Freak on a leash

You wouldn’t figure there’d be enough people interested in wearing purple lipstick to keep the product afloat. Then you go to a hard rock or heavy metal concert, look around, and think, “Oh. There it all is.”

To think I’d come so dangerously close to forgetting about the freaks. I don’t say “freaks” in any derogatory sense; in fact, it’s rather a term of endearment, as I once considered becoming a freak myself back in those heady, halcyon college days. But that’s one of the nice things about attending a metal show. You can oggle the weirdos all you want, because the weirdos want to be oggled. There’s frankly no other way to explain an earlobe gauge the size of a monster truck hubcap and a tattoo of a dragon smoking a “cigar.”

There’s so much atmosphere at a concert you could wash your mouth with it and spit it out. And it’d probably taste like Bud Light.

It’s a scene I would have basked in 15 years ago, but when most people reach a certain age, they have to distance themselves from the extreme-rock aesthetic. Personally, I chose a career path that consistently takes me out of the house and places me before sets of human eyeballs, so I’m forced to look somewhat normal -- if you can call it “normal” to be giraffe-level tall, shaved bald and sporting a nose that could be a paragliding sail. Any embellishment at this point would not only make it difficult to get a job, but would likely get me banned from any public establishment that hinges on people keeping their food down.

Concerts are a reminder of what could have been, had things gone differently. If I had become a musician or some other kind of independent artist -- instead of a corporate shill writing copy for beer money -- I could very well look like the over-tattooed lovechild of reality star Jesse James and a bottle of Kentucky bourbon. In this alternate reality, my beard is dyed red and extends to my belt buckle in a spear-like geometric tangle; I wear rings in places where rings are not appropriate; and every T-shirt I own is black and adorned with some sort of skull, many of them flaming, even though bone isn’t flammable and there’s no good reason to set fire to one anyway.

Then again, there’s always the chance that alternate-reality me is a pansy, just like the real me. Jeff Two probably looks as ordinary as a high school guidance counselor.

No matter which reality I’m in, though, people-watching has always been a favorite hobby -- particularly at concerts, where there are so many people to choose from, freaks or not.

I’m generally into bands that have been around a while, and so their fans tend to be older; “adults,” if you will, people with cars and mortgages and a taste for non-gas station wine. They go to concerts in jeans and T-shirts, yet their sensible haircuts and expensive watches give them away. They’re not what you’d call enthralling subjects. They stick to their seats and bob their heads to the music in a manner suggesting some degree of sophistication, occasionally taking out their fancy smartphones to show off the fact that they have fancy smartphones. They’re respectable and practical, a model to which the younger folks can aspire. They’re also boring to watch.

What you want in a good concert people-watching scenario are the “independent spirits,” typically 18-28-year-olds who work at Hot Topic and wear dog collars on their wrists. Next time you attend a heavy metal festival -- which I’m sure ranks highly on your list of priorities -- find a cluster of these jewel-studded souls and observe their behavior. They promise thrills much greater than those on offer at your local zoo’s monkey cage.

Take the recent Megadeth show in Bangor, for instance. Megadeth is one of those groups that’s been thrashing around for more than 30 years, and so they definitely draw the fine-cheese-and-wine-cellar crowd, believe it or not. But because of the nature of the music -- snarky, aggressive, unapologetically juvenile -- the freaks are there too, coming out of hiding with their neon-colored hair to compare body art and piercing count. The graying temples share floor space with the nose rings in a show of cross-generational solidarity that almost makes you want to cry. Although that could just be the stench of BO.

My friends and I are somewhere in the middle of these two factions. Not young and not old, we occupy that weird gray area in between. We still wear our absurd T-shirts, but eschew the moshpit trappings of the general admission floor in favor of the relative comfort of the bleacher seats. They offer a great vantage point for peeping. In the course of about half an hour, we spied a young woman with the sides of her head shaved, long pink hair extending halfway down her back and a lip ring that could sink a medium-sized fishing vessel; a middle-aged man with a tattoo of a snake coiled around his neck; and a cluster of long-haired teenagers banging their heads so ferociously they should be tapped to power a wind turbine. And this was during the opening act.

I was filled with a sick and cynical glee.

It’s anyone’s guess as to what these people are like in real life. In my experience, they often have the capacity to surprise you; you expect them to be retail slaves toiling behind the counter of a strip-mall Best Buy, but half the time they’re insurance brokers who hide their tats until it’s absolutely appropriate. Concerts bring out their inner rapscallions, and they make the price of admission more than worth it. Even if there were no bands playing I’d still buy a ticket, because why not? This is the human zoo. We’re all pretty fascinating creatures, if you take the time to look.

Besides, you’ll never see such an impressive ocean of purple lipstick outside of a Minnesota Vikings game. That much I guarantee.

