The Sheila Variations

Message to CNN

I have a request.

On a day such as today when we have:

-- 35 dead children in Baghdad
-- the continuing horror in Darfur
-- a volcano about to blow
-- a war going on
-- and various and sundry other big news items ...

I do not need a "CNN BREAKING NEWS" email that Tony Blair has a heart flutter and is getting surgery. I am concerned, yes, and I hope everything is fine, yes, and thank you very much for letting me know ...

but PLEASE. Just so you know where a little small citizen like myself is coming from?? I feel like the world is on the edge of complete and utter disaster. At any moment, the apocalypse could shriek down upon us. We've got floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, Vioxx, suicide bombs, we've got huge scary puppets in Times Square as we speak ...

PLEASE save the emails for emergencies.

There is a history to my annoyance. The last "CNN Breaking News" email I got was to inform me that Rick James had passed away.

I don't need an emergency email to tell me that. I will get the news in my own way, reading the headlines, etc. But if Mt. St. Helens blows?? (Knock wood) THEN you can feel free to shoot me an alarming email.

Thank you very much.

The continuing Muppet story

So yesterday we covered beloved Muppets from the Muppet Show. The discussion over there is probably not over ... it's a gold mine, and we could all keep going.

But today, I would like to ask:

Your favorite Muppet from Sesame Street?

Give reasons. Support your case. (I know there's overlap - Kermit, etc. That's fine. Go with Kermit again if that is where your heart leads you. Cough - JEAN - cough.)

Today in 1955...

Today in 1955... James Dean died at the age of 24. He had made 7 movies, but only 3 where he was "credited".

East of Eden (which basically changed my damn life when I first saw it) was the only one of his 3 major films (East of Eden, Rebel without a Cause and Giant) to be released while he was alive. Strange. No wonder a cult flourishes. Obviously, the man (I should probably say "boy") was very gifted as an actor - but then there was the dying a young and violent death, and to add to that - movies starring him continued to come out a couple of years after he died. It must have been especially impact-ful (in terms of a burgeoning cult) to see something like Rebel Without a Cause, knowing that he had died so young.

When I was a teenager, I saw all those movies. I saw them on late-night television, usually when I was babysitting, and then I would beg, and plead my parents to rent a VCR (member those days??) so I could see them again.

His performance in East of Eden tormented me. It was typical young-school-girl crush stuff, but there was something else. It got me asking questions about acting, about actors ...And even though I was 13, 14 years old - I was the same person then as I am now, so I read the great biography of James Dean, called Mutant King - and read all of the biographies of anyone who had come into contact with him. Natalie Wood, Carroll Baker, Elia Kazan ...

James Dean's twisted-up overly-open nearly-inarticulate brand of acting captured my imagination.

If I had had a blog when I was 14, it would have been all-James-Dean all-the-time.

Now I'm not so sure about him. I used to consider him a "great actor" - but I think there's a huge difference between a "great actor" (say, a Jeff Bridges, or a Marlon Brando, etc. etc.) and a "movie star". Not that he was "just" a movie star. Something else was going on with James Dean.

What I mean by all this is: James Dean was young, neurotic, extremely self-conscious, very shy, bisexual, filled with guilt, a loner, an outsider, may possibly have been a virgin when he died, he was reckless, had kind of a death wish ... Elia Kazan, who directed him in East of Eden called him, years later, a "sick kid". This is not to say that there wasn't magic there, because there OBVIOUSLY was. I can only think of one other person the camera loves as much as James Dean, and that's Marilyn Monroe. It may not be the magic of honing your craft, of being a Meryl Streep type virtuoso - but it is that very special brand of movie magic.

James Dean is riveting. To this day. No wonder his movies last. You can't not watch him. He is so compelling. You want to untwist that pretzel body, and help him relax. (Well, that's a very female response ... most women want to help him relax. He seems so self-conscious.)

His face is unendingly interesting. Yes, it's very handsome too ... but we're talking about what the CAMERA picks up. Plenty of people are handsome, but they wouldn't be magnetic on screen. It's magic, hard to describe. I think it might have to do with vulnerability, a willingness to let the camera read your soul. All the great movie stars have that.

I am not sure now of how aware James Dean was of what, exactly, he was doing. A lot of it was sheer instinct, bravado, and fearlessness. There's a genius there. But I'm not sure anymore that it is a genius for acting. The way Marlon Brando had a genius for acting. The way Bogart had a genius for it. Those guys were ACTORS. In the tradition of Olivier, Spencer Tracy all the greats.

I see James Dean now more in the realm of ... a "behaver". I just made that up.

What he did was, and why he is so INTERESTING (and why other actors, incidentally, were often completely frustrated when working wiht him) ... he was able to behave and let us know that something deep and psychological was going on with him - all without saying a word. He mumbles his lines, he's embarrassed, he scuffs his feet, his hands are jammed in his pockets ... We can't look away. We know that SOMETHING is going on with this poor boy. We can't wait to find out what it is.

Other actors often felt: Jesus, this guy is in his own world ... He's not really here in the scene with me ... he's off thinking about his own demons.

I am not saying this is good or bad. It is just an observation.

But being aware of one's own demons, and being able to show the audience the struggle is different from .... say, a Brando in Streetcar.

Brando, with all of his pooh-poohing the craft of acting, was, in fact, a genius craftsman. He was not just twitching around, showing us his inner torment. Each scene is perfectly modulated, he is in total control of what he is doing, he is able to burst out with a catharsis when Tennessee Williams has written one, he shows us the tenderness, the sexiness, the loutishness, the insanity ... and Brando would never say that he was consciously doing anything (hence: genius) - but to me, Brando at his best was like a great musician.

The craft, the long years of training, have become so internalized - that you see no work at all. All you see is life, on screen.

To my eye, as a huge James Dean fan, that was not what James Dean was about.

He was more un-evolved, more at the amoeba stage of human development.

Elia Kazan (and others) confirm this. James Dean was lucky enough to find acting, and lucky enough to find the roles - the twitchy rebellious youths - that could just LET him stand up there on screen, and not DO all that much, but show us how hard it was to be James Dean. (The last scene in Giant is a notable exception, when he reappears as a broken old man. He's 24 years old filming that scene. It's astonishing. To my mind, his work in that scene gives a glimmer of the truly great actor James Dean could have become.)

But now, since the untimeliness of his death, he remains before us as he was then. Young, boyish, almost pre-sexual, twisted-up, neurotic, sometimes cocky, sometimes shy, always with an inner core of kindness. Think of his kindness towards the Sal Mineo character in Rebel. Or his kindness towards Julie Harris in East of Eden.

And when he let out the torment, the inner anguish that was ALWAYS there underneath, it is so powerful, so raw, that you almost want to look away. It's horrible what is inside this kid. And when it comes out - it's embarrassing. You're embarrassed for him. And yet you weep for him, too. The father in East of Eden, when he refuses the money Cal made for him, and James Dean collapses, slowly sliding down his father's body - letting the bills slip from his hands - anyone remember that scene?? Jesus. The feelings of betrayal, of abandonment, of grief. That underbelly is ALWAYS there, which is why his acting is so interesting to watch. I can't think of him screaming "YOU'RE TEARING ME APART" without feeling tears come up in my eyes - It is so RAW. And he theatrically and courageously draws out the last word, so it sounds like, "APPAAAAAAART" - Only a truly brave person would do that. The guy had no fear. He had plenty of neuroses, but when it came to stuff like that, and it was truthful, he had no fear.

But my lasting image of James Dean, how I always think of him, is in some of the scenes with his whore-mother in East of Eden ... and how you can barely understand what he is saying, and his lean little body is all twisted up, and he's looking down, he's looking up, he can barely sit still ... in direct contrast to her frightening stillness behind the desk. It's not about the WORDS James Dean says - it never is. It's about the BEHAVIOR.

In his shy scuffing-feet awkwardness - we can tell that he is afraid to speak, afraid to articulate, perhaps because of what he might reveal about himself. And yet - and here's his fascination - even though he spends most of his time trying not to reveal himself, using body-language as a smoke-screen, an obscurer - all we can see, as an audience, is a man before us, completely revealed.

He tried to hide. But he could not hide it from the camera.

And so he gave us that gift. A complex tormented gift, to be sure, but a great gift.

A quick note

I have begun to read Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World - and am absolutely captivated. I'll be posting more on it as I go along.

For someone like me - I'm not a scholar, but I've performed in some of these plays before, and I'm a total language-FREAK... it's a perfect book. Greenblatt treats Shakespeare's plays like a code to be cracked, yes ... As in: what can we learn about the Bard from what he wrote about, how he wrote about it, and what he DIDN'T write about?? Let's invesitgate his language, his wide frames of reference, what we know about his life ...

But it doesn't make the mistake of treating the plays ONLY like a code to be cracked.

The plays stand alone, in all their greatness, as works of art, and I don't believe that they should be treated as Shakespeare's alternate means of writing his autobiography. The plays are not just puzzle pieces to be put together. That kind of analysis strikes me as very unimaginative.

There are some things in life, in history, that will remain mysterious, and un-knowable. How does a genius like Shakespeare's emerge? We can guess, we can speculate - and all of that can be great fun - but when all is said and done, what really matters is that it DID emerge. And we may never REALLY know where this guy was coming from, how he REALLY felt about his wife, his father ... and that's okay. That's okay, because we have the plays.

Stephen Greenblatt, to my taste, has found the perfect balance in all of this. He doesn't have anything to prove. He's not trying to defend a thesis. (Example: Shakespeare obviously worked at a law office at some point because of his knowledge of legalistic matters, and how frequently he uses legal tangles in his plays ... So now let me find 5,000 quotes to support my thesis.) So much of the scholarship surrounding Shakespeare is in that vein. And that's okay, too - it's all very interesting, and furthers the discussion. But I like Greenblatt's style. He never ever forgets that there is so little that we do know, there is little that is certain ... and yet ... we have those damn plays. Shining across the centuries. Let's look to the plays.

I am learning SO MUCH.

I'll post more later.

Mr. Darcy's dark alpha charm - hell yeah

Sorry, everyone - this post is a bit of a mess. I'm working through my thoughts on the matter ... and I'm trying to work it through in writing, in public.

An interesting article by Cherry Potter about the fictional character women most want to date: good ol' Mr. Darcy, from Pride and Prejudice.

Not to be a total cliche, but I'd definitely have to say that I wouldn't turn Mr. Darcy down. I think it would be fun to spar with that arrogant know-it-all. (But oh, isn't he sexy?)

Let me just state where I'm coming from and let the chips fall where they may: I'm a modern woman, blah blah. Yes. But I like alpha males, shall we say. Real alphas. Guys who are so alpha they would never describe themselves as "alpha". This is my milieu. Whatever. I'm not embarrassed about it. It's just what I'm attracted to. I could sit around and analyze it (and believe me, I have many times), but when you get right down to it: You like what you like. It just IS.

Who can say why? I don't care.

I am not part of a 21st century trend. (Or who knows, maybe I am, I probably am ... but I don't like the type of guys I like because it's trendy, for God's sake.) I don't behave the way I behave because a modern trend tells me to, or because Ms. magazine tells me what kind of relationship I should want, or what kind of life I should want ...

So that being said, here's my quibble with the article about Mr. Darcy: The question the article poses is:

How can women, modern feminist women, say they want a patriarchal dominant dude like Mr. Darcy?

What message is this Darcy fixation sending to men? On the one hand, women say they want men who are emotionally intelligent, sensitive, flexible, who enjoy sharing equally and are fun to be with. But these same women are swooning over a fictional character who is the epitome of the dominant patriarchal male. No wonder men are confused.

Now let me say that I completely get this. I understand the complaint men have. I have seen it at work around me! "Why can't you be more sensitive??" "Why didn't you beat that guy up?" Etc. I have had many a conversation with male friends about what the hell women want ... etc. etc. I get it. And I sympathize. It's very frustrating.

But I am here to tell you, as just one person, just one individual woman, that - well, I get tired being lumped in with "modern feminist women". Especially because the word "feminist" has been hijacked by shrieking anti-male sex-phobic lunatics, and I want nothing to do with them. I'm not anti-feminist - at least not its original form - but feminism has shrieked off the rails.

Feminism has done horrible things to men. (Or - SOME men. Not all men. It's the men who were whipped into submission, that I'm talking about.) And I don't like it. I NEVER HAVE. I like MEN, man. Okay? I appreciate MEN. I appreciate women, too, and probably feel more affinity with women because ... er ... I am one ... but I love MEN. I could list all the stuff I love, but I'll spare you.

I can understand why men have a filter for women of: "Jesus what the hell do they want?" But I don't like being "lumped" in with all those "girls".

However: I can put up with it (to a point). If men can put up with having to be held accountable for every act of masculine cruelty from the beginning of time (even though they had nothing to do with it), then I can put up with being held accountable for the shrill nastiness of modern feminism (even though I had nothing to do with it).

But still. I will defend myself against "lumping". Heh. That's what I call it. Being "lumped" in, unfairly, with the anti-male crones.

Again, I feel the necessity to apologize for my rambling. I realize I'm not being clear yet. Sorry.

I just read the article about Darcy and thought to myself: Of COURSE women are attracted to Mr. Darcy. Of COURSE. Yes, okay, maybe he's manipulative, maybe he wouldn't be all that fun to LIVE with ... but ... we're talking about attraction, we're talking about chemistry, pheromones, etc ... We're talking about Discovery Channel stuff here, the attraction of the female for a dominant male. That's it. Pure and simple.

One of the problems, I think, is that - Okay, let me try to express this. I know what I'm getting at, but I'm having some difficulty.

Potter makes some very good points (stuff I have thought myself, after finishing one of Jane Austen's books), like: What happens after these mismatched people are married? Would a Mr. Darcy ever give up that glowering moody arrogance? Could he?? What happens after "The End"?

I disagree with Potter when she writes: "Austen leaves us to assume that her heroine's marriages are happy despite portraying very few idyllic marriages in the rest of her texts." That's a bit of a shallow reading, in my opinion. If you look at the last sentences of Austen's books (I'm thinking of the last sentence of Sense and Sensibility) and they are MASTERPIECES of ambiguity. You THINK that you are reading: "And then they settled down and all lived happily ever after" -- but if you pick apart the sentences, there is so much more there. If you have a Sense & Sensibility lying around, pick it up and read the last sentence. It's filled with negative tenses, it's hilarious, you can hear her backing away from the commitment of a happy ending - you get the sense that even though Jane Austen is writing a happy ending, inside she's thinking: "Jeeze. Best of luck. You people sure need it."

So I do like Potter's discussion of that, as well as her taking a closer look at just what it IS about Mr. Darcy that women find so attractive...It's her CONFUSION about this that I find ... well ... confusing. Or at least, a little bit irritating.

Here's what I'm trying to say - and sorry it's taken me so long, and I probably will go back and edit this later:

The women's movement (at least the shrill anti-male manifestation of it) has hijacked how we are allowed to talk about this stuff (men and women, the battle of the sexes, chemistry, sex: you know, all the FUN things in life!!!) and they have hijacked it so completely and so successfully that people like Cherry Potter are now baffled at a simple matter of CHEMISTRY.

Potter writes: " But as modern women with our wealth of relationship experience and all the benefits brought about by feminism, we should know better. "

I can't stand that attitude. Sorry. "We should know better." Than who? The millions of women who came before us? Now please, I am not saying I want to go back when women didn't have choices. When women could NEVER have lived the kind of free and independent life I am living right now. I don't want to go back to a time when inter-office memo sheets were ONLY printed with "Mr", because it was assumed that women would never be in the office. But to think we "know better" than ... oh, nature? Feminism can't stop that. Feminism can't hold that back.

Camille Paglia has been saying for years (her entire book Sexual Personae was a rant against this attitude) that modern academic feminists have forgotten NATURE. They hate nature, they hate that their bodies are MADE for natural purposes ... they want to shut nature out. In doing so, they shut out all the other good things: art, humor, sex, fun. Oh yeah - and they shut out men, too.

No, thanks.

To me, sexual attraction, and yearning towards a Mr. Darcy, is just a simple matter of nature, chemistry. Something that's been going on for millions of years.

I don't see any contradiction between being a strong and independent woman and yearning for a strong and independent man. For me, it is the only way to go. Now that's just me - I'm not saying I'm right. An alpha guy is not for everybody, and ... well, obviously I'm not really a shy and shrinking wallflower, so any pairing up with a dominant male will obviously bring its own set of problems. (Hello?? Howard Hawks showed us he'd rather have THOSE problems than any other kind!!) I guess I'm the same way.

I don't think I'm done talking about this yet. I still don't think I've expressed it well - but I wanted to get the bare bones down. Take it for granted that I will be going back and editing this post.

Muppet Glory

The post below gave me the following idea for a discussion:

Who is your favorite Muppet - and WHY. PLEASE get into character analysis, and character interpretation, etc.

Let's NOT include Sesame Street Muppets for this go-round. I want to hear the Muppets people love from the Muppet Show and all the Muppet movies.

And most importantly - I really want to hear WHY. If you love Gonzo, gimme the reasons.

"That wild pig"

A wonderfully written and comedic analysis of Miss Piggy's character. It made me laugh out loud.

She's aggressive, and can go from polite and dainty, "ahem, excuse moi--ha, ha, ha" to just plain demanding "move it you big jerk" in only a sentence. She's really the original Adam Sandler. She's got that uncanny ability to go from 1 to 10 in intensity; the woman has some serious RPM. She's no stranger to hard work: first starting out, she struggled as an actress, even taking a role as a model for an advertisement for pork, the other white meat. To this day, she still prefers not to discuss beyond, "Moi was upset, but moi got over it." With that positive attitude, she landed herself a frog. Miss Piggy is my dramatic romantic counterpart. "Tell Kermie I love him" she'll whisper with the toss of her hair and an outstretched arm.

But there's more. So much more.

(via Steve Silver - who just got mentioned in the New York Press' "Best of Manhattan issue", 2004. Congrats, Steve!)

Full disclosure:

I am a huge Conan O'Brien fan. If any of you don't like Conan, please don't comment.

JUST KIDDING. bwhahahahahaha

Anyway. I love Conan, there's something in his juvenile (yet intelligent somehow??) brand of humor that just GETS me. He seems like just a real guy having real conversations. I like him a lot.

So ... then comes this news. Jay Leno is passing the torch to Conan.

Here's another full disclosure moment: I like Letterman over Leno. HOWEVER, I remember when Jay Leno used to be a regular on the David Letterman show, and he would wear leather biker jackets, and Dave loved him, and he was absolutely friggin' hysterical.

I find Leno's Tonight Show humor, though, to be ... well, not humor at all. I can watch the Tonight Show the entire way through and not laugh once.

So ... I fear that the same watering-down will happen to Conan. That ... his special brand of anarchic juvenile STUPID humor, which I find so charming, will somehow disappear ... to please the masses.

Is this a valid fear? What do we think?

Is there anyone else who had the same disappointing experience with the comedian Jay Leno has become?

Even more important: any Jay Leno fans out there, who can tell me what I'm missing?

For my taste: the comedian Jay Leno used to be (subversive, dark, caustic) is no longer in existence. I never felt like The Tonight Show and Jay really were a good fit ... and so Jay molded his personality (perhaps by demand) into the confines of the show. And he sacrificed what was special and funny about him.

Please, Conan. KEEP YOURSELF YOURSELF. DON'T CHANGE!!

This is sure to drum up some good old fun controversy

70 Best Rock Male Vocalists. 70!!!

I scanned it very quickly (basically looking for Chris Cornell, because I'm a lunatic, but I also genuinely feel that that guy has a phenomenal voice, one of the best to ever grace the air-waves - and if there was a re-make of Jesus Christ Superstar, I would LOVE to hear him sing Judas' songs). Chris Cornell is on there ... thank the Lord. Many of the other greats are there as well, with some notable exceptions.

Go take a look. And much fun will be had by all. (Oh, and if you want to leave a comment - you have to scroll down a bit further than you might think. I got confused. People are already shocked that Steve Perry is first ... so that gives you some idea of what is going on over there.)

(via Dan)

I am psychic or something

Not only that - but I am SO HAPPY, and so TOUCHED.

Today, I received (just now) a gift of 2 books from one of you people out there. (Unfortunately, because of screen names, etc., I don't know who my benefactor is!! So I am going public with my thank you note.) Sometimes it's the random kindness of strangers that really stabs you in the chest. (In a positive way, I mean.) I opened the gift and tears flooded my eyes. I am so TOUCHED!

I am also, frankly, psychic.

The first one I opened was John Locke's Two Treatises of Government. The only reason I know the principles therein is because the Founding Fathers used his ideas so extensively - so I put the book on the Wish List, just so I could have the actual SOURCE material around.

Thank you, thank you!

And secondly, I am so THRILLED - but the second book was Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World.

Whoo-hoo! I just mentioned it earlier today and then 2 hours later, it arrived. I felt like I was an 8 year old on Christmas morning opening up these gifts.

I cannot WAIT to dig in.

And to the reader kind enough to think of me, and to send me these gifts: thank you, thank you, thank you.

It's put a huge goofy smile on my lips!!

The traps in Shakespeare's sonnets

Yet another good review of Will in the World, by Stephen Greenblatt. Will in the World is a new literary analysis of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, which has been getting universally interesting reviews. I am very excited to read the book. I linked to another great article about it a while back.

I especially found this section of the Chronicle review interesting, the one that discusses how Greenblatt deals with those pesky sonnets people have been speculating about for centuries:

Though Mr. Greenblatt's carefully argued suppositions bridge many gaps in his narrative of Shakespeare's life, his approach to Shakespeare's 154 sonnets is more restrained. These poems have aroused the most fevered speculation about Shakespeare's life for centuries, as literary sleuths have attempted to glean Shakespeare's sexual preferences and the identity of his lovers from the poems.

