) one might be tempted to say, "no, dumb-bell, it's supposed to look like a comic book!" Except it doesn't. It looks like a video game. But why?

4. The actors are good. In a movie that depends so little on actor performance, that doesn't mean much, but I guess it's worth something. The under-appreciated but always reliable William Fichtner is likable in a supporting role, and Nick Chinlund is effective as the villainous dictator, "Vice-Cardinal" Daxus. But why is Daxus's title "Vice-Cardinal" when his role has nothing to do with religion? And why does Daxus have to wear those silly nose-plugs? I know, I know, the exposition established that people in the future are terrified of disease. But still. Come on. He looks ridiculous.

5. Why are so many cops and soldiers trained as ninjas? Ninja cops? Why? Because they can magically generate swords? But see point #2.

6. Violet's a vampire. I get that. And in this movie, vampires don't have any of the traditional vampire weaknesses against sunlight, garlic, etc. So Violet's like a female version of Blade. I understand, I really do. But then what's her super-power? Clearly she has one, as she is capable of defeating lots of enemies -- and I do mean lots of enemies -- single-handedly, regardless of whether they're human or vampiric. How good is she at fighting? Example: Daxus gloats that he is protected by 700 soldiers. That's right, seven hundred. Violet defeats them all by fighting with her magically generated guns and swords. They have magically generated guns and swords too. But she wins. Her one against their 700. That's seven hundred. Kinda makes the Bride defeating the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill seem realistic in comparison.

Now, I took a moment to imagine myself as one of the Vice-Cardinal's guards. I'm in a vast army of bodyguards. An army of 700 bodyguards. I have just seen this one woman single-handedly wipe out 650 of my comrades. What in God's name is going to motivate me to rush at her with a sword? Is the 651st guy really thinking, "well, she got lucky with those first 650, but I'll get her for sure!"

I don't care how much Daxus is paying his men, I think after seeing Violet kill the first two or three hundred, the rest might want to suddenly go home sick that day.

7. SPOILER: Of course, after Violet defeats Daxus's army without breaking a sweat, Daxus himself -- an administrator -- turns out to be a better fighter than his army of 700 highly trained soldiers. Because, yeah, if I had a choice between the U.S. Army and a CEO to kill an armed criminal, I'd wanna call the CEO?

8. SPOILER: At least the climactic battle between Daxus and Violet treats us to the delight of seeing them fight in the dark, with flaming swords. Why not flaming swords? I mean, if you're going to have a sword fight in the dark, you need some light, right? Best to somehow light the blades on fire, rather than turn on the light switch.

I am not making this up.

My Milwaukee Misadventures

1. The first interesting aspect of my Milwaukee trip happens before I even get there. I’m sitting at the gate, waiting for my plane, and, frankly, I really have to go to the bathroom. But there’s no one there to watch my stuff, and I sure don’t want to gather it all with me and then try to find someplace to put it down in the bathroom. On the floor? No thank you.

My first concern is that if I leave it there, my stuff might not be there when I come back. But I look around and think, “alright, I know I have no way of knowing this for sure, but these all seem like decent people with honest faces. I think I can trust them.”

I’m not sure what part of me was making this decision – my instincts, my naiveté, or maybe just my urge to justify what I want to do. I mean, sure, everyone says you’re not supposed to leave your stuff alone at the airport, but we’re only talking a couple of moments here. What’s the worst that could happen?

The very instant that this thought – “what’s the worst that could happen?” – goes through my head, an old man sitting across from me says to me, excuse me, do you know whose stuff that is?” as he points to the chair next to mine.

“I don’t know the guy,” I say, “but I’d recognize him if I saw him.”

I look around, but the guy who had been sitting next to me is nowhere to be found.

“He was here a few minutes ago,” I add.

“He’s been gone for a while,” the old man observed. “Excuse me,” he says to a nearby airport employee, “but somebody left a whole bunch of stuff just lying around here, and it looks like it’s attached to some wires!”

I’m about to point out that the wires are just the guy’s headphones – I saw him listening to his iPod earlier – but the airport people are already in action.

“Don’t worry, folks, we’ll take care of it.”

“We better call T.S.A.”

