The Sheila Variations

Diary Friday

Hey, member Diary Friday?

It comes in waves ... sometimes I'm into it, sometimes I'm not. I came across this entry last night and it made me laugh out loud. I had forgotten much of it. This is from my second year in grad school - and my roommate Jen and I threw a party.

Some of this might seem like gibberish - it was just my impressions in the aftermath of the party ... but I re-read it this morning, in tears of laughter.

And I still love Wade. He was one of my best friends in school, he was a cocky talented sensitive dude from Texas, so so smart, and we were drawn to one another from the first day (we had a memorable excursion on 18th street after our first dance class - I didn't even know him!) - I don't know, he was a wild boy, a "bad" boy, I guess - and we clicked. He was irreverent. And FUNNY, man. I could talk to him about anything. He also is responsible for me becoming aware of this particular gentleman (http://www.fartingpreacher.org) , and for that I am extremely grateful. He had it on video tape - Wade stayed with me for a couple of months - and we would sit on the floor, pop in the tape, and watch it over. And over. And over. And over. Sometimes we would smooch, you know ... smooch like high school teenagers ... but then sometimes we didn't. I don't know. We were good friends. Friends with benefits, I suppose. So we were relaxed about the smooching thing, and way too busy with grad school to get all bogged down or serious relationship-ish. But there are times when, sorry, a girl MUST smooch ... One can only deal with so much school. It is also important to go out and drink beer and slam-dance and then makeout for hours on end. On occasion.

And we'd be blatant about it. Like a business transaction.

"If I don't make out with someone and soon, I am gonna freak out."
"How 'bout tonight?"
"Cool. See ya after class."

Wade is one of the funniest people I have ever met. And he is also very kind and deep and exciting to be around. (I haven't seen Wade in years - I think not since then. Wade is a sort of peripheral star in this - one of the most popular posts I have ever written.)

The following diary entry makes me miss him.

DECEMBER

Last night’s party. A collage of impressions still flickers thru my brain today. Moments of sheer joy. Moments of awe: Look at everyone! Moments of sadness and acute loneliness. Hysterical shrieking laughter. Looking around at OUR APARTMENT filled with people. Awareness of life. How miraculous it seems. How did I get here? Look at the people in my life! Marcus. Wade. Jen. Who ARE these people? I LOVE them! Life is constantly evolving. You never know what’s gonna happen.

I had a party. I had a party and it wasn’t a totally hair-raising experience. I had fun. I let go.

I am so glad Brendan and Maria came. And Brett. A mixing of worlds which pleased me. Brett did Superman for all of my brand new friends. I watched Jen discover it. I have seen it a million times, but it still makes me howl. It was gorgeous! I love moments like that.

Colored lights in living room. Candles everywhere. Lots of food laid out. I was a hostess! Clip-clopping around my apartment in my velvet pants. Giorgio on my wrists, lighting candles, cooking pasta.

The living room looked beautiful. Festive. Comfy.

Rain coming down. Snow. Thunder. Lightning. Our guests dripping wet. It was a good group. A beautiful blend.

Jen is just the perfect roommate for me. We totally GET each other. She shares my issues with party-giving. She TOTALLY understands me. No judgment. We kept checking in with each other over the night. “How ya doin?” “No judgment!”

Leslie W. kept saying, “You 2 have such nice patterns!” Meaning behaviorally. Nice patterns. Our feverish huddles of affirmation in the vestibule.

Hysterical laughter mixed with hysterical tears right before everyone arrived. Jen said, right at me: “I’m scared!” God, I love that. She fucking meant it. Then she slid down the wall. “I think I just have to cry a little bit.”

Also, when it was 2 minutes past our invite time, and no one had showed up yet, Jen announced, “I’m feeling fat and unpopular.”

Then, she looked around frantically at a room FILLED with people and wailed, “Nobody came!”

She said to me anxiously, “I just hope people have a good time.”

“Jen, I hope you have a good time.”

This struck her. She filled up with tears. “Thanks for saying that.”

And we did have a good time. Many magic moments.

J. came with desserts she had made and a Xmas carol CD. Bren and Maria did come, they weren’t going to. Having my worlds meet. Not as stressful as I thought. Wade meeting Maria. Brett meeting Marcus. Bren and Marcus hit it off.

The next morning over breakfast, Marcus said to Bren, “I think we could be friends.”

Marcus commenting on the natural slope of the floor, and advising people, “Don’t resist the floor.”

Music. Annie Lennox’s Diva. Bjork. The Beatles. Joan Armatrading.

Wade called me COLLECT and asked me for directions. My heart sang. He called me “hon”.

I walked into the living room, and Maria, Brett, and Marcus were sitting on the floor. Maria was talking and Marcus said to Maria, as I walked in: “That was a long-ass saga.”

Brett glanced up at me and said, “We asked Maria how she and Brendan met, and she started the story when she was 12.”

We all sat in the living room playing Celebrity. So much fucking fun.

During Celebrity, Maria, in trying to describe King Kong - said: “He’s a monkey! He’s the head of state!” Wade and I were just SCREAMING and rolling around laughing about that. Wade couldn't stop repeating it. "He's a monkey ... he's the head of state ..." I am in love with Wade.

Celebrity went on raucously until around 3.

The party began dispersing. Various bedding down activities. A bunch of folks slept over. Brendan and Maria slept in our extra room (The Embassy in the Kingdom of Peace). Amy slept on the futon in the living room. Marcus slept with Jen. And Wade and Brett slept with me. The 3 of us in my bed. We tossed and turned simultaneously. Meaning we moved as one. I curled up against Wade’s back in my bed, Brett curled up against my back, and we all fell asleep. At one point, I got up to go to the bathroom, and the sight, on coming back to my room, of Wade and Brett in my bed together, just made me LAUGH.

Wade had to get up and go to work. I set the alarm for him. It was a beautiful day, sun streaming thru the windows. Wade showered. I stood in the kitchen in my pjs, slumbering partiers all around me, the room ABLAZE with sunshine. Call me dysfunctional but it made me feel good to be able to do something for Wade.

We then did imitations of our jazz dance teacher in the kitchen.

Others started waking. Lazy morning. . 4 or 5 of us piled on my bed, sleepy-haired, rather hilarious. Wade stood in my doorway, Sammy was up on his shoulders, climbing around, meowing - and Wade was speaking in his faux German decadent accent: “Don’t smile, Sammy.”

I saw Wade to the door. As he left, he paused, glanced back into the apartment, relived the entire night in a moment’s time, and then exclaimed with gusto, “Man, I had a blast!”

Hilly Kristal (RIP)

... sweeping up ...

Dean Stockwell montage

we need a montage ...

we need a montage ...

All Stockwell stuff can be found here

The Books: "Wonder Boys" (Michael Chabon)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Wonder Boys - by Michael Chabon. I wrote somewhere once about the long long wait for this book after Chabon's debut The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Mitchell and I had fallen so in love with his writing that we eagerly waited to see what he would do next. Years passed. Occasionally, one of us would say to the other, "What ever happened to Michael Chabon, dammit??"

Then - finally - Wonder Boys. His second novel.

The story of what happened in those intervening years is well-known (so I won't repeat it here) - and in a way - it's what Wonder Boys is all about. It's always just been such a great example to me - of following your gut. Of knowing when to say: You know what? What I'm working on is NOT WORKING. Of being bold enough to throw something out - and start over completely. (Like recently - when John Irving re-wrote his entire book, changing the POV - and NOBODY wanted him to do it, because he would miss his deadline, etc. and it's almost like - at a certain point in the process, it seems like it becomes too late to change things. I LOVE that story about Irving and I love the story about Chabon. Be bold. Be bold. Don't be afraid. Follow your gut.) The Wonder Boys is a lovely novel - funny - so funny, sad, and full of indelible characters. I mean. Grady Tripp. Come on. I can never forget him.

Oh, and GREAT adaptation of the book into a film. I heard it was going to be a film and got scared ... because I kinda feel proprietary about Michael Chabon and I didn't want them to mess it up (as they so often do. I'm still pissed about The Shipping News) But not only did they not mess it up - they did a great job - and captured the SPIRIT of the book, which sometimes is the hardest thing to get. I love that movie. Bravo.

But what I really love about this book is the parts about writing. It's not so much Chabon navel gazing ... but really examining the whole process. And how one can get so easily sidetracked - that's the excerpt I chose today - although there were so many to choose from.

Excerpt from The Wonder Boys - by Michael Chabon.

While the coffee was brewing I drank a tall glass of orange juice, to which I added two tablespoons of honey, on the theory that an increase in my blood sugar, along with a massive dose of caffeine, would eliminate the last traces of my hangover. Pot for the nausea and the heaviness of heart, vitamin C for the cell structure, sugar for the depleted blood, caffeine to burn off the moral fog; it was starting to come back to me now - the whole praxis of alcoholism and reckless living. When the coffee was ready, I poured it into a thermos pitcher and carried it out to my office at the back of the house, where James Leer lay on the sofa, his head pillowed on his praying hands, like someone pantomiming sleep. The sleeping bag had slid partway to the floor and I saw now that he'd gone to bed naked. His suit, shirt, and tie were draped across the footrest of my old Eames chair, white BVDs folded neatly on top of the pile. I wondered if Hannah had undressed him, or if he'd managed it himself. He had the shrunken look of a tall person asleep, curled up into himself, his knees and elbows and wrists too large, his skin pale and freckled. His body had almost no hair and his naked little circumcised johnson was nearly as pale as the rest of him, white as a boy's - perhaps over time one's genitals emerge from the pots and bubbling vats of love permanently stained, like the hands of a wool dyer. I felt sorry for James Leer when I saw his penis. Carefully I redistributed the sleeping bag over his form.

"Thank you," he said, without waking.

I said, "You're welcome," and then carried the pot of coffee over to my desk. It was six-fifteen. I went to work. I had to slap an ending on Wonder Boys by tomorrow evening if I was going to let Crabtree see it. I took a sip of coffee and gave my left cheek an exhortatory smack. For the one thousandth time I resorted to the nine-page plot outline, single-spaced, tattered and coffee-stained, that I'd fired off on a vainglorious April morning five years before. As of this fine morning I was halfway through its fourth page, more or less, with another five pages to go. An accidental poisoning, a car crash, a house on fire; the births of three children and a miraculous trotter named Faithless; a theft, an arrest, a trial, an electrocution; a wedding, two funerals, a cross-country trip; two dances, a seduction in a fallout shelter, and a deer hunt; all these scenes and a dozen others I had yet to write, according to the neat headings of my stupid fucking outline: nine central characters' and a lifetime's worth of destiny that I had, for the last month, been attempting to compress into fifty-odd pages of terse and lambent prose. I reread with scorn the confident, pompous annotations I'd made on that distant day: Take your time with this, and This has to be very very big, and worst of all, This scene should read as a single vast Interstate of Language, three thousand miles long. How I hated the asshole who had written that note!

Once again and with the usual pleasure I entertained the notion of tossing the whole thing out. With this swollen monster out of the way I'd be at liberty to undertake The Snake Handler, or the story of the washed-up astronaut who marooned himself in Disney World, or the story of the two doomed baseball teams, blue and gray, playing nine on the eve of Chancellorsville, or The King of Freestyle, or any of the dozen other imaginary novels that had fluttered past like admirals and lyrebirds while I labored with my shovel in the ostrich pen of Wonder Boys. Then I indulged the equally usual, not quite as pleasurable fantasy of taking Crabtree into my confidence, telling him that I was still years away from finishing Wonder Boys, and throwing myself on his mercy. Then I thought of Joe Fahey and, as always, rolled a blank sheet of paper into the machine.

I worked for four hours, typing steadily, lowering myself on a very thin cord into the dank and worm-ridden hole of an ending I'd already tried three times before. This one would oblige me to go back through the previous two-thousand-odd pages to flatten out and marginalize one of the present main characters and to eliminate another entirely, but I thought that of the five false conclusions to the novel I'd come up with in the last month, it was probably my best shot. While I worked I told myself lies. Writers, unlike most people, tell their best lies when they are alone. Ending the book this way, I told myself, would work out for the best; this was in fact the very ending my book had been straining toward all along. Crabtree's visit, viewed properly, was a kind of creative accident, a gift from God, a hammer blow to loosen all the windows my imagination had long since painted shut. I would finish it sometime tomorrow, hand it over to Crabtree, and thus save both our careers.

Remarkable

This might be my new favorite site. Lots to say but not in the mood to write today. I just find that site really moving - beautiful photographs - illuminating - interesting commentary ...

my city....

still has the power to take my breath away.

The Plain Girl

Below you'll find more from this piece. I wrote this a couple years ago. Pulling old shit out now, to take another look. Lots of writing stuff - much of it just pot-boilers, but it's important to "exercise" ye olde muscles.

The Plain Girl

In between her freshman and her sophomore year of college, Maggie did a season of summer-stock theatre at a barn playhouse in Vermont. She had never gone away from home before without her parents, at least not for that long, and so she was spectacularly on her own, surrounded by actors and dancers from New York City, a wild crew who drank copious amounts of alcohol, had an inordinate amount of sex with one another, and, in general, behaved like raving lunatics. They all liked to play charades and card games, and they took on, as a group, putting together a tremendously complex jigsaw puzzle that they found in the house, a feat which took them all summer to accomplish. Someone also initiated a "movie night": everyone had to write a #1 favorite movie onto a slip of paper and put it into a hat. And every Wednesday night, one of the slips was drawn, that movie was rented, and the entire cast convened to watch. The gypsies accepted Maggie, the virginal college girl from Rhode Island, into their clan, and within two days of rehearsals, the entire cast had become one cyclonic organism. The camaraderie of theatre.

They were put up in a huge clapboard house, with a wrap-around porch, a cavernous yard where cast members played drunken volleyball deep into the night. Rehearsals went on all day, and were grueling. The season included California Suite, 1776, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Maggie, plain Maggie, became a chorus girl. She wore wigs. She sang. She danced.

Within a week, romances began to break out in the cast. Intrigues blossomed. Girls cried backstage. Couples had furious whispered fights in the dressing room during the overture. People had affairs, although "affair" is perhaps not quite the right word for infidelity amongst "couples" who had only hooked up three weeks before.

Summer-stock was a pressure-cooker atmosphere, a time outside of time. Normal rules of everyday life grew pale, less important, personalities disintegrated. Even for Maggie. She too had an adventure that summer, an adventure that she managed to keep secret from the entire wild-world of the clapboard house, a house where gossip was a way of life, a given. Not much of the gossip was mean-spirited, but it was certainly incessant. The fact that Maggie could have an entire life-changing adventure without anyone catching on was a testament to Maggie's self-protective ability. The deeps had been stirred. But nothing on the outside changed.

She met a young man her first time going to the local church, a 10-minute walk away from her sprawling gypsy-house. The young man's name was Bobby, and he was home from George Washington University for the summer. They met at the coffee and donuts reception in the rectory after mass; he had come over and started talking to her. He was fascinated that she was an actress, a concept foreign to him, at least in terms of it being a "job" that you could "have". He was funny. He made her laugh. He asked if he could give her a call sometime, seeing as she would be in town for the whole summer. She said No, she really needed to focus on doing a good job this summer, she didn't have time. He took this relatively philosophically.

The next Sunday, they met at mass again, had coffee and donuts again, and again he made her laugh. He asked her again if he could take her out sometime. And again, she said no, but she recognized suddenly that the entire thing was a game, and that he would keep asking her out, and that eventually she would say Yes. She could feel the "Yes" impulse in her. He didn’t seem like a sex-freak. He had a sunny face, light eyes, and a mop of blonde hair. He was addicted to Ultimate Frisbee. He looked like a very good-natured Heat Miser. Again, the Heat-Miser took the rejection philosophically, and said, "All right. See you next week."

The next week, he asked her again, and she, mouth full of stale sugary donut, said Yes.

She didn't tell anyone in the house. She feared that they would pounce like vultures on her little experience, and ruin it by talking about it too much. Or try to analyze it. Or pump it up beforehand. But there was some anxiety. She was 19. She'd never been kissed. How was some random Heat Miser supposed to deal with all of that?

So she put in a call to Constance, who was also doing summer-stock at a small theatre in Ohio, and having a terrible terrible time involving embarrassing costumes, bitchy dancers, competitive queens, and vain uninteresting leading men. "The plays aren't even good," Constance hissed under her breath to Maggie on the public phone in the duplex she was sharing with the rest of the horrible cast, "We're doing some unknown Gothic melodrama. And you know what? It's unknown for a reason, do you hear what I'm saying? It should have stayed unknown. I hate my life." Constance lived for calls from Maggie, so that she could experience vicariously the carefree scenes of volleyball, jigsaw puzzles, and good-natured gossip. When Maggie first described the concept of "movie night" to Constance, she was greeted by a gloomy silence, and then came Constance's flat voice, "Fuck you." But still, Constance wanted to hear more, and more. "So tell me– any cute guys? All of mine are either gay or dickheads who are straight."

Maggie told Constance about "this guy from church." "He's asked me out three times now. I keep saying no."

"Why? Is he ugly? A psycho?"

"No, I just – That's not what I'm here for."

"But how do you know, Maggie? How do you know exactly what it is you're there for?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean – can't you do two things at once? Maybe you're also there so that you could meet him. If he's nice and all."

"Yeah. He seems nice."

"So? You believe in God and everything."

"Yeah?"

"God works in mysterious ways—" Constance suddenly snapped over her shoulder, "Brandon, I am gonna kick your ass if you don't stop tapping your foot at me. I am ON THE PHONE RIGHT NOW."

A 5 for the day ...

... near and dear to my heart

Obviously. (ahem)
But Alan's words about Kurt Russell's final moment in the film brought tears to my eyes. It was one of the best acting performances of that year - and I never get tired of saying it. PROPS must go to him. Hugely under-rated actor.

Alex:

I am sure your Shirley Bassey obsession continues - so I post a link to this for you.

The Books: "Mysteries of Pittsburgh" (Michael Chabon)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Mysteries of Pittsburgh - by Michael Chabon. I wrote a bit about my regard for this book, Chabon's first novel, here - and I'm not surprised, but I even reference the "scene" from the book I'm excerpting below. It's been years since I've read the book - but I remember the scene vividly - to me, it's one of the great introductions of a character. We keep hearing her name at the party - "Jane Bellwether" - "we need to find Jane Bellwether" ... and our narrator has never met her, has no idea what the big deal is ... or what exactly it is that Jane can give them (some of the details are lost to me) ... so they wander through this raging party, looking for Jane. And then: she appears. Awesome introduction of character.

Michael Chabon was 24 years old when his book came out. And for once - time has shown that he was deserving of all that hype. He was hailed as the next great American novelist. And whaddya know. He is. How often does that happen?? I love his writing so much - and it's cool to know that I was there from the beginning. I freakin' LOVED Mysteries of Pittsburgh - I still remember where I was when I read it (I think it might have been one of the first books I read after moving to Chicago - a vivid crazy time ... and a perfect book to read, anyway, when you're in the middle of a transition). Then when Mitchell arrived to Chicago - I passed the book off to him. He HAD to read it! He read it - and I had such a good time, reliving it through his eyes. It just goes to show you that you don't have to re-invent the wheel. You don't have to come up with the next best thing. But you had BEST know how to write! Mysteries of Pittsburgh is a coming of age novel, plain and simple. A group of college friends navigate, fight, fuck, fall in love, cheat, talk, drink beer, make mistakes, experiment sexually - things shift, move, break, meld ... No big revelations in terms of plot. It is what is expected. But the writing. Even from the first sentence:

At the beginning of the summer I had lunch with my father, the gangster, who was in town for the weekend to transact some of his vague business.

A great first sentence. I must read on. It's an attention-getter, to be sure, but in general I find that Chabon's style does not call too much attention to itself - and yet it is undeniably beautiful writing. Can you tell I adore him? I adore him even more because he has actually developed in such an interesting way (what happened to him AFTER Mysteries of Pittsburgh and before Wonder Boys is almost as interesting as one of his books - fascinating) - He was hailed as this new writer of unbelievable promise, and for once the powers-that-be got it right.