"I'm reckless in many places in the book," says Mr. Greenblatt. "But I'm careful with the sonnets because that's where I think he's setting the most traps." Some of the sonnets, he says, may have been written to persuade Henry Wriothesley, the young earl of Southampton, to marry against his personal inclination not to do so. The story behind other sonnets remains hidden behind what Mr. Greenblatt calls "a translucent curtain."

Mr. Greenblatt says that reading the sonnets as sexual autobiography is "the great temptation. This is the place in Shakespeare's work in which he uses the word 'I' and uses the word 'Will.' But it's precisely here that Shakespeare is at his most elusive, guarded and cunning in terms of how much he's willing to reveal and how much he's holding back. The closer we get to the word 'I,' the more concealed he appears to be."

Mr. Wells [Stanley Wells, another Shakespearean scholar and author]also points to the dangers of reading too much of Shakespeare's life into the work. "In the absence of some of the documents we would like to have" in writing about Shakespeare's life, he says, "we turn to the work to try to discover things."

The problem is trying to grab hold of biographical certainties in works of art that are so creatively oppositional. "Shakespeare had, supremely, the ability to hide himself," says Mr. Wells. "To enter into the minds of the persons in his plays and to present, sometimes, absolutely conflicting points of view."

Fabulous. Shakespeare had the ability to hide. To reveal as well as obscure. To grab hold of "certainty" seems pointless - can we not just revel in what he accomplished with his pen?

MUST. READ. THIS. BOOK.

Don't read Where's Waldo. It is an extremely subversive book.

It's Banned Books Week. Otherwise known as: The Week That Reminds Us of How Great it is to Read What We Like When We like, and How Sad It Is That There Are Such Fearful Boneheads In the World.

Below, find a list of "the The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000".

I do have some questions: challenged from where? To be in a school curriculum? Why would Nancy Friday's book about women's sexual fantasies be on a school curriculum? Or - do certain groups want these books to be banned everywhere? Public libraries, book stores, etc.?

Many of these books are old favorites of mine, life-changing books, books that are almost like old friends, as opposed to the printed word. I'll bold the ones I read. (Thanks for the idea, Llamas...)

[Heads up: I don't even think Mein Kampf should be banned. I am against banning books. Completely. Normally I don't do this, but I'll say it now: If you are pro-banning-books in any way, please don't comment. I don't want to hear it.]

Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier GREAT book. Robert Cormier is scarily good. I'll never forget reading After the First Death - I probably read it too soon, it's an upsetting book - but I experienced true soul-growth reading it. Soul-growth doesn't always feel GOOD. Robert Cormier's a great writer.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain Fantastic book. One of my all-time faves..
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck Oooh, what a scary dangerous book.
Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
Forever by Judy Blume
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger grrrrr
The Giver by Lois Lowry
It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
A Day No Pigs Would Dieby Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Sex by Madonna (I actually agree that this book should be banned. Heh, heh. No, just kidding. The book, however, sucked, and the production values were absolutely amateurish. The damn thing fell apart almost immediately. However - the crappy book is obviously for ADULTS. Not kids. Why be so afraid of it?)
Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle One of my favorite books ever written.
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous (an anonymous diary of a drug-user. I read it waaaayyyyy too early - I was probably 12, or 13 - there's a lot of sex in it, hallucinogenic drugs, etc. And she ends up dying in the end. The book BURNED itself into my brain. I probably shouldn't have read it, but it sure made me fear hallucinogenic drugs and getting in with the wrong crowd and succumbing to peer pressure. It served its purpose.)
Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak Why on earth would this lovely crazy book be banned?
The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
The Goats by Brock Cole
Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
Blubber by Judy Blume
Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
Final Exit by Derek Humphry
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras (Now I haven't read this, but it pisses me off that it's on here. I'm seeing red right now. God forbid pre-teen girls should find out what is happening to their bodies.)
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Beloved by Toni Morrison
The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
The Pigman by Paul Zindel One of my favorite books ever written.
Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
Deenie by Judy Blume
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) (This is pornography, erotica. I've read it. But ... it's obviously an adult book. It has nothing to do with kids. Why would anyone want to keep an ADULT from reading it? Grrrr)
Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
Cujo by Stephen King
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
Ordinary People by Judith Guest what????? This is a lovely book, heartfelt, well-written. Is it because it deals with suicide? Why? But also - this is a book for ADULTS. Why ban it?
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras (Again: see my comment above about the same book only for girls. GRRRRRRR)
Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume This book is a great book, a classic of childhood. Not only is it a good story, but it prepared me, emotionally, for getting my period. I think it prepared millions of girls of my generation for the transition into adulthood. When my period came along, I knew what was happening to me not only because of my mother telling me about it, but also because Judy Blume wrote a whole book about it. God bless Judy Blume.
Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
Fade by Robert Cormier
Guess What? by Mem Fox
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Native Son by Richard Wright
Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday Yeah, I have a copy. A lot of women I know do. It's just one of those books passed around - a classic of the genre. Again - this is obviously a book for adults. Why ban it? What is WRONG with these people?
Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Jack by A.M. Homes
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
Carrie by Stephen King
Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume Wonderful book. My favorite book of Judy Blume's actually.
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
Family Secrets by Norma Klein
Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
The Dead Zone by Stephen King
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
Private Parts by Howard Stern
Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford Uh - what?? Could someone please explain to me the rationale here?
Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
Sex Education by Jenny Davis
The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell Bwahahahaha! I LOVE this book! It was actually read to us in 4th grade. Guess we couldn't get away with that now!
View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Just seeing the name "John Cassavetes"

... gives me chills. There's something about it, for me. "Cassavetes". What John Cassavetes, the film director, represents to me ... what kinds of doors he opened up in my mind ... his collaboration with Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, many others ... Those movies, those movies he directed ... I freakin' LOVE them. Not everybody in 'my' field wants to become a Lindsey Lohan, or even wildly outrageously famous and HOT. Some people look to those like Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes' genius wife) as their idols. I'm one of those people.

This article is a gold-mine. John Cassavetes, renegade film director (and also actor - of course - Dirty Dozen, Rosemary's Baby, etc.), and his wife Gena Rowlands (otherwise known as "Sheila's Favorite Actress") are discussed here, in great depth - because of the release of Cassavetes' films in DVD.

There's a guy out in California - an ex-boyfriend - who was my partner-in-crime in terms of the Cassavetes obsession. We had a brief and intense relationship, and I always think of him when Cassavetes' name comes up. I loved that guy. Anyway, I read the article and immediately wanted to pick up the phone. But I've lost track of him ... sadly.

However - I am sure he has seen this article. I am sure of it. And I am sure that when he saw it, he thought of me, too.

So in a funny way, we are connected.

If you don't know Cassavetes' directing work, take a look at this article. It gives some great background.

It was his fierce idealism and relentless optimism that helped make him a legend. He was also difficult, unyielding, chaotic - He drank like he was on a mission of obliteration - He aged almost as though it were on speeded-up film, he lived such a wacked-out life. But those MOVIES. Especially Opening Night. That one is my favorite. One of my favorite movies ever, actually.

The last paragraph of the article made a lump rise in my throat.

The hostility Cassavetes inspired has always puzzled me. Like Orson Welles, he didn't always play well with others and he didn't make all that much money for the movie industry. The other reason for the discomfort, I think, is that he called himself an artist. Many critics prefer their art with subtitles or not at all. Cassavetes dared to believe that art and movies were not mutually exclusive, and he never gave up on the movies' capacity to move us, to make us feel, to connect us to the world and to other people. It says something about our age that it actually comes as a shock to hear him talk with such frank sincerity about his films as art, which he does in a French television interview included in the Criterion box set. For him, art was never a dirty word; it was a reason for living, the animating pulse.

God. I need to pull out some of his old films again. I have them all on VHS.

The trial continues

Bill McCabe lists the charges.

As a Han Solo fanatic, I find the second felony especially disturbing.

Keep up the good work, comrade.

Have you ever ...

Found this over at Ocean Guy's.

You bold-text the ones you have done. Some really fun ones in there (and jeez, some really personal ones too) - but whatever. Gave it a shot.

Update: I've added commentary to some of them. Couldn't resist.

01. Bought everyone in the pub a drink
02. Swam with wild dolphins
03. Climbed a mountain Mount Sunapee ... it's not really a mountain mountain ... but whatever. I am counting it.
04. Taken a Ferrari for a test drive
05. Been inside the Great Pyramid
06. Held a tarantula. ABSOLUTELY NOT. I will have nightmares tonight just for the suggestion.
07. Taken a candlelit bath with someone
08. Said 'I love you' and meant it
09. Hugged a tree
10. Done a striptease
11. Bungee jumped
12. Visited Paris
13. Watched a lightning storm at sea
14. Stayed up all night long, and watch the sun rise
15. Seen the Northern Lights. Camping with the boyfriend in Minnesota, by this little secret lake. Deer everywhere, no other people ... we sipped whiskey and watched the northern lights. One of the most spectacular and spiritual moments of my whole life.
16. Gone to a huge sports game
17. Walked the stairs to the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
18. Grown and eaten your own vegetables My parents had a garden when we were kids - and we used to go out and pick the tomatoes, the cukes, etc., for the salad - but I didn't grow the stuff myself.
19. Touched an iceberg
20. Slept under the stars
21. Changed a baby's diaper
22. Taken a trip in a hot air balloon
23. Watched a meteor shower
24. Gotten drunk on champagne
25. Given more than you can afford to charity
26. Looked up at the night sky through a telescope
27. Had an uncontrollable giggling fit at the worst possible moment More times than I can count, starting with church when I was a kid.
28. Had a food fight
29. Bet on a winning horse
30. Taken a sick day when you're not ill
31. Asked out a stranger Good story. But I'll never tell it.
32. Had a snowball fight
33. Photocopied your bottom on the office photocopier I had this horrible job in Chicago, at a real estate office - these guys were SCUMBAGS - but all the women in the office were absolutely hilarious irreverent goddesses. We became very good friends. One infamous day when the bosses were out of town, all the office-girls ordered in lunch, and we also ordered in frozen margaritas ... Before you know it, there goes the photocopier.
34. Screamed as loudly as you possibly can
35. Held a lamb
36. Enacted a favorite fantasy
37. Taken a midnight skinny dip Many many many many times. I'm from the Ocean State, after all.
38. Taken an ice cold bath During the 1995 heat wave in Chicago. I took a couple ice cold baths a day.
39. Had a meaningful conversation with a beggar
40. Seen a total eclipse
41. Ridden a roller coaster
42. Hit a home run Dad - did I? I'm assuming I did. I was in Little League. I was a great hitter. Not so good outfielder.
43. Fit three weeks miraculously into three days
44. Danced like a fool and not cared who was looking
45. Adopted an accent for an entire day Er - how 'bout for 2 weeks? Last year I was in an Irish play, too - with real Irish actors, I was the only American, so I needed to work my ass off to sound as Irish as them. I spoke in a brogue for 2 weeks. It paid off. Met an Irish guy after one of the shows, and the second I opened my mouth and spoke with my own voice, his jaw dropped to the floor. He said it never even occurred to him that I wasn't Irish. A compliment indeed.
46. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors
47. Actually felt happy about your life, even for just a moment
48. Had two hard drives for your computer
49. Visited all 50 states
50. Loved your job for all accounts
51. Taken care of someone who was shit faced
52. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
53. Had amazing friends Always. I've always had a great crowd.
54. Danced with a stranger in a foreign country I did a jig with an 80 year old man in a pub off O'Connell Street in Dublin on the eve of the millennium. This most definitely counts.
55. Watched wild whales
56. Stolen a sign
57. Backpacked in Europe
58. Taken a road-trip
59. Rock climbing
60. Lied to foreign government's official in that country to avoid notice
61. Midnight walk on the beach
62. Sky diving
63. Visited Ireland
64. Been heartbroken longer then you were actually in love
65. In a restaurant, sat at a stranger's table and had a meal with them
66. Visited Japan
67. Benchpressed your own weight
68. Milked a cow
69. Alphabetized your records
70. Pretended to be a superhero
71. Sung karaoke I love karaoke. Recently I actually sang "Lose Yourself", karaoke-style. I got to be Eminem for 2 minutes. The glory!! I also realized that DAMN does that boy have breath control. I could barely keep up.
72. Lounged around in bed all day
73. Posed nude in front of strangers
74. Scuba diving
75. Got it on to "Let's Get It On" by Marvin Gaye
76. Kissed in the rain
77. Played in the mud
78. Played in the rain
79. Gone to a drive-in theater I saw Empire Strikes Back for the first time at a drive-in, with all my cousins. That movie changed my life.
80. Done something you should regret, but don't regret it
81. Visited the Great Wall of China
82. Discovered that someone who's not supposed to have known about your blog has discovered your blog
83. Dropped Windows in favor of something better
84. Started a business
85. Fallen in love and not had your heart broken
86. Toured ancient sites
87. Taken a martial arts class
88. Swordfought for the honor of a woman
89. Played D&D for more than 6 hours straight
90. Gotten married
91. Been in a movie
92. Crashed a party
93. Loved someone you shouldn't have
94. Kissed someone so passionately it made them dizzy No one has ever said to me, "Wow, I feel so dizzy" ... but the effect is the same, so I'm bolding this one.
95. Gotten divorced
96. Had sex at the office
97. Gone without food for 5 days
98. Made cookies from scratch
99. Won first prize in a costume contest
100. Ridden a gondola in Venice
101. Gotten a tattoo Er - I think we covered this one last week!
102. Found that the texture of some materials can turn you on
103. Rafted the Snake River
104. Been on television news programs as an "expert"
105. Got flowers for no reason I have no memory of the moment, but I'm sure it happened. Boyfriend was a flower-giver-type.
106. Masturbated in a public place long long ago
107. Got so drunk you don't remember anything
108. Been addicted to some form of illegal drug
109. Performed on stage
110. Been to Las Vegas
111. Recorded music
112. Eaten shark
113. Had a one-night stand
114. Gone to Thailand
115. Seen Siouxsie live
116. Bought a house
117. Been in a combat zone
118. Buried one/both of your parents
119. Shaved or waxed your pubic hair off
120. Been on a cruise ship
121. Spoken more than one language fluently
122. Gotten into a fight while attempting to defend someone
123. Bounced a check
124. Performed in Rocky Horror
125. Read - and understood - your credit report
126. Raised children
127. Recently bought and played with a favorite childhood toy
128. Followed your favorite band/singer on tour
129. Created and named your own constellation of stars
130. Taken an exotic bicycle tour in a foreign country
131. Found out something significant that your ancestors did
132. Called or written your Congress person
133. Picked up and moved to another city to just start over
134. ...more than once? - More than thrice?
135. Walked the Golden Gate Bridge
136. Sang loudly in the car, and didn't stop when you knew someone was looking
137. Had an abortion or your female partner did
138. Had plastic surgery
139. Survived an accident that you shouldn't have survived.
140. Wrote articles for a large publication
141. Lost over 100 pounds
142. Held someone while they were having a flashback
143. Piloted an airplane
144. Petted a stingray
145. Broken someone's heart
146. Helped an animal give birth
147. Been fired or laid off from a job
148. Won money on a T.V. game show
149. Broken a bone
150. Killed a human being
151. Gone on an African photo safari
152. Ridden a motorcycle
153. Driven any land vehicle at a speed of greater than 100mph
154. Had a body part of yours below the neck pierced
155. Fired a rifle, shotgun, or pistol
156. Eaten mushrooms that were gathered in the wild
157. Ridden a horse
158. Had major surgery
159. Had sex on a moving train
160. Had a snake as a pet
161. Hiked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon This is also a funny story. My boyfriend and I were hiking down, and it was on the day the "trial of Clarence Thomas" began, and we had been listening on the radio, kind of obsessed - and we almost RESENTED the fact that we were going to take this gorgeous hike, because it would keep us away from the radio. Ridiculous.
162. Slept through an entire flight: takeoff, flight, and landing
163. Slept for more than 30 hours over the course of 48 hours
164. Visited more foreign countries than U.S. states
165. Visited all 7 continents
166. Taken a canoe trip that lasted more than 2 days
167. Eaten kangaroo meat
168. Fallen in love at an ancient Mayan burial ground
169. Been a sperm or egg donor
170. Eaten sushi
171. Had your picture in the newspaper
172. Had 2 (or more) healthy romantic relationships for over a year in your lifetime
173. Changed someone's mind about something you care deeply about
174. Gotten someone fired for their actions
175. Gone back to school
176. Parasailed
177. Changed your name
178. Petted a cockroach
179. Eaten fried green tomatoes
180. Read The Iliad
181. Selected one "important" author who you missed in school, and read I'm still doing this - it's a favorite pastime. There are still authors I've "missed" ...
182. Dined in a restaurant and stolen silverware, plates, cups because your apartment needed them
183. ...and gotten 86'ed from the restaurant because you did it so many times, they figured out it was you
184. Taught yourself an art from scratch
185. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
186. Apologized to someone years after inflicting the hurt
187. Skipped all your school reunions
188. Communicated with someone without sharing a common spoken language I had an actual conversation with someone who spoke not a word of English and she only spoke Farsi - and it was on the PHONE - and ... I cannot describe how it happened - but we communicated just fine.
189. Been elected to public office
190. Written your own computer language
191. Thought to yourself that you're living your dream
192. Had to put someone you love into hospice care
193. Built your own PC from parts
194. Sold your own artwork to someone who didn't know you I'm counting writing and acting as artwork.
195. Had a booth at a street fair When I was 10 years old, my friend Betsy and I pretended we were palm readers, and we had a dark spooky booth at the school fair. It was probably 110 degrees inside that booth. We also had no idea how to read palms. But we wore cool gypsy costumes.
196: Dyed your hair
197: Been a DJ
198: Found out someone was going to dump you via LiveJournal
199: Written your own role playing game
200: Been arrested

Fabulous...

... a fabulous writing game.

Care to play??

Beware of amateur drunks

I was waiting for a cab last night, coming home after the Red Sox game, which I watched at Dempsey's in the East Village. I stood in line in Hoboken, with a bunch of other drunk Yahoos. Anyone who has spent any time in Hoboken on a Friday or a Saturday night will know what an absolute madhouse it is.

I mean, hey, whatever, let the kids have their fun ... but the AMATEUR drunks are what I'm talking about. It's like the entire town turns into a raging frat party. Vomiting people on the sidewalks, fights breaking out, sloppy sloppy sloppy drunk staggering ... Whatever floats your boat. It just ain't my scene, and it never was.

Truly dangerous bar fights break out, because it's a post-college-guys-who-can't-control-their-liquor social scene. At around 2 or 3, when the bars start to close, is when the vibe on the streets starts to get a bit scary. If you're a woman walking down them by yourself, I mean. Washington Street transforms into a gauntlet of nicely dressed absolutely wasted white boys - hostile wasted white boys. They travel in packs, large groups of roving drunk post-frat-boys, who have not hooked up with someone yet. Their mission of sex for the night was not accomplished. And now they're too drunk for a hook-up anyway, but that doesn't stop them from getting in the goddamn face of every woman unfortunate enough to be strolling by them.

If any of you people have ever hung out in Hoboken recently, you will so know what I am getting at. The chicks in Hoboken aren't much better. Drunk, sloppy, they all look like rejects from the first round of casting for The Bachelor.

Again, whatever. It's a social scene - for a specific age and place .... everyone is in the 21 to 27 range, everyone's having fun ... I mean, that kind of sloppy drunk stuff never appealed to me, even when I was 24, whatever, I was in a whole different place during that age-range. I was hanging out with Chicago boys in pool halls, going to improv shows, and laughing like crazy.

Basically, I like a guy who can hold his liquor. A sloppy out-of-control hostile drunk makes me freakin' nervous.

Call me unreasonable, but whatever.

Anyway, long story longer.

A guy got so in my face last night, as I waited for the cab, and got so in my personal space, and he kept saying the word "c***s***er" - RIGHT AT ME - that I finally hauled off and slapped him across the face. As hard as I could.

WHAP.

Please keep in mind that this is not some insane homeless drunk. This is a cleancut guy wearing khakis, a Polo shirt, with a nice haircut.

Here's how it went. I was standing in line, waiting for a cab. It was 2 am. A bad time to be in Hoboken on a Saturday night, if you're a chick, all by yourself. You have to pretend you're wearing a walkman, and you have no peripheral vision, in order to avoid all the SHIT you get tossed at you. This guy obviously hadn't gotten laid yet, despite an entire night of carousing - and so all his hostility towards all the women who had probably turned his sorry drunken ass down over the night - came right out at me. I knew it had nothing to do with me, not really, but whatever. I'm not gonna be a fucking therapist for your precious pain when you get 2 inches away from my face and say "Do you like that word? C***s***er?? Huh?"

He was with a group of friends who were also WASTED - but one of them had some semblance of manners still surviving beneath the flood of alcohol - and when the guy got in my face like that, the friend with the vague memory of manners intervened, drunkenly. Turned on his friend and said, "What the hell are you doing, talking to her like that? What is your problem?"

But he wouldn't stop - he was on a mission to humiliate me and frighten me, in order to pay back all the other bitches who had rejected him. Hostility like his has a scent. It's not logical. It's an animal response.

Right up against my nose, wafting alcohol-breath into my face, saying "c***s***er" at me ...

I said, immediately, firmly, "Please back off - gimme some space... " This was like a red flag to a bull.

He said the c word one too many times. It wasn't just a word, coming from him. It was ... an intimidation tactic, maybe? He wanted to see me embarrassed?

I don't know. And I don't care.

So I slapped his face. I mean - Jeez. I was coming back from a really fun night, with my friend Jen, my sister Siobhan, my friend Nate ... we had hung out, watched the Red Sox, laughed so hard we cried, had great conversations ... and now I come home and have to deal with this nonsense?

The slapping made QUITE a scene.

I'm 5' 4". This guy was probably 6' 2". A big tall sloppy young drunk.

The look on his face after the slap was one of the most beautiful and satisfying things I had ever seen in my life.