Next thing I know, the gate is swarming with police officers and TSA agents. Then I spot the guy who owned the stuff in the first place.

“There he is!” I say, trying to calm everybody down. “He’s right over there!”

One of the airport people tells the guy that he’s not allowed to leave his stuff unattended, and warns him that in another moment, it would have been confiscated by security.
As if on cue, the automated message that has been repeating itself all day again announces over the p.a., “do not leave your luggage unattended.”

The old man hears this, looks at me, and gestures at the guy next to me, as if to say, “can you believe this guy?”

I gesture back as if to say, “I know, right?”

2. Despite the fact that my doctor and I both consider me of “average” build, I seem to be remarkably thinner than the average airplane passenger. So I don’t take up much room in my seat. Still, the asshole next to me – who isn’t fat, but who has broad shoulders – keeps elbowing me in the side. Each time, I skooch over a little bit to my right, without even realizing it, until I suddenly notice that I’ve managed to squish myself against the wall of the airplane – and the idiot next to me is still elbowing me in the side. What the fuck?!?

3. No matter where you are in the country, the first things you notice when looking out the window as your plane descends are landscape features – land/water barriers, large clusters of trees, mountainous ripples, that kind of thing. The second thing you always notice is farm land. The third thing is baseball diamonds. Trust me on this. It happens with every single plane ride, no exceptions. So here we are, descending, and I’m seeing landscapes, farm land, farm land, and more farm land. But where are the baseball diamonds?

“What the hell does Milwaukee have against baseball?” I think with sincere anger, which is sort of a weird reaction, considering that I don’t give a damn about baseball myself. I guess it’s just human nature that once you get used to a pattern, you’re honestly disturbed when that pattern is disrupted. Anyway, I guess I was just impatient, because the next thing I saw: a whole cluster of baseball diamonds. I’m not sure, but I probably had a big grin on my face.

The last thing we fly over before actually landing at the airport: an office building with a truly large parking lot. I notice that, despite the fact that it’s a weekday, not a single car is in this gigantic office parking lot.

“That’s odd,” I think to myself. I don’t dwell on it at the time, although this moment will prove significant as the weekend goes on.

4. At first, I really like our hotel room. I find it charming, although it’s difficult to explain why. Sure, it’s a little chilly, and the view isn’t that great, but I like something about it.

As time goes on, we realize that the hotel ain’t so great. The carpet is buckled. The coffee pot doesn’t work and looks dirty. The television power button has to be pressed several times for it to work. The thermostat insists it’s 80 degrees, even though it’s freezing. The towel racks are crooked and look like they’re about to fall off. Even the elevator indicator lights don’t work, which is more disconcerting than you’d think. Maybe because, just the previous day, I had watched an episode of Homicide, in which Giardello muses, “watching lights in an elevator is one of life’s simple, unspoken pleasures. You can monitor your progress. In an elevator, you always know when you’re going somewhere!”

Not at the Ramada City Center.

5. Friday night in a new city, time to go out on the town!

The problem is, the town is already out. And it’s apparently not coming back. According to the map, we’re in the center of downtown, so where is everybody? Where are the bars, movie theaters, restaurants, stores, video rental outlets, etc.? We search for hours, and find very, very few places of interest – and all of those places of interest are closed. In the early to mid evening. On a Friday night.

We stumble upon the theater district, where we find four theaters right next to each other, back to back, each one bigger and with more glamorous architecture than the last. But they’re all closed too.

“Maybe everything’s closed for Halloween,” Shu-Chuan suggests, even though Halloween is still a few days away.

“That’s not how Halloween works,” I tell her.

We later retreat to the hotel restaurant, where the food is bland. I mean everything is tasteless, even the root beer. But it’s the only place we could find that’s open.

“Hey, what is there to do in Milwaukee?” I ask the waitress.

“You want something to do in Milwaukee?” she repeats, as if it’s the strangest question ever asked by anybody ever. “Ummm . . .”

“Nevermind,” I eventually say, as we can tell that trying to think of something to do in Milwaukee is short-circuiting her brain.

On our way back to our room, we stop in the lobby to pick up a Milwaukee travel brochure, hoping to get some ideas. Among the suggestions are theaters that we’ve already found to be closed, and festivals that ended a few months ago. Not much else.