So about the excerpt .

You know people who are like celebrities - even though they're not famous to the world? People who are famous in a certain circle ... who are revered and watched and admired and envied - in the same way that celebs are? Someone who, even though they are not famous, they have star quality? It may be more of a thing that happens when we are young ... you know, like the popular kids in high school and how they were like famous people to those of us not popular. We knew who was dating who, we took note of what they wore, we were always aware of them - even if we were sitting at another table, or across the room. They were KNOWN.

Whether or not this attention was warranted is irrelevant. It's what happens.

And sometimes ... (like with my friend from grade school and high school Keith M.) - the person is a star. They have that magic THING about them, that aura ... people want to be near a person like that, people vie for attention, or status ... they just want to be CLOSE to the magic. The glow. Whatever ineffable thing this star-quality person has.

It's what big movie stars must feel all the time.

Jane Bellwether and her boyfriend - whose name is Cleveland - both have that.

They are famous. They are different. Cleveland is a great character - my favorite in the book - a wild guy who rides a motorcycle - and who is seen as the key to all things good and right. He is beloved. (I need to read the book again.)

But here is our first glimpse of Jane - her name, though, has already come up multiple times. Because she's famous. "Where's Jane?" "We need to talk to Jane." "You need to meet Jane."

So here she is.

Excerpt from Mysteries of Pittsburgh - by Michael Chabon.

To find Jane Bellwether, who acquired a last name and a few vague features during our search, we passed out of the jumping seraglio and through a long series of quieter, darker rooms, until we came to the kitchen, which was white. All the lights shone from overhead, and, as is sometimes the case with kitchens at large parties, an unwholesome-looking group, all the heavy drinkers and eaters, had convened in the fluorescence. Its members all lookeda t us as we entered the kitchen, and I had the distinct impression that a word had not been said in there for several minutes prior to our arrival.

"Say! Hi, Takeshi," Arthur said to one of two blenched Japanese who stood near the refrigerator.

"Arthur Lecomte!" he yelled. He was well more than half in the bag. "This is my friend Ichizo. He goes to C-MU."

"Hi, Ichizo. Glad to meet you."

"My friend," Takeshi continued, his voice rising, "is very horny. My friend say that if I were a girl, he would fuck me."

I laughed, but Arthur stood straight, looked deeplyl, beautifully sympathetic for perhaps a tenth of a second, and nodded, with that fine, empty courtesy he seemed to show everyone. He had an effortless genius for manners; remarkable, perhaps, just because it was unique among people his age. It seemed to me that Arthur, with his old, strange courtliness, would triumph over any scene he chose to make; that in a world made miserable by frankness, his handsome condescension, his elitism, and his perfect lack of candor were fatal gifts, and I wanted to serve in his corps and to be socially graceful.

"Does any of you know Jane Bellwether?" said Arthur.

The louts, so morose, so overfed and overliquored, said no. None looked at us, and it seemed to me, in the exaggerating way that things seemed to me that exaggerated evening, as though they could not stand the sight of Arthur, or of me in his magic company, in our Technicolor health and high spirits, in our pursuit of the purportedly splendid Jane Bellwether.

"Try on the patio," one, some kind of Arab, finally said, through a white moutful of shrimp. "There are many people sporting out there."

We came out into the yellow light of the back porch, that estival old yellow of Bug Lite, which had illuminated the backyards and soft moth bodies of so many summers past. It was untrue; there were not many people sporting on the murky lawn, though a large group had gathered with their drinks and their light sweaters. Only one young woman sported, and the rest watched her.

"That's Jane," Arthur said.

She stood alone in the dim center of the huge yard, driving imperceptible balls all across the neighborhood. As we clunked down the wooden steps to the quiet crunch of the grass, I watched her stroke. It was my father's ideal: a slight, philosophical tilt to her neck, her backswing a tacit threat, her rigid, exultant follow-through held for one aristocratic fraction of a second too long. She looked tall, thin, and, in the bad light, rather gray in her white golf skirt and shirt. Her face was blank with concentration. Thik! and she msiled, shaking out her yellow hair, and we clapped. She fished in her pocket for a ball and teed it.

"She's plastered," a girl said, as though that were all the explanation we might require.

"She's beautiful," I heard myself say. Some of the spectators turned toward me. "I mean, her stroke is absolutely perfect. Look at that."

She smashed another one, and a few moments later I heard the distant sound of the ball striking metal.

"Jane!" Arthur shouted. She turned and lowered her shining club, and the yellow light caught her full in the face and fell across the flawless front of her short skirt. She put a hand to her forehead to try to make out the caller among us shadows on the patio.

"Arthur, hi," she said. She smiled, and stepped through the grass to him.

"Arthur, she's whose girlfriend?"

Half a dozen people answered me.

"Cleveland's," they said.

The number

So okay, I'm going to brag now. It's my blog and I feel like bragging because I've been working really hard. I met with my trainer today. It is the mid-point of my 10 week kickboxing intensive. I took a week off to go to the Cape and have felt a bit, shall we say, OFF since I returned. Like suddenly everything was uphill. But I'm staying with the program - I have completely changed how I eat and it's been major - I have never been a person who habitually eats bad things, never been into fast food or fried food - I don't have a sweet tooth ... but WHEN I eat and how often has been a major problem. Basically I don't eat. I UNDER-eat. So now on this program I feel like I have to eat all the mo-fuckin' time. 6 times a day?? This is so counter-intuitive to me. I have to nibble all day long - 6 small meals a day - in order to make my quota. So it's been a huge adjustment. I pack lunches, I cook in bulk, I have little sandwich baggies of carrots and celery sticks - I time it out - so that I'm eating every 3 or 4 hours. It feels WRONG. But that's only because I've been starving myself (unsuccessfully) for nigh on 10 years. So there's THAT. Changing my eating habits has been so empowering, it really has. I feel in control. I have grabbed the reins. And if I want to sweve - then I KNOW I'm swerving. It's not about never having a glass of wine, or a piece of pizza or whatever. It's about being in control of when I snack, how I snack, and how often. I carry around my food chart. None of this is IN me, yet - as in habitual. I need to be a Nazi for a while, so I am.

Today was my mid-point and I had to weigh in and also get my body fat measured. I was, naturally, scared. I've felt off. I also have my period right now (I just have to quote an exchange I had with M., my longtime boyfriend in Chicago. I announced to him once, "I have my period right now." - It was in context, by the way, it wasn't just a random outburst. But still, had to let him know: "I have my period right now." And he replied flatly, "What else is new." hahahaha It's not that I menstruate more than once a month - it just seemed like it. It still seems like it.) - so I feel like: Oh dammit, YOU again, period? Why now? When I have my weigh-in etc? I swear I gain 15 pounds every month over a 3-day period and then lose it all in one fell swoop. So I was stressed.

I get on the scale. I do not look at the number because I do not want to look at the number and I am sick of dealing with THE NUMBER. I am not doing this intensive to change that number. I can't look at it that way - because that way doom and failure lie. I am doing this to get healthy, fit, strong.

Then I do the body-fat test with the little gizmo.

She says to me, "Okay, do you want the good news or the bad news?"

I shouted, "TELL ME EVERYTHING IMMEDIATELY."

She said, "The bad news is you've only lost 1.2 pounds."

So from the 4 pounds I had lost at the one week mark - I'm back up. I deflated. That damn NUMBER. The number on the scale runs our lives, our identities, how we feel about ourselves and relate to the world. At least that's true for me.

She said, "And the good news is - you've lost 6% body fat."

That is meaningless to me. It sounds so small. Is that good?

She went on, "Let me give you some perspective. Normally, when people do this 10-week program - they lose 7% body fat over the whole 10 weeks. You;ve lost 6% in 5 weeks."

So. What? How is this possible??

Obviously, I am gaining muscle. I have not lost weight - but I can tell my body is different ... and the loss in body fat is why.

She was so cute, she said, "I hate to sound all girlie and everything - but I know that we women obsess about that number on the scale. It's all about how much we weigh. But what you have to get is that it is amazing how much body fat you have lost - it is highly unusual - have people told you you looked different?"

"Yes, they have as a matter of fact."

"Do your clothes feel different? Do you look different to yourself in the mirror?"

"I am not a valid judge about my appearance. I feel like a fat cow at all times. So I am not to be trusted."

"You need to listen to the people who have told you they see a difference. I know you want that weight to go down - but it's going to be in the reduction of body fat that you really see a major transformation in your actual body. So that's great news and I'm really proud of you. Seriously."

Then we did my session with the weights and it was like being coached by an emissary from Beelezebub's entourage. Seriously, this woman is demonic. I go into this ZONE - where my muscles are literally (they feel that way anyway) BURNING. They burn. And she will not let me stop, or give up, or slow down. She is a messenger from the freakin' underworld and I love her.

But it;s over now - and I have lost 6% of my body fat in 5 weeks - and I'm just gonna keep going, dammit, and now I need to watch To Live and Die in LA (I love you, Dean Stockwell!!) and put my damn feet up.

And I actually AM going to think about the number. But not the number on the scale.

I'm going to fall asleep tonight murmuring "6%, 6%, 6% ..." in a mood of utter bliss. That's the number I like.

This Friday: 9:30 pm at The Duplex: Jackie Sidle

One of my best friends in the world, Jackie (she of brown wool leg-wraps fame, and other essential tales of hilarity), is making her New York cabaret debut this Friday at the famed Duplex in Greenwich Village. It's a prime-time spot, too - 9:30 pm.

I'm so proud of her. Jackie has a brilliance to her - it's been there ever since I met her, when we were in college. She's one of the funniest women I have ever met (seriously. She's apocalyptically funny) - and has a beautiful singing voice as well. I am so so psyched for her, and can't WAIT to see her in action.

New Yorkers, if you're interested, come check it out!

Date: Friday, August 31, 2007
Place: THE DUPLEX
61 Christopher Street
(at 7th Ave.)
NYC, NY 10014
Info:
(212) 255-5438
Time: 9:30pm-10:30pm
Price:$5 Cover & a 2 Drink Minimum

You can make reservations by clicking here .

Go, Jackie!!

Daily Dean Stockwell Fix: Quantum Leap: Get ready!!

My life right now is really busy - there's much writing, and television, and kickboxing, and dudes from Trinidad, and keeping my plants alive, and planning a trip, and writing more, and procrastinating about the writing, and talking with friends and family, and cooking, and taking pictures, and also exchanging casual banter with television stars in random elevators. You know, my plate is full.

But I am (eventually - once all THAT is done) going to start a Quantum Leap ongoing thing - which is going to be a lot of fun (for me, and ... er... others). I want to treat the show as if it's on NOW - and do an episode by episode breakdown (Sheila-fashion) - what I notice, what I like, what makes me roll my eyes, blah-dee-blah. I won't skip an episode. I haven't re-watched all of them yet - I'm only thru season 3 now so I have two more to go ... and I don't want to start this project until I've seen the whole thing (I mean: seen it again, since I used to watch the show religiously.) I want each piece I write to be detailed - almost to an obsessive level. Actors who show up on the show, people who do good jobs - people who are too corny - music choices I like (and this is already controversial since they released the DVD without a lot of the music) - what happens in each episode, and also - the execution thereof. You know, like a movie review. That's my plan anyway. Ambitious, yes - but I need a writing project that's ongoing, not TOO hard and that I can do in my voluminous spare time.

Anyhoo. That's my plan. To become as big a fangirl as I possibly can.

But for now. I'm focused on keeping my plants alive. And keeping in touch with friends. And my parents. And handling my aching muscles. And writing every day. Make voyages. Attempt them. There's nothing else.

Oh - and my story of the eclipse the other night is a funny one - almost too perfect, especially since I had just seen that Werewolf movie ... but I'll save it for another time.

Daily Dean Stockwell fix below: (to prime the pump for all the Quantum Leap fans out there):

hahahahahaha

This is gonna be fun!

The Books: "The Alienist" (Caleb Carr)

It is now time to say goodbye to Truman Capote.

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

The Alienist - by Caleb Carr.

I have to confess - I remember almost nothing about this book - which I find weird, because I remember loving it when I first read it!

I read this book when it first came out, although it's not really my thing. Actually, it is my thing - with the whole historical New York setting, which I love - and the serial killer plotline - which I love even more. I love any book about the psychology of killers (having just finished 2 books in a row on Leopold & Loeb ... the theme continues) But it was one of those moments when you look around on the subway and you see EVERYONE reading the same book ... and in general, I don't read books like that. Not that I have anything against them, morally or whatever - but if everyone's reading it, I probably will not be into it myself. At any given moment you can look around and see people reading Nicholas Sparks. Or Mitch Albom. I'm not reading those people. But they're obviously massive bestselling authors - which is why you look around and see everyone reading their books - but I am not their audience. Just not. There have been a couple of times when my taste coincided with the zeitgeist moment - and The Alienist was one of them. I can't remember why I picked it up - because i'm usually turned off by 100% agreement, as in: a neverending chorus of "you have to read this book!" What can I say. I'm contrary. The weird thing is, though, I can remember my experience of reading The Alienist (I could not put that book down. Total page-turner) - but I can remember almost nothing about it. I know there was a group of people who came together to solve the crime. I know that one of them was a woman. I remember loving all of the characters - and kind of wishing that I was back in time and part of the group. And the whole setting of New York in 1896 was SO well done - I truly felt like I was reading a novel that had been written IN the 1890s - it had such a breath of reality to it, and it made me look at the streets of Manhattan in a new way (especially Union Square - although I was unable to find the Union Square section this morning ... so I'm wondering if that was actually from his second book Angel of Darkness?) Don't know. I remember almost nothing about The Alienist - no plot points, nothing ... But I do remember these elements very well.

I wonder why on EARTH it hasn't been made into a film. It seems like it is MADE for a Hollywood movie treatment ... it feels very cinematic to me, inherently dramatic - with a great cast of characters ...

I liked the book so much I even read the second one in the series (which, I think, stopped at 2) - and that one I wasn't so wacky about. But I think he should have kept going. I would have definitely kept reading. The main draw about the book was the group of investigators and their interactions - it was a pleasaure to read about them.

Anyhoo, I flipped thru the book this morning and was amazed by how much I didn't remember. And I couldn't find the Union Square section which I DID remember and wanted to excerpt ... so here's another excerpt I tripped over, that seems to capture the true time-machine appeal of this book.

Especially since I live here in New York - and I feel proprietary about the city - it's MINE - I loved the sepia-toned landscapes in the book, with the different skyline - but some of the buildings are still there, buildings I know well. I love that.

Excerpt from The Alienist - by Caleb Carr.

True to Kreizler's prediction, Harris Markowitz proved thoroughly unsuitable as a suspect in our case. Aside from being short, stout, and well into his sixties - and thus wholly unlike the physical speciment described by the Isaacsons at Delmonico's - he was obviously quite out of his mind. He'd killed his grandchildren, he claimed, in order to save them from what he perceived to be a monstrously evil world, whose salient aspects he described in a series of rambling, highly confused outbursts. Such poor systemization of unreasonably fearful thoughts and beliefs, as well as the apparently complete lack of concern for his own fate that Markowitz exhibited, often characterized cases of dementia praecox, Kreizler told me as we left Bellevue. But while Markowitz clearly had nothing to do with our business, the visit was still valuable, as Laszlo had hoped it would be, in helping us determine aspects of our killer's personality by way of comparison. Obviouslly, our man was not murdering children out of any perverse desire to attend to their spiritual well-being. The furious mutilation of the bodies after death made that much plain. Nor, clearly, was he unconcerned with what would happen to him as a result of his acts. But most of all, it was apparent from his open display of his handiwork - a display that was, as Laszlo had explained, an implicit entreaty for apprehension - that the killings did disturb some part of him. In other words, there was evidence in the bodies not of the murderer's derangement but of his sanity.

I puzzled with that concept all the way back to Number 808 Broadway, but on arrival my attention was distracted by my first really clear-headed perusal of the place that, as Sara had said, would be our home for the foreseeable future. It was a handsome yellow-brick building, which Kreizler told me had been designed by James Renwick, the architect responsible for the Gothic edifice of Grace Church next door, as well as for the more subdued St. Denis Hotel across the street. The southern windows of our headquarters looked directly out onto the churchyard, which lay in a dark shadow cast by Grace's enormous tapering spire. There was quite a parochial, serene feel about this little stretch of Broadway, despite the fact that we were smack in the center of one of the city's busiest shopping strips: besides McCreery's, there were stores selling everything from dry goods to boots to photographs within steps of Number 808. The single greatest monument to all thes commerce was an enormous cast-iron building across Tenth Street from the church, formerly A.T. Stewart's department store, currently operated by Hilton, Hughes and Company, and eventually to gain its greatest fame as Wanamaker's.

The elevator at Number 808 was a large, caged affair, quite new, and it took us quietly back up to the sixth floor. Here we discovered that great progress had been made during our absence. Things were now so arranged that it actually looked like human affairs were being conducted out of the place, though one would still have been hard-pressed to say precisely what kind. At five o'clock sharp each of us sat at one of the five desks, from which vantage points we could clearly see and discuss matters with one another. There was nervous but pleasant chatter as we settled in, and real camaraderie when we began to discuss the events of our various days As the evening sun dipped above the Hudson, sending rich golden light over the rooftops of western Manhattan and through our Gothic front windows, I realized that we had become, with remarkable speed, a working unit.

Gene Krupa

Awesome photo of the great drummer.

Here's Krupa in action - accompanying Barbara Stanwyck in "Drum Boogie" - from the movie Ball of Fire.

There are a couple of shots of him drumming in that particular clip that make me laugh out loud. He is so IN it. For example: Just WATCH him at around 2:16 in the clip ... like ... chomping gum, grinning, banging, his hair flapping - exhilarating!!

Another great clip - he's so nuts!! Freakin' sexy, too.

Douglas Fairbanks, JR.

The Shamus writes about volume 1 of his autobiography. I think I might have to pick it up. Sounds very enjoyable.

A must-read:

A sunbeam in the abyss.

A thoughtful and really moving piece of writing. Thank you, Matt. I've been staying away from most commentary about Owen Wilson (and all the simplistic and ignorant attitudes about fame, comedians, and depression - in particular - that are ususally par for the course with such commentary) - because I knew it would grate on my nerves. Your piece is affirming and sensitive - not just about Wilson, and what you picked up on in his personality - but also about depression. For me, he's always been a bright spot in any movie he shows up in. Unlike the folks who somehow find this ODD, in lieu of his suicide attempt - it makes perfect sense to me. Despair doesn't look just one way. And one is not incompatible with the other. Let's hope he recovers, and can continue to be productive.

You know what sucks?

When you're the White House press secretary (and strangely, you look like John Dean and you also live in the Watergate, even though the Watergate scandal hasn't even broke yet), and you're on the President's private helicopter - with the President and the Prime Minister of Red China - and you're supposed to be the President's right hand man ... but the full moon is rising over the Washington Monument ... and ever since you had that run-in with a wolf and a creepy gypsy lady on a lonely road in Budapest you've been a bit ... OFF, shall we say ... and as the President (who's kind of a moron, he really NEEDS you) tries to speak intelligently to the PM, who can barely understand English, you sit off to the side ... and your panic grows ... and you realize that ... you're not feeling ... quite right ...

I'm not feelin' so good. Maybe I ate some bad crabcakes.

Just breathe. It might be just a migraine.

Fuck. There's that insistent underbite that always gives me away.

To quantum leap into the future and quote a certain show that will eventually make my name for all time: "Oh, boy ..."

I hate my teeth.

I have now surrendered to my hairy-faced befanged destiny. Foreign policy be damned.

I am press secretary no more.

I am werewolf.

The throngs wait below. They have no idea that the pentagram has been revealed, the moon is high in the sky, the crucial silver bullets are far from this location, and a werewolf is hungry, dammit.

So yeah. All that sucks.

But you know what doesn't suck? Getting to watch such a film. And getting to watch my favorite actor right now do his thing. I consider this to be one of his bravest and most uninhibited performances - and I'll talk a bit about that, because it might seem like a silly thing to say.