But I wasn't going to hold a grudge. Once I punished him, I was done. I was still trembling, though, from ... fear ... adrenaline ... whatever ... I turned and watched the line of cabs advance. Strangely, I felt like crying. I think it was just because a confrontation like that is upsetting, in general.

The friend with the manners was kind of beside himself (in a drunken sweet way) over how his friend had acted, and said, "Please ... go in front of us ... take our spot in line ..."

The slapped-man stepped back to let me pass. He looked .... horrified. In a deep-down "oh God I am so out of control" way. He remembered his fucking manners, he remembered that I am a goddamn person sharing space with him on the sidewalk, and not a holograph of all the women who said "No" to him over the night.

I stepped in front of the group. My knees were trembling.

A cab pulled up, and I got in. Gratefully. It already had taken on this strange unreality ... did that really just happen?

The second I got into the cab, I heard a fight break out - between the three guys I had just left.

The kind one with the manners started yelling at the guy I slapped, "Jesus Christ - dude - you are so - what the FUCK -"

Slapped-dude was drunkenly defending himself, "What the fuck is your problem ..."

"You just ... you don't get it ... SHIT, you do this every time ..."

Blah blah.

As my cab pulled away, I saw guy-with-manners shove slapped-guy - in a manner which suggested it could escalate into a big ol' fight.

But I was safe now, on my way home, to my lovely curtains, and my comfy bed ... leaving behind the chaos of the sloppy amateur-drunk social scene of Hoboken.

It felt good to slap that guy. But still. It took me about half an hour to stop shaking.

Simple pleasures

Girlie post filled with domestic details ... :

My mother and I had been talking about getting nice curtains for my main room for about a year now. One of those: "We've got to do that ..." But then finally - last month, we went to pick out fabric, after I had measured the windows. The project had begun. She and I went together, browsed, asked questions, I agonized over my choices, I tried to picture living with the fabric, day in, day out ...

I had a fantasy for my room. My room has pale yellow walls. It has a gorgeous hard-wood floor. I have a small Oriental rug, with dark colors - dark blue-black, deep maroon ... The ceiling is high, and old-fashioned - it has a pattern on it, like those old tin ceilings. It's a white painted ceiling. Then I also have a huge ceiling fan. On one wall I have a large window, with a nice wide sill. This is where I live. I have a small kitchen off to the side, but I spend all my time in that main room. I've got dingy blinds in the window, leftovers from the former tenant, completely uninteresting.

I'm not into sunlight, really. I don't like bright colors, they give me a headache, and make me nervous, and I like my room to feel a wee-bit cave-like. Cozy. Like I can shut the world away, and be safe and warm in my humble abode. Basically, what I'm saying is - billowy sheer white curtains are not my style.

So I picked out this heavy dark fabric - a deep dark chocolate-y brown, with a Paisley pattern in it (but not a Paisley pattern that would give you a migraine ... it's more like the memory of a Paisley pattern, swirling through the dark brown). I just liked it. It reminded me of a dream. I could see it ... the dark brown in contrast to the pale yellow walls ... I knew I could live with it. I loved it.

My dear mother became a Tasmanian devil and made me the curtains in a matter of 2 days.

She and my dad drove down yesterday to bring the curtains, and to hang out ... spend a bit of time together ...

It's in these circumstances, these moments of simple pleasures ... that I realize, in my heart: There are moments, indeed, when curtains = love. I look at my gorgeous curtains and I can see the love that my mother has for me.

My curtains make me ridiculously happy.

My dad brought his tools. And he went to work setting up the hooks, the brackets, measuring, marking, drilling, etc. You know, the "guy" side of curtain-hanging.

Meanwhile, my mother and I are busy huddled over the curtains, clipping on the little hooks, and handing up tools to my dad if he needed them. The "girl" side of curtain-hanging.

It's in a moment like that when I realize: my dad with the drill gun = love.

It is not SAYING "I love you" that matters at all. It is what you DO. What do you DO?

My dad was busy at work, doing his manly part of the project, and my mother was showing me the basket she had made for me - well, she didn't make the basket itself - but she lined the basket with the same material as the curtains. To put on my dresser, perhaps.

So there's all these projects happening in my small space.

And I felt kind of overwhelmed by love. You know? I felt lucky. That's what I felt.

It was beautiful. Beautiful to have them down in my apartment, we talked, we laughed (once the curtains were up) - we sat in my little kitchen, we caught up a bit. I kept peeking back into my main room at the unbelievable GORGEOUSNESS of my new curtains. The deep dark brown folds, hanging next to the pale yellow walls ... It changes the feel of my room. It feels cozy, enveloping ... warm.

Thank you, Mum, thank you, Dad ... for ... well, for everything. I woke up this morning, made coffee, sat in my little cozy chair, and stared up at my beautiful new curtains for, no word of a lie, 20 minutes.

Reveling in the simple pleasure of it.

12 to 5

Say it with me. 12 to 5. Doesn't it sound nice???

Happy - Sad

The game last night. Well. Whatever. It sucked. Big ol' bummer.

However - I watched the game with the great Bill McCabe - and I finally met 2 longtime readers: Mr. Bingley and Dave J. These men are mythical in my mind. Dave J! Mr. Bingley!! So it was great to put faces to the names, and to hang out, drink beer, eat burgers, and watch the Red Sox. I was HIGH afterwards. (High on happiness, I mean.) I smiled like a goofball during my commute home.

My friend David (who did a brief stint blogging here) showed up at the beginning of the night - and joined our crowd for a time. Much fun. Then he left.

Then Mr. Bingley had to leave ... and then my sister Siobhan showed up. A table of musical chairs.

The bar was absolutely jam-packed. Going to the ladies room was a 25-minute affair. Everyone wearing Red Sox caps, shirts ... an absolutely fanatical atmosphere. Love it.

Conversation flowed, fast, furious ... as always. Even though we had all just met for the first time.

It was funny because I was heading down to the Riviera Cafe (the bar for Red Sox fans, an enclave in the middle of Yankee-Land) - to meet 2 men whom I had never met. Bill showed up maybe 20 minutes after I did, so I knew Mr. Bingley would be waiting for me, by himself, somewhere in that bar ... so I wandered through the bar ... saw a man standing alone, reading a big book ... I tentatively approached. Not sure ... not sure ...

And then I said, shyly, "Mr. Bingley?"

heh heh heh

Of course it was him, and of course he was standing there reading a huge biography of Alexander Hamilton.

My own kind!!

But then again - all of you people who read me are my kind. Curious, intelligent, funny, well-read, passionate about certain things, knowledgeable, generous with that knowledge ...

I just want to say, flat out: I had a wonderful time with you fine gentlemen ... you are just as nice, as funny, and as interesting as I imagined ... and despite the defeat of the Sox at the last freakin' second (this team! Jesus!!) - it was a great night.

I hope there will be more to come.

Message to Theodore Dalrymple:

I have enjoyed many of your columns. Some of them have made me want to stand up and cheer. You're a good writer, at times an energetic and inspirational writer. I will continue to seek out your stuff, and I will continue to read your work.

That out of the way, your article discussing why tattooes are no longer exclusive to the "proletariat" class, and the trend of middle-class folks getting tattooes now - even WOMEN are getting them now - strikes me as way over-blown. There is a trend, of course there is, but ... so what? Why are you so worried about it?

You sound, frankly, disturbed by the tattoo trend. You have a lot of worries about what it means. You have a lot of opinions. You say that one man's stated reason for getting a tattoo (it makes him feel "special") is "infinitely sad".

Time for the Redhead to take the gloves off, Ted. Who the hell are you to say what is or is not infinitely sad? Get off your freakin' high horse.

People have their own reasons for doing things, and you may think they are half-crocked, but I beg your pardon: who the hell cares what you think? Who appointed you the arbiter of what is or is not "infinitely sad"?

Chill out, dude. What do you care who gets tattooes? Why does it have to mean some big huge thing? Some cultural moral trend, some "oh NO, what is happening to our culture" thing?

Full disclosure: In case you haven't guessed, heh heh, I have a tattoo. Dalrymple seems especially disturbed by the fact that women are getting tattooes now ... and not just on body-parts hidden by clothes. He can't get over THAT one. I got my tattoo for my own reasons, I knew exactly what I was doing and why ... and all of this I am sure Dalyrymple would find "infinitely sad".

He only finds it "infinitely sad" because HE would never get a tattoo for those stated reasons. HE would never behave in such a way.

Ick. I hate that kind of moral judgment from on high.

So here's my message to Ted:

Sometimes you just have to suck it up and say: "You know what? I am old , and I do not understand the younger generation. I have to admit that I am completely un-hip. I don't get it. But ... oh well. Guess I'm just out of tune with the times."

Don't make it mean some big thing, like society's going down the toilet, oh my God, stop the clock, stop the clock, why can't we go back to a time when the younger generation didn't do such incomprehensible things???

Er - what time would that be, I wonder?

Bravo

You don't normally find insightful and spot-on commentary of the actual work of actors and acting in movie or theatre reviews. It's usually general pass/fail stuff, like: "So and so gives a good performance", etc. Which is fine - but sometimes, sometimes, a reviewer will actually start to talk about a certain performance, and what he thinks the actor actually DID to make the performance happen ... If the reviewer has some understanding of the craft of actors (like Ebert does, like all the good ones do), the review can sometimes illuminate just what it is about a certain actor that we like, love, or hate. Whatever. I love it when a reviewer takes the time to "go there" - it doesn't happen often.

I came across this review of Julianne Moore's new movie The Forgotten - which I don't think I will be seeing. It sounds pretty bad.

However, Manohla Dargis opens the review with one of the most insightful observations about Julianne Moore that I have ever read.

The actress Julianne Moore has one face as transparent as water, the other as opaque as a mystery. With her milky complexion and lapidary features, Ms. Moore can seem alarmingly fragile, as breakable and translucent as fine French porcelain. It's a face that suggests vulnerability, femininity and an almost otherworldly ethereality.

But there is a tough side to the actress, too, a core resolve that can harden her beauty into a mask, and it is in the space between her perceived delicacy and this mask that Ms. Moore does her best work. For filmmakers who know how to put her faces into play, the actress can work wonders, as she did for the director Todd Haynes in "Safe" and his wrenching melodrama "Far From Heaven."

it is in the space between her perceived delicacy and this mask that Ms. Moore does her best work

Damn. What an observation. It strikes me as utterly true - an apt description of the talent of Julianne Moore.

Anyone see Safe? Tremendous and creepy performance by Julianne Moore - it might be my favorite. I found the movie so disturbing, though, that I don't think I could see it again. I was "off" for days after seeing it.

For you electoral college fanatics:

Here's an excerpt from the latest book I'm reading, Susan Dunn's Jefferson's Second Revolution: The Election Crisis of 1800 and the Triumph of Republicanism.

To orient you, this excerpt is from the beginning of the book, where Dunn sets up her story. Thomas Jefferson is surreptitiously running for president from the privacy of Monticello, pretending he's not campaigning at all, getting all of his news from Madison... basically pretending that his eyes were lifted towards loftier philosophical goals, and he would not get mucked up in politics.

Remember, in those early days, it was seen to be very VERY bad form to WANT to hold the highest office in the land. Campaigning meant that you obviously admitted you wanted to have a ton of power, which people feared, and campaigning also meant that you, in your heart of hearts, didn't think you were really up to the job and had to spend a lot of time convincing people. (Heh heh. I sure wish THAT attitude would return into vogue. There is nothing more disgusting to me than a career politician telling me why I should vote for him, why his vision is better than the other guy's.)

Not that Thomas Jefferson didn't feel all those things. He is, to my taste, one of the most infinitely fascinating and contradictory men this country has ever produced. We will NEVER get to the bottom of this man.

John Adams, by contrast, was an open book. He left behind journals, personal letters that could fill a library ... He ranted, raved, whined, he was completely open with Abigail about his inner thoughts and insecurities, and so he shared all of that stuff with her. By sharing himself with her, we get to know him. We get to see his concerns, his humanity, his fears, his yearning to be with her again.

Thomas Jefferson had no such confidante. It was not in his nature, perhaps? I don't know. The journals he kept were basically financial records, and farming and gardening records: "Sweet peas bloomed today. Bought a harpsichord." (With money he didn't have! But that didn't matter - he would meticuously write down the price in his records) There was no introspection in his language, no hint of an inner life ...

There's a VERY funny story about John Adams and Thomas Jefferson taking a country-trip through England, during their sojourn there ... John Adams wrote in his journal eloquently and emotionally about wanting to kiss the door-stone of Shakespeare's house, he tells Abigail he wishes she had been there, he raves about the unbelievable beauty of the country, the gardens, and how he hopes that America can someday achieve such cultivation. Thomas Jefferson's journals are all: "Paid 2 pence for wine. Found an inn. Paid 3 pounds for a room. Went to the stables. Good horses. Book shop. Bought 49,000 books." Whatever. Blunt, financial, boring.

Side by side, these accounts are HILARIOUS. There is no mention in Jefferson's journal about John Adams, their conversations, their enjoyable evenings in the inn, what they talked about ...

And yet, when Thomas Jefferson decided to put pen to paper for a purpose - literally nobody could touch him. Perhaps it was that his gift for the English language, and for expressing deep and inspirational ideas (and rage - don't forget that rage in the Declaration of Independence) only manifested when it was in the cause of an ACTION, as opposed to a moment of reflection.

By that I mean: Thomas Jefferson was the typical example of a man who used his pen as a sword.

John Adams used his pen to work through his problems, his feelings, his grievances ... he used his pen to ward off loneliness, to feel close to Abigail ... You read those letters now, and you can FEEL the presence of John Adams, sitting beside you, in all his complexity and warmth.

So Thomas Jefferson sat on his mountaintop, pretending to not campaign, pretending to be unaware that an election was going on ... but this was, in essence, a pose.

And now on to the excerpt:

...Federalists were not as enchanted by the Virginian's [Thomas Jefferson] courtly manners, pensive eyes, and gentle lilting voice. His intellectual stature and distinguished public service -- author of the Declaration of Independence, member of the Virginia House of Burgesses at the age of 26, wartime governor of Virginia, delegate to the Continental Congress, minister to France, secretary of state under George Washington, vice president under John Adams -- left them unimpressed. Perhaps in the little republic of St. Marino Jefferson's political "experiments" could be tolerated, observed Charles Carroll of Carrollton, but in America the Virginian's "fantastic tricks" would most assuredly dissolve the Union.

Carroll and his patrician Federalist friends not only wanted to remain at the help, from which they had so ably steered the country toward stability and prosperity, but they believed that they were entitled to remain there. Clinging to the myth of the virtue of the elite few, they were convinced that only they possessed a deep commitment to public service and an unerring sense of the common good. How could the nation survive and flourish without them, "the wise & good," asked Alexander Hamilton, one of the Federalist leaders. "Obedience and submission to the powers that be," a Pennsylvania congressman declared, "is the duty of all." In private, the Federalist governor of New York, John Jay, was just as blunt. Conflating power and property, he candidly confided to a friend that "those who own the country ought to participate in the government of it."

Oddly, the pedigreed, patrician Jefferson was one of those "owners" of the country -- wealthier and from a more distinguished family than Federalists like Adams and the self-made Hamilton. And yet Jefferson sought to challenge their hold on power -- their "strident exclusivism," in the words of historians Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick -- and even challenge the legacy of the great George Washington. The father of the country and his closest disciples, Federalists believed, had created and bequeathed to America an orderly society and well-functioning institutions. "Our government is as free as it is capable of being -- the country as happy as a government can make it," they crowed. "What more do you want? Will you grasp at a shadow, and lose the substance?"

What principles guided Jefferson and his so-called Republicans? The Jeffersonian brand of republicanism, Federalists scoffed, simply meant "an essential want of integrity, and an unprincipled pursuit of whatever promotes the interests, or gratifies the passions of the individuals." In short, Republicans were motivated only by base "self-interest" whereas Federalists were proud to be anti-individualists, committed to the notion of the common good of all...

Surely in a democracy in which the people were sovereign, the Republicans, though political outsiders, had the right to criticize and oppose those who governed. And yet, some Federalists proposed that "a few BOLD STROKES" be used to silence all opposition to government. But Republicans refused to be silent. They offered voters a forceful platform and an aggressive agenda for change. They blasted John Jay's recent one-sided treaty with Great Britain in which the English had made no concessions to American claims. They attacked Adams and the other Federalists for passing the repressive Sedition Act in 1798, designed to smother opposition to the Federalist regime. They denounced the standing federal army, warning that it could be used to quash domestic dissent. They condemned the dispatching of federal troops in 1799 to crush a tax revolt -- Fries's Rebellion -- in Pennsylvania.

Republicans pounded home their message: a simple government, low taxes, state militias instead of a standing army, repeal of the Sedition Act, and free schools. In the South and the burgeoning West, they attracted voters by offering security for slavery, access to new unsettled lands, and markets for their agricultural products. In New England, their democratic message appealed to voters with aspirations of upward mobility.

Most of all, Republicans criticized the Federalist "monocrats" for upholding the rights of the few and ignoring the rights of the many, for catering to the social and financial elite, for disdaining the people and democracy itself. Even Federalist Governeur Morris, the former minister to France and now the junior senator from New York, conceded that his Federalist colleagues had given Republicans reason to believe that they wished to establish a monarchy. [Remember Abigail's warning to her husband John, in re: Hamilton: "That man could be a Bonaparte.] The Republican's affinity for inclusion contrasted sharply with Federalist elitism.

The election, declared Massachusetts Republican Elbridge Gerry, was a battle between the people and a party "utterly devoted to a monarchical system."

If you think the country is polarized NOW, you oughta go back and look at some of the rhetoric from the election of 1800. It was sheer apocalyptic language. 1776 and the long years of war following was a living memory for everyone ... The union was fragile, fractious, exhausted. At any moment the grand experiment could crumble. There was a deep suspicion and hatred of "parties" and "factions" (I know how they feel) - and yet, inevitably, two sides emerged - the Federalists and the Republicans - with two different philosophies, plans of action. And each side was utterly convinced that THEY were holding the true legacy of the American Revolution.

Not only that but each side demonized the other to the point of absurdity.

There is, as well, that old question: what is the more important event, in terms of the creation of this country and its spirt: The Declaration of Independence or the creation of the Constitution? The country was split in its opinion on this question.

There were those who believed (and Jefferson was one of them) - that a state of perpetual revolution was good for the nation. Nothing should be set in stone. All authority was to be distrusted - ALWAYS. He even wanted laws to not be continuous - to be up for review from administration to administration. John Adams thought he was wacked - there had to be SOME continuous culture in this country, you couldn't just re-write the laws every 4 years. But Jefferson felt that revolution "cleared the air". People feared him for this reason. Abigail Adams feared him for this reason. He seemed blood-thirsty (in his lofty Monticello way), too eager for violence, he thought the revolution in France was great. It took him a while to perceive that things had taken a chilling and horrific turn in France, because he was so against monarchies, he was so against kings and queens of any kind.

I really have no conclusions here. It's a topic I'm hugely interested in, obviously. Something I enjoy pondering.

1905 - 2005

Next year will be the 100th birthday of E=mc2. I posted about it before.

I tripped over another article about Einstein this morning (thank you, Arts and Letters Daily, couldn't live without you!!) - and wanted to pass it on.

The article begins:

Everybody has a good day from time to time, but what happened to Albert Einstein in 1905, when he was just 26 years old, was extraordinary: He wrote five powerful papers in one year — any one of which would have been worthy of the Nobel Prize, laying the foundation for the modern pharmaceutical industry, quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. He even came up that year with the beguilingly simple formula — E=mc2 — that has done so much to transform our century.

26 years old? Jeez. When I was 26, I was hovering over random jukeboxes in Wrigleyville, drinking beer, and flirting with blurpy Chicago boys like a manic Lorelei.

I love this section on what happened to Einstein, while working in that patent office - the job that gave him the necessary time and leisure to reflect and question:

Two beliefs kept Einstein motivated in those years at the patent office. The first was that there were great truths waiting to be discovered. He felt, as he once put it, like a little boy standing in a big, dark room lined with books with titles that were hard to distinguish — but with enough concentration and humility, a few of the waiting pages could be read.

His second motivating belief was that the universe was simple, and the same for everyone. If I, standing still, view a light beam as moving at a certain rate of speed, I have no right to say that this is the "true" rate, and that what you, running along beside the beam, might measure about its speed is wrong. Rather, there had to be a way to make any two such views be seen as just one aspect of a deeper, common truth. From that reasoning — and with just a few lines of high school algebra — much of relativity, as well as the formula E=mc2, could be deduced.

"great truths waiting to be discovered"

How utterly exciting.

If poop stories offend you ...

then do not click on this post. Also, if poop stories offend you ... I have to admit I wonder: what the hell is wrong with you???

The post is entitled: "A Story About Someone Else's Ass", and it is by one of my favorite bloggers, Dooce.

Possibly not work-safe, because you may roar with laughter at your desk, and then have to explain why you are laughing so loud.

Oddly enough -

I didn't see the game last night - but it sounds like it was quite a nail-biter. Man.

My friend David came over last night (you may remember him from his guest-blogging days here). We hung out in the kitchen, we drank wine, we talked about life, love, baseball, alpha males, acting, finding the work you love, his kids, our families ... I gave him a rough draft of something I've been writing for about a year now. He's read other versions of it, and I really like his eye. I like his perspective - he can see what I'm TRYING to do, and his comments help me see where I am NOT accomplishing it. We talked about our mutual friends, all of their issues, swirling dramas, neuroses ... (all with love, of course) It's always good to catch up with David. It's also nice to play hostess once in a while.

He's an insane Red Sox fan. As is his wife.

So the phone rings late in the evening. David immediately knew. "The game's over." We both froze. Which way did it go? What would the news be? David murmured as he reached for his phone, "I bet they won." (Because, obviously, if they had lost, Maria would have slunk off to bed, crushed and defeated. At least this was David's hopeful - and correct - guess.)

