A Real Cool Hand

Life's mysteries start to reveal themselves when you discuss "Cool Hand Luke." It just happens that way. Maybe because Paul Newman was a bad ass. Maybe because one of the all-time great movies is just packed full of an attitude that most of us could use a whole lot more of.

The title scene of the movie, Newman and some other inmates are playing poker. The betting is getting high. People are folding rather than chancing losing. Newman keeps going all in. Wins the hand. When he shows his cards, he had nothing. He bluffed his way through it. His friend calls him out for having nothing. Newman pops a beer and says one of the greatest lines ever spoken on screen:

"Sometimes nothin' is a real cool hand."

I have heard folks complain about the hand, the cards life dealt them. Not third world country poor folks, not homeless folks, but folks who have things in their lives that some would kill for. But more to the point, it's not about the cards you were dealt, but how you play them; what you do with them.

If life is a poker game (and not a box of chocolates) and you get crap cards and fold right off, then you have no one to blame but yourself. Play them for everything you can. Because you know what? Maybe the person with the best hand is afraid to lose, afraid to play it. It's not the cards, it's the attitude. It's what you do with what you've got.

And that got me to thinking, about the cards we are dealt, Life cards. Maybe that's God as dealer's big joke. Maybe we are all dealt EXACTLY the same hand of cards. And we all walk around with them close to the vest, letting only ourselves see them. When if we play them, we learn we don't lose. These are meta cards people, you're not playing for the cash in your wallet.

Newman's attitude in Cool Hand Luke made being in prison an adventure for him and those around him. He didn't mope around and go into a funk. He ate 50 eggs. He boxed the biggest dude there and wouldn't quit. He won a poker game with a nothing hand.

What if we brought more of that attitude to our own lives? What if we had the stones/balls/guts to play our hand to the fullest? We could learn a bit from Lucas Jackson. Play your cards, whatever they are, and what they are likely won't matter. It's in the playing.

The Duality of Man

I've never met Lawrence Kasdan. Prior to yesterday, I'm not sure I could have placed his name right off. At the same time, I can rap with anyone who will throw something like this out there as fodder:

" Most movies are about this same issue -- Grand Canyon is about it. It's about how part of you wants to follow your desires, and the other part wants to do what's right and responsible. And one side is the dark side, and the other is the light side. Every one of us faces it every day. We live certain kinds of lives in the light of day, and at night all our fears come out. That's what most art is about."

Kasdan is a screenwriter. He's written a couple movies you might know: Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Big Chill, Return of the Jedi, The Bodyguard and Grand Canyon to name a handful. Funny, I remember watching Grand Canyon in a friend's room at N.C. State and immediately cruising back to my room with a permanent marker and scribbling a long quote from the movie on the ceiling. Kasdan writes tight, crisp, funny, insightful dialogue that makes his movies work.

But this morning I am more interested in the above quote, which he gave during an interview when asked about writing Empire Strikes Back. The question asked what Kasdan thought when George Lucas told him he wanted to make Darth Vader Luke's father. His answer was that it made perfect sense per the rest of the quote.

I know that struggle--following desires vs. doing what's right and responsible, living one way during the day and another at night--seems like almost daily. I like to get up early and write or run or do stuff that charges the ole soul, yet I also stay up til midnight or beyond far too often, doing nothing productive, watching Road House (not that there is anything wrong with Road House, mind you ;) or any other movie that I've seen before. I'll meditate or do yoga and be completely chill then suddenly feel the need to yell to get a point across or move the get-ready-for-school routine in the morning. I can feel a pull between what I want to do and know I should do for being the actualized self I know I want to be and saying fu-- it and rolling with the gluttonous gang to sate desires.

There have been major points during younger years where the Dark Side (if we're going to talk in semi-cliched Star Wars metaphors) has driven the train and the life trajectory hasn't gone anywhere good (please see St. James at the end, most of N.C. State for me). But rolling with the consequences of my actions then has also brought me to some of the brightest Light. If I hadn't had to roll out of Raleigh and wound up back on the Shore, I would have never been at the Blue Miracle show at the Avalon Theater where I met Robin.

And I am not one to drop high seriousness on any matter, fully subscribing to and living the notion that the fun, the zany, the childlike are prime movers as much as gravity. But when I read Kasdan's interview and come across a quote like that I recognize something of myself in it. It resonates and brings me back to a non-Kasdan written movie scene, from Full Metal Jacket, when Matthew Modine and company have cruised over to Vietnam and Modine, the Joker, the journalist, the Marine, the trained killer is sporting a peace symbol button while he has "Born to Kill written on his helmet. When pressed, it comes to this:

Colonel: "You write 'Born to Kill' on your helmet, and you wear a peace button. What's that supposed to be, some kind of sick joke?"
Joker: "No, sir."
Colonel: "Well what is it supposed to mean?"
Joker: "I don't know, sir."
Colonel: "You don't know very much do you?"
Joker: "No sir."
Colonel: "You better get your head and you ass wired together or I will take a giant shit on you."
Joker: "Yes sir."
Colonel: "Now answer my question, or you'll be standing tall before The Man."
Joker: "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man sir."
Colonel: "The what?"
Joker: "The duality of man, the Jungian thing, sir."

That exchange has stuck with me after one watching and after multiple watching. "I think I was trying to suggest something about the duality of man." Yep, something like that.

From Denzel to the Truth, or Props for props

I'm the dork who notices the books that characters in movies are reading. And if the title or author strikes me as interesting, I'll Google it to find out more. A pathetic practice, sure, but I find books all kinds of ways and movie books have netted me a few keepers.

I'm pretty sure that Matt Damon's intellectual smackdown in "Good Will Hunting" was the first place/time I'd heard of Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States." That's a book that reminds you that there is more than one story to be told around any historical event, that the less told stories are a critical part of getting a more complete picture, and that we rarely get close to a complete picture in history classes growing up.

At the end of one of the X-Men movies, Patrick Stewart as Professor Xavier asks a new group of mutant students if they know T. H. White's "The Once and Future King." As a nine-year-old in fourth grade, I named our Golden Retriever "Morgan" after King Arthur's sister Morgan Le Fay (not so much endorseable as a namesake, but I liked the name ;). Any creative re-telling of the Arthurian legend will get my attention and White's "King" sits on my bookshelf as a keeper--one which is a favorite of my brother-in-law as well.

In the movie, "The Hurricane," as Denzel Washington lies in bed in his prison cell, there is a scene where he is reading "The Awakening of Intelligence" by Jiddu Krishnamurti. JK is not one you'd come across in school, but maybe he should be.

Krishnamurti has become one of my peeps. A philosophical/spiritual seeker who shuns the known/the expected, poo-poos the concept of gurus and won't be spoon-fed anything by anyone. He encourages us to find ourselves and to find things out for ourselves and to learn from our experience in the present; not to be so conditioned by the past that we lose the chance to live, to learn, now, for ourselves.

So that's my Monday morning thought for today. And Krishnamurti's "Freedom From the Known," thanks to a tangential introduction from Denzel and co., now ranks as one of my favorite slim books (124 pages). Feel free to fire back your own slim book favorites, which will perhaps be a post unto itself.