One of the reasons I say this is that the film was made in 1973. Dean Stockwell has said that during the 70s and early 80s he couldn't "get arrested", let alone get a job. He heard from his buddies Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson that directors in Hollywood were saying shit like, "We need a Dean Stockwell type for this part ..." and Hopper and Nicholson were like, "Uhm ... how 'bout gettin' the real thing, peeps? Our friend needs a JOB." But his career was iced. It was over. Werewolf of Washington was one of the few jobs he got during that time - and so, there's something lean and hungry and insanely intense about him in this film. He NEEDS the job - and he fucking PLAYS the part with reckless abandon. He has said he has never worked harder on a part. It's almost uncomfortable at times - the scene in the bowling alley when he breaks down in tears ... You are watching him unravel.

And it's messy - gripping, in a weird way - he pulls you in. There's something completely available about Stockwell (at all times - but espeically so in this movie).

It's never good for an actor to get too comfortable. I'm not saying being a starving artist is great shakes, it's not. What I mean is: there's a certain point where stars get too big to take chances. (Tommy Lee Jones has been quite eloquent about this. "I'd love to go back to the stage - do some Moliere, some Shakespeare - but I can't afford to now." etc.) But here is Stockwell - with no career to speak of - doing his damndest to keep afloat financially ... and he acts the shit out of this part. It's over the top (as well it should be - uhm, it's a freakin' werewolf movie. You don't want kitchen-sink realism in a werewolf movie) - and there's something beautifully affirming about it for me. Because the movie flopped - the Watergate scandal broke while they were shooting, and the parallels were too potent - and nobody felt like seeing a political satire when things were actually so dire. The movie died (although it has its following now.) So it's a thankless part - and Stockwell was not thanked for it - by having his career resurrected. It would be another 12 goddamn years before Paris, Texas catapulted him back to where he should be. 12 years. And the man was in his 40s. When it seems like he SHOULD have found some ease and comfort - the same level of ease and comfort he had had as a kid actor. Nope. That was not in the cards for Stockwell. True and lasting success would not really come for him until he was in his 50s. But here he is - in a movie which was, for all intents and purposes, invisible ... DOING HIS JOB and doing it well. A movie made in the middle of Dean Stockwell's leanest years of anonymity when he never made more than $10,000 a year.

It's easy to admire the performances of those who are at the top. Who get the best scripts sent to them. Who can pick and choose. But those who don't have choices ... or not as many ... what do THEY do with their talent? At this point in my life, that is the question that interests me. And I think that might be why the Dean Stockwell obsession has come into my life right now like a force from above. I really need to learn that life lesson (and I have to learn it over and over again - because I keep forgetting. It's so easy to get caught up in where I feel I SHOULD be right now, and what I SHOULD have accomplished, and where is my husband and my brood of children? I thought they all would have shown up by now. And where is my red carpet, because I'm THIS age now and what has happened to me? Where did it all go? Is it too late for me? It is sometimes a daily struggle to not "go there", so to speak. To keep going, to keep doing the work, to follow Tennessee Williams' advice: "Make voyages - attempt them - there's nothing else". Or like Herb Brooks shouting at his players over and over as the minutes ticked down in the final period on February 22, 1980: "Play your game. Play. Your. Game." Over and over and over. Never ever forget to Play. Your. Game.)

And a movie like The Werewolf of Washington - and Dean Stockwell's ferocious performance - is a great reminder, for me, of all of that.

More screengrabs here:

Jack pleads his case, and it involves push pins and pentagrams.

"Whatever you say, Mr. President."

"I think that damn wolf bit me."

Headin' to work.

What? Huh? Is someone speaking to me? I can't hear you because my hands are swelling up into claws.

This was one of my favorite shots. The car comes driving up to the camera - it's night-time - a sort of Katherine Graham equivalent is driving - hugely powerful in DC circles and therefore a threat to the administration's plans. She also, sadly, has the mark of the beast in her palm so she must die. The car comes into the frame from the road beyond - and as it gets close - we can see a creature crouched on top of the car. It's done with no cuts. And this was a bare bones budget, so I'm sure it was actually Stockwell and not a stunt werewolf.

Intense scene. Hilarious - but played to the hilt. He MUST be chained up so he cannot kill again - and yet his lover shows up, and refuses to believe him and tries to unchain him - and he freaks OUT. He shouts something along the lines of, "I'M A VICIOUS BEAST WITH A TASTE FOR BLOOD. FOR GOD'S SAKE, DON'T UNCHAIN ME." It's genius.

He glances down at his hands during an important stressful meeting with the President and all the top brass in the military (Stockwell's dad plays one of the generals - no lines, but whatever, there he is.) Anyway - Jack is trying to hold it all together - but glances down and sees that his hands are ...

Oh God, no!!!

He basically is struggling NOT to become a wolf during the whole meeting and it's a great acting job, really fun.

Smile while you still can, Jack.

I think that's a hot picture. I'm just sayin'.

"Check out the scar on my chest."
"For God's sake, put your shirt on."

Stockwell quivers with conviction - he MUST show the psychiatrist the scar.

Shots like this are what elevate the movie into satire. It's fun.

"What's it for?"

Oh God, man, don't ask!

On a foggy night in Budapest, with my Commie girlfriend Gisele ... I had a run-in with a wolf and a gypsy. And my life was never the same again ...

I love you. You are the President's daughter. I work for your dad. I am also a werewolf. I am fucked.

Poor Jack. He hangs up the phone from making a date with his lover - and bursts into tears. The moon will rise tonight. He says something to himself like, "Please don't let me go thru this again ..." He is not a HAPPY werewolf, is what I'm trying to say. He is a werewolf tormented with guilt by his own thirst for blood.

God bless you, Dean Stockwell. You are chained to a chair.

Hot kiss. But he is still completely wrapped in heavy chains and there is something I find strangely endearing and also hot about all of it. Even as I realize: oh my god, this is so stupid.

"Are you there, God? It's me. The werewolf of Washington."

Looking at that shot makes me realize why he was first choice to do a planned (but never completed) biopic of James Dean, after Dean's death in the 50s. Stockwell didn't want to do it - said he had no interest in impersonating Dean, and also found no interest in playing an actor - but his name was bandied about quite a bit as the guy for the job. I'm kind of thankful that movie was never made.

Faces I Love, part 4

(For those of you unfamiliar with this - here's part 1, part 2, and part 3)

The wonderful Dennis started it all here ... and I LOVED the idea.

To think about faces I love - and not just because of their physical beauty or that I'm crushing on them. There are many reasons to love a face. And then to search out photos that really illuminate what it is about the face I love so much. And to NOT EXPLAIN. To just post the photos. There was a simplicity to the approach that really appealed to me.

It goes along with the theme of "celebration" that I want to create on this blog.

So Dennis: THANK YOU for the idea!! (More from Dennis in this same series here, and here)

Oh, and I think I've repeated myself a couple times here with a couple faces. So be it.

And here's round 4!

FACES I LOVE

Both.

All 3 of 'em, bless their hearts.

"This next one is me if I had posed for El Greco."

.... "this is what I would look like while relaxing between Islamic rages."....

Read the whole post.

.... Man, I needed that laugh. The photos did me in ("the hills definitely have eyes") - I'm STILL laughing about it ...

Kids on a slide

There's something infectious about the expressions on the faces of these three kids. I find myself smiling, too.

Showbiz anecdote

Director Henry Hathaway was doing a movie - starring Robert Mitchum. First day of shooting he comes up to Mitchum and says, "Hi, Bob! I just wanted to give you a heads up: sometimes, when I'm doing a movie, I get frustrated and I'll cuss an actor out, call him names. I just want you to know that it happens sometimes, I don't want you to take it personally."

Mitchum replied, "Thanks for letting me know, Henry. I should give you a heads up that when someone cusses me out or calls me names, I like to punch that person in the nose. It happens sometimes, and I don't want you to take it personally."

Wow.

Check this out.

Speaking of Capote:

... here's a great photo of him.

I am drooling over those bookcases.

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from 'Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex'. This is the final piece in Music for Chameleons and it is a "transcription" of a conversation Truman Capote had with himself, as he lay tossing and turning in bed one lonely night. One side of his personality interviews the other. It's incredibly narcissistic, but because I find him an interesting character as well as a wonderful writer and storyteller, I love it. For example, the excerpt below. Now he was a huge name-dropper (as should be probably obvious by now) - but I don't really have a problem with that, either - not like some folks do. I love to hear stories about famous people, and if someone's got the dish on someone else - I'm on board. I read Perez Hilton. Of course I do. Anyway, here is Capote's story about someone famous - an idol of his. He is ruminating to himseslf about "great conversationalists" he has known. He lists some names. Then tells this story.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'Nocturnal Turnings, or How Siamese Twins Have Sex'.

When I was eighteen I met the person whose conversation has impressed me the most, perhaps becaue the person in question is the one who has most impressed me. It happened as follows:

In New York, on East Seventy-ninth Street, there is a very pleasant shelter known as the New York Society Library, and during 1942 I spent many afternoons there researching a book I intended writing but never did. Occasionally, I saw a woman there whose appearance rather mesmerized me - her eyes especially: blue, the pale brilliant cloudless blue of prairie skies. But even without this singular feature, her face ws interesting - firm-jawed, handsome, a bit androgynous. Pepper-salt hair parted in the middle. Sixty-five, thereabouts. A lesbian? Well, yes.

One January day I emerged from the library into the twilight to find a heavy snowfall in progress. The lady with the blue eyes, wearing a nicely cut black coat with a sable collar, was waiting at the curb. A gloved, taxi-summoning hand was poised in the air, but there were no taxis. She looked at me and smiled and said: "Do you think a cup of hot chocolate would help? There's a Longchamps around the corner."

She ordered hot chocolate; I asked for a "very" dry martini. Half seriously, she said, "Are you old enough?"

"I've been drinking since I was fourteen. Smoking, too."

"You don't look more than fourteen now."

"I'll be nineteen next September." Then I told her a few things: that I was from New Orleans, that I'd published several short stories, that I wanted to be a writer and was working on a novel. And she wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ..." "No living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rivalry factor being what it is, for one contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?"

With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it."

I had seen photographs of Willa Cather - long-ago ones, made perhaps in the early twenties. Softer, homelier, less elegant than my companion. Yet I knew instantly that she was Willa Cather, and it was one of the frissons of my life. I began to babble about her books like a schoolboy - my favorites: A Lost Lady, The Professor's House, My Antonia. It wasn't that I had anything in common with her as a writer. I would never have chosen for myself her sort of subject matter, or tried to emulate her style. It was just that I considered her to be a great artist. As good as Flaubert.

We became friends; she read my work and was always a fair and helpful judge. She was full of surprises. For one thing, she and her lifelong friend, Miss Lewis, lived in a spacious, charmingly furnished Park Avenue apartment - somehow, the notion of Miss Cather living in an apartment on Park Avenue seemed incongrous with her Nebraska upbringing, with the simple, rather elegiac nature of her novels. Secondly, her principal interest was not literature, but music. She went to concerts constantly, and almost all her closest friends were musical personalities, Yehudi Menuhin and his sister Hepzibah.

Like all authentic conversationalists, she was an excellent listener, and when it was her turn to talk, she was never garrulous, but crisply pointed. Once she told me I was overly sensitive to criticism. The truth was that she was more sensitive to critical slights than I; any disparaging reference to her work caused a decline in spirits. When I pointed this out to her, she said: "Yes, but aren't we always seeking out our own vices in others and reprimanding them for such possessions? I'm alive. I have clay feet. Very definitely."

Dean Stockwell: 3 stories about Errol Flynn

Speaking of Errol Flynn ...

In 1950, Stockwell appeared in Kim - with Errol Flynn. Stockwell was about 12 or 13 when they filmed it - and nearing the end of his run as a child-actor. He is here, in this movie, on the brink of adolescence - and he's described how he, unlike other normal kids, YEARNED for acne and awkwardness - because that meant he wouldn't have to be a "child actor" anymore. He's great in Kim - it's an enormous part, he's in almost every scene - and the movie wouldn't work without him. It could have been an insufferable bore with the wrong kid in that part - but as it is, it's a ton of fun (to this day). Errol Flynn, naturally, was a huge star - and you just have to overlook the fact that he's supposed to be from Afghanistan, and just go with it. The rapport between Stockwell and Flynn seems quite genuine - Flynn's terrific with him, and you really believe that these two - one a kid, one a grown man - are buddies. It's fun to watch them together.

Stockwell, as always, has enough talent to go toe to toe with anybody - it has nothing to do with age, or even experience. It's like him practically stealing Anchors Aweigh away (ha) from Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra - and also how he strolls away with Gentleman's Agreement - and Gregory Peck, in all of his ponderous self-righteousness, barely even notices that the kid is walking away with the picture. With one hand tied behind his back. Seriously, Stockwell is TINY in that film, a small child, and easily, easily, steals the whole thing. Just by listening, talking, and seeming like a real little person, as opposed to a plot device. So Stockwell had that THING. He never (to my eyes) seems "precocious" - meaning one of those little show-biz kids, who never takes off their tap shoes, and doesn't seem quite like a real child. Stockwell always just seems like a little boy, alive on screen. Natural, unselfconscious, confident - it's lovely to watch. You realize how rare it is when you see it.

Stockwell's dad had never really been around when he was a kid - and I believe his parents got divorced when he was quite little. He was raised by his mother, a single woman - and he basically grew up on the studio where he was under contract. A surreal life, to be sure.

Dick Moore (or "Dickie Moore") - wrote a book about what it was like for children actors of that era (he should know - he was a huge star as a youngun) - and the book is called Twinkle Twinkle Little Star (but don't have sex or take the car). I've had the book for years - since I was a teenager myself ... because I always kind of wished I had grown up in that era, in the heyday of child movie stars. Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney, Margaret O'Brien, etc. etc. blah blah blah. The book is great, though, because Dickie Moore tracks down all of his old friends - all the kids who are now adults - and asks about their experiences. So some (like Rooney) were like, "It was delightful!" and some, like Stockwell, were like, "Yeah, uhm, it was NOT so delightful." I like the book because it's honest about the pressures those kids were under - and yet it's not a diatribe against it either. Everyone has a different story. Stockwell has been quite honest about how horrible his education was - how he basically had to teach himself how to read, as in - not just learn your lines - when he was in his 20s, because his education had been so spotty. He loved his teachers (all of these kids went to the studio school called The Little Red Schoolhouse - there are pictures in the book of Elizabeth Taylor and Roddy McDowall and Stockwell - sitting at their little desks, all smiling, as they read or write - but classes were held in the hour or so between takes, it was insane.) Anyway, Stockwell looks back fondly on those teachers - even though he never actually learned anything.

He says, in an interview in Twinkle Twinkle Little Star:

When we graduated from MGM, we had to do a magazine layout of a graduation party: Rusty Tamblyn, me, Claude Jarman, Jr., Elizabeth Taylor, and Jane Powell. They wanted a photo with all of us outside in front of the schoolhouse. Elizabeth was so happy she threw her books in the air, and Miss McDonald [the principal] came running out, screaming at the photographers, "Don't have her throw her books like that."

Mary McDonald intimidated me. She didn't have the most beautiful visage in the world. She didn't teach me shit. But in retrospect, I love her because I feel she was intent upon educating us. In some way - a way she didn't realize consciously - she sensed that she was dealing with kids that were out of place in time and ties and culture. I tend to revere her.

So now we're coming back to Errol Flynn - and what he meant to Dean Stockwell. Stockwell was a little child, an alien from the rest of boyhood - he had adult responsibilities, he was carrying movies, he made tons of money - and basically spent most of his time wishing he was playing football and going to a regular school. He had no father figure in his life, and was, for the most part, surrounded by women. His mother, his teachers - all of whom loved him, but ... You know. A boy needs a father.

In walks swashbuckling sex-crazed Errol Flynn.

I read some interview with Stockwell - it was recently - and he was asked, "So who taught you about sex?" He said, "I did a movie with Errol Flynn when I was 13. I got quite an education."

Many of these stories might be deemed inappropriate - and probably Mrs. Stockwell would have been horrified if she had known what Flynn was telling her young son. But that's just a matter of perception. From Stockwell's point of view, Errol Flynn was essential. Children actors are always a rare and odd entity ... easy to forget that they are, after all, just children. (A good friend of mine is a casting agent here in New York and the stories she tells of the kids who come in to audition ... and how horrible the parents can be ... She said she was coaching one little boy, he was about 4 or 5, and he had to take a waffle out of the toaster oven, take a bite, and say "Yum"! Something simple like that. My friend has two kids of her own, she loves kids and is very sympathetic to the young phenoms who come in and out of her office. This little boy sat down in the chair, legs dangling - and she told him what she wanted him to do. He thought a little bit, and then said, "I don't want to." They talked a bit - and he basically "didn't feel like it" that day ... He was only 4 so he couldn't give her any reasons - but DUH. He's 4. He shouldn't have to give a treatise about why he doesn't want to audition for a Lego My Eggo commercial. He wasn't a brat, but he was telling her he didn't want to do it. My friend brought him back outside and said to the mother, "He's not really in the mood for this today." And the mother was having NONE of it. "What? No! He has to go back in there and do what he's supposed to do!" My friend was gentle and firm. "No, I really don't think he wants to do it today. Okay?" Etc. The child is 4 years old - and not ready for all that responsiblity - and he said it as clearly as he could. Sadly, his mother was unwilling to deal with that fact - but my friend took it upon herself to at least LISTEN to the small child and get him off the hook. You should never have to do something you don't want to do. If you don't want to be an actor - then you don't have to be one!!) It's a tough line to walk - because naturally there are some little kids who want nothing more than to traipse into an audition room and say their lines and try to get a job. Parents/adults must LISTEN to their young ones. It's okay if a 4 year old doesn't 'feel like' auditioning for something. When Stockwell was 15, 16, his contract was up - and he told his mother he didn't feel like acting anymore and he wanted to go to college. She was surprised - but she also let him go. He had to choose his own way. He had been trapped in that profession long enough.

Stockwell was so good at what he did - that people forgot, sometimes, he was a child.

Stockwell talks about Errol Flynn and what it meant to Stockwell to work with him and be in his presence at this particular adolescent moment in his life:

I'm not saying I'd recommend him for the rest of society. It just so happened that at that time of my life - I was twelve or something - he was what he was: a truly profound, nonsuperficial sex symbol. He was the fucking male.

Funny (and, to me, moving) stories below.

Dean Stockwell:

Flynn was a maniac practical joker. I had a horror looming up, one of those crying scenes - a real toughy - with Paul Lukas. He's a dying lama. The scene is a master shot inside a tent in India and I'm there with the lama and Flynn comes through the tent flaps and gives me food for the lama in a rice bowl, and I'm supposed to be - as the character Kim - on the job and I can't let the lama eat maggots. So I check the bowl. Flynn has a line and leaves. Then I have this big crying scene with the lama.

So we rehearse and do a take. I'm talking to the lama and in comes Flynn and hands me the bowl, piled high with fresh camel dung, still steaming. Now I'm supposed to look at it and say, "Is this okay for the lama to eat?" And he's supposed to say, "Yes, of course. I promise it's good."

I looked at the mess and said my line and he backed out. I played the rest of the scene and it cost Flynn five hundred dollars. He had bet everyone on the crew that he would break me up.

haha - I love that Flynn assumed Stockwell would crack up ... but Dean Stockwell, already a seasoned professional, kept going. Ha!!

Dean Stockwell (this one makes me laugh!!):

I had a hell of a good time shooting that picture.

Errol Flynn came onto the set one morning a little blurry-eyed, and told me about picking up a girl the night before, a waitress. He really liked waitresses and working girls - secretaries.

So he took this waitress to his place. Next morning, he said, "You know what she did? As I'm fucking her, she said, 'Oh, fuck me, Errol Flynn! Fuck me, Errol Flynn!' I mean, that really tells you where it's at. 'Fuck me, Errol Flynn.' Not 'Fuck me, Errol.'"

hahahahaha

Inappropriate to tell this to a 13 year old boy? Yes.