He picked up. And Maria, on the other end, gave him (and me, by proxy) a play-by-play recreation of the game.

Maria would tell him what happened. And he would turn to me and repeat it.

At one point, David got this very serious look on his face as he was listening, and he said, "Keith Foulke scares me, man."

Indeed.

Obsession Central: Cary Grant

This may be the most embarrassingly obsessive post I have ever done. I had a blast.

Archie Leach (later Cary Grant) arrived in New York City as a boy of 15, having joined the Bob Pender acrobat troupe. They performed at the Hippodrome (God, to have been in New York in those days!!! WHAT I would give to have a time-machine and go back!!) The Bob Pender troupe was a big hit at the Hippodrome, so they took the show on the road, traveling all over America. Quite an education for a feisty trouble-making (and troubled) Cockney boy with no other prospects. The troupe came back to New York City, and were preparing to sail back to England to tour in Europe.

Archie Leach and a friend decided to stay behind in America. Of course they were minors, and their parents had had to sign contracts with Mr. Pender, giving Pender guardianship of their children. Archie Leach knew this, and knew that no one would give him permission to stay on by himself - so he (nobody quite knows the rights of the story) lied to Mr. Pender, making up some bull-shit story about why he would stay on in America temporarily, and that he would soon return to join the troupe.

Pender was fooled by whatever bull-shit story it was, and gave Archie Leach some money for his promised return home.

Archie Leach pocketed the money, and stayed on in America, using the dough to live on for a couple of months. He had NO intention of ever returning to his father in England, to his old life. Bob Pender was angry at being tricked, and also robbed - and wrote a whiny beleaguered letter to Elias Leach (Archie's father), saying, basically: "Your son has lied to me. He said he would return. I gave him money for the passage, and now I see he's taken that money and isn't coming back... blah blah blah."

Elias Leach promptly wrote to his rebellious teenage son, now shacking up in a boarding house all the way across the ocean with the other acrobat-runaway, and said, "I'm proud of you whatever you do. I will take your word over Mr. Bob Pender's any day ... I hope you keep safe and healthy - be a good boy ... "

Paraphrase, obviously, but the gist of it was: Go. Make your fortune. Be a good boy.

And so Archie Leach, who had one suit and an indecipherable Cockney accent, started his career. Which began very randomly. He walked on stilts on the boardwalk ... he and a couple other friends formed a tumbling troupe, and they traveled through America with it ... Archie started getting cast as "the straight man" to stand-up comedians. Basically, he would just stand there, and ask the questions which would set up the ba-dum-ching jokes. Cary Grant's later words on comedy, and the rules of comedy, are fascinating. It's a science, it really is. "Straight men" are often highly under-rated, but without them - there would be no laughs. George Burns was a "straight-man" to Gracie for half a century!

There are some great stories about his early poverty-struck hustling days in New York City. He was an odd bird, unplaceable: he was over 6 feet, and had that face. But there were things which didn't fit: he had a Cockney accent, he was an acrobat, and he had a tendency to laugh so hard that tears streamed down his face. He wasn't suave, not in those days. He also had this kind of strange ramrod military-esque walk - which was just how he moved, and how he walked til the end of his days. He used it to great comedic effect in Bringing Up Baby - you think it's an act, but it wasn't - that was really how the guy walked.

So yeah, there was the cleft chin, the black hair, the gorgeous-ness, his height - but because of all the other stuff (his stiff physique, his accent, his playful sense of humor) - it was difficult for him to get jobs. At least acting jobs, where he had to speak. His personality was too rowdy to be crammed into the small box of most leading-man roles. Cary Grant would become one of the first actors to blend leading-man sex appeal and comedy (I would even venture to say he is still one of the only ones who has been able to pull such a thing off). Normally, the romantic lead in movies is kind of a drip, and it's usually the best friend who is the wise-cracking funny one, the character actors. So Archie Leach/Cary Grant was a character-actor in the body of a leading man. Now it all makes perfect sense, because he became a huge star, and everything seems inevitable in retrospect, but when he was 18, 19, trying to get jobs, he had a rough time.

Archie Leach knew he had to re-create himself. He didn't want to be pegged as a British actor. So he consciously got rid of his accent, and yet - he somehow didn't American-ize himself. It's a strange accent, mercurial, a chameleon - You can project onto it whatever you want. It's English, it's not English, it's not quite American, it's ... what the hell is it?? It's Cary Grant's voice. It is a sheer invention.

Fascinating.

Of course, at the time, Archie Leach was just trying to wrench his own voice into something more presentable, more hire-able. And now: his voice is one of his defining characteristics. But it began as a survival technique: I can't speak in my normal voice, I will never work, I have got to change that voice!

He and a couple friends decided to give Hollywood a shot. California, and its weather, its heat, its blew skies, blew the English boy away. He decided: "I want to always live, from now on, where it is warm." And he did.

He did a screen test. He had no acting training. His experience was of the vaudevillian variety, he had no idea how you had to DO LESS with the camera. The guy was a quick study, though. Any time anyone gave him a tip in those early days, he would assimilate it quickly into his bag of tricks. He forgot nothing.

An older actor said to him, "Don't befriend the leading ladies. They are your competition. Make friends with the character actors. They're the ones who will be generous, and they're the ones who know everything about acting."

In those early Archie Leach days, he looked like he had just rolled out of the English music hall. Nobody knew what the hell to do with him. The second he started talking, with that in-between accent, the leading-man expectations went out the window.

One of the people who saw his screen test wrote notes about him: "Very handsome. Odd accent. His neck is too thick."

But slowly ... he started getting jobs, doing movies. He changed his name to Cary Grant, at the insistence of the studio.

The jobs he was getting, however, did not match the inner life. That's what I find so damn interesting about this actor, in particular. The LOOKS which are so strikingly handsome ... are almost a shield. Nobody could perceive the ability that this actor had for comedy, nobody saw how he had a gift for absurdity. They just saw the handsomeness. If he had been a kooky-looking fellow, it would have been no problem.

However: kooky-looking character actors are a dime a dozen. But a physical comedian who looks like Cary Grant?? You could probably count them on one hand.

Mae West always claimed she discovered him, and that she saw him hanging out on the studio lot with a bunch of other extras, and said, "If that man can talk, I'll have him."

Cary Grant, always the gentleman, never spoke badly of anyone, he never answered the question: "Who was your favorite leading lady", etc ... but he did have some choice words for Mae West in regards to this, which he only spoke about much much later:

"She did not discover me. She likes to think she created me, pulled me out of the crowd ... Nothing can be farther from the truth. I had done 8 movies by that point, I wasn't just an extra. But Mae West was never in love with the truth. She was a true original, and yes - she did give me some great roles."

In the 1933 film She Done Him Wrong (which I watched last night), Cary Grant plays the pious missionary-worker who meets Mae West in the chaotic crime-ridden music hall right next to the mission. He looks so damn YOUNG in the film. I mean, he must have been in his late 20s, but still - there's something unformed in him. Something soft. He also is obviously wearing makeup, some eyeliner, some lip color - like Rudolph Valentino did, like all male actors did in those days. Cary Grant hated that male-movie-star-with-makeup look so much from his early films that he kept a perpetual suntan for the rest of his life so that he would never have to wear makeup on screen again.

It's in this old film that Mae West says the very famous (and famously misquoted) line: "Why don't you come up some time and see me?"

She says it right to Cary Grant, the pious missionary worker who is trying to reform her.

Cary Grant is obviously cast in the film just to look gorgeous. The film is through the perspective of Mae West ... and so we look at him as SHE looks at him - like a piece of meat. HE'S the sex object in the movie. She's like the man, and he's like the woman. He's objectified, we watch her snarling at him with desire ... and he's strangely passive (until the totally hot last moment of the movie when he leans in to kiss her, saying, in a suddenly purposeful way, "You bad girl ..." Grrrrr) - But up until that moment, she is the leader. She pursues him. He tries to reform her, tries to talk to her about her soul ... she, of course, bats him off with those classic one-liners.

Like he says to her: "Haven't you ever met a man who could make you happy?"

She purrs, "Sure, lots of times."

The things about him which would later become trademarks are in evidence in this early film: - the semi-crankiness of his delivery (he seems constantly on the verge of becoming irritated), the purposeful almost military way he had of walking, how damn good he looks in a suit, and how - when the time comes for him to turn on the sex - he can do it like no one's business ...

It's just that nobody really noticed all of this yet. Nobody was capitalizing on it, exploiting it. Nobody saw how SPECIFIC this guy really was. How he was NOT just another leading man.

Mae West just thought he was hot. Everything could have ended there for Cary Grant. He was NOT just hot, and when he was cast as JUST THE HOT GUY he is not all that convincing. Because - he's too cranky, he has too many hard edges, he has the potential for having a dark side ... "The hot guys" are not supposed to have all that complexity. But he did.

It would take George Cukor, who directed him the next year in Sylvia Scarlett to take the reins off of this odd trans-Atlantic duck - and basically say to him: "Do whatever the hell you want to do. If it's too much, I'll let you know, and we can pull it back - but feel free to do whatever you want to do. You know this character better than I do. GO."

The difference between Cary Grant's acting in She Done Him Wrong and Sylvia Scarlett is startling. And exhilarating, too. It's exhilarating to watch a break-through. A break-out. The films are one year apart but he might just as well have been 2 different actors. In a way, I guess he was.

Cukor said years later, "It was in Sylvia Scarlett that he found the ground beneath his feet. He was liberated. It was one of the most exciting things I had ever seen."

And really, that's all I have to say for today. But you know what? I could keep on writing in this vein FOREVER.

Ac-cent-uate the Positive

Bambino's Curse lists 10 reasons why all Sox fans shouldn't jump off a cliff. Just got a great email from my friend David (who guest-blogged here a while back) saying the same thing. Ah, not to worry. I'm not in despair. We're used to this drill over here. Besides, my emotions only last in their pure forms (anger, sadness) for about 10 minutes. My emotions don't exactly MORPH into other forms, it's more like they TRANSMOGRIFY.

Blogger Birthdays

Bill McCabe and Steve Silver both had birthdays in July. They've become friends of mine, so I checked out their Amazon Wish Lists, wrote down a couple of titles, and then headed off to the book store. (I wanted to give the gifts in person).

Many of Bill's titles had to do with hating the French, n'est ce pas. So it was tres funny: I was standing at the information desk at the Barnes & Noble, holding a piece of paper, saying: "So ... do you have 'Fuck the Frenchies'? No? You don't? How about 'Wow, I Really Hate France'. Not that one either, huh? Hmmm...I don't suppose you have 'The Streets in Paris Are Lined With Elms So the Germans Can March in the Shade' then ...Last title: Do you have Sweet Sweet Surrender?"

I gave up on the French books, and said, "How about Crisis of Islam by Bernard Lewis?" (A great book. Highly recommend it. I recommend anything written by Lewis.)

That one they had. As they showed me where to find it, I was laughing to myself at ... the image I must have made. A litany of French-hating books ... and then, switching course bluntly: "Okay, then, gimme Crisis of Islam and let's call it a day."

For Steve, I had another list - so after I found Crisis of Islam I went back to the information desk, and said, "Hi. It's me again. Do you have the book Terror and Liberalism?"

hee hee hee

I felt like a LUNATIC. And these were BIRTHDAY presents!

And only with bloggers - beautiful passionate intellectually curious bloggers - could you buy Crisis of Islam and Terror and Liberalism for birthday presents, and be greeted with big hugs, and excited, "Thank you"s. I LOVE that.

Light

Thank you, all, for your helpful suggestions and your support through my hours of darkness. The power came back on last night at 11:30 pm. I didn't realize how addicted I was to ice water until I had ice-trays filled with lukewarm water in my freezer. When the power came back on, I was sitting in my main power-less room, with tea lights and candles EVERYWHERE, and I had bought a 15 foot extension cord which I stretched from the TV into the kitchen (where there was power) - and was blissfully watching I Was A Male War Bride. I didn't have ice water, no, but I had Cary Grant. Life was good.

And I had pretty much spent the entire day yesterday outside (well, except for when I stopped off in a bar in Hoboken to watch the Sox) ... but other than that, I was OUTSIDE, in the glorious sunny windy autumnal day, with the Hudson gleaming green, the city gleaming silver ... everyone out, on skateboards, with dogs, with bikes, a soccer game. I sat on a bench by the Hudson for an hour or so, drinking ice coffee, and reading Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture (yes, I am still working on it. It's a VERY good book - it's just that military history is a bit new to me, it takes much concentration for me to GET what he's talking about at times - but still - I love it.) Then I meandered about, bought candles, bought stuff to give myself a facial, had some phone calls, walked, walked, walked, up hills, down vales, through the wastes of Mordor ...

I must have walked 10 miles yesterday. It was great.

Where the hell is my hate mail?

I am laughing OUT LOUD reading this post from Steve Silver. Just go read it. It is TOO FUNNY. Here's the background: Steve picked up on my sadness that Romantic Depot had come to town.

So Steve posted about it - and he got hate mail from the manager of the store. An email rank with horrible spelling and grammar. Too freakin' funny.

I want hate mail! Dammit! (Oops. I am gonna be sorry I posted this.)

Oh, and here's a small adendum to my original post (for those of you who have no idea what I am talking about: My favorite video store was taken over by "romantic comedy" succubae and I was bummed about it):

I have since learned that Romantic Depot is actually a chain. And their deal is "movies for couples" - which is a euphemism for soft-core porn, apparently. Does that mean ... er ... every Red Shoe Diaries ever made, or...? Emmanuelle 1, 2, 3, 4, and the horrific 5? I can't rent Vertigo there, but I can rent Bush Pilots 3?

I walked by there today and saw a huge sign in the window: COUPLES WELCOME! And member how I described their new design, with the rug and the fish tank? All that is now gone - I peeked in, and I saw shelves and shelves filled with sex toys. Romantic Depot's thing is carrying a huge selection of porn in the back, stocking up on the naughty lingerie and lube, and then saying to unwitting new customers, "We focus on romantic comedies."

Now, weirdly enough, I lived in Hoboken long enough to remember what was in that spot beFORE my favorite video store Take 3, and it was a ... "novelty" store. Don't know what to call it. The kind of stores that line West 4th in the Village. Porn videos, sex toys, and lube. It was ALWAYS empty (the one in Hoboken, I mean. The ones on West 4th are always packed. Or ... er ... so I've heard.)

So now I know what Romantic Depot is really about.

They were selling off True Grit and Double Indemnity as quickly as they could to make way for the butt plugs.

And basically, I'm pissed that I didn't get any hate mail.

One last note: I have nothing against porn. NOTHING. It's just that I miss my old video store, and my movie-geek clerks.

11 to 1

Goldurnit. I watch ... I watch ... I go with the flow, bad things happen, good things happen, and then it's almost like I can SEE the wheels slip off the rails.

3 innings before it's over ... I can see: oh well, there it goes, buh-bye, it's over.

On a more positive note:

I find there to be something almost orgasmic about a double play. A triple play might cause me to die from ecstasy. I watch a double play and I see perfection. What I really see is this: Years and years of hard work, struggle, sacrifice ... suddenly manifesting in a one and a half second moment of total and utter ease.

But still. 11 to 1. GodDAMNit.

Grania

My sister Jean Grania had her birthday yesterday. I thought for a long time about what to write about her, how to describe how I feel about her, what she means to me ... but then when the tears came, I decided: No, I don't know how to write about her. All I can say is - the woman means the world to me (both my sisters do ... and my dear brother) - and I can't imagine my life without her. The worst nightmares I have are when something horrible happens to my siblings. I had one about Jean years and years ago that makes me shudder to this day.

In trying to come up with an acknowledgement post about this beautiful woman - all I could really come up with was how afraid I get of losing her.

Not a very positive birthday message.

Jean Grania is a classic human being, warm, hilarious, intelligent ... People get excited to see her. A party is planned, a gathering ... people ask: "Is Jean gonna be there???"

She's a teacher. A good one. She's passionate about her work, she's an amazing woman.

She's my younger sister, but there have been times when I've felt like she's the older. People seem to think that Jean knows things. It's so funny. And, in general, she does.

I remember when my roommate Jen and I were throwing a Valentine's Day party. We had bought decorations, hearts and stuff. Jean and Siobhan came over to help us get set up. Jen didn't really know Jean all that well, but ... within 10 minutes, Jen was standing on a chair in our living room, trying to dangle big red hearts from the ceiling, and I heard her say, "Jean - is this right? Will this work, you think?"

That's what I mean. People turn to Jean for stuff like that.

I love my sister. I have tears in my eyes now, because I'm a big goofball, and because I get overwhelmed.

She's a great woman. Happy birthday, Jean Grania.

Cashel, Part Deux

Cashel does not have cable. So there's THAT. So - over the past year or so, his main entertainment has been watching documentaries, ordered over Netflix. He's watched millions of them. I remember going up there this past spring, and he was babbling to us about "cro-magnon man" and "woolly mammoths" like an expert. He put me straight on a couple of my own misconceptions. It's hilarious.

The documentary topics have a wide range. Outer space, animals, history, geology ... you name it.

So recently, he was at my parents house. My dad was sitting on the couch, watching TV, and Cashel was catapulting about the room, in his normal fashion, shooting imaginary laser guns, and battling off dark-force Jedi knights. But then he turned, and looked at the TV.

My dad was flicking through the channels, surfing, and he stopped, briefly, on one channel - probably the History Channel, or PBS or something ... On the TV-screen, there was a Renaissance-era painting of a man ... and there was a voice-over droning on ... That was ALL that was seen before my dad flipped onwards.

Cashel, seeing just that one snippet, rolled his eyes, and said in a bored over-it voice, "The Medici popes."

Then he went back into Jedi land.

Heh heh heh

We all find that so FUNNY: Cashel being tremendously bored with "the Medici popes".

Sheila is very happy - and also a tiny bit unhappy

Happy because:

-- I went out last night and hung out with 5 blurpy Irishmen. There were others at the table, but I was primarily interested in the blurps. They are the kind of men who, no matter what is going in their lives, if you say to them "Hey, how are you?" they will reply jauntily, "Oh, can't complain, can't complain." I could say, "Wow, it looks like someone just chopped off your foot with an axe ... does it hurt?" Back would come the jaunty reply, "Oh, can't complain, can't complain." I am strangely charmed by that attitude.

-- I had a phone conversation with Cashel yesterday. He is going to be 7 soon. He reads "4 chapters a day" of Harry Potter. He is now on the 5th book in the series. He told me that he is planning a surprise and wanted me to keep a secret. I was extremely excited. Then he said he had to go, and hung up promptly. Without divulging the secret. I love it because his personality is so HUGE, and his voice, on the phone, sounds soooooo teeeny. So cute!

-- Emily, you will be happy to know that I braved Hollywood Video. Just to see the scene. To evaluate the prospects. And lo and behold - they have completely built out their "classics" section, and they are all videos, not DVDs, and there are so many movies I haven't seen and want to see that I almost had a heart attack looking at all of the titles. I am so happy!!! I signed up promptly. The first video I rented (which I realize made me look like a JACKASS probably) was the Howard Hawks/Cary Grant film I Was a Male War Bride, which I haven't yet seen. CAN'T WAIT.

Unhappy because:

-- I have lost electricity in ONE of my rooms. My main room, with my computer, my clock, my stereo, and my TV. My kitchen and bathroom are fine. So ... even if I wanted to watch I Was a Male War Bride I couldn't. I may have to drag my TV and VCR into my miniscule kitchen this evening. I thought the loss of power might have something to do with the tail-end of Ivan which whipped through here yesterday. It was like we were in a tropical country. SHEETS of rain, huge thunder, wind driving the rain past my window in horizontal lines ... I called the landlord, so hopefully we'll be back up and filled with electrical power this evening.

Gladys, you're all right

Just now:

Standing in line at the post office. Very very long line.

A woman asked me if I knew what time it was. I told her. She started talking to me.

Normally, in New York, when someone gets all chatty with you, it is because they are lost, desperately lonely, or mentally ill.

This was not how it was with Gladys (I found out her name at the end). As the conversation flowed (and it did, man, it just flowed) I thought: This could, conceivably, go on forever. And that wouldn't be too bad a thing. It was a GREAT conversation. Very very deep.

Gladys. I may never see her again. But I won't forget her.

She was very petite, and Latin-looking. Obviously bi-lingual, she had a bit of an accent. A beautiful face. Smooth tan skin. She had her black hair slicked across the top of her head, and then it popped out into a curly ponytail in the back. She was young, she almost looked like a teenager. She obviously was from a rough background. Do not ask me how I know, but I just know. You can tell these things.

It's fresh in my mind, so let me just re-create the conversation, as it occurred:

Gladys: "Excuse me, do you have the time?"

Me: "It's blah blah blah."

Gladys: "Oh, thank you. I'm on a break." Pause. "I go to school across the street."

"Oh ... in my building, I think? There's some kind of school on the 2nd floor."

"Actually, that's the administrative offices. The school itself is on the 3rd."

"What kind of school is it?"

"They train people to be medical assistants. That's one of their programs, anyway."

"Is that what you're doing?"

"Yes. They also have other programs ... They train people to be private detectives, they teach people to run laboratories, stuff like that."

"Private detectives ... really? And so ... how long is the program?"

"My program is 9 months long. I have 3 months to go."

"Once you're done, do they place you?"

"Well, then we can apply for internships, and if they like you at the internships, they might hire you. Or - the school will help you get a job. But I don't really want the school to do it for me. I'd rather do the research on jobs on my own, and the kind of internships that would interest me - so that - if they do offer me a job, I would actually want to work there. Know what I mean?"

"Sure. Sounds like a really good program. Do you like it?"