We're men, we're men in tights

From the 1930s to about the 1960s, westerns were a pretty big deal. I’m still trying to figure out why; best I can tell, movies about cowboys tend to drag, featuring long passages with minimal dialogue, and extended close-ups of ugly men hawking globs of tobacco into spittoons. If you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, then I could sort of see the appeal. Of course, if you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, you probably don’t make it to the cinema very often. A basement and a reliable Internet connection are probably your best friends.

We associate westerns with a certain era because at a certain point, Hollywood pretty much stopped making them. You see one trickle out occasionally, but half the time they have some incongruous modern twist, like robot dinosaurs that the cowboys kill with bazookas. Save for the odd throwback here and there, westerns are a dead genre.

Perhaps the same fate will befall the superhero movie.

The two genres don’t have a lot in common at face value. Westerns are slow and sparse; hero flicks are speedy and overstuffed. Westerns are cheap to produce; hero flicks cost more than the gross domestic product of Tanzania. Westerns feature macho outlaws dressed in ridiculous outfits; hero flicks … okay, so they have something in common.

But the main quality they share is that they saturated the market. Since westerns could be cranked out on shoestring budgets, the local cineplex was silly with tales of jug-hatted desperados making a go of it in the rough-and-tumble plains. You couldn’t escape them. They were the cinematic equivalent of mosquitos, only you couldn’t get rid of them with incense and cartons of Virginia Slims.

Superhero movies are complex, big-budget affairs, but they’re prevalent because they make their money back and then some. Google the 50 top-grossing films of all time and a shocking number of them feature protagonists who wear underwear on the outside of their pants. And that’s not even taking into account teenage wizards, lusty vampires or giant blue hominids in loincloths. Assemble all of these odd characters in one room and it’s like the hallucinatory dreams I used to have during puberty.

Full disclosure: I love superheroes. I was a huge comic book nerd when I was a kid, which meant I spent a lot of time indoors and didn’t know any girls. Comics were a window into a giddily absurd fantasyland, awash with primary colors and soap-style melodrama. The good guys got to wear Halloween costumes every day of the year, and the bad guys had absurd names like “Dr. Doom” and “Killer Croc.” Everything was exaggerated and distorted. This is a medium ostensibly run by adults, but clearly their creative imaginations are deeply rooted in childhood; how else do you explain metal claws popping out of someone’s hands, or a man who turns into a big green beast whenever he gets mad? Desert wanderers succumbing to heatstroke have had less vivid visions.

The glut of comic book films over the past decade-plus are tailor-made for people of my generation -- unabashed geeks who crave an adult spin on their childhood indulgences. A lot of these movies actually work, and they owe their success to computers; with digital animation you can take an absurd concept, like Spider-Man tussling with a masked goblin on a flying surfboard, and make it look as real as someone’s front porch.

This is in stark contrast to anything made prior to 1989. I remember watching a Captain America movie that was produced sometime during the early 1980s, and it was like seeing home footage of a mentally disturbed man having a very public nervous breakdown. His supposedly “indestructible” shield bent in the wind like an oversized Frisbee, and his costume seemed stitched together from the full-body onesies favored by small children with Kool-Aid mustaches. In the modern iteration, he comes across as remotely plausible, at the very least inspiring you to suspend your disbelief. Thirty-five years ago, he was a walking, talking cry for help.

Westerns had a pretty good run -- their peak lasted around 30, 35 years, give or take, equivalent to the lifespan of an average sea urchin. If superhero movies are in for a similar reign, then they’ve still got a long way to go. That’s good news for anyone itching to watch Superman and Batman beat the everloving snot out of each other, bad news for those who feel a cape is only appropriate on a magician.

Either way, I’ve got to believe they’ll come a day when these films reach the point of oversaturation. They’re not there yet, given the box office numbers, but there’s only so many times you can tell the story of the Caped Crusader before the audience collectively yawns and starts shopping for garden gnomes on Amazon. Hollywood has become addicted to “rebooting” these franchises -- scrapping continuity, enlisting new writers, casting new actors, and approaching the stories with a fresh angle -- and that’s fine, for now. But there may come a day when even die-hards like me say, “You know what? I’d love to plunk down fifteen bucks to see ‘Batman Adopts a Puppy,’ but maybe I should watch a nice historical drama instead. Is ‘Churchill Eats a Crumpet’ streaming on Netflix yet?”

The day is coming. When it does, who knows? Maybe westerns will be back in vogue by then; like fashion, there’s a chance these things are cyclical. Or maybe genre mash-ups will be the order of the day. Just imagine: cowboys wearing capes and skin-tight leotards. Hide your children, folks.