But amusing and human and appreciated by said 13 year old boy? Hell yes. Stockwell had grown up in the hothouse atmosphere of the studio which had a vested interest in keeping the kids innocent (sometimes to a fault - most of the girls interviewed in Dick Moore's book - Jane Withers, Margaret O'Brien, many others - say that they hadn't even been warned about menstruation - they just randomly began bleeding one day and were like: AHHHH, WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME!) Granted this was also the time ... but the studios were particularly intent on shielding their little child stars from the realities of adolescence.

Errol Flynn was like: FUCK THAT. (In more ways than one.)

Dean Stockwell:

Okay, so I'm going to play this little Indian kid in Rudyard Kipling's tale of Kim and Errol Flynn is going to play the other guy. While they're building the sets, I come onto the sound stage with my mother and the studio teacher, the perfect Norman Rockwell portrait of middle America - sixty-three years old, sweet, giving, a long-suffering spinster with the rimless glasses and high lace collar. She was terrific with her rosy cheeks. Didn't even have to blue her hair; she had her own natural white hair. She and my mother were flanking me.

Errol Flynn came up to me. Somebody said, "This is Dean Stockwell." Of course, he's bigger than me, and with this gleam in his eye, he looked down at me. He stuck out his hand and said, "Hi. Have you had your first fuck yet?"

There was a moment, it lasted an eternity, where both my mother and the teacher were going "Brrrr," like pigeons with a gnat up their ass, blushing and doing everything but bleeding on either side of me. Flynn is still staring at me, waiting for me to answer him, but I didn't know what the word meant. I'm just looking at this guy, thinking, I finally found a friend, a father.

Obviously, he knew I hadn't had my first fuck yet, or he figured that out right after he asked me. Still, he gave me one of the special lapel buttons he'd had made. It had beautiful hand-carved wings. In the center were three F's, interlocked. It was "Flynn's Flying Fucker" club, and the part that went into your lapel had a huge erect cock and balls to hold it in. I had it hidden in my top drawer for four years. My mother finally found it. She didn't tell me until two years after she threw it out.

Dean Stockwell:

"There were uglies and there were beauties. For me, Errol Flynn was the best... He was the ultimate father figure for me."

All Dean Stockwell stuff here

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'A Beautiful Child' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from 'A Beautiful Child'.

This is perhaps the most famous of these little transcripts. 1955. Marilyn Monroe and Truman Capote, drinking buddies and gossipy friends, meet up at a funeral for a well-loved actress and acting teacher. Monroe and Capote spend the whole day hanging out, drinking champagne, walking down by the docks, talking ... at this point, Marilyn is divorced from Dimaggio - and has a "secret lover" - which will turn out to be Arthur Miller. Monroe has moved back to New York - to protest the crap movies the studios were placing her in - she has formed her own production company and started studying acting with Lee Strasberg. I love this photograph of Capote and Monroe - dude, hold her HAND, not her wrist!!

It's a fun piece .... an illuminating glimpse of Marilyn Monroe.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'A Beautiful Child'.

TC: Now do you think we can get the hell out of here? You promised me champagne, remember?

MARILYN: I remember. But I don't have any money.

TC: You're always late and you never have any money. By any chance are you under the delusion that you're Queen Elizabeth?

MARILYN: Who?

TC: Queen Elizabeth. The Queen of England.

MARILYN: (frowning) What's that cunt got to do with it?

TC: Queen Elizabeth never carries money either. She's not allowed to. Filthy lucre ust not stain the royal palm. It's a law or something.

MARILYN: I wish they'd pass a law like that for me.

TC: Keep going the way you are and maybe they will.

MARILYN: Well, gosh. How does she pay for anything? Like when she goes shopping?

TC: Her lady-in-waiting trots along with a bag full of farthings.

MARILYN: You know what? I'll bet she gets everything free. In return for endorsemenkts.

TC: Very possible. I wouldn't be a bit surprised. By Appointment to Her Majesty. Corgi dogs. All those Fortnum & Mason goodies. Pot. Condoms.

MARILYN: What would she want with condoms?

TC: Not her, dopey. For that chump who walks two steps behind. Prince Philip.

MARILYN: Him. Oh, yeah. He's cute. He looks like he might have a nice prick. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Errol Flynn whip out his prick and play the piano with it? Oh well, it was a hundred years ago, I'd just got into modeling, and I went to this half-ass party, and Errol Flynn, so pleased with himself, he was there and he took out his prick and played the piano with it. Thumped the keys. He played You Are My Sunshine. Christ! Everybody says Milton Berle has the biggest schlong in Hollywood. But who cares? Look, don't you have any money?

TC: Maybe about fifty bucks.

MARILYN: Well, that ought to buy us some bubbly.

(Outside, Lexington Avenue was empty of all but harmless pedestrians. It was around two, and as nice an April afternoon as one could wish: ideal strolling weather. So we moseyed toward Third Avenue. A few gawkers spun their heads, not because they recognized Marilyn as the Marilyn, but because of her funereal finery; she giggled her special little giggle, a sound as tempting as the jingling bells on a Good Humor wagon, and said: "Maybe I should always dress this way. Real anonymous."

As we neared P.J. Clarke's saloon, I suggested P.J.'s might be a good place to refresh ourselves, but she vetoed that: "It's full of those advertising creeps. And that bitch Dorothy Kilgallen, she's always in there getting bombed. What is it wiht these micks? The way they booze, they're worse than Indians."

I felt called upon to defend Kilgallen, who was a friend, somewhat, and I allowed as to how she could upon occasion be a clever funny woman. She said: "Be that as it may, she's written some bitchy stuff about me. But all those cunts hate me. Hedda. Louella. I know you're supposed to get used to it, but I just can't. It really hurts. What did I ever do to those hags? The only one who writes a decent word about me is Sidney Skolsky. But he's a guy. The guys treat me okay. Just like maybe I was a human person. At least they give me the benefit of the doubt. And Bob Thomas is a gentleman. And Jack O'Brian."

We looked in the windows of antique shops; one contained a tray of old rings, and Marilyn said: "That's pretty. The garnet with the seed pearls. I wish I could wear rings, but I hate people to notice my hands. They're too fat. Elizabeth Taylor has fat hands. But with those eyes, who's looking at her hands? I like to dance naked in front of mirrors and watch my titties jump around. There's nothing wrong with them. But I wish my hands weren't so fat."

Another window displayed a handsome grandfather clock, which prompted her to observe: "I've never had a home. Not a real one with all my own furniture. But if I ever get married again, and make a lot of money, I'm going to hire a couple of trucks and ride down Third Avenue buying every damn kind of crazy thing. I'm going to get a dozen grandfather clocks and line them all up in one room and have them all ticking away at the same time. That would be real homey, don't you think?")

MARILYN: Hey! Across the street!

TC: What?

MARILYN: See the sign with the palm? That must be a fortunetelling parlor.

TC: Are you in the mood for that?

MARILYN: Well, let's take a look.

(It was not an inviting establishment. Through a smearaed window we could discern a barren room with a skinny, hairy gypsy lady seated in a canvas chair under a hellfire-red ceiling lamp that shed a torturous glow; she was knitting a pair of baby-booties and did not return our stares. Nevertheless, Marilyn started to go in, then changed her mind.)

MARILYN: Sometimes I want to know what's going to happen. Then I think it's better not to. There's two things I'd like to know, though. One is whether I'm going to lose weight.

TC: And the other?

MARILYN: That's a secret.

Clips to make one feel homesick.

Pat McCurdy is an old old friend of mine - I guess I can call him that now - we're certainly old enough, known each other for years, had major adventures (What's Up Doc quote: "What adventure did I have?... What adventure DID I have?")

-- and today I found some clips of Pat in action on Youtube. I hope it's okay I link to these, Mark?

Okay. So. Some clips I found. Just clips from various shows - look to be pretty recent, judging from the songs.

First clip:

The F*** Buddy Song:

Wow, you think he's into Gilbert & Sullivan? hahahahaha

Oh - and at the end, as he's coming to the big finale - he kind of makes his voice go whispery and intense - and to quote Mitchell: it is pure liquid bullshit (the highest of compliments in our world) - and it just makes me LAUGH.

Also:

Screw You

An all-time favorite. "I never thought forgetting you could be so easy ...."

And this one:

Oh Well

Listen to that audience. You are loved, Pat McCurdy!!

I can't explain why I find him so perpetually amusing and entertaining. I've been going to his shows for, good Lord, forever now? I don't even want to think of how long. I NEVER get sick of him.

There are gestures he does. Like there's one near the beginning of "Screw You" (22 seconds in, to be exact) - a kind of swoopy double-armed move - that is so STUPID, and yet - SO FUNNY. I am thinking about it now, and I am laughing out loud.

There are lyrics. There is audience participation. But there's also a constant whiff of Gilbert & Sullivan that floats around everything he does - that just ... it just strikes me as sooooo funny.

I am never over it. Love it.

One last clip below. Gives you KIND of an idea of the raucous-ness of his live shows. Also - the melodrama - he's so ... melodramatic. Like every song is part of Edwin Drood or something. It cracks me up!!

I Have My Moments

"spawn of Satan"? hahahahahaha

Listen to the audience chiming in. And I love how he basically demands more applause at the end. I love that about him. MORE, MORE, MORE!

"Peyton ... fucking Manning!"

Nothing like a Pat McCurdy show. Nothing at all.

Ann - when you read this, for whatever reason the following anecdote popped into my mind yesterday (Oh, I know why - because I kept writing "Learn boundaries" in my Dean Stockwell post):

I think it was at a show at Hoghead McDunna's and I believe Pat had some instant drunkenness going on - you know what I'm talking about. We loved it when he got instantly drunk. hahaha You and I were sitting there, having a great time - and he was coming up to a break, and he said something to the entire audience like, "I'm gonna take a 15 minute break now ... so please ... feel free to sexually approach one another ...."

You and I DIED ... we just were like: WHAT? Feel free to what?? and you shouted up at him: "LEARN BOUNDARIES."

I don't know - that came into my head yesterday and I burst out laughing, even though it's an anecdote from the Pre-Paleozoic Era of our lives!

One more story and then I'll be done: Speaking of his whole "more more more" quality - one of my favorite Pat stories (and they are legion) is this: He and I were in Rhode Island. We had gone to Foxwoods and had the most hysterical time gambling. I took pictures in the casino and got in trouble. I drove him around my old haunts. I showed him the house on Ocean Road where I lost my ............ luggage. He was enthralled. "Over there? Right over there?" Goofball. He spoke in a bogus New England accent and made jokes that everyone was named Ezekiah or Jebediah. "Ezekiah, batten down the hatches - a nor'easter's comin' down!" he kept declaring. So stupid. So fun. We went out for seafood at George's (Rhode Islanders in exile may swoon with homesickness now) - and we had beer and then went for a walk on the beach. It was a full moon. The beach was spectacular. I felt as though my homestate were showing off for Pat - putting on her finest clothes, letting him see her at her best. The tide was low, there was a huge moonpath in the water - we walked silently - it was absolutely gorgeous. A perfect moment. Pat was like a little kid, staring around him. Then he said, eagerly, "Wouldn't it be perfect if there were like little flopping dead fish on the sand?" (Okay, so first of all - I love it that THAT was what he thought was missing ... but that's not the point of the story.) He said that, and I stared around - at the full moon, and the ocean and the lighthouse - and said, "Man, it's never enough for you, is it?" And he just LOST it. My comment took him so by surprise - and I had just nailed him - not with scorn or contempt - it was a simple observation. Pat was dying. "It isn't! It's never enough!" Hours later, we were still laughing about the two of us walking thru this dream-like perfect scene of nature - and him wishing for more.

"my engagement in the Arab business..."

Letter by TE Lawrence: erudite, yet rambling.... His references amaze me. His self-knowledge (what he is and is not good at), and also - just his writing style, even in something as casual as a letter.

Thanks, Keith

... for the link! I love the "links for the day" feature over there ... and not just when I'm included, mkay? Keith always finds bizarre and interesting things.

Spreadin' the Stockwell gospel ...

... one movie at a time.

A me-me-me

from the wonderful and superfast Annie

List some of your favorite words:

Elixir
Twilight
Evensong
Numbnuts
Paleontology

What’s your favorite maxim or proverb?

I love that line from Braveheart:

"In order to find his equal, an Irishman is forced to talk to God."

I kid, I kid. Not really - but I'll list another one:

Not sure if this counts as a proverb - but I would say the quote is one of the guiding lights of my life so I will list it:

"Make voyages! -- Attempt them! ... there's nothing else."

-- Tennessee Williams, Camino Real

What’s your favorite quotation?

How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.

-- Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice

What’s your favorite first line of a novel?

Oh this is hard. There are so many.

But I think I'll go with:

It was love at first sight. -- Catch 22, by Joseph Heller

I also have a real fondness for:

"Where's Papa going with that ax?" said Fern to her mother as they were setting the table for breakfast.
-- Charlotte's Web, by EB White

Give an example of a piece of description that’s really pleased you in your reading lately:

Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated, that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least; but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes, without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit. The little plaintiff or defendant, who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled, has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world. Fair wards of court have faded into mothers and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps, since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the Court, perenially hopeless.

Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke. That is the only good that has ever come of it. It has been death to many, but it is a joke in the profession. Every master in Chancery has had a reference out of it. Every Chancellor was "in it", for somebody or other, when he was counsel at the bar. Good things have been said about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers, in select port-wine committee after dinner in hall. Articled clerks have been in the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it. The last Lord Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers the eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers;" -- a pleasantry that particularly tickled the maces, bags, and purses.

-- Bleak House, by Charles Dickens

Which five writers do you particularly admire for their use of language?

James Joyce
Annie Proulx
Joseph Heller
AS Byatt
Michael Chabon
Herman Melville (oops, that's 6 - but Melville must be on the list)

And are there writers whose style you really dislike?

Well, Nicholas Sparks, although I hesitate to say that he even has a "style". He disgusts me.

Other than that ...

I don't like simple writing that just stays on the surface. I don't like obvious writing. People with fundamentalist views in general, are awful writers because they either write to convince - or they just preach to their own choir - and this does not make for interesting writing, in the slightest. (I'm not just talking about religious fundamentalists. I use that term to mean: black and white certainty of being right.) Yawn. I prefer mystery and depth. I don't like writers who start with a huge generalization that you MUST accept before you read on. I don't like lazy writers who start with assumptions. Actually, those people aren't lazy writers, really. They're lazy THINKERS. I don't like writers who take sit-coms as their main inspiration for dialogue. I like writers who are bold - even if they fail on occasion. I don't mind if you over-write (Stephen King) ... if you tell me a damn good story (Stephen King). I can't stand condescending writing. I also like writing that is SIMPLE. I guess that might seem like a contradiction, but you know - do I contradict myself? very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. Even James Joyce said, "With me, the thought is always simple." And yes. That is true true true. I don't like purposefully obscure writing, although I do love to be challenged. But something that is opaque because perhaps the opacity will hide the fact that there ain't no there there?? Yuk.

What’s the key to really fine writing, in your opinion?

There's definitely so much truth to the "show, don't tell" rule, in my opinion. I love writers who SHOW me stuff. Annie Proulx is marvelous at that - her At Close Range collection is spectacular in this regard. I literally lost my sense of time and space and self reading that book. (Example here) I was on the plains, I could feel the frost, hear the crunch of dry grass, feel the wind ... Her descriptive passages are NEVER too much. I'm never like: Okay, okay, I get it. She finds JUST the right words ... and stops when she should. Unbelievable.

And I suppose this is just a matter of taste - but to me, fine writing is something that transports me. I forget I'm reading - and I go into the story. But what in the writing actually does that? I'm not sure - it's different for different books.

Like, I would put something like Good Night Moon in this category - even though it's a kids book and it only has 20 words in it. I find that book transportive, and perfectly so. I lose myself.

And I would also put most of Stephen King's books into this category.

All the good writers have that ability.

John Irving, George Eliot, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Dostoevsky, Dickens, Ian McEwan, Charlotte Bronte, etc. etc.

I lose myself in their books. It's like diving into a pool.

There's something CONFIDENT in their prose. They know how to lead me by the hand into their story. They are not ambivalent, they do not overstay their welcome, they TRUST me to fill in the blanks - they don't talk down to me, or over-describe, or make sure I "get it". They are confident storytellers, and their prose reflects that. It's why I look forward to their books.

And here's Dan's answers

And here are Stefanie's answers. I like "effervescent" too.

Gone with the Wind

Makeup and hair stills.

Neat! (I love that blog, by the way.)

Dean Stockwell: The Dunwich Horror

Dunwich Horror from 1970 has pretty much nothing to do with the HP Lovecraft story from whence/which it came - and that's a bone of contention for many people, Stockwell included. He was disappointed in how the movie came out - being a huge Lovecraft fan. But the point must be made that it is, essentially, a B-movie, with all the glory and mortification that that implies. It must not be taken too seriously, and it must be seen as an homage to Lovecraft - rather than a faithful adaptation. I think the thing is a HOOT. I love B-movies anyway - I love camp classics - I love Ed Wood's movies, for example - To me, they are the best examples of the sheer JOY of film-making. And Dunwich Horror, while it definitely has much better production values than Ed Wood's stuff, is in the same vein. It doesn't take itself too seriously - it's not ponderous or pretentious in the slightest - it doesn't worry too much about itself - it is unapologetically manipulative - and frankly, it's a blast.

Every time I find myself in the middle of such an obsession as the one I am in now - and I "go to work" - meaning: seeing everything they've done - there are always surprises. And there are always movies I discover that I NEVER would have seen otherwise ... and I don't know, it's a great joy to me. Like Only Angels Have Wings. I had never seen that movie before my Cary Grant obsession - I think I had only seen Bringing Up Baby, Philadelphia Story, North by Northwest ... but when the obsession began, I saw EVERYthing. And the gems!! I mean, I know I'm late to the game on that one, but better late than never. It's so fun for me - and not only that, movies like Only Angels Have Wings add tremendously to the enjoyment of life for me. It's a movie I can sink into, relax with ... I still watch it probably once every two weeks. I know it by heart now. It doesn't lessen the enjoyment of it at all.

So I love that aspect of my obsessive personality. And the same thing is happening with Dean Stockwell - an actor who has made 100 movies - there's just so much stuff to see - not all of it good, not all of it worthy of his gifts - etc. But I love the discovery process.

And discovering movies like The Dunwich Horror has been so much fun. There's another really campy movie he did - a werewolf movie - called The Werewolf of Washington - and that's another one that I probably never would have seen if I wasn't ALL ABOUT DEAN FREAKIN' STOCKWELL right now. And it's SO much fun. Anyone who loves B-movies, and campy horror flicks - should definitely check these out. They're part of a genre I love, and everyone in them plays their parts to the campiest HILT!

Dunwich Horror wastes no time in getting started. There's a "creepy" opening sequence as the credits roll - a cartoon depiction of a woman being impregnated by this massive devil-like creature - and then the first scene shows a plump and innocent Sandra Dee, with her immovable blonde bob, walking on a college campus with her professor. She is holding a huge book that looks very old. The professor says, "Could you please go return the Necromonicon to its case? Can I trust you with this task?" Suddenly - with no warning - we get a glimpse of a man nearby, eavesdropping. He is Dean Stockwell and he looks distinctly sketchy. He is intense, his eyes burning a B-movie glaze at Sandra Dee and the book. He also is wearing a totally porn-star-from-the-70s 'stache. It is so gross. Sandra Dee goes back into the library with the book - obviously an important book - and she goes to put it back into its case - and suddenly, as if from out of nowhere - Stockwell is there, intense, quiet, and asks if he can look at the book.