"It's all right. I mean, I think that the program should really reach out more to people like me - people with lower incomes, or no income - They should do outreach, stuff like that, because that's the people who are really looking to make changes in their lives, people who want to ... I guess progress is the word I want. You know? I want to progress. I started out on the bottom, but I want to better myself, and make a better life for myself. This program is perfect for people like me. But they don't advertise, they don't do outreach programs up in the Bronx, where I live, and they really should. People who already have good jobs, and who have money, aren't gonna want to take this program. But whatever."

I joked. "Maybe you should move into the administrative offices. Whip their business into shape."

She laughed. Sharp as a whip, this Gladys. We are standing in the post office, and this perfect stranger is telling me about how she wants to "better herself".

Gladys went on. "I mean, I'm 24 years old. I have a 6 year old son. So obviously, I've made some mistakes in my life. I did some things too soon. And a lot of my friends are the same way, you know? Don't get me wrong, when I was 22, 23, I spent a lot of time looking at myself in the mirror, feeling sorry for myself. 'I can't believe I'm 22 and I'm such a loser!' Stuff like that. But then I realized - wait a minute. Yeah, I've made mistakes..."

"Who hasn't?"

"Exactly! Who hasn't! And you can sit around dwelling on it, or you can pick yourself up, and try to make something out of your life. That's what I am trying to do. It's hard, though, because a lot of the girls in my program are really young - and ... I mean, they come into classes like this--" (Gladys then did a perfect imitation of young hip-hop tough-girl posing) "They snap their gum, they don't talk right, and they're just ..."

"They sound immature."

"Yeah! They're totally immature! They think that stuff should just be given to them, you know what I mean? And, sorry, but they're totally ignorant. Like - I mean ... with everything going on in the world right now ... and not even just the world ... just in our city ... how can you not take stuff seriously? How can you not get that we don't have a lot of time on this earth, and you need to work hard?"

"I so hear what you're saying." (In case you haven't guessed, I DEEPLY loved this girl by this point, and wanted her to keep talking forever.)

She went on. "I try to tell that to my friends. I tell them that we are not our mistakes. Mistakes are things that happen, choices we made ... and we can either moan about it, or we can stand up again."

I said, "And you have a 6 year old son. That's wonderful."

"I don't know about that! I'm exhausted all the time."

"Well, I'm a lot older than you, and I don't have kids."

She burst out laughing. "You're lucky!"

"I see what you mean - it's a grass is always greener thing - but I'm telling you, that biological clock is a real thing!"

"Did you not want to have kids, or...?"

"Guess I just haven't met the right guy yet. I do want kids."

She laughed again. "I don't want anymore."

"But see? That's great! You are DONE! When you're in your 30s, and 40s - you won't have little kids running around, you'll have more freedom. But if I have a kid now, I'm gonna be schlepping them around well into my 50s."

She said, "It's weird - having a kid. It's really scary. Especially now." (I was getting the sense that Gladys was not - to use Rebecca West's term for females only interested in their private concerns - an "idiot". She was well-informed. She continued to reference "especially now", "in a world like ours," "these days" ...)

I said, "I can't even imagine."

She said, "I mean, my God, when that thing happened in Russia ... I just ... my son's school started the next day and I was terrified to take him."

"Oh, God."

"And my friends were all like, 'Oh, it could never happen here!'"

She and I then spoke in unison. Loudly. As though speaking to her group of idiot friends: "YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!"

Gladys said, "How could they think that? Especially now ... especially in this city ... how could they not think that something like that could happen?"

We were now approaching the end of the line.

I said to her, "You know, I have a feeling you're going to do really well in your life."

She can't see it now. Of course she can't. She's in the middle of it! She's just trying to survive right now.

She rolled her eyes, sighed, said something like, "I gotta do SOMETHING, you know?"

I said, "You're gonna do fine. I can tell."

The next service window was called. I held out my hand to her. "I'm Sheila."

She shook my hand. "I'm Gladys."

"Nice to meet you."

"You too, Sheila."

And that was that.

But damn. I really feel like I just met someone completely SUBSTANTIAL. "We are not our mistakes." 24 year old girl.

Talking to her was the random gift of the day.

Obsession Central: Grant and Hepburn

The sky over Manhattan right now is a "Ghostbusters" sky.

I need a fix.

So here it is.

I like the following anecdote. It has shown up in multiple entertainment biographies I have read, so it appears to have validity. Besides, whatever. It's an anecdote. Take it or leave it!! Katherine Hepburn used to tell the story herself.

This is in regards to the Great Kate (and Cary Grant, by proxy) in Bringing Up Baby.

By the time she took the part of heiress Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby, Hepburn had made 13 movies, won 2 Oscars back to back (for Morning Glory, and Little Women) and had become a huge star. She was a bit controversial (the whole wearing-pants thing, the whole not-giving-interviews thing, the whole "What is her relationship with Laura Harding anyway?" thing) - and although she had gained enormous success in a very short time - there were some "limits" to what she could play.

She talked about this herself, later on.

Most of her parts through the 30s had certain similarities: there was an earnestness there, and also a haughtiness. A certain know-it-all quality. She played by nobody else's rules, she did things her own way. And while it was this very different quality that helped make her a star, it also tended to ... remove her a bit from her audiences. It wasn't until later, when she started being able to put more warmth into her roles, that audiences truly fell in love with her.

That was one of the reasons Philip Barry wrote Philadelphia Story for her. In that character, Tracy Lords, Barry wrote out the problem Hepburn had being Hepburn, and how people responded to her ... Barry gave Hepburn a vehicle to express herself in three-dimensional fullness.

People thought of her as a goddess, removed from everyday dirt and drudgery, somehow black-and-white in her certainties, and ... a little bit serious.

I'm just giving all of this as background - because now it is difficult to even THINK of Hepburn as having ANY limits as an actress. And all I can remember is the overwhelming warmth and humor and love she was able to portray in ... oh, On Golden Pond, or Lion in Winter ... But that was later.

As a younger actress, oftentimes she had so much ambition for success that she was unable to let any softness or vulnerability show in the characters she played.

Then along comes Bringing Up Baby.

By this point, Hepburn's star had already begun to set. Despite her Oscars, she had appeared in a couple of box-office flops ... Whatever it was she was doing was no longer working. Audiences weren't liking her anymore, audiences weren't finding her different-ness appealing anymore - They found it alienating, haughty.

She and Cary Grant first teamed up to do Sylvia Scarlett. This was Grant's big break. She was already an established star, and so her name came first in the credits.

Hepburn has talked about how bad she was in that film. I happen to disagree with her - she's not "bad" - but it is definitely an overly stylized piece of acting, kind of overwrought, melodramatic, a bit more obvious than her later roles - Cary Grant pretty much steals the movie from everyone else, veteran actors, without even appearing to break a sweat.

With each box-office failure, Hepburn lost confidence (of course. You're only as good as your last picture. Who the hell cares about the 2 Oscars you won back to back 4 eternal years ago???)

So. There she is. Coming off of a string of bad movies, to do Bringing Up Baby, directed by the great Howard Hawks, and co-starring her old friend, Cary Grant. Who by this point had blossomed into a star of his own.

Bringing Up Baby, of course, is a classic screwball comedy.

Cary Grant, while not a veteran yet of these types of films, had more of that screwball sensibility in his DNA than Katherine Hepburn did - Hepburn was more of a "serious actress". She had played Mary Queen of Scotland, and Jo March! She had won Oscars! She cried beautifully, she suffered beautifully ... she was an ACTRESS!! Cary Grant was different. One of Cary Grant's first jobs in America was stilt-walking on the Coney Island boardwalk, handing out fliers. Katherine Hepburn went pretty much straight to Broadway after college. Cary Grant was a tumbler, an acrobat, a stilt-walker ... the people he admired were the stand-up comedians who did the circuit, he learned much from watching them.

Readings and rehearsals began for Bringing Up Baby.

Cary Grant immediately clicked into Dr. David Huxley. Cary Grant did not need to be told, "Okay. So here is what is needed in this film. It will be funny if..."

But it wasn't as easy for Hepburn.

As she described it, and as Grant and a couple others described it later - she started out trying to be funny. What she was doing was - adjusting her style of acting to fit the style of the movie. This is a very delicate issue - and hard to explain.

Here's how it is:

What's FUNNY when you watch comedies, is that everyone IN them is taking the situation deadly seriously. If you get the sense that the actors somehow are telegraphing to you the audience, "I'm in a comedy right now. None of this is all that important" - you won't laugh.

What is funny is to see people in these comedic situations, and to THEM - it IS life or death. Absolutely Life. Or. Death.

In that respect, there is no difference between The Producers and Hamlet.

In The Producers: If putting on a flop-show was not a life-or-death matter to those two guys it wouldn't be funny. They are as desperate and as serious about those circumstances as Othello or Willy Loman are about theirs.

And so at first - Hepburn was condescending to the material of Bringing Up Baby. Her character's desires and dreams were not AS important, because she was in a comedy. Hepburn went through the first couple of readings, acting as though everything that happened in the plot was a "lark" (Grant's word), hilarious ... no big deal ... after all, she was in a comedy, and in comedies, nothing is a big deal!

(Am I making this clear? I feel like I'm not. Please ask if you don't get what I'm saying.)

Grant and Hawks tried to tell her that her approach was the exact opposite of what was needed.

For example, all of Grant's pratfalls - which still make me laugh no matter how many times I have seen them: Apparently, in the beginning stages of shooting, when Grant would do a pratfall, Hepburn would react in a certain way, she would over-play her response of laughter, or whatever. She didn't trust herself yet in that kind of comedic material. So Grant would fall flat on his ass, and she would stagger about laughing, pointing, etc.

Grant instinctively knew that by doing this, Hepburn was going to kill any potential laughs.

They were good friends by this point, so he felt comfortable enough to say to her, "Look, dear - We're going to get the laughs here from the expression on my face. Every time I fall, I am going to look more and more depressed. That's all we need to do."

Basically, he was saying to her - You don't need to "do" so much. Just relax. Just be yourself, don't "act" a response to the pratfalls. Just let Cary fall, and the moment will be hysterical.

And it's wonderful, because when you see the movie - every time he falls, what is so FUNNY is, indeed, that kind of silently mortified and depressed look on his face. He is doing all the work for us in those moments. Just by looking depressed and beleaguered. And once Katherine Hepburn relaxed into the material - you can so see the result on the screen. She is really laughing at him at certain points. She's not just acting like she's laughing.

Wild - cause Bringing Up Baby was another huge box-office flop, so much so that Hepburn went back to Broadway. But I think, having seen her earlier films, that this is the film where she really grounded her position as a great and important star. I mean, there's a reason why this movie is still so beloved.

She is still haughty, a bit, yes - because the character is an heiress - but Hepburn shows that she is not afraid to look foolish, to look weak, to fall down cliffs, get wet ... to get a little bit dirty, for God's sake. And also - she is very very funny.

Last anecdote and then I'll shut up:

During these awkward beginning-stages of meetings and rehearsals - Hawks set Hepburn up with an actor named Walter Catlett. Howard Hawks thought that Catlett, a real old-timer, could give Hepburn a good sense of the pace, and the style needed.

After Hepburn's first conversation with Catlett, Hepburn went to Hawks and said, "We need to keep him around during the shoot. I totally understand what he is getting at - when I hear how he says the lines - I can do it, I know I can - but only if he's around."

Howard Hawks ended up casting Walter Catlett in the film as the absent-minded Constable Slocum. The performance is a masterpiece of comedic style.

Anyone remember him? Full of bluster, and forgetfulness, and sudden bursts of raving inappropriate anger ...

A real pro that one. Hepburn recognized it.

I guess you could say I admire Katherine Hepburn. For being a big enough artist to admit: Okay, I'm in over my head. I need HELP!!!

I admire everyone in that anecdote, actually.

Howard Hawks ... who saw the potential in the duo of Hepburn and Grant ... and who wanted to make Hepburn the dominant one in the relationship, yes, but (and this is key to its appeal) - to add a layer of absolute and utter thoughtlessness on top of the dominance - which is why it is so FUNNY, and different from the more haughty dominant types she had played.

And in terms of Cary Grant, Howard Hawks said about him, years and years later, "What a great receiver. The best."

Hawks knew that all he had to do was put that character through a bunch of different catastrophes ... and Grant, being the "great receiver", would respond to them all - openly, unpredictably, comedically. He never missed a beat.

"You told them my name was Bone ... and you didn't tell me..." --- said with a deep and weary sadness. It makes me laugh every time.

Frank Delaney ...

lists his Top 10 Irish novels.

Is the Elizabeth Bowen on the list the same author as the one who wrote John Adams and the American Revolution? Dad?

From this list, I have read Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, both by Joyce, obviously, The Country Girls, by Edna O'Brien, and Amongst Women, by the miraculous writer John McGahern.

The Country Girls, O'Brien's first novel, is a trilogy - about two young girls from County Clare who end up in Dublin, and we learn about their love affairs, their issues with their families, their jobs ... It's most definitely a first novel, but there are bits of prose so delicious you want to eat it, you want to read over certain images again. She GETS it. The way in is through your senses. I can still remember her talking about the mist rising from the grass, the red-velvet dress of the sort of slutty mother in their town ... other sensory things, too. I like the first part of the trilogy best - when Kate and Baba are teenage friends, in the country ... before they make the break to the city ... before they start to get married and have awful love affairs, etc. etc. Not a great book, certainly, but a favorite.

And Amongst Women is a treasure. It's one of the most painful books I think I've ever read. (Not as painful as Atonement, but pretty damn close.) That FATHER. He is one of the most well-drawn characters I've ever seen. He made my heart hurt. McGahern blew me away.

But ... no At Swim-Two-Birds? In a round-about way, my blog is named after that great book!

(via Dan)

David O'Hara David O'Hara David O'Hara David O'Hara David O'Hara David O'Hara

Normally I don't do this, but here goes:

Somebody (the same person, apparently) KEEPS searching my site for references to "David O'Hara", that great burly (dare I say - blurpy??) Scottish actor who was in Braveheart - and a ton of other movies.

I've noticed the prevalence of "David O'Hara" in my Search terms for a while now ... and finally this morning ... my curiosity was truly aroused by this. (Obligatory What's Up Doc reference: "My natural curiosity was AROUSED! And I did a little research on Mr. Bankister and Miss Burns ...")

I do not know why this person seems convinced and determined to KEEP checking my blog for posts about this guy. It seems like this person's thought-process might be: "Maybe this week will be the week that she writes about David O'Hara?"

I even had a strange and pathetic fantasy that it was David O'Hara himself. Did he trip over my blog ... does he like what he sees ... does he want to make contact with me? Heh heh heh.

I did a search, just to see what came up - and here is the only entry which references that actor.

So. Here goes.

For the person who keeps looking for David O'Hara, whoever you are, even if you ARE David O'Hara, this post is for you:

I have a crush on David O'Hara. Kind of a big crush, truth be told.

Not because of Braveheart, although he was GREAT in that film, but because of The Matchmaker, with Janeane Garofalo, Dennis Leary, and Milo O'Shea. That movie is definitely on a "guilty pleasure" list. There's a lot wrong with it, the plot isn't all that great - but the plot doesn't matter. The plot is just an excuse to tell the love story. And a sweet and interesting love story it is.

David O'Hara is great in the part. Amusing, cocky, intelligent, sexy ...

My favorite scene is when he and Garofalo are stuck out on the Aran Islands, and end up in a pub where a singing contest is going on. The movie has a comedic tone to it, yes, kind of madcap, with people racing around, breaking their legs randomly, bumping their heads ... but suddenly in that Aran Islands scene, something else happens. I've been to the Aran Islands myself, not during tourist season, but on a freezing windy November day ... and that scene captures the vibe out there perfectly. The cold outside, the crashing Atlantic all around, the pints of Guinness in dark little pubs with roaring fires ... David O'Hara and Janeane Garofalo play 2 characters who resist falling in love. They are wise-crackers, they are cynical, they've been burnt ... so when they DO start to fall in love (during the singing contest) - there's a melancholy to it.

The 2 of them play that scene perfectly.

David O'Hara is also in Some Mother's Son with Helen Mirren, and others. He plays one of the hunger strikers, whose mother lets him die - lets him die for Ireland. The martyrdom of her son is more important to her than his life. Helen Mirren plays a mother in a similar situation, facing a similar dilemma, but she can't let her son die. O'Hara's great in that movie too.

I believe he's actually Scottish, but he plays Irishmen all the time.

And there's my post.

I hope that satisfies the curiosity of ... whoever that person is ... who seems to NEED to know my thoughts on this actor.

And David O'Hara - just in case it's YOU looking for YOURSELF:

I love you deeply. I think you are hot. If I were to sculpt a man who was "my type", he would look exactly like you. So don't be afraid. Contact me. If you dare.

A sad moment has come to pass.

My favorite video store has been sold and taken over by Demons from the 9th Circle of Hell.

Hoboken has a Blockbusters (which I refuse to frequent) and a Hollywood Video which is all well and good - but their selection focuses on the last 10 years of movie history as opposed to the last 100 years. And that doesn't work for me and my taste. If I want to see It Happened One Night, it's nice to know that I can, if I want to. My old video store had it. They had every Bogart film. They had many Cary Grant films. James Cagney. Hepburn. It was a treasure trove.

And best of all - it was run by movie geeks. People who actually knew about movies. You go into Blockbuster and half the time those people look at you blankly if you bring up a movie that wasn't ... well ... a blockbuster from last summer. Those people could work anywhere.

My video store had closed down for the last week, and I thought it was just that the movie-geeks wanted a vacation. But I swung by there on Saturday ... and immediately knew something was different.

There was a new rug put in, first of all. There was a fish tank next to the check-out counter. Loud hip music was BLARING. There was this cheesy contraption over in the corner which ... hard to explain ... but there were fake flames going, and some kind of wind machine, making the fake flames waver about.

My old video store had no artifice. It was a dump. Flourescent lights, rickety shelves ... the walls covered in movie posters ...

The whole newly decorated place was different. Too clean and generic (well - generic except for those fake flames.)

A girl was behind the counter. Which was also a sign. Only guys worked there before. She was young, "hip", and had a nose-ring. I wasn't the only person baffled - there were a couple of other confused-looking people wandering around, trying to figure out what the hell had happened.

The girl came out from behind the counter, friendly, "If any of you have any questions ..."

I said, "Are you guys ... new owners or something?"

"Yes."

"So ... will my account that I used to have still be good, or ...?"

"No ... and we're not renting movies right at the moment ... we'll be ready for that in a couple of weeks ... and once that happens, you can set up an account with us again."

I didn't like the fake flames, or the fish tank. I did not approve. I missed my geek-boys who used to laugh at me when I rented The Big Sleep for the 3rd time in a 2 month period. Would this hip nose-ring girl understand that?

But here's the clincher - and - for some reason, I KEEP THINKING ABOUT THIS:

She said to me, excited, her face open, fully expecting that I would leap for joy, "We are only going to keep romantic comedies in stock. That's our thing. The new name of the store is "Romantic Depot" - so we're going to focus mainly on romantic comedies."

I have one thing to say: EUUUUUUUUUU

I kept my counsel and said, calmly, "The main reason I used to come to this store is because of all the old movies - Will you be keeping those?"

She shook her head regretfully. "No. No more old movies. We're selling all of those off."

Selling off all old movies, all kids movies, all dramas ... and only keeping "romantic comedies". I just ... have a visceral dislike of this.

I promptly bought 4 old films (Sunset Boulevard, The Talk of the Town, Suspicion, and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer) for the whopping total price of 10 dollars.

I have so many thoughts about this.

My main thought is that that is a stupid business model. I could be wrong - but I don't think it'll last. Maybe it would last in MANHATTAN, where you can get as specialty-focused as you like, because there are so many other options for people. You can have a store JUST with gay and lesbian films, or horror flicks, or kung-fu movies in New York City. As a matter of fact, your business will flourish. But in Hoboken? With romantic comedies?

What on earth could be the rationale? That there are so many chicks in Hoboken?

But ... what about the guy population?

And what about the chick population who either doesn't care for romantic comedies -- or has eclectic taste - or occasionally wants to branch out and see Aliens or something like that?

Also ... what exactly COUNTS as "romantic comedy"? Do they think that women won't want to see, oh, The Insider? Or Schindler's List? Why limit yourself?

What were they THINKING?

I'm mad. I'm sad.

And judging from the looks on all the other old customers wandeirng around confused (most of whom were women), I wasn't the only one.

Romantic Depot? Does The Sting count? How 'bout Bonnie and Clyde? No?

Not my scene at all. They've lost my business, and I'm going to have to find another place to get my fix.

Bummer.

Dumb idea, it seems to me.

Also, I'm going to miss the gentle teasing of my movie-geek guys. They were cool.

"I don't like the way Teddy Roosevelt is looking at me"

This is a wonderful little article, written by architect Daniel Libeskind (he designed the WTC memorial) - and in it he describes how North by Northwest changed his life. A man after my own heart.

It was the Mount Rushmore scene in particular that had the greatest impact on him as a child - He saw it on his first trip to America, at Radio City Music Hall (he didn't speak a word of English at the time) ... Beautiful article about America. Go and read it.

(via Jeff Jarvis)

"this rough magic"

The New Yorker's Adam Gopnik is one of my favorite writers out there. His latest review, on display here, is a perfect example why. Granted, the topic (Shakespeare) is near and dear to my heart - but it's the WAY he writes, his style, what he reveals, and how he reveals it.

First off - I have GOT to read the book being reviewed: Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World. It's now on my Wish List. Not that that's a hint or anything.

I needed to be convinced to want to read this book, basically because I dislike postmodern criticism so much it makes my teeth itch - so I usually stay away from more recent critics. Gopnik convinced me.