That night, as Shu-Chuan is in the shower, I look out the window, watching the traffic from our lovely view of the parking lot and street intersection beyond. The traffic is very light – as it should be, considering the late hour – but oddly steady.

“It’s weird,” I point out to Shu-Chuan. “Even this late at night, there’s constant traffic. But nothing in this damn town is open. So where are they going?”

I think about it and then add, “Maybe they’re going to New York.”

6. Call me crazy, but I’m actually starting to enjoy these sociology lectures! One man discusses Chinese religious discourse, noting the simultaneous fall of Marxism and rise of Confucianism in standard religious conversations in China. Another guy claims to have discovered that whether you believe in life after death directly affects your physical health. Still another guy – talk about narrowing your field of specialization! – reveals his findings while researching the religious beliefs of Chinese immigrants in the town of Turin, Italy. Interestingly, he discovered that most Chinese Turinians claim to be “too busy” for religion in their daily lives, but actually do practice various forms of religion every day. How to explain this discrepancy? Partially because the Chinese immigrants and the Italian researchers interviewing them have completely different concepts of what is religious and what is sacred. And, most intriguingly to me, even those Chinese immigrants who later agreed that they are religious, explained that they had initially denied it because they felt the desire to fit into the Italian concept of the Chinese as a productive, secular people.

7. Saturday night – another boring, lonely weekend night in Milwaukee. Even the buildings we pass are boring. Until my visit to Milwaukee, I never realized how colorful cityscapes are in the northeast. Our buildings are a delightful mixture of brown wood, grey stone, red brick, and multi-colored billboards and signs. In Milwaukee, every damn building is the exact same shade of dull tan.

Okay, I shouldn’t complain too much about the boredom, because truth be told, Shu-Chuan and I are enjoying each other’s company a great deal. But the city is beyond boring, it’s abandoned to the point of outright creepiness. Here’s perhaps the weirdest thing of all: the city is host to over 500,000 people, at least according to Wikipedia, but the reason it feels so empty is because it was clearly designed to hold, not thousands, but millions of people.

Everywhere we go in our vain search for something to do, we find hotels, easily more than a dozen hotels, each one enormous. I have never seen hotels this size in Stamford or New York. But add up all the people we saw throughout the entire extended weekend (not counting the people at the sociologists’ convention) and they might, just might fill up one of those hotel floors.

Similarly, the downtown area has dozens of parking lots. Great, enormous, multi-storied parking lots. And not a single car in any of them. Add up all the cars we saw throughout the weekend, and they might fill one level of one of those parking lots.

The most interesting thing we found was a staircase in a courtyard by the Frontier Airlines building. After climbing these stairs for a few steps, you find yourself at the top, and nothing is there except for a single, pathetic, tiny apple tree, withering in the cold wind. We started calling these stairs “the Milwaukee Stairs,” as the embodiment of all things Milwaukee, because, like the city they’re in, they lead nowhere. Case in point: I’m here explaining that the most interesting thing about the whole city is a staircase that leads nowhere.

8. Jim Beckford – President of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion, Shu-Chuan’s mentor, and a really cool guy. He’s charming, intelligent, humorous, and thoroughly friendly. If I was a woman and three decades older, I’d probably fall in love with this guy.

9. At the airport with Shu-Chuan and her two colleagues. We’re walking at a slow but steady pace, weighed down by our luggage. A TSA agent shoves past us, shouting at us, “walk, people, walk, goddammit!!” That was uncalled for.

10. On the plane home, again at the window seat. A flight attendant offers us drinks, and the guy on the aisle seat immediately spills his coffee everywhere. For some reason, we’re all in a good mood, and the three of us, as well as the flight attendant, start joking about it much more than it’s worth. But the whole time, I’m thinking, “I’m glad it was him and not me, because I’d feel like an idiot.” Then I spill my ginger ale everywhere, apparently not learning from the cautionary tale of The Man in the Aisle Seat who Spilled his Coffee. “Wait a minute!” says the woman in between us, trying to wrap her head around the fact that she’s surrounded by morons.

11. Home. Remember when all the passengers used to clap at the end of every flight? Whatever happened to that little tradition? When did people stop doing that?