She, at first, is befuddled ... No, no, she can't ... the library is closing ... she's supposed to put it right back ... but he, with his subtle arts of persuasion (uhm, burning-eyed porno-stache brainwashing) gets her to give it to him to flip through. He sits down at a table, and naturally (because that's what you do) - he begins to read it out loud, in a quiet low voice - that builds in intensity as he turns the pages. The words he reads are all like:

"and then when the moon is ripe and the sea is in high, the door will open ... and the Old Ones will come through ... and all will flow, and all will cease to be, and all will move and churn and there must be a sacrifice ... there will be a sacrifice ... and then ... as has been decreed ... the Old Ones will rise again ..."

Total gibberish, new age gibberish - but Wilbur (Stockwell) is obviously enthralled. Watching Dean Stockwell sit in that library, reading those words out loud like a creepy incantation, has become one of the primary joys of my life. He has all these thick rings on his hand - with weird squiggles on them (what does it mean???) - and his shoulders are narrow in his little corduroy jacket - and he looks sort of normal, yet there is something OFF about this Wilbur. Is he attractive? Sandra Dee seems to think so. She murmurs to her friend, "Did you see his eyes?"

Uhm - how could you miss them with closeups like this one?

Dude. Step back. Learn boundaries.

Thanks.

So the movie is tons of fun. There are gloriously campy moments (Stockwell speaking some ancient "language", while holding his Ogam-stone rings up beside his head Ha!!! Love it, love it, love it, love it... Sandra Dee writhing almost naked on some Druidic altar as Stockwell places the sacred book in between her legs - to do his incantations - naked witchy hippie types running through fields in dream-esque sequences that are supposed to be horrifying yet end up looking just mildly amusing and vaguely erotic - lots of intense closeups of people looking evil or suspicious. Also there has to be the creepiest house in history. Wilbur takes Sandra Dee there for a "date" - and seriously, if some dude took me into his house, and it looked like that one, I'd run for the hills as quickly as I could.

Oh, some interesting trivia:

Curtis Hanson (you know, LA Confidential) wrote the screen play.

And Talia Shire is in it. This is pre-Rocky. She has a small part but it's always cool to see someone on the cusp of great fame. She has no idea what's going to happen in her career in the next decade, and it's going to be something else!!

Stockwell's great in the movie. One of the things he has said about it that I really liked was this:

He loves HP Lovecraft, so he was really psyched to be involved with the film. Very early on, though, he realized: Okay. This isn't exactly the movie I thought it would be. This ISN'T really about Lovecraft's story.

So what did he do? He adjusted how he played the part. He gave up the movie he wanted to be in, and accepted the movie he was in. He said he played the whole thing in a "tongue-in-cheek" manner - because that was the overall TONE of the movie. This is a very very smart move - and surprisingly difficult. I can think of examples of my own life where I had to give up my idea of what I WISHED was happening - and just go wtih what was actually happening. To quote one of my acting teachers in college, "It may not be the show you want, but it's the show you got."

I was in a version of The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man in the Moon Marigolds - and at the time, it was one of my favorite plays ever - and I had got the part I wanted. Tillie! The lead! So exciting! Dream come true! And very early on in the rehearsal process (one of the worst I can remember) it became apparent that ... well, I was gonna have to give up my fantasy of being in that play I loved so much ... because of certain factors I won't go into (the woman playing my mother, ahem) - It was NOT Zindel's play because that actress refused to play her role in the manner in which it was written. She used to go off stage and vomit. That was how big her antipathy was to the material. She REFUSED to play a bad mother, and basically - that's what the whole play was about. It was a devastating experience for me - a huge disappointment - but my acting teacher's maxim "it may not be the show you want, but it's the show you got" really came in handy.

The Dunwich Horror was a campy movie, with 'scary' moments, and an infrared "monster" raging through the woods, and lots of nudity and dream-sequence orgies (again, they're supposed to look scary but they actually end up looking really fun) ... and Stockwell went with the movie he was IN, rather than his fantasy of what the movie SHOULD have been.

And the tongue-in-cheek manner in which he plays that part is delicious.

It's one of his funnest performances.

There's a scene where his grandfather dies (his nutso bearded grandfather who wanders around the haunted house like a wraith - holding a huge stick) - and Wilbur and the Sandra Dee character go to the local graveyard to bury him. But because he was a Whateley - a hated entity in the town - the funeral is busted up by townsfolk who refuse to have a pagan madman be buried near their Christian relatives. But before the townsfolk show up - Wilbur goes through his pagan rituals, and guys? Seriously. I watch Stockwell with the little mortar and pestle, and his big shiny knife, and his chunky rings - he is also wearing a black cape - and he does these swoopy motions with the knife over the gravesite, saying things like, "Ick. Nick. Ick." Or whatever - gibberish - but you know it means something to Wilbur. Anyway, I watch him - and I am in love with him. I love actors. There is something beautiful about a job well done, even in a B-movie such as this one. There's dignity in it - and I love it.

Then at the end, Sandra Dee is all naked on the altar - she's gonna be a virgin sacrifice - or - it's going to be a Rosemary's Baby type situation - where some Beelzebub creature from the 9th dimension enters our world and impregnates her - or maybe it's like The Astronaut's Wife ... anyway, and Stockwell, in his stupid cape and his cheeseball mustache, walks around the altar - holding his hands up beside his face, knuckles facing out - so his rings are ... what ... facing the heavens? And he's shouting gibberish incantations into the wind ...

And I watch such scenes and think, "I have never been so happy. This is hysTERical."

Doing Hamlet is awesome. The classics are there for us, to challenge us, and to be embodied, generation after generation.

But something like The Dunwich Horror also has its place - and it's a blast. I highly recommend it.

Some screenshots below.

The freakin' rings.

Dude, I thought I told you to learn boundaries.

run for the hills, Sandra!!

The 'stache. In all its nasty glory.

That's such a Stockwell expression.

Run!!!

Up to the Altar of New-Age Death and Virgin Sacrifice.

You vill climb up on ze altar, you vill take off your clothes, and you vill soon feel very very sleepy ...

Here's a quote from Dean Stockwell:

"The best thing in The Dunwich Horror is a scene towards the end, where the guy takes the girl up and sticks her on the altar and does these incantations. It was indicated in the script that he opens his shirt. In Lovecraft's story, there's an indication that he has very weird stuff on his skin. So, I arranged to have a friend of mine, George Herms, a fine artist, paint my chest. He came down to the set and spent four hours in the morning, doing what looks like runic hieroglyphics, all on my chest. Those stand out when I open up my shirt and you see all these weird calligraphies on my body."

I love that that was his idea.

And here is part of the scene at the graveyard I mentioned above. I just love him. He's an actor, playing a part, he is behaving ridiculously serious ... but he's not at all condescending to the material. If that makes sense. Stockwell is not "slumming" in this movie. "Tongue in cheek" doesn't mean condescending - it means a certain attitude towards style. Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) is DEADLY SERIOUS as he does this stupid ritual, with runes, and dust, and shiny knives, while wearing a flowing black cape. I adore it. And look at Sandra Dee in the background, all concerned and womanly. Hilarious.

I just ... come on. Look at that. It's hysterical.

Those damn rings again.

Uh oh.

I have no words for how much I love that shot.

Oh whatever, I'm just wearing a black cape, reading my book, which just happens to be resting on your mons veneris, as you writhe about on an altar. Yeah, same ol' same ol' for me.

Wilbur, man, you gotta cut it out with that ring gesture. It's gettin' kinda old. ChillAX, bro!

I wouldn't look so cocky, Wilbur. Things are NOT going to end well for you, my friend.

All Stockwell stuff here

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'Then It All Came Down' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from 'Then It All Came Down'. This is another transcription of a conversation Capote had, and it's the most chilling in all the collection. Truman Capote sits in a maximum security prison cell with Robert Beausoleil - the real key to the Manson murders. He was convicted of killing musician Gary Hinman - and imprisoned. Manson thought, "Hmmm ... maybe if we - my little brood of happy hippies and gunmen - do some copycat killings while he's in jail - then it will be obvious that he is innocent and he'll be released." On the wall of Hinman's apartment were the words "Death to Pigs" - written in his blood. Of course we all know that other such erudite statements were found on the walls of the Tate house and the LaBianca house. Naturally, Manson's little plot to free his bud didn't work out as planned. The rest is history. Bobby Beausoleil is still in jail to this day. Truman Capote, ever since In Cold Blood spent a lot of time in prisons - interviewing killers and those on death row - he became quite in demand ... and I think there was something in him that was quite fascinated by people's capacity for evil. It made him sick to his stomach (he said he would vomit when he left the prison after interviewing Perry Smith and Dick Hickock) - but he also just wanted to get close to it. What secrets could such people reveal? And, the eternal question: WHY? As a novelist, as a student of human nature - it is perhaps the most important question to ask.

I am not sure of the date that this takes place - it must be the late 70s. Beausoleil has been in jail for a decade.

Truman Capote sits in the cramped cell, and asks questions.

Here's just a bit of it. The whole thing, though, is a must-read. It gives no answers (naturally) - it's just a terrifying glimpse.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from 'Then It All Came Down'.

RB: (reaches for guitar, tunes it, strums it, sings): "This is my song, this is my song, this is my dark song, my dark song ..." Everybody always wants to know how I got together with Manson. It was through our music. He plays some, too. One night I was driving around with a bunch of my ladies. Well, we came to this old roadhouse, beer place, with a lot of cars outside. So we went inside, and there was Charlie with some of his ladies. We all got to talking, played some together; the next day Charlie came to see me in my van, and we all, his people and my people, ended up camping out together. Brothers and sisters. A family.

TC: Did you see Manson as a leader? Did you feel influenced by him right away?

RB: Hell, no. He had his people, I had mine. If anybody was influenced, it was him. By me.

TC: Yes, he was attracted to you. Infatuated. Or so he says. You seem to have had that effect on a lot of people, men and women.

RB: Whatever happens, happens. It's all good.

TC: Do you consider killing innocent people a good thing?

RB: Who said they were innocent?

TC: Well, we'll return to that. But for now: What is your own sense of morality? How do you differentiate between good and bad?

RB: Good and bad? It's all good. If it happens, it's got to be good. Otherwise, it wouldn't be happening. It's just the way life flows. Moves together. I move with it. I don't question it.

TC: In other words, you don't question the act of murder. You consider it "good" because it "happens". Justifiable.

RB: I have my own justice. I live by my own law, you know. I don't respect the laws of this society. Because society doesn't respect its own laws. I make my own laws and live by them. I have my own sense of justice.

TC: And what is your sense of justice?

RB: I believe what goes around comes around. What goes up comes down. That's how life flows, and I flow with it.

TC: You're not making much sense - at least to me. And I don't think you're stupid. Let's try again. In your opinion, it's all right that Manson sent Tex Watson and those girls into that house to slaughter total strangers, innocent people --

RB: I said: Who says they were innocent? They burned people on dope deals. Sharon Tate and that gang. They picked up kids on the Strip and took them home and whipped them. Made movies of it. Ask the cops; they found the movies. Not that they'd tell you the truth.

TC: The truth is, the LaBiancas and Sharon Tate and her friends were killed to protect you. Their deaths were directly linked to the Gary Hinman murder.

RB: I hear you. I hear where you're coming from.

TC: Those were imitations of the Hinman murder - to prove that you couldn't have killed Hinman. And thereby get you out of jail.

RB: To get me out of jail. (He nods, smiles, sighs - complimented). None of that came out at any of the trials. The girls got on the stand and tried to really tell how it all came down, but nobody would listen. People couldn't believe anything except what the media said. The media had them programmed to believe it all happened because we were out to start a race war. That it was mean niggers going around hurting all these good white folks. Only - it was like you say. The media, they called us a "family". And it was the only true thing they said. We were a family. We were mother, father, brother, sister, daughter, son. If a member of our family was in jeopardy, we didn't abandon that person. And so for the love of a brother, a brother who was in jail on a murder rap, all those killings came down.

TC: And you don't regret that?

RB: No. If my brothers and sisters did it, then it's good. Everything in life is good. It all flows. It's all good. It's all music.

TC: When you were up on Death Row, if you'd been forced to flow down to the gas chamber and whiff the peaches, would you have given that your stamp of approval?

RB: If that's how it came down. Everything that happens is good.

TC: War. Starving children. Pain. Cruelty. Blindness. Prisons. Desperation. Indifference. All good?

RB: What's that look you're giving me?

TC: Nothing. I was noticing how your face changes. One moment, with just the slightest shift of angle, you look so boyish, entirely innocent, a charmer. And then - well, one can see you as a sort of Forty-second Street Lucifer. Have you ever seen Night Must Fall? An old movie with Robert Montgomery? No? Well, it's about an impish, innocent-looking delightful young man who travels about the English countryside charming old ladies, then cutting off their heads and carrying the heads around with him in leather hat-boxes.

RB: So what's that got to do with me?

TC: I was thinking - if it was ever remade, if someone Americanized it, turned the Montgomery character into a young drifter with hazel eyes and a smoky voice, you'd be very good in the part.

RB: Are you trying to say I'm a psychopath? I'm not a nut. If I have to use violence, I'll use it, but I don't believe in killing.

TC: Then I must be deaf. Am I mistaken, or didn't you just tell me that it didn't matter what atrocity one person committed against another, it was good, all good?

RB: (Silence)

Introverts/my Salieri post

It never ceases to amaze me the number of blogs that are out there - and how some of them somehow find me, and link to things I hadn't even remembered writing. (It's the second post excerpted in that post I'm linking to.) And to pick out, I think, my most vulnerable post ever ... and to do so in such a nice way ... I feel honored - even though I've never really thought of myself as an "introvert". It's an interesting thing to contemplate.

That was a post I really thought hard about pressing "Publish" on. But it was the Truth. In that moment.

Aviation

CW (as always) has some amazing photos. I love those flying boats, man.

In case you're not aware:

... a kind of extraordinary month-long project is going on on Damian's site Windmills of my Mind.

31 days of Spielberg. An in-depth review of a different Spielberg movie every day.

He's got a great eye (Damian) - and his criticisms, so far, have really made me think, and look at some of these old favorites. Obviously, what Damian doesn't know about Steven Spielberg probably isn't worth knowing.

I know we have 10 days left of the series, Damian - but just wanted to say: so far, WELL DONE. I'm amazed!

Dating advice

Okay, so yet again - there's a post at Progressive Boink that shows why it is one of the best sites on the web. I cannot stop laughing.

There's some "Dating IQ" quiz that "Bill" takes ... and he analyzes not only the questions, but his own answers to said quiz.

Example:

Listen: Call her after three days. Talk ten minutes, then tell her there's a Price is Right you want to see coming on and hang up. This lets her know that she ranks just below daytime TV in your mind. If you can work something into the phone call about thinking she's kind of ugly, all the better. Two days after that, call back and tell her you've got nothing better to do so you want to take her out. Let the awkward silence as she waits for you to say where fill the air between you and begin to crush her spirit. You don't want her getting too feisty. When she starts to make her own suggestion, cut in and tell her that you're going to a bar called Skeeter's that is actually just open pallets of warm beer in an abandoned warehouse out by the pier where those murders happened. Casually warn her that you will cut and run without her if a knife fight breaks out.

She is an attractive woman who could possibly be moderately discerning about who she dates, so you've really got to beat that sense of entitlement out of her. You may be short, fat and bald, but you're short, fat and bald that she can't have, and that's going to drive her nuts. Let's be honest, you're clearly the best thing that has happened to this woman. Make her work for it.

Then fall in love.

But there is so much that is funny and insightful (and TRUE!!) in that post. I love, too, how he adds his own answer to the quiz question he's eviscerating - something about: what do you do if she doesn't return your repetitive phone calls:

E. Lock yourself in the closet sobbing openly while listening to Bonnie Raitt's I Can't Make You Love Me set to repeat on your iPod

And then - beautifully - he ends up giving some lovely advice at the end.

Anyway, read the whole glorious thing

Daily Dean Stockwell fix

Ah, the happy innocent 1950s. When good girls didn't and bad boys stayed on their side of the tracks where they belonged. Yeah, uhm, not so much, not so much.

Shots from The Careless Years, 1957 - a movie I really want to see - but can't find anywhere. It sounds rather William Inge-ish, frankly - a "shocking" expose of the sexual desires of teenagers so popular in the 1950s when "adolescence" became its own demographic, to be feared and also admired. Like Splendor in the Grass. Something like Rebel Without a Cause seems kinda, well, trite today (I love it - but it's hard to see how shocking it was at the time!) - so the message - that teenagers are people too, even juvenile delinquents - is a bit ho-hum now. The best part in that movie is the relationship between James Dean and Sal Mineo - homoerotic, tender, and oh so sweet. It's still mysterious and moving today. Dean becomes paternal. Mineo looks up to him. But there's more there, there's more.

"Do you think the end of the world will come at night?" asks Sal Mineo, worriedly, his eyes glimmering and huge.

Dean thinks a bit, then shakes his head. "No. Dawn."

First encounter:

I don't know ... to me, their dynamic is the best in the film. Natalie Wood is great, too - but I just don't find it "shocking" that a girl would rebel and wear lipstick and mess around with boys, and have problems with her father. Duh. The film doesn't work on that level anymore.

It's important, though, to put stuff like that in context. It really is. It's more interesting that way, I think - to try to see it as part of its time. Same way that a play like Dark at the Top of the Stairs was SO controversial at the time it was on Broadway (Inge again!) ... and now? It's a period piece, basically. No way could you transpose that story into the modern era. Not without a lot of work. (Full disclosure: I was in a terrible production of Dark at the Top of the Stairs which Mitchell, sadly, got to see ... so I know of what I speak!)

Dean Stockwell, at around this time in his life, actually wrote a piece for some film magazine in conjunction with the film Careless Years - basically saying, "Teenagers are people, too. The film looks at the issues we teenagers have and takes them seriously." I'll have to find the article, I tripped over it somewhere. You can see how WORRIED people were about the impact of showing such things on screen. I suppose on some level that same crap goes on today!

Anyhoo, The Careless Years was about a "good" girl, who falls for a poor boy ... and when they're alone together, they actually consider having sex outside of marriage! Shocking. Didn't only girls like Rizzo have premarital sex?? Apparently not. Stockwell had dropped out of acting for a good 5 years - he had stopped when he was 14, 15 ... and came back at 20 when he realized: Uhm, I can't do much else, and I also can't stand a 9 to 5 sched. He was always a little bit embarrassed about being an actor. It seemed almost like an accident that he was so good at it. It made him miserable. He has said that he didn't start to enjoy himself as an actor until he was well into his 40s. Interesting.

So anyway. On to the shots from The Careless Years.

Oh no ... you are a good girl ... as is evidenced by your bathing suit ... and I am a poor boy (nobody loves me ...) ... and our families disapprove ... yet, in the words of Albert Schweitzer - I FANCY you!

When I was in high school, I also wore woolen traveling suits and heels. Her figure is something to be admired. Hourglass! And, dude ... whatcha doin' on the floor? Just have some premarital sex. It's all gonna be okay.

Uhm, put a sweatshirt on, bro. You look freezing.

I love it too

This is hysTERical!

Summer

Vitaphone Varieties is a marvelous site - hard to describe or explain - it must just be experienced. Anyone who loves vintage ANYthing from the earliest decades of the 20th century MUST check out this terrific site. Not just for the images (which are so wonderful - I want to eat them all up with a spoon) - but the detailed and insightful commentary. Not for dilettantes, I would imagine ... but for obsessives like myself, and history buffs, and memorabilia buffs - you MUST go check out the site. The latest piece is an extravaganza called A Summer Idyll. So well done - thank you!!

come back ....

Mental Multivitamin makes me think, she inspires me, she challenges me, and sometimes - she makes me cry.

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'Hidden Gardens' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from 'Hidden Gardens'. This is another transcription of a conversation Capote had - this one takes place in New Orleans in 1979. He runs into an old friend - someone he's known for 40 years - a raucous bar-owning woman whose name, apparently, is Big Junebug Johnson. They sit and talk and reminisce - she's a great character. You can HEAR her voice in the transcription. Here they talk about good old Clay Shaw. Big Junebug Johnson's nickname for Capote is "Jockey" - back from the time when he was little and lithe and young.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'Hidden Gardens'.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: When was the last time you got to Mardi Gras?