Gopnik does a great analysis of what is wrong with much criticism these days - I found myself nodding enthusastically as I read this:

The point, as Greenblatt emphatically argues, is “not to strip away the reimagining, as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses but, rather, to enhance a sense of wonder at Shakespeare’s creation . . . that took elements from the wasted life of Robert Greene and used them to fashion the greatest comic character in English literature.” One need not accept the identification to value the discovery. Biographical criticism may be a practice without certainties, but it is not a game without rules. Each time we come closer to Shakespeare’s life, we escape from the aridity of formal criticism or the cheap generalities of social history into a recognizable world of real experience. When A. L. Rowse insists that Emilia Bassano Lanier, the tempestuous, adulterous, musical, poetic wife of a court musician, was the original “Dark Lady” of the Sonnets, we can buy it or not, as we please. But the very existence of a woman like Emilia demonstrates that the clichéd images of Elizabethan women, as subservient wives or unruly whores, are too grossly tuned to capture the reality of Shakespeare’s world. Whether she is the Dark Lady or not, Emilia is a dark lady. Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms, and replaces them not with gossipy puzzle-solution certainties but with glimpses of life as it is lived, and art as it is made. Criticism is always a map of possibilities, roads taken, neglected, and cut fresh, and the map of art is never more vivid than when the possibilities of a period are incarnated as the people in a life.

God. YES. "Good biographical criticism dissolves determinisms" ... Isn't that the truth?

Also: "as if the life sources were more important than the metamorphoses" - In a nutshell, that's most of my problem with current lit crit. I prefer the "rough magic" of the art - and theories on how the "metamorphoses" came about ... rather than the obsessing on the "life sources" of the artist.

Sylvia Plath's poems have suffered from that kind of too-literal biographical analysis.

Don't ONLY look at biographical details. Don't just look at the timeline of a person's life! You've got to try to get into their subconscious mind, too!

Gopnik discusses Greenblatt's conclusions, in regards to Shakespeare's influences, and where certain characters may have come from. Again: MAY have come from. Greenblatt's guess at the origin of Falstaff is positively thrilling.

One other part of the article which I thoroughly DUG is the section on the soliloquies in Hamlet - what sets them apart from all soliloquies written before, the evolutionary leap taken by the playwright. Thrilling stuff.

What makes “Hamlet” different from Shakespeare’s previous work is the way it brings out a complete inner life. Before Hamlet, soliloquy is mostly just exposition of motive. (“Why am I acting this way? Well you may ask. I’m doing it because . . .”—as in “Richard III.”) With Hamlet, as Greenblatt very neatly puts it, we get “an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision.” ... Shakespeare, by compressing the plot into a matter of days, making Hamlet full-grown, and having the murder a secret known only to Hamlet, through the Ghost, makes Hamlet’s show of madness not just superfluous but truly self-destructive—it does nothing but draw suspicious attention to him. In any case, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is half-crazy and suicidal before he even sees the Ghost, and most of his soliloquies, instead of furthering our understanding of the action, are at direct cross-purposes to it. (Hamlet knows very well that a traveller has returned from that bourne from which no traveller returns.) What Hamlet says replaces the clear exposition of motive with a kind of chattering, compulsive, image-chasing interior monologue of dreads and desires.

And the following observation too (which is why I love Gopnik so much):

The questions forced on every screenwriter—where is the character’s motive? what does he “want”?—are exactly the questions Shakespeare ignored. (When Hollywood melodrama does touch the edge of the tragic, it is nearly always through the removal of motive: Why does Michael ruin his own values and dearest hopes by shooting the policeman and Sollozzo? Why does Gittes pursue Noah? All that keeps “Citizen Kane” from tragedy is Rosebud.) With Shakespeare, the inner life is no longer a condition of narrative but one of existence. They are, therefore they think.

Now criticism like THIS exhilarates me. I hadn't ever thought of it in quite that way - the "removal of motive", and how effective that can be. It is why we continue to discuss certain films years after they were made. We know WHAT Rosebud is, but we still don't know WHY. Etc. etc.

1980s Music

For those of us who grew up in the 1980s - or who at least were in high school in the 80s ... that music is a bond between us that can NEVER be broken.

I posted on it once before - Songs From High School Dances of my Youth.

But - Mr. Z in the comments to my St. Elmo's Fire post below suggests an elaboration of that theme:

Songs That May Be Intolerable - Unless They Are Played on Friday Nights at a Roller Skating Rink Sometime in the 1980s

Here are some of my thoughts:

-- "Everybody's Workin' for the Weekend" - Loverboy

-- "You Should Hear How He Talks About You" - Melissa Manchester

-- "White Wedding"/"Dancing with Myself" - Billy Idol

-- "I Love Rock and Roll" - Joan Jett

-- "Rock Lobster" - the B52s

-- "The Heart of Rock and Roll" - Huey Lewis

-- "Take On Me" - Aha

-- "Stray Cat Strut" - Stray Cats

-- Anything by Devo. Devo was HUGE.

-- "Angel is a Centerfold" - J. Geils

-- "Another One Bites the Dust" - Queen

And, of course, the aforementioned (and melancholy) "No One is to Blame" by Howard Jones - which was always a slow "couples-skate" - and I would watch from the sidelines. Apparently, so would Mr. Z.

This is a 1980s fest. Please begin the discussion.

St. Elmo's Fire

Jen and I watched St. Elmo's Fire yesterday, before going out for some beers. She and I hadn't seen each other in quite some time, so we sat on her couch, we blabbed our heads off, we caught up with each other ... it was wonderful. Just wonderful. We began to surf through the TV and gasped, as one, when we saw that St. Elmo's Fire was on.

St. Elmo's Fire ... I mean, my God. It was so much a part of that specific cultural moment of my late teens ... I mean, all those other movies too - Breakfast Club, 16 Candles ...

So we settled in, ecstatic, and watched St. Elmo's Fire.

Jen knows the entire movie by heart. I was quite impressed.

I haven't seen it in a while. I had forgotten some things.

-- how cute Andrew McCarthy was in it. He has morphed into something not so cute, but he was at his cutest during St. Elmo's Fire. And I'm still moved by that love-making scene. He's wonderful in that scene.

-- Of course Judd Nelson, the most despicable character in the film, is a Republican. Of course. It's shorthand for "asshole-prick who fucks every girl in town, and then comes home and makes his prissy anorexic girlfriend wear slutty lingerie in order to assuage his guilt". All of that adds up to: Republican.

-- The OUTFITS!!!! I mean, there's almost too much to discuss. The flashbacks of my entire past! I'll come back to that.

-- Rob Lowe's HAIR.

-- The feeling I got from Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, and Judd Nelson, primarily, that this was their "segue" out of teen flicks. Watch the scene where Sheedy and McCarthy get drunk together before they fuck. And especially watch how they hold their glasses. It's not like real people hold their glasses when they're getting drunk. It telegraphs: "I USED TO BE IN TEENAGE MOVIES WHERE I COULDN'T DRINK. NOW I'M A GROWN-UP AND HOO-HOO-HOO - LOOK AT ME GETTING DRUNK!" They held their glasses of whiskey self-consciously, if that makes any sense.

-- NONE of this is meant as a criticism. Even my critiques of it cannot dislodge the place this movie holds in my heart.

-- Again, I have just got to come back to the CLOTHES. Here are some of the items: skinny ties worn by the guys, socks pulled up over the hem of your jeans, enormous lace collars worn by the girls, flouncy glittery skirts (a la Cyndi Lauper), bracelets which stack themselves up all the way to the elbow - and then when Rob Lowe was playing his sax like a banshee in the club, he wore this skinny head-band. HA. The headband! Also, un-matching earrings. Or just one earring. And the earrings were ALWAYS of the dangly variety. There was a lot of pastels.

-- One other thing: the annoying-ness of the clothes of Mare Winningham. Apparently, if you are a virgin, it also means that you have no access to fashion magazines. It means that if you are the last virgin in your group of friends, you must have a goofy page-ball haircut that cups your face like a mixing bowl, you must wear thick lumpy PINK sweaters, and long plain plaid skirts, with stockings that are thick and opaque. Virgins clearly don't know how to dress. Everybody knows that. Also, you must wear THE MOST UNATTRACTIVE eyeglasses possible, eyeglasses that, put together with your long plain skirts, make you look like Gloria Steinem in a Mennonite colony.

Personal note:

When I saw this movie for the first time, in the movie theatre, I was the last virgin in my group of college friends. And although I very much related to Mare Winningham's journey (I've always loved her acting), I was so MAD about her clothes. I took it personally. It seemed to say: Virgins don't know about fashion.

So needless to say, Jen and I had an absolutely wonderful time, watching this movie, and strolling down memory lane.

There was some memorable commentary.

--- I said at one point, "This movie is a PART of our generation!"

Jen agreed enthusiastically, "Oh, I related to every one of these characters." (Ally Sheedy strolls by with this huge lace collar) Jen goes on: "I didn't wear lace, but..."

--- During the scene when Judd Nelson walks in on McCarthy and Sheedy having sex -- he just stands there, looking at the two of them, forever ... back, forth, back, forth, looking, looking, looking ... before he turns and walks out.

Jen said, "You wouldn't just stare at someone, though."

I said, "If you were a soulless Republican, you would."

--- I randomly diagnosed Demi Moore with a mild case of TMJ.

--- At the party scene (where Sheedy confronts Nelson about his "extra-curricular love life") - Sheedy wore a black black dress with an absolutely enormous wide white-lace collar - coming down in a triangle, like a middy blouse almost. I took one look at her and began to sing.

"Climb every mountain ... ford every stream..."

--- Every time Mare Winningham appeared, I had to comment on her terrible old-lady clothes. "LOOK at her sweater." "Oh my God, look at those STOCKINGS!" "Hello, with the terrible glasses." "Can she LOOK any more goofy right now??"

Finally, I exclaimed, in righteous indignation, "I was a virgin, but I did NOT dress like an Amish woman!"

Final comment:

In terms of the "St. Elmo's Fire" scene - with Demi Moore huddled in the empty red-walled room, with the blowing pale-blue curtains, and the huge doll-clown propped up against the wall ... with Rob Lowe putting that flame up into the air ...

There is definitely a cheesy element to that whole scene, but I will tell you this: After so many years, I remembered the whole thing almost word for word, image for image. There is something classic about it, something wholly original.

That's the scene.

If every movie was put through a sieve, like in a gold-rush, hopefully there would be at least ONE scene that sits in the sieve, a chunk of gold. The "St. Elmo's Fire" scene is the chunk of gold in that movie.

Oh, and lastly: Ally Sheedy is an IDIOT for not going with Andrew McCarthy in the end, and for making the choice to find her "own life", and trying to be by herself. Sorry. You're an idiot. Love like that doesn't visit twice. Believe me, sweetheart, I know.

Tribute of light

I could see the two beams of light from downtown Manhattan last night, when I lay my head down on my pillow. Gave me such an odd feeling. Melancholy, reflective, yet ... somehow ... there was hope there, too.

The tribute of light seemed to me to be the hopeful resonance of a community remembering its loss. A community that mourns without making a fetish out of their pain.

A country that fetishizes its pain is an unhealthy one. I do not wish that for America. Actually, I don't wish that for anyone!

We will mourn, we won't forget, we will pour columns of light up into the night sky every year - as a remembrance of what was once there, as a remembrance of all the lives lost, all the innocent lives ... but we will not huddle over our pain, nurturing it, coddling it - until it morphs into something monstrous. We can see the results of such pain-nurturing all around the globe today. (Perhaps coming off of Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has helped me to see what can happen when an entire nation fetishizes its pain, and purposefully keeps its injuries from healing.)

Pain, when you have been injured, is a logical response.

But - and I can only speak from personal experience - when the injury is dwelled on, protected, guarded fiercely, horrible transformations can occur. Then, the pain - which was once a logical response - turns into an obsession, a hateful obsession. Example: a garden-variety heart-break can twist your soul into something hard. You know - like a love affair breaks up. Your heart breaks. I'm the type who resists the so-called healing properties of time. "No. MY HEART IS BROKEN, DAMMIT." I nurture the ache, I huddle over it, I protect it, I defend it, I refuse to be helped.

The pain has become a monster. The pain is now ruling my life, as opposed to just being an emotion I am experiencing.

This is what I mean when I say - I do not wish that our nation should make a fetish out of its own injury.

I hope you get what I'm saying here, and that you don't think I'm saying, "Get over it."

Yesterday I was woken up to the mournful sound of bagpipes in the air. The memorial ceremonies had already begun. I went up onto the roof with my coffee, and stared at the glimmering truncated skyline. Sending my energy down to the lower end, knowing the crowds had gathered there ...

I had my watch with me, which was an odd experience. I realized the unbelievable SHORT-ness of 20 minutes - the 20 minutes in between the 2 planes ... Jesus Christ. The unforeseen horror of that 2nd plane. Of course, the first plane hitting was a nightmare too ... but that 2nd plane ...

What had appeared to be just an awful aviation accident of some kind, at least from our perspective in those 20 minutes before the 2nd plane came, turned into the impending apocalypse. We were under attack. Where is the next plane? What is happening? We are all gonna die. I still remember the screams filling the air on my trapped bus, as we watched that second plane hit, and saw that orange fireball fill the air. We were screaming. My sister ... my sister ... my God. My Holy God. 20 minutes. Boggles the mind.

So I had my own little private memorial service on the roof.

The rest of the day, I bustled about ... errands, a couple hours of writing, a long phone call with dear friend Mitchell, and a great evening with my friend Jen.

And then - I came home in a cab. The dude drove so dangerously that I refused to pay ... and yelled at him, in a freaked-out way, for the entire ride: "Hey, man, what the hell??? Jesus CHRIST, THAT'S A RED LIGHT ... What's the hurry, asswipe? SLOW DOWN!!" - Yes. I called him "asswipe." Let me introduce to you my inner-child who, apparently, is a 13 year old boy. But his driving was so reckless that I felt I had no choice. Anyone who plays hard and fast with my life is an asswipe, as far as I'm concerned.

But anyway - during my frightening cab ride home - late at night - I suddenly saw, behind me, the thick columns of light shooting up into the sky ...

Something happened to me when I saw them. (Even though I was about to die, because of the asswipe's horrible driving skills)

What happened was - my energy went inward. I guess, my energy became prayer-ful. I hope that doesn't make me sound like an asswipe myself. You know, there's an extroverted daylight energy, a conscious energy, I'd call it the public face, the sociable side of our personalities. And then there's the other energy, the reflective, the contemplative, the philisophical, the emotional ... where one sits with the mystery, the uncertainty, the feelings ...

And so I was SO GLAD to see those columns of light. So glad - because you know why? They gave me the reminder (not that I need one - that's not what I'm saying) ... It was the reminder: Move away from the conscious energy now ... get into the contemplative energy. It is right and proper that one should be reflective on this day. To honor the dead, to honor the wound we have received. Life goes on, football games happen, there are beers to drink, conversations to have, huge bursts of laughter ... but there they were. Soaring up into the sky. And they were there, if anybody felt like having a reflective moment, it was something to focus on - they were a monument, the expression of the feelings of the community made visible.

There was an Italian feast day of some kind in Hoboken - and I'm not like others who seem to think it inappropriate to have gatherings like that on the anniversary of Sept. 11. Like - when is the cut-off date? When would it NOT be inappropriate?

Besides - I think the fact that life goes on - (which is not the same thing as forgetting) but that LIFE GOES ON - is not awful, and un-feeling, but it's a fucking MIRACLE, quite frankly - and indicative of the HEALTH of our spirits. We have not made a fetish out of our pain. We can go out and enjoy LIFE still. We are still looking towards LIFE, we are not in love with death, in love with our own injury.

Anyway, that's just my opinion.

The bagpipes began my day. I was woken up by the traditional sound of mourning and I felt oddly comforted by the sound. I felt surrounded by a community, an invisible community of people - all of whom had their focuses pouring into one place, on this anniversary.

And the columns of light ended my day. A spectacular reminder of what we have lost, a focus-point for our feelings of loss, grief, absence ... silent, white, enormous ... soaring up infinitely until the white dissolved into the black.

"I started with A"

Billy Collins, former poet laureate, wrote "The Names" in the wake of September 11 and read it during a special joint session of Congress in New York on September 6, 2002.

The Names

Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.
A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,
And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,
I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,
Then Baxter and Calabro,
Davis and Eberling, names falling into place
As droplets fell through the dark.
Names printed on the ceiling of the night.
Names slipping around a watery bend.
Twenty-six willows on the banks of a stream.
In the morning, I walked out barefoot
Among thousands of flowers
Heavy with dew like the eyes of tears,
And each had a name --
Fiori inscribed on a yellow petal
Then Gonzalez and Han, Ishikawa and Jenkins.
Names written in the air
And stitched into the cloth of the day.
A name under a photograph taped to a mailbox.
Monogram on a torn shirt,
I see you spelled out on storefront windows
And on the bright unfurled awnings of this city.
I say the syllables as I turn a corner --
Kelly and Lee,
Medina, Nardella, and O'Connor.
When I peer into the woods,
I see a thick tangle where letters are hidden
As in a puzzle concocted for children.
Parker and Quigley in the twigs of an ash,
Rizzo, Schubert, Torres, and Upton,
Secrets in the boughs of an ancient maple.
Names written in the pale sky.
Names rising in the updraft amid buildings.
Names silent in stone
Or cried out behind a door.
Names blown over the earth and out to sea.
In the evening -- weakening light, the last swallows.
A boy on a lake lifts his oars.
A woman by a window puts a match to a candle,
And the names are outlined on the rose clouds --
Vanacore and Wallace,
(let X stand, if it can, for the ones unfound)
Then Young and Ziminsky, the final jolt of Z.
Names etched on the head of a pin.
One name spanning a bridge, another undergoing a tunnel.
A blue name needled into the skin.
Names of citizens, workers, mothers and fathers,
The bright-eyed daughter, the quick son.
Alphabet of names in a green field.
Names in the small tracks of birds.
Names lifted from a hat
Or balanced on the tip of the tongue.
Names wheeled into the dim warehouse of memory.
So many names, there is barely room on the walls of the heart.

The Falling People

I found this article - "Falling Bodies, a 9/11 Image Etched in Pain" intensely painful to read ... but I also felt compelled to finish it.

It wrenches up the soul to think of the people who fell, or who jumped. It haunts me. As I know it haunts many others. It horrifies me, in such a deep I'm-an-infant-having-a-nightmare kind of way, that my brain tries to protect me from getting near enough to it to contemplate.

One horrible anecdote:

Police helicopter pilots have described feeling helpless as they hovered along the buildings, watching the people who piled four and five deep into the windows, 1,300 feet in the air. Some held hands as they jumped. Others went alone. As the numbers grew, said Joseph Pfeifer, a fire battalion chief in the north tower lobby, he tried to make an announcement over the building's public address system, not realizing it had been destroyed.

"Please don't jump," he said. "We're coming up for you."

Almost instinctually on Sept. 11, people recognized that they had an unfortunate view into an intensely private matter, an unseemly intrusion not just into someone's death, but into the moment of their dying. American broadcast networks generally avoided showing people falling. A sculpture that depicted a victim, known as "Tumbling Woman," was removed from display at Rockefeller Center after one week.

Some commentators later remarked that those who had fallen had made one brave final decision to take control of how they would perish. Researchers say many people had no choice. Witness accounts suggest that some people were blown out. Others fell in the crush at the windows as they struggled for air. Still others simply recoiled, reflexively, from the intense heat.

God rest their innocent souls.

A sad moment ...

... I finished Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon early this morning. I began it in May.

I tried to stretch out that damn epilogue - because even though the book is pretty much one long expose of pain and human misery - it is so well-written, so juicy, so challenging, so insightful ... that I hated to see it end.

The book was published in 1941. Horror had already descended again over the Balkans ... but the outcome at that point was still unclear. Hitler was still at large. Russia had taken a kind of hands-off attitude. The Communists hadn't yet rolled through the peninsula, blotting out the light of civilization yet again.

Rebecca West could not see the future, and although she knew that Hitler would, eventually, over-reach, it hadn't happened yet. It was only 1941. But she could see which way the wind was blowing.

Her "epilogue" is a masterpiece.

I cried a couple of times as I read it, because her grief over what was happening, her grief for the convulsion of violence and insanity the world was going through yet again, palpitates on those last pages.

So much has happened in the peninsula since then. Yugoslavia is history.

But still - the book is not out-of-date. It just stops where the story ended at that point. And it still tells you pretty much all you need to know. Every convulsion the Balkan peninsula has experienced since 1941 is predicted on her pages. Everything makes a kind of horrible sense. The hatreds, the losses, the antipathies, the wars ... You get to understand the underlying issues, complex and overlapping as they are.

It's one of the saddest books I have ever read.

Her 3 or 4 pages where she lets loose on what the symbols of the black lamb and the grey falcon mean, not just for Yugoslavia, but for the entire world, is some of the most brilliant analysis of human events and the psychology of the human race that I have ever read.

It has enormous implications for the world in which we NOW live, for the issues we face TODAY.

I'm gonna have to post some excerpts when I have time.

I will MISS reading that book. It will be one I go back to, again and again and again.

There's something I've been a little bit afraid to talk about

... and that is what is going on with the Red Sox right now.

I am highly superstitious. Maybe it's cause we've been disappointed so many times. It's hard to give over to hope, fully. Or joy. We know the path of despair too intimately. My fellow Sox fans and I have thrilled conversations - in whispers, practically - we are afraid to upset the Gods. It's all been QUITE an amazing ride.

The "blogger formerly known as Dan" discusses the Red Sox team's new confident bad-ass attitude - which naturally makes Dan think of Steven Seagal - and the rest is comic history.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 moments in the original Star Wars trilogy:

1. The entire opening of Star Wars: the scrolling text and the unbelievably massive ship passing by overhead. My entire life changed when I saw that in 1977. I don't even know HOW, but I know it did.

2. The asteroid belt sequence in Empire. I like it cause of the kiss, of course. I had some of my first sensations of "Hmmm, maybe boys aren't so gross after all" as a result of watching that kiss. But also - the suspense is fantastic in that sequence.