Air today, gone tomorrow

If you crammed four live kittens into a plastic carrier, cut windows into the sides, loaded it into a giant catapult and sent it careening through the sky, those kittens would probably know what it feels like to fly on one of the major airlines. All they’d need is a pretzel and a dog-eared copy of Skymall.

Just don’t say “dog-eared” around them. They hate that.

Or hey, here’s a better idea: Don’t load kittens into a catapult. Chances are they’ve got nowhere to be. They’re not like we humans, with our burning need to travel long distances quickly. Of all the differences between people and other species, one of the strangest is our tendency to gather in large groups and sit facing in a certain direction. We do it at concerts, we do it at the movie theater, and we do it on airplanes, even though the most scenic thing in front of us on the plane is a shock of brown hair tied back in a ponytail. They should put a window on the bottom of the aircraft and have all the seats facing downward. Bet the crowds at the jetport would thin out in a hurry.

Air travel is an experience like no other. Somehow it manages to be quick, convenient, and a complicated pain in the butt, all at the same time. Sure, you can start a day in Maine and end it in California, but by the time you walk out of the terminal it feels as if you’ve spent nine hours under interrogation from a pinstriped mobster named Johnny Big Hands. And boy, what he does with those hands.

You know it’s going to be an ordeal as soon as the TSA asks you to remove your belt and shoes. The shoes I can understand -- people have used their shoes to smuggle bombs, and bombs are bad. (Just ask Pauly Shore. Zing!) Requiring us to remove our belts seems a bit excessive. Most of us don’t wear full-fledged utility belts, so they don’t seem like prime transporters of contraband, unless someone’s stupid enough to sheath a hunting knife and a couple of grenades. What are we, Batman? Yeah, I know, terrorism and safety and yadda yadda yadda. It just doesn’t inspire a great travel mood when your pants are one misstep away from falling down around your ankles. Next person who laughs at my Salvador Dali underwear gets a stern talking-to.

That’s nothing compared to the waiting, though. You’re advised to get to the airport an hour and a half before your flight, which seems prudent, but once you get your tickets and go through the TSA screening, you mostly just sit. And sit. And then you sit some more. Travel veterans use this odd dead-time as an opportunity to wander the terminal and check out some of the shops, knowing that hours of additional sitting await them on the aircraft. But that can be a trap. If you’re apt to make purchases as a form of entertainment, you can find yourself walking to the gate with 12 extra books in your carry-on and an $8 bagel causing havoc in your gastrointestinal system. Plus, admit it: You weren’t even hungry for that bagel. Richard Simmons weeps for you. And by you I mean me.

Once you’ve settled in on the plane, the quality of the flight can vary wildly depending on your seating assignment. On a recent jaunt to Chicago I was stuck in the middle seat, which is fine if you’re the size of a Keebler Elf. I hover around 6’4” and have the wingspan of a pterodactyl, so assuming the role of sandwich meat isn’t what you’d call an ideal situation. For me, being bookended by two dudes is like squeezing into an old pair of jeans after a week of eating nothing but Cadbury Eggs and cake. All you can do is draw in your shoulders, keep as still as possible, and hope against hope that neither of your aisle mates decides to cut a righteous fart.

Sometimes you get lucky and there’s a video screen installed on the back of each seat. With a complimentary set of headphones you can settle in for a three-hour marathon of “The Big Bang Theory,” which coincidentally is one of the torture techniques formerly employed by federal interrogators at Guantanamo Bay. These screens are a great idea in theory, but in practice they’re a pipeline to some pretty questionable content, considering all the reality shows now in production that revolve around eating or just being weird. You can get access to higher-quality shows and movies, but for a price -- which means it’s possible to pay theater prices to see “The Peanuts Movie” yet still watch it on a screen the size of a spatula.

And of course there’s the disembarking process, which is far from a model of efficiency. Passengers typically grab their belongings and file out row by row, so if you’ve got a seat near the back of the aircraft there’s just enough time to plow through “War and Peace” before your number’s called. If you’re on a jumbo jet, you can teach yourself a new language and read Tolstoy’s tome in the original Russian. In a world run by Willie Wonka, the bottom of the craft would simply open up like a trap door and everyone would fall from their seats into a giant kiddie pool filled with foam. Oompa-Loompas would hand over your carry-on bags and shepherd you to the gate with cattle prods. It’d be a ruder process, but at least you’d make it down to baggage claim before your family files a missing persons report.

But here I am grousing about the miracle of human flight. Even a couple hundred years ago, such a thing would have been inconceivable; put James Madison in the window seat on a nonstop to Philly and he’d probably go insane. As comedian Louis C.K. pointed out, “You’re sitting in a chair in the sky. You’re like a Greek myth right now.”

Like it or not, our current method of passenger aviation is the best we can muster … for now. Still, I’ve grown rather fond of the catapult idea. Think I’ll tinker with that one for a while.