TC: (reluctant to reply, not desiring to evoke Mardi Gras memories: they were not amusing events to me, the streets swirling with drunken, squalling, shrouded figures wearing bad-dream masks; I always had nightmares after childhood excursions into Mardi Gras melees): Not since I was a kid. I was always getting lost in the crowds. The last time I got lost they took me to the police station. I was crying there all night before my mother found me.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: The damn police! You know we didn't have any Mardi Gras this year 'cause the police went on strike. Imagine, going on strike at a time like that. Cost this town millions. Blackmail is all it was. I've got some good police friends, good customers. But they're all a bunch of crooks, the entire shebang. I've never had no respect for the law around here, and how they treated Mr. Shaw finished me off for good. That so-called District Attorney Jim Garrison. What a sorry sonofagun. I hope the devil turns him on a slooow spit. And he will. Too bad Mr. Shaw won't be there to see it. From up high in heaven, where I know he is, Mr. Shaw won't be able to see old Garrison rotting in hell.

(B.J.J. is referring to Clay Shaw, a gentle, cultivated architect who was responsible for much of a finer-grade historical restoration of New Orleans. At one time Shaw was accused by James Garrison, the city's abrasive, publicity-deranged D.A., of being the key figure in a purported plot to assassinate President Kennedy. Shaw stood trial twice on this contrived charge, and though fully acquitted both times, he was left more or less bankrupt. His health failed, and he died several years ago.)

TC: After his last trial, Clay wrote me and said: "I've always thought I was a little paranoid, but having survived this, I know I never was, and know now I never will be."

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: What is it - paranoid?

TC: Well. Oh, nothing. Paranoia's nothing. As long as you don't take it seriously.

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: I sure do miss Mr. Shaw. All during his trouble, there was one way you could tell who was and who wasn't a gentleman in this town. A gentleman, when he passed Mr. Shaw on the street, tipped his hat; the bastards looked straight ahead. (Chuckling) Mr. Shaw, he was a ard. Every time he come in my bar, he kept me laughing. Ever hear his Jesse James story? Seems one day Jesse James was robbing a train out West. Him and his gang barged into a car with their pistols drawn, and Jesse James shouts: "Hands up! We're gonna rob all the women and rape all the men." So this one fellow says: "Haven't you got that wrong, sir? Don't you mean you're gonna rob all the men and rape all the women?" But there was this sweet little fairy on the train, and he pipes up: "Mind your own business! Mr. James knows how to rob a train."

(Two and three and four: the hour-bells of St. Louis Cathedral toll: ... five ... six ... The toll is grave, like a gilded baritone voice reciting, echoing ancient episodes, a sound that drifts across the park as solemnly as the uncoming dusk: music that mingles with the laughing chatter, the optimistic farewells of the departing, sugar-mouthed, balloon-toting kids, mingles with the solitary grieving howl of a far-off shiphorn, and the jangling springtime bells of the syrup-ice peddler's cart. Redundantly, Big Junebug Johnson consults her big ugly wristwatch.)

BIG JUNEBUG JOHNSON: Lord save us. I ought to be half way home. Jim has to have his supper on the table seven sharp, and he won't let anybody fix it for him 'cept me. Dont ask why. I can't cook worth an owl's ass, never could. Only thing I could ever do real good was draw beer ... Oh hell, that reminds me: I'm on duty at the bar tonight. Usually now I just work days,a nd Irma's there the rest of the time. But one of Irma's little boys took sick, and she wants to be home with him. See, I forgot to tell you, but I got a partner now, a widow gal with a real sense of fun, and hard-working, too. Irma was married to a chicken farmer, and he up and died, leaving her with five little boys, two of them twins, and her not thirty yet. So she was scratching out a living on that farm - raising chickens and wringing their necks and trucking them into the market here. All by herself. And her just a mite of a thing, but with a scrumptious figure, and natural strawberry hair, curly like mine. She could go up to Atlantic City and win a beauty contest if she wasn't cockeyed: Irma, she's so cockeyed you can't tell what she's looking at or who. She started coming into the bar with some of the other gal truckers. First off I reckoned she was a dyke, same as most of the gal truckers. But I was wrong. She likes men, and they dote on her, cockeye and all. Truth is, I think my guy's got a sneaker for her; I tease him about it, and it makes him soooo mad. But if you want to know, I have more than a slight notion that Irma gets a real tingle when Jim's around. You can tell who she's looking at then. Well, I won't live forever, and after I'm gone, if they want to get together, that's fine by me. I'll have had my happiness. And I know Irma wil take good care of Jim. She's a wonderful kid. That's why I talked her into coming into business with me. Say now, it's great to see you again, Jockey. Stop by later. We've got a lot to catch up on. But I've got to get my old bones rattling now.

Why I love Tom

First of all, because of this (second snapshot down). Best prank EVER.

Second of all - because the last time I was at Beth and Tom's house - we were talking about music - and I mentioned my undying love of ELO and that the first album I had ever bought as a youngun was ELO's Time. (Post about all of that here.) I have just never gotten my act together to re-buy Time - although I have a large ELO collection on my iPod. Anyway, to me - it seemed like a casual moment - somethiing I didn't even make a big deal out of - but on Saturday night - when I went to the party at Beth and Tom's house (you know it's an Irish Catholic party when the local priest is there, in a T shirt and jogging shorts - and he knows your whole lilfe story even though he hasn't seen you in 10 years) - Tom comes over to me with 2 CDs, and says, "You left so quick the last time I didn't have a chance to give these to you." And there - was a burned CD of ELO's Time and also a huge compilation of mp3s - all of ELO's albums - that Tom had bought in the Philippines.

I mean: what????

This is a man who pays attention!!!

Bless people like that! They grease the wheels of life, they make you realize that people are, actually, good - and that we can connect with one another.

I have been listening to ELO NON-FREAKIN'-STOP ever since Saturday.

So Tom, I thank you!!

Jimmy Stewart

The Shamus has a great post about him

Bad Girls

A marvelous montage of vintage movie posters. That's one of the most beautiful blogs out there, by the way.

Book questionnaire

I got this from my good friend Ted.

What are you reading right now?

Bleak House by Charles Dickens.

It is making me laugh out loud.

Do you have any idea what you’ll read when you’re done with that?

I'm not sure. I've been meaning to read Villette finally - so maybe that one.

What magazines do you have in your bathroom right now?

None. I do have Wired by Bob Woodward stashed beside the toilet. Just in case.

What’s the worst thing you were ever forced to read?

Billy Budd in high school. My entire soul rebelled against that book. I hated it.

I just re-read it a month ago and actually enjoyed it - although there are parts of it I still find unbelievably trite. Naturally, my favorite character is the "bad guy". He's far more interesting than Billy Budd.

What’s the one book you always recommend to just about everyone?

It depends who I'm talking to. My favorite books - Possession, Goldbug Variations, Hopeful Monsters have not really gone over well with most people I've recommended them to. However, my friend Ted and I have VERY similar tastes - so we are the co-presidents of the Richard Powers/Nicholas Mosley fan club.

Allison and I are huge on sharing book recs, too - we share mainly biographies.

Kate and I also have very similar tastes ... we've shared lots of titles with each other. I love talking with her about books.

Admit it, the librarians at your library know you on a first name basis, don’t they?

Nope. I'm a book buyer, not a book renter.

Is there a book you absolutely love, but for some reason, people never think it sounds interesting, or maybe they read it and don’t like it at all?

I've recommended Possession to a couple of people who couldn't finish it. And Hopeful Monsters too - which is, perhaps, my favorite book ever. Ted read it - and loves it - so at least I have SOMEONE to talk to about it.

Do you read books while you eat? While you bathe? While you watch movies or TV? While you listen to music? While you’re on the computer? While you’re having sex? While you’re driving?

Yes, to all of the above, except for the sex part and the driving part.

When you were little, did other children tease you about your reading habits?

No. Most of my friends were readers, too. Weirdly, it was when I got to college - and lived in an all-girl's dorm my freshman year - that I started getting teased about my intellectual interests. Those girls were ruthless. Mean girls, all of them. Sorry, chickadees, I don't want to be date-raped by some drunken frat boy and call it love. I'd rather read. They would mock me behind my back (I caught them at it a couple of times.) Bitches.

What’s the last thing you stayed up half the night reading because it was so good you couldn’t put it down?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

UPDATE: Of course everyone who reads me who has a blog can consider themselves tagged!! I love to read about people's reading habits.

Here is Tommy's!

And here's Nina's!

Here's Ricki's!

Here is the newly married man's answers! (His opening paragraph involving my continuing fascination with all things Stockwell made me laugh out loud.)

Here are Lisa's answers

I just find this whole reading-habits thing so interesting.

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'A Day's Work' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from 'A Day's Work'.

In 1979 Truman Capote spends the day hanging out with Mary Sanchez - a professional cleaning woman who has worked for him for years. She is tremendously loyal to her clients - she has been cleaning the same apartments for decades - and is very involved in the personal lives of all of the people she cleans for (as will be apparent at the end of this excerpt - the people she prays for, mostly, are her clients.) He records their conversation. He follows her from job to job - they get stoned - and talk about all kinds of things - -Robert Frost, drugs, her work, her family. Her husband Pedro - who had been an alcoholic, a mean drunk, and a sucky father - died last year.

Here's an excerpt. I love these recorded conversations - there are a bunch of them in the book, and 'A Day's Work' is the first. The excerpt below is the end of the story. Beautiful.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'A Day's Work'.

TC: Let me catch you a cab.

MARY: I hate to give them my business. Those taxi people don't like coloreds. Even when they're colored themselves. No, I can get the subway down here at Lex and Eighty-Sixth.

(Mary lives in a rent-controlled apartment near Yankee Stadium; she says it was cramped when she had a family living with her, but now that she's by herself, it seems immense and dangerous: "I've got three locks on every door, and all the windows nailed down. I'd buy me a police dog if it didn't mean leaving him by himself so much. I know what it is to be alone, and I wouldn't wish it on a dog.")

TC: Please, Mary, let me treat you to a taxi.

MARY: The subway's a lot quicker. But there's someplace I want to stop. It's just down here aways.

(The place is a narrow church pinched between broad buildings on a side street. Inside, there are two brief rows of pews, and a small altar with a plaster figure of a crucified Jesus suspended above it. An odor of incense and candle wax dominates the gloom. At the altar a woman is lighting a candle, its light fluttering like the sleep of a fitful spirit; otherwise, we are the only supplicants present. We kneel together in the last pew, and from the satchel Mary produces a pair of rosary beads - "I always carry a couple extra" - one for herself, the other for me, though I don't know quite how to handle it, never having used one before. Mary's lips move whisperingly.)

MARY: Dear Lord, in your mercy. Please, Lord, help Mr. Trask to stop boozing and get his job back. Please, Lord, don't leave Miss Shaw a bookworm and an old maid; she ought to bring your children into this world. And, Lord, I beg you to remember my sons and daughter and my grandchildren, each and every one. And please don't let Mr. Smith's family send him to that retirement home; he don't want to go, he cries all the time ...

(Her list of names is more numerous than the beads on her rosary, and her requests in their behalf have the earnest shine of the altar's candle-flame. She pauses to glance at me.)

MARY: Are you praying?

TC: Yes.

MARY: I can't hear you.

TC: I'm praying for you, Mary. I want you to live forever.

MARY: Don't pray for me. I'm already saved. (She takes my hand and holds it.) Pray for your mother. Pray for all those souls lost out there in the dark. Pedro. Pedro.

"Want to see her?"

a beautiful shot from Marilyn Monroe's last unfinished film.

You know, certain cinematographers said that it was so easy to film her and light her because her skin was naturally reflective. Lots of actresses need makeup to pick up all that light - and to have it come across - and of course Marilyn wore makeup - but it wasn't just makeup that made her look like that - there was something glowing already about her skin. There's a wonderful grainy photograph of Marilyn, 1955, in an acting class in New York. It's dingy - there's a bare bulb - a scratched floor. People like Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward are also in the class. A crowd of people sit in battered wooden chairs, listening to the teacher. Marilyn is just one of that crowd. She's wearing a trench coat, very plain and simple - no makeup - and I swear, it is as though there is a special spotlight shining down on her. Partly it's the blonde - your eyes naturally go to the blonde hair - but it's more than that, and more than the fact that she's so famous. It is as though she has a key light with her, at all times. I read one photographer say that he had noticed a layer of peach fuzz over her face - almost thicker than other people have - and he thought that that was what gave her that luminous look - the fuzz catching the light - there was nothing MATTE about her face.

There are also wonderful stories about her walking around in New York completely anonymous - she was able to douse that light (by magic, I'm convinced) so that nobody would ever look at her and say, 'That's Marilyn Monroe'. She was walking with a friend through the crowded streets of Manhattan - she had a headscarf on, no makeup, she was wearing jeans, sneakers - and completely disappeared into the crowd. The friend was amazed. This was the most famous most desired woman in the world. How did she turn that OFF so completely? They discussed it a bit. And then Marilyn said, with a wicked grin, "Want to see her?" Meaning: Marilyn with a capital M. I love that she referred to her persona in the third person. The friend said, yeah, let's see "her";. So Marilyn took off the headscarf, and - without any makeup - any fluffing of hair - anything external - she turned on the light inside. And there "she" was. Marilyn Monroe, walking in the grime of 9th Avenue. And slowly - people noticed - and came over - and asked for autographs - and the whole thing ended with a mob scene - Marilyn surrounded by throngs.

"Want to see her?"

That's a movie star. It can't be taught. Whether it was a small layer of fuzz on her face that picked up the lights ... or whether it was something magical within ... that's the key to her mysterious appeal.

Cape Cod montage

Objects/landscapes.

More vacation shots HERE

Wow.

What a beautiful and honest post. Terrific. I know that feeling he speaks of ... he articulates it perfectly. I'm inspired.

Dean Stockwell: 2 movies

I watched 2 of his movies back to back - Anchors Aweigh (his debut in 1945) - and Psych-Out, a movie about hippies in San Francisco from 1968, starring Stockwell and Jack Nicholson. I'll write more later - I just wanted to say how hilarious it was to watch those two particular movies in tandem. It's the most unlikely double bill ever. And Stockwell in the first is fresh and adorable and squeaky-voiced and totally natural - and in the second, he's a Buddha-like presence who sits back, holds court, and doesn't miss a thing. He also wears flowery flowing shirts and a headband. He's the alpha male in the film. He sits in a dark hole, smokes cigarettes, and nothing moves but his eyes (and his eyebrows). He's kind of wonderful in it, riveting ... but after seeing Anchors Aweigh, where he prances around in his pajamas, and cries shiny money-in-the-bank tears, and rides around on Gene Kelly's back, and looks eagerly and wistfully up at Frank Sinatra - I was kind of struck by how bizarre it must have been. To grow up on screen. To have everyone know your every phase of life. It's documented. In a way, your journey is objectified - it's the nature of the beast. So to see him lolling about in a hippie halfway house, drawling out incisive remarks and observations, with a babealicious babealolio with a flower in her hair curled up in his lap - it's like: Is that the same person? Is this even the same WORLD that made Anchors Aweigh? It's only 20 years apart. It was truly freaky to go from one to the other.

And yeah, whatevs, I'm obsessive. But I grabbed some screenshots - from each movie - to show how truly bizarre the switch is.

Same dimple, same grin, same person. But the journey in between!! Wild.

Anchors Aweigh, 1945

Psych-Out, 1968

Anchors Aweigh, 1945

Psych-Out, 1968

Anchors Aweigh, 1945

Psych-Out, 1968

Anchors Aweigh, 1945

Psych-Out, 1968

Anchors Aweigh, 1945

Psych-Out, 1968

All Stockwell stuff here

pas de deux with the wind

There's a new choreographer on the block.

Here is a sneak peek of his latest work.

It is called "The Windiest Day EVER at the Beach."

typed in from blackberry ... hence, the serial killer typing style:
mad libs
pilates with the o'malley siblings
ocean - the beautiful beautiful ocean
stubbies
boggle
reading
crossword puzzles
sunblock
daily red sox game
the mason jar
ipods being charged all over the house - we each have one ... keeping them straight has been quite a task
wind and sun
laughing
ice coffee
comparing beds Me and siobhan:"our beds suck ... can we switch tonight?" Jean: "uhm ... no?"
two rabbits and a toad
every time siobhan plays one of her playlists thru bren's speakers, one of us asks about this or that song: "who is this??" she has great music.
used book store
Fact or Crap
star market
bourne bridge confusion
Aye carumba - "authentic" mexican restaurant
watched cash's movies he made
goggles
singing the Barnum soundtrack while sitting in beach chairs on the beach:
quite a lotta
roman terra cotta
livin' lava from the flanks of aetna
statuary
ride a dromedary
see the temple tumble and the red sea part
mcnamara's band the fattest lady in the land
a pickled prehistoric hand
a strand of pochahontas' hair
.... our neighbors at the beach must have been like: holy god, when will it end
swimming wtih cash
citronella candles
cashel sitting watching buster keaton movies, laughing out loud "Oh, this one's really funny, sheila - you have to watch THIS one."
kayaks
karaoke plans
reading (did i mention reading?) - I've finished one book, started another
pictures of Siamese cats being emailed to siobhan every 5 minutes
painting rock people at the table Jean: "See the grandmother's pearls I just made??"
it is as though dice k, mike lowell, jd drew, tek, manny, coco, pedroia (Jean calls him "little buddy") and papi are all on vacation with us. we speak about them as though we know them personally. Oh, and gagne. we scorn him. Continuous 8th inning balderdash! Oh shit, here's Gagne, get ready to lose! We scorn him!! until the moment last night when it came time to love him. then we loved him without reservation. because he deserved it.
Books:
Me: Game of Shadows (finished), now reading Compulsion, by Meyer Levin
Bren: Game of Shadows (handed off to him when I finished)
Dad: The amazing adventures of kavalier and clay
Mum: the stranger
jean: wicked
cash-man: once and future king, and also this series about Titans
siobhan: stumbling on cough cough

Quote from cash: "auntie sheila, i'm not the type of guy who feels the need to intrigue people ... I'd much rather ......" (long pause as he tried to get his thoughts together. I waited.)
Then I suggested helpfully, "Make people laugh?"
He nodded. "Yes. I'd much rather make people laugh."

"i'm not the type of guy who feels the need to intrigue people ...." Just blurted that one at me, out of the blue.

Uh-huh. Got it. You'd rather make people laugh. good to know what type of guy you are.

snapshots

-- Reading Game of Shadows at last. I've had it ever since it came out - but now is the time to read it- what with the whole career homerun brou-haha that's going on right now. I won't even type his name because I still get occasional hate mail from the piece I wrote about him in 2003 when I called him a racist. I stand by that remark, but I don't want the psychos bothering me anymore. I took the old post down but people still find it thru Google cache. It sucks. Being a racist is the least of his issues - but whatevs. I can't put the book down, by the way. (Gladwell blogs about it here. I've been on a renewed Malcolm Gladwell kick ... spurred on by my conversation with David the other night.)

-- There is nothing I like better these days than to hang out on Quantum Leap fan sites and message boards. I love all of those people. I've still only re-watched season 1 and season 2 - (I mean, since they were first on) ... so I'm excited to keep going. I love the show. And the "leapers", as they call themselves, are a passionate bunch, I tell ya. I fit right in.

-- Cashel, Siobhan and I stood by the side of the road and watched the parachuters filling the air from the hovering helilcopters. It was pretty cool. Like the beginning of Red Dawn. Cashel filmed it. He seemed pleased with his footage.

-- Laughed so hard in the car with Jean and Siobhan that I thought I would die from lack of oxygen. I was in the middle of telling a story and boom. The laughter hit. They had to wait for me to stop HOWLING - but it took FOREVER. It had to do with Little Shop of Horrors and renting the video back when we were kids.

-- the following article fascinated me, for various personal reasons I won't go into. Really interesting.