3. Han's first appearance in Star Wars. Where HE SHOOTS FIRST, DAMMIT. As a matter of fact, that entire scene in the bar ... I still can never get over it.

4. Luke's time with Yoda during Empire. I loved those scenes. The blue palate, the mossy landscape ... I loved Yoda, frankly.

5. Hmmm, nothing from Return of the Jedi is coming up. Am I insane? Missing something? The Ewoks have blotted out the rest at the moment ... Please help me fill in the blanks.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 Moments in John Hughes Films

1. The party scene in 16 Candles. The girl getting a chunk of her hair cut off. The drunken girls wearing fur coats. The Mad Magazine mania of the scene. Long Duk Dong on the exercise bike. HAHAHAHAHA Best. Party Scene. Ever.

2. Ferris Bueller - it may be an odd choice, but I love the scene between pre-nose-job Jennifer Grey and the hot-as-hell Charlie Sheen - when they randomly connect. Love that scene.

3. The Breakfast Club - Lord, how to choose. I love when they are all settled in their chairs at the beginning of the morning ... before they have connected. The different shots of all of them, the behavior ... it's just classic.

4. Ferris Bueller - I must add the big parade. Where all the little frauleins in Danke Shen turn into raving go-go dancers in Twist and Shout. HILARIOUS.

5. The Breakfast Club - when they all get stoned.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 Cary Grant acting moments in films

1. Bringing Up Baby - The nightclub scene - when he slips on the olive dropped by Katherine Hepburn and his feet fly out from under him, and down he goes, crushing his top hat under his ass. I guffaw every time I see it.

2. Philadelphia Story - the great 2-way scene between Grant and Jimmy Stewart when Stewart shows up at his house wasted in the middle of the night. I especially love when Jimmy Stewart hiccups, and Cary Grant says, "Excuse me." That moment was improvised.

3. Notorious - the last scene. Cary Grant's acting has never been better. Especially the look on his face when he holds her and says, "I was a fat-headed guy full of pain." Such understatement, but so pained.

4. North by Northwest - the crop-dusting scene.

5. Only Angels Have Wings - the first scene when he and Jean Arthur are alone, in the empty juke joint, at 1 in the morning. The sexual tension and repartee in that scene are out of this world. Out of context it might not read as well as seeing it - but they have the following exchange. She says, as he pours her a drink, "When are you going to get some sleep?" He says, "After your boat sails." (It has already been established that her boat is sailing at 4 a.m.) Cary Grant makes "after your boat sails" sound positively primal.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 Humphrey Bogart scenes in films

1. The last scene in Casablanca. Especially the look on his face when he says, "Here's lookin' at you, kid."

2. High Sierra - the last scene, where he is a fugitive from the law hiding in the mountains, screaming down at the cops: "COME AND GET ME!"

3. The Caine Mutiny - the interrogation scene, where you watch him disintegrate mentally - rolling those little ball bearings around in his hand

4. African Queen - when he emerges from the water covered in leeches.

5. To Have and Have Not - the stunned and turned-on look on his face after Lauren Bacall says the "Just put your lips together and blow" line to him.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 moments in Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious:

1. The kiss between Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman - it was the longest kiss in screen history at the time. Because of the morality production codes, no kiss could last longer than 3 seconds. Hitchcock got around this by having them break up the kiss, pulling back, talking, nuzzling each other, nibbling ... as they moved from the balcony into the apartment, over to the phone, and then over to the door. All in one long unbroken shot.

2. When Claude Rains looks up slowly at his evil Nazi mother and says, "I am married to an American agent."

3. The frenzied sequence in the wine cellar during the party. Ingrid Bergman standing guard, Cary Grant snooping around. Hugely suspenseful.

4. The scene where Ingrid Bergman realizes her husband and his mother have been slowly poisoning her.

5. The entire last scene: Cary Grant finally coming to rescue her ... the long long descent down the stairway. Apparently, Hitchcock wanted the descent to be longer and more drawn out - and the stairway, although quite long, wasn't long enough - so he had them back up a couple steps in between takes ... and continue the scene - so that the stairway seemed much longer.

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 lines said by Humphrey Bogart in his films:

1. "I don't mind if you don't like my manners. I don't like them myself. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them long winter evenings." - The Big Sleep (another good one from The Big Sleep is: "She tried to sit in my lap while I was standing up.")

2. "I was misinformed." - Casablanca

3. "I hope they don't hang you, precious, by that sweet neck. Yes, angel, I'm gonna send you over." - The Maltese Falcon

4. "Ahh, but the strawberries that's... that's where I had them. They laughed at me and made jokes but I proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic... that a duplicate key to the wardroom icebox DID exist..." - The Caine Mutiny

5. "I stick my neck out for nobody." - Casablanca

Top 5 Mania

Top 5 lines said by Cary Grant in his films

1. "Oh, Alice! It's the intercostal clavicle!" - Bringing up Baby

2. "I've always been afraid of women.....But I get over it." - Notorious

3. "How does a girl like you get to be a girl like you?" - North by Northwest

4. "What's all this cooking? STOP TURNING MY ROOM INTO A LUNCH STAND." - shouted at Jean Arthur in Only Angels Have Wings

5. "You can't be a true person, or a true woman, Red, until you have learned to have some regard for human frailty." -- Philadelphia Story

Maybe I'm a bitch

Maybe I'm a purist, but I hope this book fails miserably. I mean, with advance reviews like "This is the worst book I've ever read", I don't think I have to worry, but still - I will kneel by my bed tonight, praying fervently for this author to CRASH. Everything he says rubs me the wrong way.

Lewis Carroll does not need your improvements, sir.

Yup. I'm a bitch. I'm a purist. No apologies. Something about this whole thing, the TONE of his comments ... I don't like it. Don't like it at all.

More on that Howard Hawks Woman

So ... the massive rainfall we had early this morning (causing flash floods in Jersey and a nightmare commute for all involved) woke me up. It was 5:15 or so. I could not get back to sleep. I made a pot of coffee, curled up in my chair, and watched some of To Have and Have Not. You know. Just to get that daily fix I keep talking about.

Because of the Cary Grant tsunami that has over-taken my life, I had moved away from the Bogie-Bacall pit I had been wallowing in for months ... so it was good to re-visit my old friends Steve and Slim, as they tried to get off that embattled island in the Caribbean ...

Anyway, noticed an interesting thing - which somehow (I think) illuminates what I was trying to write about here - in my piece about "the Howard Hawks woman".

Howard Hawks directed Only Angels Have Wings in 1939, and To Have and Have Not in 1944. In between he directed His Girl Friday, Sergeant York, Ball of Fire, and Air Force. In these films, he was still working on this whole male-female dynamic, what he saw, what he looked for, what he loved about women, the kind of men he admired ... searching for the perfect woman - the one to whom he could be a Svengali.

Many of the ideas about all of this were touched upon in Only Angels Have Wings - but in To Have and Have Not - all of that stuff takes center stage. Hawks has gotten clearer about what he wants, and clearer about how to EXPRESS all of it.

Only Angels Have Wings feels a little bit like a rough draft of To Have and Have Not.

In both films, he has the lead female character say to the lead male character:

"I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

Same exact line. I find that so INTERESTING. The line is deceptively simple. There's a lot going on there. It seems, at first, that what it SHOULD say is: "I'm not hard to get. All you have to do is ask me." But it doesn't, it says "I'm hard to get." Which makes a much deeper kind of sense. You have to think about it. Ponder it.

Jean Arthur (as Bonnie Lee in Only Angels Have Wings) finds herself in love with the Cary Grant character (Geoff Carter) - but he's so independent, so macho, and he says over and over, like a mantra: "I'd never ask a woman to do anything!" that Jean Arthur is left twisting in the wind. He's obviously interested in her, they kiss a couple of times, they have major sexual tension ... but he makes a big point of showing her:- You are free to come and go at any time. I will never ask you to do ANYTHING! Which is all well and good, but Jean Arthur is tormented trying to play by his rules, trying to hold herself back, trying to be all tough-guy and nonchalant about him ... when she's obviously crazy about the guy. Finally, by the end of the film, Bonnie has practically fallen apart (in a comedic way, though - Jean Arthur is beautiful!! So funny!) and she decides: "Fine. If he won't point-blank ASK me to stay on here with him, then I am GONE. I will take the next boat out." When Cary Grant finds out she's leaving, he gets - of course - kind of cranky about it - like: I didn't think she'd actually BEHAVE that freely!! Very funny. After all his boasting and bragging ("I'd never ask a woman to do anything!!") - he looks suspiciously crestfallen when Jean Arthur decides to leave, and he says something to her, tentatively, like, "Why don't we flip a coin to see if you stay or not?"

By that point, she has had it. Here's the tension of the moment, captured:

She throws her head back and says, angry, but with tears: "I'm hard to get, Geoff. All you have to do is ask me."

He ignores this, it's a hurried scene, people pulling him every which way ... he's about to run off and fly the mail-plane ... so he needs to go ... He ignores her tears, takes out a coin, says, "Heads you stay, tails you go!" - flips it, looks at it, exclaims happily, "It's Heads! You stay!!" He hands her the coin, gives her a huge juicy kiss on the mouth, orders her: "Keep that coffee warm!" (his way of saying: "Don't get on that boat, I want you to be here when I get back") and dashes out the door, leaving her stunned, and HURT.

Until she looks down at the coin. The coin has a head on both sides. No tails. So no matter which way it fell, she would be staying. That is the closest Geoff Carter will ever come to asking anything of anyone. This huge goofy happy grin breaks across Jean Arthur's face ... it's very funny. Moving too, in a weird way.

There is an almost identical situation in To Have and Have Not, only with different characters. Steve and Slim (Bogie and Bacall) have this INSANE sexual tension ("You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips together and blow..." Mmmmmm) ... but Steve is very independent (in a typical Bogart "I stick my neck out for nobody" way) - and, finally, in this film, Howard Hawks had found a heroine to match his hero. A woman AS independent and AS free as the man.

In Only Angels Have Wings, Jean Arthur has to learn the ropes the hard way, she has to get burnt, she has to lose the guy, she has to realize, the hard way, that typical female games will not work with him.

But in To Have and Have Not, from the second Lauren Bacall appears ("Anybody got a match?") - we can see that this is a different kind of woman altogether. Her voice is low, and un-girlish, she never seems perturbed, she's got that insolent little grin on her face - the same way Bogie does. Slim would never crumple into a million pieces because of the imperturbability of Geoff Carter. Geoff Carter would be mince-meat in her insolent hands. What Carter is really looking for is not total independence, but a woman who can really "handle" it, a woman who can really go the distance with him. Slim appears, beats Bogart at his own game, Bogart has met his match.

Slim is stuck in Martinique, with no money to get out. (Similar situation to Bonnie being stranded down in Peru, or wherever it was that Angels took place)

Steve (Bogart) - perhaps afraid that he will fall in love with this woman - buys her a plane ticket out of there. Both of these men push these women away, not because they don't need them, but because they fear they need them too much. (Hence, the red-hot sexiness of the performances. It's sexy because everyone's fighting with themselves about their own desires ... I don't know why that is sexy, but it is. Perhaps it's only when human beings are faced with obstacles, either inner or outer, can they truly come alive. And that's sexy.)

Slim, during their conversation about whether or not she should leave, is trying to get a sense of where Steve is coming from. Slim is no dumb girlie-girl woman. She's talking to him - she keeps asking him - "Do you want me to go? Do you want me to stay?" (But not in a needy way, of course. She's calmer than that.)

Finally, Slim says, flat-out, "I'm hard to get, Steve. All you have to do is ask me."

Funny - the way Bacall says it gives it a bit of a different spin. There's a bit more self-knowledge behind it, perhaps. Jean Arthur is saying it out of hurt, and out of self-protection, although it is sincere enough. Like: "I am not gonna sit around panting at your heel, Mister. I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

Slim says it more like - she's giving Steve a helpful tip on how to seduce her.

Like - "You want to get into my skivvies? Here's the deal. I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

I think, too, that these women are looking for these men to openly step up to the plate and state their intentions. Just ASK ME TO STAY, then, WHAT IS THE BIG DEAL??

Because Geoff Carter and Steve are who they are, it's not that simple. Something in them resists declaring themselves. Also, something in them so believes in man's essential freedom, that they yearn for a woman equally as free. Make your OWN choice, sister, why are you waiting for me to do all the work??

So there they are - the male, the female - across a divide - sparring about all of this - beautifully - and at the ends of these films, these issues are STILL unresolved, to some degree.

Carter DOESN'T ask Bonnie to stay. Slim tricks Steve and "misses" her flight out of Martinique ... she refuses to disappear. The men and women still circle each other, warily, but with desire as well. Always with desire.

Hence: Drama. Sexual tension. People NOT getting what they want (which is always far more interesting to watch than people getting what they want).

"I'm hard to get. All you have to do is ask me."

Much to ponder in that one simple line. Obviously Howard Hawks thought so, too - otherwise why would he have used it twice?

Yet another reason to love Lauren Bacall ...

Read this anecdote. I love it. Such a spitfire, still!

Exactly

I love James Lileks' mellow Bleat today - especially the part where he describes one of his hobbies as: "Sitting at the kitchen table with no radio or music playing, quietly photoshopping scans of old soft-drink ads."

But it’s true. It makes me calm. I enjoy it because it doesn’t matter. The bane of any life is a lack of things that matter, but the other bane of modern life is an excess of things that matter too much.

God! Yes! Exactly! I do not want a life filled with stuff that doesn't matter - that's when everything looks cold and grey, and you wonder "what the hell is the POINT??" - but to ONLY have a life filled with stuff that matters?? In a ponderous life-changing challenging way? Sheesh. No thanks.

I have a friend who never gives herself leisure time. It never occurs to her to just do something randomly because she loves to do it. She never ever just sits around, doing nothing, or "quietly photoshopping scans of old soft-drink ads" - or whatever meaningless thing it is that floats her boat. She would never "waste" an hour like that. She is always worried she is not doing enough to further her career, to become physically fit, etc. etc. She's always revising her cover letters, reading the classifieds, going for a run ... She never does nothing. She's a great friend, and we've talked about this a lot. Her hard-task-master attitude gives a certain grim humorlessness to her work, it doesn't look like she's having all that much FUN. Her eye is TOO on the ball, if that makes sense.

My first boyfriend was like that, too. Always working on stuff, building stuff, racing around ... our vacations were frenetic nightmares. I just want to read, and go for swims, and drink ice coffee and get pedicures ... He couldn't really get that. Which is fine - no need for him to change to MY way ... I think all of that constant-activity was, for him, the equivalent of Lileks' photoshopping old soda-pop ads. It was calming for him. But it drove me absolutely insane. We should have taken separate vacations.

I have a lot of stuff in my life that matters, that I feel I have to pay attention to. There are big questions to ask, big issues to consider ...

But there's also nothing like a grey and rainy afternoon, sitting around my dimly lit apartment, doing things that might not really matter, but that fill me with great joy and yes, like Lileks says, help me stay "calm".

I remember when I first moved into my apartment, the one I live in now, I had these reveling moments of weird freedom - I had just come from living with someone for 8 years. Now she was a great friend, and we gave each other mucho space ... never any problems ... but there were certain things I probably would have held back from doing, in her presence ... because ... well. It is a little bit crazy. Like watching Bringing Up Baby all the way through, then rewinding it, and watching it all the way through again. With printed-out reviews of the film, and essays about the film and about the screwball-comedy-genre spread about the couch. That kind of stuff.

I really realized that I was living ALONE when I found myself, at 1:30 in the morning one night, sitting in a chair, watching Some Like It Hot, remote-control in hand, with Cameron Crowe's book Conversations with Billy Wilder open on my lap ... reading about the filming of all the scenes in the movie - then watching each scene ... rewinding to notice certain things Wilder had pointed out ... sometimes rewinding the scene 4 times ...

I probably would keep a lid on that stuff if I lived with someone.

Who knows. Perhaps true intimacy is letting somebody in to your crazy little world where you do stuff like that.

Writing extensive essays here about Cary Grant makes me feel so damn CALM, you have No. Idea. Because it doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters about it is that I love to do it. And sometimes that's enough.

Bye Bye Love

I've been on a writing tear. Non-stop writing, for the past 4 or 5 days.

Strangely (and I have no idea why - artists are insane and superstitious - and ours is not to reason why) I have found that the Everly Brothers, of all things, have helped me to STAY in the Zone.

I do not know why this is the case.

If I played the Foo Fighters, or Metallica, or Evanescence ... it just doesn't feel right. I would lose momentum. Listening to them is procrastination music, not getting-down-to-work music.

But ... last week, I randomly pulled out my "Best of the Everly Brothers", popped it in ... and now my fingers ache from clutching my pen, I've just been writing, writing, writing.

My neighbors must be sick of "Bye Bye Love." "Wake Up Little Susie".

"Jeez," they must be thinking. "What the hell is going on over there? She's playing that again???"

But ... the first chords of "Bye Bye Love" ... I can't explain it. It's energizing, it's focusing ... I want to sit down and get to it.

My God. My God.

The funeral of 2 sisters, Irina and Alina Tetova (ages 13 and 12), murdered in Beslan.

There is nothing to say here. These people's wounds will never be healed. Their children are dead. Forever. That's it. Over.

This is a terrible terrible day.

Let's put 300-plus checks on the "evil" side of the balance sheet.

The riveting psychodrama of Vincent Gallo - at 10 bucks a pop

So last night I went with Jess and Curly to see Brown Bunny, the film which was literally Boo-ed out of the Cannes festival this year, the film which, we are informed by the very first credit, was:

WRITTEN, DIRECTED, PRODUCED, AND EDITED BY VINCENT GALLO

I wonder if he was also the "best boy", the "key grip", and also in charge of craft services? If you're gonna wear a lot of hats, you may as well wear them all.

Brown Bunny has already become notorious because of the bad reception it got at Cannes, and also because Chloe Sevigny performs an actual sex act ... in the film. (Of course, the recipient of the sex act is Vincent Gallo. Who else???)

WE HAD TO SHOW OUR IDS to get into the movie theatre.

I haven't been carded to get into a movie since going to see The Breakfast Club in high school.

The 3 of us went for myriad reasons. We went to see how bad it really was. We went to see if the Cannes brou-haha was warranted. We went out of curiosity. We also went for openly prurient reasons. We wanted to see the penis. Bring Me the Penis of Vincent Gallo!

Here is Jess' summary of this god-awful film. heh heh heh Go read it.

And here is curly's response. heh heh heh

Vincent Gallo has slipped off the rails. He has lost the plot. His spool has unwound.

But his penis is huge.

So he's got that going for him.

I have a couple of things to say:

-- What the hell was up, dude, with the 15 minute motorcycle race, around and around and around, that opened the film? WHAT made you look at the editing of that sequence (and, as you so freely told us, you also EDITED this movie, so it's your responsibility) and think: "Okay. The way I have cut the scene is perfect. I won't change a thing."

-- Basically, I think that you have a depression problem, Vince.

--Okay, so I get that you like girls who have flower-names ... but ... they have to also be wearing necklaces with the flower-names on little lockets in order for you to ... what ... try to pick them up? Or ... not pick them up? Drive them around? Or ... not drive them around? What exactly was going on there?

-- Your crying in that last scene was embarrassing.

-- About the crying - I couldn't even concentrate on what was going on, because I was still reeling from staring at your enormous penis. Have you ever heard, Vince, of this very very important concept called "willing suspension of disbelief"? Very important theatrical concept, you really should read up on it.

-- I now intimately know the contours of your ear lobe, Vince (not to mention the size of your dick) because 75% of the movie was shot in profile, as you drove along ... directly into your ear. Scene after scene after scene after scene after scene ... It was riDICulous! (Stella Adler, great acting teacher, used to always say that "Talent is in the choice." Someone's talent is revealed in the choices they make. So .... Vince's choice of camera placement here ... is ... er ... well, frankly, it stinks.)

-- Dude. What was up with bunny? What is the significance of it? No, never mind. Please don't answer that.

-- I just want to know WHAT made you think this was good? What made you think the final cut was ... final? "Yes. There is no more that I can do with this movie. It is finis."

I also have a message for Chloe:

-- Do your parents care?????? I know you have a good relationship with them (because I'm Sheila, and I'm nuts, and I actually know stuff like that. I actually know that Chloe Sevigny has a good relationship with her parents) ... but I know that my parents would - well - Jesus, they just would not go for me getting all rated-X like that!

-- I really want to know your decision-making process as well. I know that you were actually dating Vincent Gallo ... but I've dated lots of guys and haven't agreed to perform X-rated sex acts that will then be on display in the Sunshine Cinema on Houston Street. So ... please tell me. How did you decide that ... this was what you needed to do?

One last note: I have a lot of thoughts about what has happened to Vincent Gallo, because I've actually very much liked his acting work before, and I thought Buffalo 66, his other directing foray, was great. But I'll save my in-depth analysis of Vincent Gallo (which I think pretty much comes down to clinical depression - He directs like a depressed man - he points the camera like a depressed man - he acts like a depressed man) for another day.

Billy Wilder - America

On arriving in America

I first saw America from the Aquitania. We were delayed half a day, we were up in the harbor. It was a snowing winter night. I stayed with my brother in his little house on Long Island. In the morning when I got up, I looked out the window. It was still snowing. And there was a big, black, stretch Cadillac. Out comes a young boy with a stack of newspapers and he deposited one on the front doorstep. The weather was bad, and the newspaper boy's family was driving him in that big car. But to me, I thought, "What kind of country is this?" Newspapers delivered by Cadillac! It was stunning! I liked it. I loved it.