-- Music listened to in the car so far: Timbaland, High School Musical, LEO (a genius goofball rock-opera idea - a takeoff on ELO - by 3 dudes we all LOVE), Little Shop of Horrors, Grace Potter, Dr. Dre, Mike Viola singing Paul Simon's "American Tune" (my God), and then a segue to Paul Simon (natural progression). Oh and I listened to Queens of the Stone Age and also Olivia Newton-John.

-- Great night out with David before I took off. Spur of the moment. Topics covered: kickboxing, the Dalai Lama, neuroscience, facial expressions and Paul Ekman, auditions and the agony thereof in some cases, Law & Order vs. Wal-Mart - agony!!, leaping off the Olympic diving board at his public pool and that whole experience, breakthrus in perception in regards to reality, masturbation, Patrick Hughes, the Red Sox, Dean Stockwell in Psych-Out (hm, who brought that one up?), acting, growing older, marriage, sex, liquor ... I'm not even coming CLOSE to scraping the surface of what we talked about. It was awesome - a well-needed touching base.

Dean Stockwell: "The Player"

I love Stockwell's frenetic cameo in The Player. He and Richard Grant play a pair of writers who have a brilliant mind-blowing idea for a film and are desperate to get it made. They buttonhole poor Griffin Mill at a rooftop restaurant - and he says, "Okay, fine, give me your pitch - but do it in 25 words." Richard Grant begins the pitch (the two have obviously rehearsed the pitch many times - Stockwell, a fussy little New York-ish type guy in the movie, gets himself out of the way - he does "backup"). Richard Grant eventually gets so moved by his own pitch that tears flood his eyes. It's a very very funny scene. Grant behaves as though THIS - his idea - will make all other movies irrelevant. THIS will be the best. movie. ever. made. And even cynical Griffin Mill is impressed - it certainly gets his attention.

Grant and Stockwell do this tag-team act - and as with most Altman movies, it's hard to really tell what is scripted, what is not ... it FEELS improvised, and yet it doesn't seem random or un-focused. The event of the scene is clear. It's one of the scenes everyone remembers from that movie - that and the first tracking shot - because it is so clear, the indictment of the Hollywood decision-making process is so apparent in the scene - yet it is obvious that these two writers, Grant and Stockwell, have the best of intentions. It's no crime to want to make a buck. But when Grant goes off on how there shall be "NO STARS" in the picture - "I don't even think this should be a Hollywood picture at all ..." and Griffin Mill is like, "Uhm, you don't? Then why talk to me about it?" - but when Grant goes off on a flight of fancy about how there shall be NO HOLLYWOOD STARS in the film - no "personalities" - nothing like that - Stockwell, across the table, basically mutters at Griffin Mill, hoping no one will notice his sibliminal message, "Bruce Willis ..." Like - right there you can see: everyone is willing to compromise. "No Holly wood stars!! But ... if Bruce Willis is available ... that would be great." Nobody has integrity. And of course at the end of the film, when we see some of the finished product -the film has now been made and everyone sits in a screening room, congratulating themselves, patting themselves on the back - and the movie within the movie now stars, of course, Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis ... It's just a perfect Altman-esque observation of how things are really done - the system in which he had operated for many years - trying to maintain his independence, etc.

Stockwell, in this part, never stops moving or talking - it's a very different energy from many of his other parts, where he is normally sort of watchful, detached, with an ironic grin, or a snarky comment. Stockwell, at least as an adult man, is "cool". In this? He's desperate, impassioned, a bit fuzzy around the edges (like: his totally un-cool glasses - he's wearing a big billowy blazer, a turtleneck, jeans, and big white sneakers - like, the guy needs a power suit and SOON) - he gestures like crazy (I love his gestures in this movie - completely unlike his other parts) - he has a definite New York writer thing - maybe a bit of Woody Allen in there. When we first see him, he is shmoozing with poor Andie Macdowall - who looks a little trapped - and he's all curled up next to her on the couch, legs up, arms hugging his knee. Totally un-cool outfit on display - not letting her get away from him.

And then there's the symbiotic talking-at-same-time tag-team relationship with Richard Grant - I love watching the two of them in this movie - it's like they are one being. Stockwell will nudge Grant, and Grant will say his "line" - or Grant will glance at Stockwell, and Stockwell will say his "line" - they are a team of writers, Grant the more passionate and idealistic, Stockwell the personable kind of cuddly guy ... Their interplay is freakin' hilarious - and it comes at the perfect moment in the movie as comic relief. Things are getting pretty damn heavy for Griffin Mill, he's looking over his shoulder, the murder has already occurred - and we don't even LIKE Griffin Mill - as far as I'm concerned, the guy deserves all the mental torment he gets ... but still - it's an eerie stressful movie - and then in the middle of it, boom - we're back in the Hollywood mover-and-shaker game, Griffin Mill is ambushed by the pair of writers - they will NOT let him say "no" to the pitch, they will NOT let him put them off till tomorrow - they must pitch the project NOW. And off they go. Richard Grant's pitch should be studied by film students. He's hilarious. And then they go back and forth to shots of Stockwell, eagerly listening and squinting across the table - through his dime-store reading glasses.

Really funny performance.

Meanwhile: I have no idea if Stockwell consciously said to himself, "Okay. Andy is going to always lead with his pointing finger." but I would imagine not. Stockwell doesn't work that way, meaning: planning. He's not a cerebral actor (a la Malkovich, for example - who plans everything meticulously). Stockwell doesn't plan (he has said as much - his approach is intuitive from when he was a little kid - and has a lot to do with going with his first impressions of a script). He doesn't do much research, he doesn't overcomplicate things - (not that cerebral actors like Malkovich overcomplicate - it's just a different approach). So I see something like this pointing-finger thing in The Player - and it doesn't seem like a conscious choice. I am not aware of the actor and his wheels turning in his head. I am aware of Andy, the character, trying to get what he needs. Stockwell, as an actor, is interested in the interplay of the scene - and being alive moment to moment to moment.

But the pointing thing. If you see the scene again, just notice him pointing - and it's hysTERICAL - because sometimes he's not even in the frame, and all we see is his hand - and there's always a finger pointing.

Andy (his character) is trying to direct this event. He is trying to force Griffin Mill to sit still and listen to the pitch - even though it's obvious Mill doesn't want to. Andy points this way, that way - points at his writing partner - basically saying with the gesture, "Okay - you go now ..." And while Grant speaks - Stockwell stands there - listening with every fiber of his being - ready to jump back in to pick up HIS part of the pitch. They are ONE BEING, these two writers - and Stockwell keeps it all up in the air with this frantic finger-pointing. It makes me laugh out loud to see it.

Like: dude!!! What are you POINTING at?? But it's so perfect, so ... unlike anything he's done before. Stockwell is a lot of things, and he has great versatility as an actor - but geeky and nervous are not usually the words that come up when you think of Stockwell's persona. In this - he is both - and with the pointing finger, he keeps the action moving, he keeps the pitch up in the air - as long as he is pointing directly at Griffin Mill, or at his writing partner - then all is not lost, and his mind-blowing movie might still be made.

I love the scene. It's a hoot.

Here are some screenshots. I don't even have to tell you to look for the pointing finger.

Oh - and it never feels like a "bit" imposed from above. It seems like: this is something that Andy, the character, does. It looks totally real. That's why it's so funny.

"Buh-bye, Griffin ... let's do lunch ... we'll do lunch ... okay, Griffin? Okay?"

If you ever stop pointing with your fingers, all will be lost! You will lose all momentum! So KEEP. POINTING.

Look at his outfit. hahahahahaha

Uhm, who ya pointing at, Andy?

hahahahahahaha

"My writing partner over here ...."

Griffin is standing up now. All is almost lost. Keep pointing at him! He will not be able to resist!!

I don't know - it gets funnier every time I look at it.

hahahahahahaha Double point!! And look at Richard Grant's face! Ha!!

I can't stand it.

A brief relaxed respite. But then, of course ... in the next moment ...

... we're right back on target.

I love this shot because just LOOK at how Grant and Stockwell are focused on Mill. It's almost terrifying. hahahahahaha They look like they're about to murder him.

Next scene. Pitch to studio exec complete. Stockwell and Grant go to leave.

Stockwell has a finger-pointing EXTRAVAGANZA on his exit line. "Griffin ... you move in mysterious ways ... and I like it ..." fingers gyrating up and down. Seriously, the performance is hysterical.

Last scene. The screening room. Griffin's old girlfriend freaks out about how they have sold out - how the ideals are lost - the movie is now a commercial piece of shit. Stockwell (again with his GOOFBALL outfit) stares up at her, blankly. Turns slowly to Griffin ... for help. "Griffin ... who is .. this ... this person?"

"Doesn't she know anything about working with grown-ups?"

Point. Point.

All Dean Stockwell stuff here

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from a story called 'Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime'.

An interesting story - not sure what is real or not - Capote blurs the edges - but one thing's for certain: he is trying to "get back" into In Cold Blood territory - and yet (this is a judgment) he no longer has the narrative power. He cannot write a narration - in the same cool detached way he was able to in In Cold Blood. He inserts himself into the story - he is a character - and, as you will see in the excerpt - the majority of the story (it's a novella) is done as though it were a script. It's interesting to read - it's a good story, true or no ... but this script thing (which he does time and again in this collection) to me is indicative of Capote's lessening of confidence in himself as a writer. Again, this is a judgment - based on knowing the rest of Capote's work, and knowing what was going on for him in his life at the time he wrote this collection. He was FLAILING about for just a smidgeon of his old ease ... There's something about Handcarved Coffins that REALLY appeals to me - the main characters - Jake and Addie - are wonderfully drawn, they seem real - and you give a shit about them.

Here's an excerpt. It's been years since I've read it, so many of the details are lost - but I always remember the bit about the rattlesnakes.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime'.

Jake Pepper is a detective employed by the State Bureau of Investigation. We had first met each other through a close mutual friend, another detective in a different state. In 1972 he wrote a letter saying he was working on a murder case, something that he thought might interest me. I telephoned him and we talked for three hours. I was very interested in what he had to tell me, but he became alarmed when I suggestted that I travel out there and survey the situation myself; he said that would be premature and might endanger his investigation, but he promised to keep me informed. For the next three years we exchanged telephone calls every few months. The case, developing along lines intricate as a rat's maze, seemed to have reached an impasse. Finally I said: Just let me come there and look around.

And so it was that I found myself one cold March night sitting with Jake Pepper in his motel room on the wintry, windblown outskirts of this forlorn little Western town. Actually, the town was pleasant, cozy; after all, off and on, it had been Jake's home for almost five years, and he had built shelves to display pictures of his family, his sons and grandchildren, and to hold hundreds of books, many of them concerning the Civil War and all of them the selections of an intelligent man: he was partial to Dickens, Melville, Trollope, Mark Twain.

Jake sat crosslegged on the floor, a glass of bourbon beside him. He had a chessboard spread before him; absently he shifted the chessmen about.

TC: The amazing thing is, nobody seems to know anything about this case. It's had almost no publicity.

JAKE: There are reasons.

TC: I've never been able to put it into proper sequence. It's like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing.

JAKE: Where shall we begin?

TC: From the beinning.

JAKE: Go over to the bureau. Look in the bottom drawer. See that little cardboard box? Take a look at what's inside it.

(What I found inside the box was a miniature coffin. It was a beautifully made object, carved from light balsam wood. It was undecorated; but when one opened the hinged lid one discovered the coffin was not empty. It contained a photograph - a casual, candid snapshot of two middle-aged people, a man and a woman, crossing a street. It was not a posed picture; one sensed that the subjects were unaware that they were being photographed.)

That little coffin. I guess that's what you might call the beginning.

TC: And the picture?

JAKE: George Roberts and his wife. George and Amelia Roberts.

TC: Mr. and Mrs. Roberts. Of course. The first victims. He was a lawyer?

JAKE: He was a lawyer, and one morning (to be exact; the tenth of August 1970) he got a present in the mail. That little coffin. With the picture inside it. Roberts was a happy-go-lucky guy; he showed it to some people around the courthouse and acted like it was a joke. One month later George and Amelia were two very dead people.

TC: How soon did you come on the case?

JAKE: Immediately. An hour after they found them I was on my way here with two other agents from the Bureau. When we got here the bodies were still in the car. And so were the snakes. That's something I'll never forget. Never.

TC: Go back. Describe it exactly.

JAKE: The Robertses had no children. Nor enemies, either. Everybody liked them. Amelia worked for her husband; she was his secretary. They had only one car, and they always drove to work together. The morning it happened was hot. A sizzler. So I guess they must have been surprised when they went out to get in their car and found all the windows rolled up. Anyway, they each entered the car through separate doors, and as soon as they were inside - wam! A tangle of rattlesnakes hit them like ilghtning. We found nine big rattlers inside that car. All of them had been injected with amphetamine; they were crazy, they bit the Robertses everywhere, neck, arms, ears, cheeks, hands. Poor people. Their heads were huge and swollen like Halloween pumpkins painted green. They must have died almost instantly. I hope so. That's one hope I really hope.

TC: Rattlesnakes aren't that prevalent in these regions. Not rattlesnakes of that caliber. They must have been brought here.

JAKE: They were. From a snake farm in Nogales, Texas. But now's not the time to tell you how I know that.

(Outside, crusts of snow laced the ground; spring was a long way off - a hard wind whipping the window announced that winter was still with us. But the sound of the wind was only a murmur in my head underneath the racket of rattling rattlesnakes, hissing tongues. I saw the car dark under a hot sun, the swirling serpents, the human heads growing green, expanding with poison. I listened to the wind, letting it wipe the scene away.)

New Onion video!!

I love these things. And here is the latest:

Should we be shaming obese children more?

Friend Nate appears in the panel. "These kids are starving. They're having fun." hahahaha

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'Dazzle' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from a story called 'Dazzle'.

A touching short story about a little boy in New Orleans - he lives with relatives - and he is tormented by a secret worry. Eventually it is revealed - he wants to be a girl instead of a boy. But he can't tell ANYone this secret, it is too horrible, too ... weird ... he doesn't know anyone else who has such a problem. He is only 8 years old but he already knows he is beyond the pale.

There is a woman in the Garden District - named Mrs. Ferguson - she is a laundress, but also a fortune teller. Our tortured little narrator is fascinated by Mrs. Ferguson and decides that maybe he could tell HER his horrible secret. But nobody must know that he is even going to speak to her! He has to do it quietly and subversively!

Mrs. Ferguson is a weirdo, frankly - and not a very nice person. She covets a certain dazzling (dazzle dazzle) necklace worn by our narrator's grandmother. She uses it as a bargaining chip with the little narrator when he asks if he can have a session with her. Basically: sure, come see me - and bring that necklace as payment.

Here's an excerpt. A lovely sad little story. You really feel for this little boy with the secret.

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote- 'Dazzle'.

Now, about this wish of my own, the worry that was with me from first thing in the morning until last thing at night: it wasn't anything I could just straight out ask her. It required the right time, a carefully prepared moment. She seldom came to our house, but when she did I stayed close by, pretending to watch the delicate movements of her thick ugly fingers as they handled lace-trimmed napkins, but really attempting to catch her eye. We never talked; I was too nervous and she was too stupid. Yes, stupid. It was just something I sensed; powerful witch or not, Mrs. Ferguson was a stupid woman. But now and again our eyes did lock, and dumb as she was, the intensity, the fascination she saw in my gaze told her that I desired to be a client. She probably thought I wanted a bike, or a new air rifle; anyway, she wasn't about to concern herself with a kid like me. What could I give her? So she would turn her tiny lips down and roll her full-moon eyes elsewhere.

About this time, early December in 1932, my paternal grandmother arrived for a brief visit. New Orleans has cold winters; the chilly humid winds from the river drift deep into your bones. So my grandmother, who was living in Florida, where she taught school, had wisely brought with her a fur coat, one she had borrowed from a friend. It was made of black Persian lamb, the belonging of a rich woman, which my grandmother was not. Widowed young, and left with three sons to raise, she had not had an easy life, but she never complained. She was an admirable woman; she had a lively mind, and a sound, sane one as well. Due to family circumstances, we rarely met, but she wrote often and sent me small gifts. She loved me and I wanted to love her, but until she died, and she lived beyond ninety, I kept my distance, behaved indifferently. She felt it, but she never knew what caused my apparent coldness, nor did anyone else, for the reason was part of an intricate guilt, faceted as the dazzling yellow stone dangling from a slender gold-chain necklace that she often wore. Pearls would have suited her better, but she attached great value to this somewhat theatrical geegaw, which I understood her own grandfather had won in a card game in Colorado.

Of course the necklace wasn't valuable; as my grandmother always scrupulously explained to anyone who inquired, the stone, which was the size of a cat's paw, was not a "gem" stone, not a canary diamond, nor even a topaz, but a chunk of rock-crystal deftly faceted and tinted dark yellow. Mrs. Ferguson, however, was unaware of the trinket's true worth, and when one afternoon, during the course of my grandmother's stay, the plump youngish witch arrived to stiffen some linen, she seemed spellbound by the brilliant bit of glass swinging from the thin chain around my grandmother's neck. Her ignorant moon eyes glowed, and that's a fact: they truly glowed. I now had no difficulty attracting her attention; she studied me with an interest absent heretofore.

As she departed, I followed her into the garden, where there was a century-old wisteria arbor, a mysterious place even in winter when the foliage had shriveled, stripping this leaf-tunnel of its concealing shadows. She walked under it and beckoned to me.

Softly, she said, "You got something on your mind?"

"Yes."

"Something you want done? A favor?"

I nodded; she nodded, but her eyes shifted nervously; she didn't want to be seen talking to me.

She said: "My boy will come. He will tell you."

"When?"

But she said hush, and hurried out of the garden. I watched her waddle off into the dusk. It dried my mouth to think of having all my hopes pinned on this stupid woman. I couldn't eat supper that night; I didn't sleep until dawn. Aside from the thing that was worrying me, now I had a whole lot of new worries. If Mrs. Ferguson did what I wanted her to do, then what about my clothes, what about my name, where would I go, who would I be? Holy smoke, it was enough to drive you crazy! Or was I already crazy? That was part of the problem: I must be crazy to want Mrs. Ferguson to do this thing I wanted her to do. That was one reason why I couldn't tell anybody: they would think I was crazy. Or something worse. I didn't know what that something worse could be, but instinctively I felt that people saying I was crazy, my family and their friends and the other kids, might be the least of it.

Good good things

-- Met with trainer. She kicked my ass. There were times when it was like the chest-waxing scene in 40-year-old virgin. I cursed her out. But she upped the weights - and I made it through. Gaining strength every week. Again with the tomato head. And the wet wet hair.

-- We went over my food chart. She totally approves of what I'm doing. Gave me some tips on breakfast.

-- I've lost 4 pounds. whoo- hoo!!!

-- I am about to watch Anchors Aweigh - again, a movie I have seen countless times - I think the first time I saw it was when I was 6 or 7 at my cousins. And, naturally, it is Dean Stockwell's movie debut. He's 9 years old. And so adorable that you want to lie down in a warm bath and open your veins to acquire a quick and ecstatic death.

See?

-- Another kickboxing class tomorrow.

-- I am all about my body right now. I can FEEL it ... (my body, I mean) ... it aches, it throbs, it's alive. I am so so grateful.

-- Anchors Aweigh!!

Broadway montage by Alex

A mesmerizing post of faces. Many are immediately recognizable - others I had to guess at. Fun!!

It's appropriate - because I just got a note that the Broadway special I raved about (oh, and cool thing - Rick McKay - the director of the special - showed up in the comments section to that post - wonderful!! Anyway, I'm on his mailing list now - which is how I am aware of what's happening) - so Broadway: The Golden Age is being re-run in the NY/NJ area in August (and stay tuned, those of you in other areas, because it will be visiting your airwaves as well, they just haven't released the exact dates yet). NOT to be missed if you haven't seen it!!

It's a toss-up ...

... which Hogwarts house I would belong in, according to Ye Olde quizze. It could go either way with me.