Billy Wilder - "Ace in the Hole"

On his film "Ace in the Hole" - which did not get a good response from the audience - It tells the story of a newspaper man who basically makes his career on the tragedy of a young man he writes about - it's a comment on journalism, morality issues, therein - Kirk Douglas stars. It was a big bomb, and yet - it's a very very good movie. Spike Lee wanted to remake it. It has huge relevance to our times now, with the paparazzi out of control:

I was hoping that it would find an audience.... An they didn't get it at all, lots of them. Some discerning critics lauded it up and it was their favorite picture of mine. But many at the time did not want to face that people are sensation-grabbing, and any time you see an accident, you know, you see people coming and staring at it. They love to see ... to see. They can be smug about Princess Di and the paparazzi, but then they sit in the theater and say, "All right, entertain me." But this was not exactly the entertainment they wanted to see.

Billy Wilder - on William Holden

On structure in the movies - also on William Holden

I always tell myself that I will do a picture that is interesting character-wise, not just something atmospheric. The atmosphere, that I photograph. But I am careful to find an original set if I can, an original erection of that set, so that I know where I'm going to put the camera already. I write with the camera, but not too much. The picture succeeds because of the story, the characters, and the actors. I'm not looking for an original camera move that doesn't go with the story ...

[William] Holden was very good. Physically, he was first-class. He was wonderful, for instance, in a picture like Sabrina. He had that scene where he sees Sabrina downstairs on some steps leading into the garden. By this time he knows it's Sabrina; he'd given her a ride to his own home. Now he sees her down below, in that wonderful white dress that was sort of glowing in the dark. And he says, "Sabrina!" and he jumps over the five steps, over the railing.

Now I, like an idiot, I said, "That's very good, Bill, but could you drop a little slower." And he tried, but he could not do it, because he's got the weight of his own body. But he always had the joke with me: "I know, I know ... you want it exactly like this, but a little slower."

Billy Wilder

Heh heh, I love this.

I don't like pictures where you can take half an hour out and it's only better.

Billy Wilder - on Audrey and Marilyn

On Audrey Hepburn and Marilyn Monroe, 2 of his most famous and beloved leading ladies:

I had a special little niche for Givenchy. He did the clothes for Audrey Hepburn. There was always that style, you know. Of course she did not wear the clothes when she was with her father washing cars [at the beginning of Sabrina]. She was barefoot. So that I have distance, you know. She has some way to go there. So when she wore the clothes that she brought from Paris, Givenchy kind of gets all the fireworks...

Givenchy was one of the best. And he kind of felt the girl she was - underneath that dress. And that was Audrey Hepburn. She was simple, but stunning ... She had first-class taste...

Marilyn was not interested in costumes. She was not a clotheshose. You could put anything on her you wanted. If it showed something, then she accepted it. As long as it showed a little something.

Billy Wilder - on the Marx Brothers

On the Marx Brothers

We had an idea of doing a Marx Brothers picture set against the background of the United Nations. They were the four representatives of a republic. And that is always good, because the Marx Brothers were at their best against a very serious, pompous background. They were very good in A Night at the Opera because it's very pompous, the opera. They were also quite good at the race track in Day at the Races. But other things they did, they were not so good because there was nothing good to poke at. I wanted to do a Marx Brothers picture, but then Chico died, and Harpo was very, very unstable. But Groucho was a genius, absolutely a fabulous, fabulous man. They were at Metro. The movie would have been a combination of at least six of their top stars of the early sixties. Zeppo was the leading man. Zeppo as lead was incredible, absolutely incredible. When you went to see A Night at the Opera, you were not disappointed. Thalberg was very smart, you know, because he treated it like a serious picture.

Billy Wilder

On audiences:

I kind of think that overall, audiences are pretty smart. Sometimes they are a little cruel; sometimes they are too nice to you. But as soon as you say, "I don't give a damn whether they come to see me or not, what's the next picture?" -- then there is no next picture. If you do something that is totally artificial, that is unbelievable, it might be good for the plotting, but you don't want to see "plots". You want to see stories develop. Overall, I think audiences are much smarter than what they are getting. Mostly, they are being talked down to.

Billy Wilder - more on Marilyn

More on Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, and who she was as an actress and a star

She had a kind of elegant vulgarity about her. That, I think, was very important. And she automatically knew where the joke was. She did not discuss it. She came up for the first rehearsal, and she was absolutely perfect, when she remembered the line. She could do a 3-page dialogue scene perfectly, and then get stuck on a line like, "It's me, Sugar"... But if she showed up, she delivered, and if it took 80 takes, I lived with 80 takes, because the 81st was very good ...

She had a feeling for and a fear of the camera. Fright. She was afraid of the camera, and that's why, I think, she muffed some lines. God knows how often. She also loved the camera. Whatever she did, wherever she stood, there was always that thing that comes through. She was not even aware of it.

Billy Wilder - more on Marilyn

Wilder on Marilyn Monroe, again - and for the record, they had a very rocky relationship - and after Seven Year Itch, Wilder swore that he would never work with her again. Thank God he got over it, because their next partnership brought us Some Like it Hot. He disliked her unprofessionalism, but he always always gave her props. By that I mean, he always gave her credit, never belittled her. He was honest about how her shenanigans drove him nuts, but when push came to shove, she was Marilyn freakin' Monroe, and she was a light-source, and he knew it. I love how he keeps saying, "she instinctively knew where the laugh was." A rare gift - can't be taught.:

I never knew what Marilyn was going to do, how she was going to play a scene. I had to talk her out of it, or I had to underline it and say, "That's very good" or "Do it this way." But I never knew anybody who ... except for a dress that blows up and she's standing there ... I don't know why she became so popular. I never knew. She was really kind of ... She was a star. Every time you saw her, she was something. Even when she was angry, it was just a remarkable person. A remarkable person, and in spades when she was on the screen. She was much better on the screen than not on the screen.

Billy Wilder "Make it true"

I love this quote. It reminds me of one of Hamlet's pieces of advice to the players: "whose end, both at the fist and now, was and is to hold as ?twere the mirror up to nature". Hold the mirror up to nature. That's really the job. That's IT.

I just always think, [in terms of his own films] "Do I like it?" And if I like it, maybe other people will come and like it too. Maybe it's gonna get some good reviews, maybe they're gonna come. But I never ... I never go with the wave, you know. Now it's catastrophes, right? They have floods, they have cars, they have buses. Bah. It's just absolutely -- just no dialogue. And some are pretty good. Like, for instance, this thing Die Hard. It was a good picture. I liked that. But I just think, a picture has to have something new. It has to have something that they don't see every day, but recognize as the truth ...

Make it true, make it seem true. And don't have something, even in a farce like Some Like it Hot that isn't true.

Billy Wilder

On humorists:

The real humorist is always sad. You'll find that people who are trully funny never laugh about their own jokes. They just let it go, they let it pass.

Billy Wilder on Jack Lemmon

Here's a long quote from Billy Wilder on the genius of Jack Lemmon. Genius indeed.

Jack Lemmon was my Everyman. And he could do everything, except carry a love interest to the extreme, to kissing and the precoitus thing. That is very difficult, because people could then laugh. He's very good. It's not a fault. It's his quality. He would surprise me too. He would come to the set in the morning, almost all made up, at 8:30 am, on the stage where I am working. He was figuring out how he would do the scene. He was almost made up and he would say, 'Last night, Felicia [Lemmon's wife] and I were running th elines and a wonderful idea came up.' Then he tells me the idea, and I would go --" [shakes his head] "And he would say, 'I don't like it either.' And he left the stage, finished his makeup, played the scene beautifully, and never brought it up again. He did not force it in his voice, and he did not ask everyone to listen to his great idea which was not all that great. Somebody else would fight me, and I would have to say, 'It's no good, because it leads someplace else.' Not Lemmon. There was a little bit of genius in everything he did.

Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity

[Barbara Stanwyck] was just an extraordinary woman. She took the script, loved it, right from the word go, didn't have the agent come and say, "Look, she's to play a murderess, she must get more money, because she's never going to work again." With Stanwyck, I had absolutely no difficulties at all. And she knew the script, everybody's lines. You could wake her up in the middle of the night and she'd know the scene. Never a fault, never a mistake -- just a wonderful brain she had...

And then there was an actor by the name of Fred MacMurray at Paramount, and he played comedies. Small dramatic parts, big parts in comedies. I let him read it, and he said, "I can't do that." And I said, "Why can't you?" He said, "It requires acting!" I said, "Look, you have now arrived in comedy, you're at a certain point where you either have to stop, or you have to jump over the river and start something new." He said, "Will you tell me when I'm no good?" [Wilder nods; a partnership is born.]

And he was wonderful because it's odd casting.

Billy Wilder on "Nobody's Perfect"

... maybe one of the most famous last-lines in movie history. Wilder tells how he and his writing partner came up with it.

The final scene of Some Like it Hot, we wrote on a weekend in the studio. We just did not have it. We had the guys escaping, jumping into the motorboat of Mr. Joe E. Brown. And a little dialogue between Marilyn Monroe and Tony Curtis. And then we came to the unmasking, when Jack Lemmon says, "You know I cannot marry you because ... I smoke." And finally he takes that wig off and says, "Look, I'm a man." Now we needed a line for Joe E. Brown and could not find it. But somewhere in the beginning of our discussion, Iz [Diamond] said, "Nobody's perfect." And I said, "Look, let's go back to your line, 'Nobody's perfect'. Let's send it to the mimeograph department so that they have something, and then we're going to really sit down and make a real funny last line."

We never found the line, so we went with "Nobody's perfect". The audience just exploded at the preview in Westwood ...

It's always very difficult for me to say, "This is my line and this is his," always, except of course I have to give him credit for "Nobody's perfect". Because that's the thing they jump on, and I say, "That was a temporary line, suggested by Mr. Diamond." And it wound up to be our funniest last line. I was asked by many people, "What is going to happen now? What happens now to Lemmon, what happens to his husband?" And I always said, "I have no idea." "Nobody's perfect." Leave it up there on the screen. You cannot top that."

Billy Wilder

Across the restaurant, a man waves insistently at Wilder.

Cameron Crowe: Is that a friend of yours?

Billy Wilder: No. I don't have friends that have shirts like that.

Billy Wilder

He talks about Marilyn Monroe

It's very difficult to talk seriously about Monroe, because she was so glitzy, you know. She escaped the seriousness somehow; she changed the subject. Except that she was very tough to work with. But what you had, by hook or crook, once you saw it on the screen, it was just amazing. Amazing, the radiation that came out. And she was, believe it or not, an excellent dialogue actress. She knew where the laugh was. She knew.

Billy Wilder

"Which is the best picture I have ever seen? My answer always is Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein."

Billy Wilder

Very funny story about previews

I'll tell you my best story, which has something to do with previews. We were previewing Ninotchka, and Lubitsch took the writers along too, in Long Beach. And they are outside in the lobby there, a stack of cards, with the audience invited to put down their thoughts. So the picture starts playing, and it plays very well. Now Lucitsch takes the cards, a heap of the cards, doesn't let anybody else touch them. We get into the big MGM limousine. We turn the light up. Now, so, he takes the preview cards and he starts reading. "Very good...brilliant ..." Twenty cards. But when he comes to the 21st card, he starts laughing as hard as I ever saw him laugh, and we say, "What is it?" He keeps the cards to himself; he does not let anybody even look. Then, finally, he calms down a little and starts reading. And what he read was -- I have the card -- "Funniest picture I ever saw. So funny that I peed in my girlfriend's hand."

Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder makes a great point here about too-obvious symbolism in movies:

If you do a picture like George Stevens -- he did that very famous picture A Place in the Sun. Now, there is a district attorney in that picture who limps. I talked to somebody and said, "It's a very fine picture, but he did not have to make justice itself limp." That was too allegorical. That was not good.

Billy Wilder

Wilder on director Ernst Lubitsch - his main inspiration as a director of comedy.

[Lubitsch] realized that if you say two and two, the audience does not have to be told it's four. The audience will find it themselves; let the audience find the joke. There was always an innuendo, in setting up situations, and you were rewarded by the laugh of the people who added it up.

Lorne Michaels should take note.

Billy Wilder

Wilder on Cary Grant's elusiveness, in terms of appearing in one of his pictures. Wilder also discusses Cary Grant's legendary stinginess with money:

I had Cary Grant in mind for 4 of my pictures. He was a friend of mine, and I liked him enormously, and he liked me. But he was apprehensive, he did not want to be in new hands. He always played almost the same part. He had to because, you know ... Clark Gable, if he's not Clark Gable, if he has a beard and he does that Irish Republican picture, Parnell [1937], nobody wants to see it. You see? You did not even know there was such a picture. Gable always has to be Gable. He must be Gable. Just the situations are different, the characters a little bit different. Same with Cary Grant, who slipped through my net every time...

I wanted him to play the part that Gary Cooper played in Love in the Afternoon. It would have been wonderful, right? "Cannot do it ... please don't. Don't persist. Look, I like you, Wilder, but I cannot explain it. I just ... the wrong signals come up in me."...

He loved my movies. He called me after Some Like it Hot and congratulated me that [Tony] Curtis had done a wonderful imitation. [Member how Tony Curtis mimics Cary Grant through his entire romance with Marilyn Monroe.]

No, Grant was very nice, he was absolutely great. But he was a very, very peculiar man, and he was very stingy. Stingy, Mr. Cary Grant. We had a dinner party at our apartment, and then after dinner we went to my den, where I have my radio and my television. I started playing for him a recording by a German composer, a medieval hymn of instruments and of voices...It was very strong and very loud. So he sits there, and he says, "How much is your loudspeaker? How much is your phonograph?" So, knowing how stingy he is, I say, "A hundred and eleven dollars." So he calls his wife, "Barbara! This machine here! We are crazy, we are crazy. We paid two hundred and fifteen!" [Laughter]...

He was a very good friend. My disappointment was professional disappointment, never personal...

Now, just to finish the story about the phonograph. He says, "Now, tell me, those two loudspeakers. Tell me, are they included in the hundred and eleven dollars?" And I say, "No, they were extra." He says, "How much?" "Six-fifty apiece." "Barbara!!! Barbara!!!" [Laughter.] He was absolutely ... [shakes head with wonder.] I've never seen it, but I understand he had a room in the basement that was filled with gold cigarette cases. He would buy them and throw them down there. A pile of gold. Very very nice guy otherwise...

I did not know him very well, but I saw him all the time. The two of us were on the board of directors of the Pasadena museum ... We would go there for the meeting and have lunch. He only came there for the lunch... because he didn't have to pay for it. [Laughs.] It's all right. On him it was becoming. It went with his chaqracter. If he had also been very generous, then that would kind of disturb me. Too perfect.

That last observation is, perhaps, my favorite part of that whole anecdote - and why I think Wilder was such a good director. He liked contradictions, and he didn't like "perfect". ("Nobody's perfect", after all...)

Billy Wilder

Wilder on Jack Lemmon, one of his favorite actors to work with:

His first day on a sound stage, with George Cukor directing, he's all revved up. He rattles down half a page of dialogue, rararaaumphrara, and then there's "Cut" and he looks at Cukor. Cukor comes up to him and says, "It was just wonderful, you're going to be a big big star. However ... when it comes to that big speech, please, please, a little less, a little bit less. You know, in the theater, we're back in a long shot, and you have to pour it on. But in film, you cut to a close-up and you cannot be that strong." So he does it again, less. And again Cukor says, "Wonderful! Absolutely marvelous, now let's do it again, a little bit less." Now after ten or eleven times, Mr. Cukor admonishing him "a little less", Mr. Lemmon says, "Mr. Cukor, for God's sake, you know pretty soon I won't be acting at all." Cukor says, "Now youre' getting the idea."

Billy Wilder

(These are all taken from the book Conversations with Billy Wilder by the way, written by Cameron Crowe.)

Tom Cruise is a thinking actor. He makes it look effortless. For example, Rain Man. It took several years for everyone to realize that the roles could have been switched. That is a movie I would have liked to have seen -- the crazy guy is the good-looking one. The ease in which he handles the hardest roles ... Tom Cruise, he's like Cary Grant. He makes the hard things look simple. On film, Cary Grant could walk into the room and say "Tennis anyone?" like no one else. You don't value the skill until you see a less skilled actor try to same thing. It's pure gold.

(Wilder and Cary Grant were friends for many many years. Wilder, til the end of Grant's life, was trying to get Cary Grant in his films. Grant, for his own private reasons, continuously said no. I'll post more quotes on that later. The Humphrey Bogart role in Sabrina had been turned down by Cary Grant, which was why Bogart was so cranky during the whole shoot. He knew that he was second-choice.)

Billy Wilder

"I graduated from the worst high school in Vienna. The students were either retarded or they were crazy geniuses."

I declare

that today is Billy Wilder day. Get ready for an onslaught of quotes.

The hostages

The terrorists in Beslan have let 26 of the hostages go (some of them were babies - BABIES) ... but the standoff continues.

When I used to do my "Country of the Week" series (Jesus, where did I get the energy??), I wrote a thing on the breakaway regions in Georgia, of which Ossetia is one.

It's not comprehensive, because I'm not a scholar - just a big reader, and voracious in my fascination of the Caucasus. My essay gives some background to the conflicts.

Hoping, praying, that the rest of those children are released un-harmed.

Look at these faces. Using weeping children as shields, political chess pieces. It's evil.

The General's Book Shelf

This is very cool. An article about the evolving recommended reading lists for people in the military. There are different levels of reading lists - books for cadets, books for "senior leaders", and a couple of sub-sets in between.

I am proud to say I have read a couple of the books included. Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, I've read all of John Keegan's books, and I've read Stephen Ambrose.

This year, chief of staff General Peter Schoomaker put out a list for senior members of the military (but go check out the article to see the recommendations for all levels) - This is an abbreviated version of that list (full version included in the article I linked to):

2004 List
Issued by Gen. Peter Schoomaker

"Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision Makers," by Richard E. Neustadt and Ernest R. May

"The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," by Samuel P. Huntington

"The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization," by Thomas Friedman

"War in European History," by Michael Howard

"The Making of Strategy: Rulers, States, and War," edited by Williamson Murray, MacGregor Knox, and Alvin Bernstein

"Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age," edited by Peter Paret

"The Peloponnesian War," by Donald Kagan

"Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam,"by H. R. McMaster

"Victory on the Potomac," by James R. Locher III

"The Dynamics of Military Revolution, 1300-2050," edited by MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray

"The Challenge of Change: Military Institutions and New Realities, 1918-1941," edited by Harold R. Winton and David R. Mets

"Transformation Under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights," by Douglas A. Macgregor

Stillness

Hard to describe how a bustling city can be still, but it is this morning. Even though the sidewalks are as crowded as ever, and Port Authority buzzes with activity as usual. The overwhelming sensation is one of stillness. The weird thing is - you look down 8th Avenue, and you can see the circus a couple blocks away. But that doesn't matter. It doesn't touch the essential stillness of this place today. A city holding its breath, perhaps.

The cops have been doing an incredible job. Keeping the traffic flowing, moving, never at a standstill. Multiple crossing guards at every intersection, keeping things moving, controlling everything. I suppose this is so no cars will have a chance to come to a full stop and then ... er ... blow themselves up or something. But the traffic moves, moves, moves. The pedestrians move, move, move. Even at the intersection of 42nd and 8th which is, typically, an absolute clogged nightmare.

The crossing guards and the cops waving traffic by gives a veneer of order, and efficiency to the entire urban landscape. But it also adds to this odd feeling of waiting, of watchfulness, of overriding stillness.

Anyway. It's almost over.

The Astor Bar - Thanks for the memories

I'm going tonight to what used to be called The Astor Bar to celebrate the birthday of a very good friend of mine. She sent me the address of the joint, I did a little MapQuest thing, and realized that ... I was going to the same intersection ... only now the bar has a new name. I had no idea. I had a moment of wistfulness when I realized that The Astor Bar is no more.

My relationship with The Astor Bar goes way back. In a strange way, it's connected in my mind with Sept. 11, because I spent a raucous and memorable evening there on the 9th. I wrote about it (and Astor Bar) in this post.

The atmosphere of the place was indescribable, fantastic. If you're gonna hang out in a bar, then you might as well get the feeling that ANYTHING can happen while you're there. Astor Bar had it. It was lively, the downstairs was dark and romantic ... And to me - it has always been a reminder of my Sept. 10 world. Not to be over-dramatic or anything. But my night there on Sept. 9, 2001, was my last evening out in this city before it came crumbling down and everything changed. And so - whenever I walked by old Astor Bar, all kinds of things would go through my mind - the good times I had had there, the meetings with siblings, cousins, the times with Allison, with Rebecca ... all of these things though are like relics. Archaeological relics from a time now gone.

I'll miss knowing that the Astor Bar will always be the Astor Bar.

I hope they didn't change anything. Even the chipped and curling-paint ceiling in the basement bar.

Anyway, here again is a link to that old post, if you feel like reading it. The doppelganger makes an appearance in that old post ... so I guess I associate him with the Astor Bar, too.

The place was loaded with associations.

Just a thought - out of nowhere

I so look forward to the day when Tom Hanks no longer picks roles where he is a symbol, a myth, a metaphor, a representation of something else, a stand-in for an idea or a concept, a comment-on-the-American-personality, a comment-on-humanity, an expansion on the theme of man-vs.-himself, a role-model, or an archetype.

I look forward to the day when he plays a regular old guy again. Just your regular Joe who has some shit happen to him. Who reacts like a regular guy. Who has bad days, but without it meaning some big thing for the human race. Who gets cranky, who has sex, who plays with his kids, who has a normal life. Who is not burdened with having to be an archetype or a symbol of the effervescent human spirit.

Tom Hanks is way too far into the stratosphere of his own celebrity status right now. This is not a criticism - it happens to people. Actors who become that huge have to fight against it. Cary Grant went through it. Marlon Brando consciously rejected being archetypal. He eventually rejected having a career! But Tom Hanks' career now seems to be commenting solely on the fact that he is a massive star. Which is a bit inevitable. You see it happen all the time with people (talented people, I mean) who reach that level of stardom.

But I am now tired of Hanks playing archetypes and symbols and Steven Spielberg's alter ego. Don't get me wrong. He's always good.

I just miss seeing him play an actual human being.