GRYFFINDOR:
[ ] You've never done drugs.
[x] You have a lot of friends.
[ ] You get along with everyone.
[ ] You love football.
[x] You love baseball.
[x] You're into writing and art
[x] One of your favourite music genre is rock.
[x] You believe in "innocent until proven guilty" theory.
[ ] One of your favourite colors is red or gold.
[x] Good grades at school.
[ ] One of the worst things you can do is lie.
[x] You plan on going to college.
TOTAL: 7

HUFFLEPUFF:
[ ]You're content with mostly everything in your life right now.
[x] You laugh a lot.
[ ] You like to follow trends.
[x] Politics suck.
[x] You love to swim
[ ] Water polo is awesome.
[ ] Pink is one of your favourite colours.
[ ] Black is morbid & depressing.
[ ] You're an optimist.
[x] You're very emotional.
[ ] You believe in going steady at a young age.
[ ] You haven't made fun of anyone this month.
[ ] Loyalty is the MOST important thing in a relationship.
TOTAL: 4

RAVENCLAW:
[x] You're depressed to a certain extent.
[x] You love to read.
[x] You appreciate theatre & arts.
[ ] Sports suck.
[ ] Hate is completely unneeded.
[ ] Indie is one of your favourite genre of music.
[x] Every once in a while you have little anger outbursts.
[x] Lying is sometimes okay.
[ ] Blue is one of your favourite colours.
[ ] Knowledge is the key to power
[ ] Sarcasm is the best kind of humour
[ ] People should know what they're talking about before they talk.
TOTAL: 5

SLYTHERIN:
[x]There's at least one person you hate.
[x] Basketball is a good sport.
[ ] Football is amazing.
[x] Black is a cool color.
[x] You've lied about something serious
[x] You're a very deep person
[ ] You are not very loyal.
[x] You like heavy metal.
[ ] You make school seem more important than it is.
[ ] You're scared to grow up.
[ ] Anger is one of your primary feelings.
[x] You have trust issues.
[ ] Guilty until proven innocent.
Total: 7

Got this from the wonderful Emma.

J'adore ...

j'adore!!!

Primping stars

A delicious montage. I won't even go into the specifics - which ones I love most and why - just beautiful: stars at their mirrors.

Sadly, this also reminds me of one of my old ideas for a post - the Man in the Mirror. Men looking at themselves in the mirror in the films of the 1960s and 1970s - a sea-change in the culture, a sea-change in how we see men and how we allow them to be seen. I did a ton of research for that post - and have compiled examples from probably 10 films ... and sadly I got derailed, distracted, bewitched, bothered, what have you.

I WILL write that post!!! And the photos of the primping starlets with their mirrors jut proves my point even more. We are accustomed to seeing women looking at their reflections. We know what it means. But men? It means something different - at least in the iconography of film ...and blah blah blah - must. write. that. post.

I even went back into the films of the 30s and 40s, searching for examples - either to prove or disprove my theory .... so. One of these days I'll write the damn thing up.

In the meantime: go check out the lovelies!!

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" - 'Mojave' (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. Today's excerpt is from a story called 'Mojave'.

Now it's no secret that Capote lost much, in terms of his talent, as he grew older. His drinking and drug use I am sure contributed to it. He had horrific writer's block. And he was one of those "lucky" writers who had success (and huge success) very early on ... his first novel was a hit, and he became an immediate celebrity. He loved it at the time, he was young, popular, an artist - but to be a success, especially as a writer, at a young age, can turn around and bite you in the ass. The pressure to repeat yourself, the unreal expectations of what kind of money your books should make, etc.

Anyway, all of this is to say that - I love Capote's writing, even the late-era stuff - but I can feel, in stories like 'Mojave' - his struggle to write. It feels sketched in, to me - as opposed to fully realized. His earlier stuff is truly effortless (not that he didn't work his ass off - he did - but the finished products FEEL effortless. Like he agonized over In Cold Blood - every sentence was parsed and examined - he was ruthless in his own editing of that book - but when you READ it, it feels effortless. None of his sweat and tears SHOW.) The stories in Music for Chameleons do not have any of the significance of his earlier stories - they are light, they are fragments - it's almost like each one is an overheard piece of gossip. Now this style has its own charm - and if you're interested in people, and how weird and beautiful and mysterious they can be - Music for Chameleons is all about that. It's just that I can feel the effort.

And also (and this is key): This is the best Capote could do in that moment. Capote is, without a doubt, doing his best.

This was part of his torment. He knew what, at his prime, his best was. And now all he could squeeze out were 3 page stories that were little more than character sketches - writing exercises.

But you know what? That's what he could do at that particular moment. He did not have a novel in him anymore. he did not have the constitution to complete anything BIG. He had ruined his health. A small story like "Mojave" - which really is just a sketch, a draft - was what he could do. And so he did it. And I happen to think there is a beauty in that. Perhaps a sad beauty - because we remember what he was capable of - but a beauty nonetheless.

Here's the opening of "Mojave".

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'Mojave'.

At 5 p.m. that winter afternoon she had an appointment with Dr. Bentsen, formerly her psychoanalyst and currently her lover. When their relationship had changed from the analytical to the emotional, he insisted, on ethical grounds, that she cease to be his patient. Not that it mattered. He had not been of much help as an analyst, and as a lover - well, once she had watched him running to catch a bus, two hundred and twenty pounds of short-ish, fiftyish, frizzly-haired, hip-heavy, myopic Manhattan Intellectual, and she had laughed: how was it possible that she could love a man so ill-humored, so ill-favored as Ezra Bentsen? The answer was she didn't; in fact, she disliked him. But at least she didn't associate him with resignation and despair. She feared her husband; she was not afraid of Dr. Bentsen. Still, it was her husband she loved.

She was rich; at any rate, had a substantial allowance from her husband, who was rich, and so could afford the studio-apartment hideaway where she met her lover perhaps once a week, sometimes twice, never more. She could also afford gifts he seemed to expect on those occasions. Not that he appreciated their quality: Verdura cuff links, classic Paul Flato cigarette cases, the obligatory Cartier watch, and (more to the point) occasional specific amounts of cash he asked to 'borrow'.

He had never given her a single present. Well, one: a mother-of-pearl Spanish dress comb that he claimed was an heirloom, a mother-treasure. Of course, it was nothing she could wear, for she wore her own hair, fluffy and tobacco-colored, like a childish aureole around her deceptively naive and youthful face. Thanks to dieting, private exercises with Joseph Pilatos, and the dermatological attentions of Dr. Orentreich, she looked in her early twenties; she was thirty-six.

Kickboxing update

About 40 minutes into every class, I have a sort of existential crisis. I seriously feel that I cannot go on. All kinds of dire thoughts parade through my head. I am DRENCHED in sweat. Seriously: that is not a euphemism. My clothes are so wet that if you wrung them out you could fill a damn bucket. I punch, I kick, I jog ... and circa 40 minutes in, I think: No. No. I cannot. No more. I can't. No. I can't. I can't.

On the heels of this is always emotional despair.

You always give up. You let go and give up. What IS that about you that gives up? Why do you give up? Why?

I just GO there. As I punch and kick and punch, I contemplate my own emotional makeup and history. Sometimes tears stream down my face during this nadir. Like clockwork.

Then ... for the last 20 minutes of class I enter what I call a "burn zone". Everything gets hot. Literally. I can feel my arms on fire, my legs on fire - my face is BLAZING (I'm an irish person. I sweat primarily in my face) - and so then I'm in the burn zone, and time and space disappear - and I accept the burn - I have no more emotional nadir - all I am doing is obeying the instructor. I do not count the minutes because I dont wear a watch and I am glad that there are not clocks everywhere in my ghetto-fabulous gym. It's not about checking the clock to see how much time is left. It's about LIVING in that damn burn zone.

I'm still not used to it but I do recognize the pattern. "Okay. Here I am having an emotional crisis. It must be 6:47."

And today I spoke to my husband for the first time. It was a momentous occasion, filled with romantic possibility. I was leaving class - and I realized he was behind me, carrying his bike. I held the door. I said, "You got it?" as he struggled his bike through. He replied, "Thank you."

It was a thrilling moment.

"You got it?"
"Thank you."

God.

So damn profound. I love our relationship.

Dean Stockwell: "Compulsion" on Broadway

Found some cool images of the 1957/58 Broadway production of Compulsion.

Compulsion, the novel, was written by Meyer Levin and became a bestseller. It's based on the Leopold and Loeb case, although he changed all the names - morphed a couple characters together - and was primarily interested in the psychology of that relationship. He goes into great detail - the king/slave sexual fantasies that Leopold and Loeb acted out and what they meant in terms of the power dynamic, what they signified - etc.

Photo of Leopold and Loeb going off to prison

Levin adapted his novel into a script, which then went into production for Broadway. It was a hot property, one of the bestsellers of the day. The script was very much true to the novel and did not shy away from some of the details that the eventual film would not be able to mention (the gay relationship, the S&M factor, etc.) However (and I said this before) - when you do see the film, the "gay" is being played so specifically - both actors are playing the subtext, playing what was cut out ... It's amazing how overt they actually are about it. Like when Loeb (Artie) cuts his hand in a rage after he hears about the glasses being found. Watch Stockwell's hovering response to it, taking out his handkerchief, running to his side... We don't even need language. They're boyfriends. Plain and simple. But apparently it was much clearer in the Broadway script, much more overt (same thing happened with the film adaptation of Streetcar where Blanche's husband betrayed her in a way left unsaid ... where it's quite clear in the play that she found him with another man).

Roddy McDowall played Artie Strauss (or "Loeb") on Broadway - and Dean Stockwell played Judd Steiner (or "Leopold") - the role he would eventually re-create in the film. Roddy McDowall did not do the film, which pissed Stockwell off. He loved working with McDowall and has been quite vocal about how brilliant he thought Roddy was in the part. The handsome Bradford Dillman played McDowall's role in the film (and, oddly enough - Dillmann originated the role of Edmund in Long Day's Journey Into Night on Broadway - it made him a star - and it was the same role that Stockwell eventually would do in the film version in 1962). Ah, the tangled webs. From what I can gather - Dean Stockwell, child star, graduated from high school, went to college for one year, dropped out, changed his name and then drifted about the country, doing odd jobs. Cherishing the anonymity. He had hated his years as a child star. He yearned for pimples and awkwardness and gangliness - because that would mean he wouldn't have to be the cute little dude anymore. But regular life didn't suit him either, regular jobs were not for him. At age 20, 21, he went back to work in Hollywood. Did a couple movies. Then a girl he was dating, an actress, gave him the book Compulsion and told him about the upcoming Broadway production. Stockwell had been looking for good roles, something he could really do - Compulsion was a hot property, everybody wanted to be in it. Stockwell didn't have to campaign for it, though - Alex Segal (director) called him up and asked him to read for it, saying that he had in mind the role of Judd for him. Stockwell was not a big reader - not that he didn't like books, I just mean that he didn't like to 'read' for parts, he doesn't feel that he can really show up and do his thing when he's reading - but Segal insisted, so Stockwell 'read' for the part. It went great, and Segal offered him the part.

Stockwell, a California-born-and-bred guy, a person raised on movie lots - moved to New York for the rehearsals. He suffered in the city like a caged bird. He suffered so badly that he came down with the Asian flu - part of a huge epidemic at the time where people were dropping like flies. The show had to open without him and his stand-in did the previews. Stockwell recovered - and did the run of the show, getting great reviews. Walter Kerr wrote: "There are scenes that catch hold in their first few moments and seem to explore every nuance of disturbed and disturbing minds. Dean Stockwell, for instance, draws his mouth taut, freezes his shoulders, and - in gasp after fearful gasp - wrings from himself the truth of his relationship to a 'master' he has chosen to serve. The grinding arrival at self-knowledge is chillingly drawn." Frank Aston wrote of McDowall and Stockwell, "They're magnificent, these lads." Stockwell had a tough time during the run of the show, despite the accolades. He wasn't used to having to REPEAT things night after night after night - at least not in the way you have to on stage. He was a movie actor primarily, although he had been on Broadway before as a little boy. The stress of putting himself through the play every night wore away at him. He hated the city. He had a tiny apartment, and he hated the lack of space, the dirty air, the garbage - He would rent a car on his days off and drive out into Pennsylvania or whatever. He hung out at jazz clubs all night. He sat in on one acting class at the Actors Studio and walked out in disgust halfway through the class. He dated people. Tried to preserve his energy for the show each night (the script was way too long - most of the criticisms had to do with the bloated script) - and tried not to let the city get him down too much.

I love the film (wrote about it here) - but, of course, i would have loved to see the live production.

Found some stills from the show below. I love the thought of these two former child actors, who grew up in the studio system, getting educated in the studio classroom, having no childhood, no freedom ... on Broadway together, starring as Leopold and Loeb. Pretty neat.

Clippings below (some other recognizable names in the cast. Joan Croydon, for one. Barbara Loden, as well - an actress who would go on to marry Elia Kazan).

Oh, and I know how obsessive I am but when you look at the last picture below - obviously of the trial scene - find Dean Stockwell sitting in the back, beside McDowall. And notice the gesture. Ahhhh, continuity, humanity.

The Books: "Music for Chameleons" (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote. This lovely collection of short fiction, essays, and ... er ... transcriptions of conversations ... was the last thing Capote had published. I love it - you can't sit and read it and compare it to In Cold Blood because that wouldn't be fair - you have to take it on its own terms. I personally think some of his best writing is in Music for Chameleons. In the preface to the book, he goes on a long explanation of what he is "working" on, and he says that in this collection he himself has taken center stage. This is true, as anyone who has read the collection will know. He transcribes conversations he has (with people such as Marilyn Monroe - in perhaps the most well-known piece from the collection - and also people such as the superintendent of his building.) He creates little SCRIPTS, slices of life, snippets - Capote says in his preface that he thinks he has created a new form of literature here (which rather makes me sad. I do love the little scripts, but I wouldn't say that it was anything "new".) But I guess I should remember that when In Cold Blood came out, it truly was hailed as something "new" - a nonfiction book that read like fiction ... a nonfiction true crime book that had the touch of the poetic in the writing ... Anyway, Capote is grasping at straws in Music for Chameleons, still trying to be that writer who was hailed as new and important. But still, I have to say - I love the collection and it did quite well, staying firmly on the NY Times bestseller list for months. (This is why the blunt end-title in the movie Capote sayiing he never published another book after In Cold Blood annoys me. Yes, he did publish another book. Okay, not a novel - not another In Cold Blood - but Music for Chameleons is, indeed a book.)

If you don't like Capote, as a persona, then Music for Chameleons would, perhaps, be annoying, since he is a character in his own book. And you know what? This just occurred to me. In a funny way, the writing here is a precursor of certain trends in literature right now - well, literature and other parts of culture. The self-driven culture - reality TV, memoirs, and then the Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace school of literature ... naval-gazing - but also, commenting on themselves as a persona, noticing themselves operating in the world - and expanding on it, making fun of it, mocking it ... That's what Capote is doing here. And he's not doing it in a typical memoir fashion - he's doing it in scripts, little movie-scripts of conversations from his own life. Very Eggers-esque, huh?

Here's an excerpt from the first story in the collection - called "Music for Chameleons". It's a situation where you do not know if the "I" of the narrator is Capote - but the way he sets it up makes you believe it is. And so ... what is true? What is fiction? Capote blurs the edges - he was always into that ... and in the stories here he delights in that confusion.

He also uses the present-tense - which is now almost passe - but was never done at the time.

This is the story of a writer who goes to Martinique - a friend of his had been murdered there many years before. The writer sits on the porch of a woman called Madame - she is the grande dame of Martinique - she knows everything, and everyone ... the story is just the two of them sitting out there ... she talks, he listens and asks questions ... It's a mood piece. There's something grotesque here. I am not sure how to describe it. But it's a grotesque piece of writing. (That's not a judgment - I'm just describing). There's a black mirror on the wall - used by various famous writers who came to Martinique to write - if you look in the mirror, you will see the truth, you will find the way. So the narrator-writer finds himself drawn to the black mirror - glancing over at it ... And what about his friend who had been murdered in Martinique? Would he be seen in that haunted mirror?

Excerpt from Music for Chameleons - by Truman Capote - 'Music for Chameleons'

She is tall and slender, perhaps seventy, silver-haired, soigne, neither black nor white, a pale golden rum color. She is a Martinique aristocrat who lives in Fort de France but also has an apartment in Paris. We are sitting on the terrace of her house, an airy, elegant house that looks as if it was made of wooden lace; it reminds me of certain old New Orleans houses. We are drinking iced mint tea slightly flavored with absinthe.

Three green chameleons race one another across the terrace; one pauses at Madame's feet, flicking its forked tongue, and she comments: "Chameleons. Such exceptional creatures. The way they change color. Red. Yellow. Lime. Pink. Lavender. And did you know they are very fond of music?" She regards me with her fine black eyes. "You don't believe me?"

During the course of the afternoon she had told me many curious things. How at night her garden was filled with mammoth night-flying moths. That her chaffeur, a dignified figure who had driven me to her house in a dark green Mercedes, was a wife-poisoner who had escaped from Devil's Island. And she had desribed a village high in the northern mountains that is entirely inhabited by albinos. "Little pink-eyed people white as chalk. Occasionally one sees a few on the streets of Fort de France."

"Yes, of course I believe you."

She tilts her silver head. "No, you don't. But I shall prove it."

So saying, she drifts into her cool Caribbean salon, a shadowy room with gradually turning ceiling fans, and poses herself at a well-tuned piano. I am still sitting on the terrace, but I can observe her, this chic, elderly woman, the product of varied bloods. She begins to perform a Mozart sonata.

Eventually the chameleons accumulated: a dozen, a dozen more, most of them green, some scarlet, lavender. They skittered across the terrace and scampered into the salon, a sensitive, absorbed audience for the music played. And then not played, for suddenly my hostess stood and stamped her foot, and the chameleons scattered like sparks from an exploding star.

Now she regards me. "Et maintenant? C'est vrai?"

"Indeed. But it seems so strange."

She smiles. :"Alors. The whole island floats in strangeness. This very house is haunted. Many ghosts dwell here. And not in darkness. Some appear in the bright light of noon, saucy as you please. Impertinent."

"That's common in Haiti, too. The ghosts there often stroll about in daylight. I once saw a horde of ghosts working in a field near Petionville. They were picking bugs off coffee plants."

She accepts this as fact, and continues: "Oui. Oui. The Haitians work their dead. They are well known for that. Ours we leave to their sorrows. And their frolics. So coarse, the Haitians. So Creole. And one can't bathe there, the sharks are so intimidating. And their mosquitoes: the size, the audacity! Here in Martinique we have no mosquitoes. None."

"I've noticed that; I wondered about it."

"So do we. Martinique is the only island in the Caribbean not cursed with mosquitoes, and no one can explain it."

"Perhaps the night-flying moths devour them all."

She laughs. "Or the ghosts."

"No. I think ghosts would prefer moths."

"Yes, moths are perhaps more ghostly fodder. If I was a hungry ghost, I'd rather eat anything than mosquitoes. Will you have more ice in your glass? Absinthe?"

"Absinthe. That's something we can't get at home. Not even in New Orleans."

"My paternal grandmother was from New Orleans."

"Mine, too."

As she pours absinthe from a dazzling emerald decanter: "Then perhaps we are related. Her maiden name was Dufont. Alouette Dufont."

"Alouette? Really? Very pretty. I'm aware of two Dufont families in New Orleans, but I'm not related to either of them."

"Pity. It would have been amusing to call you cousin. Alors. Claudine Paulot tells me this is your first visit to Martinique."

"Claudiene Paulot?"

"Claudine and Jacques Paulot. You met them at the Governor's dinner the other night."

I remember: he was a tall, handsome man, the First President of the Court of Appeals for Martinique and French Guiana, which includes Devil's Island. "The Paulots. Yes. They have eight children. He very much favors capital punishment."

"Since you seem to be a traveler, why have you not visited here sooner?"

"Martinique? Well, I felt a certain reluctance. A good friend was murdered here."

Madame's lovely eyes are a fraction less friendly than before. She makes a slow pronouncement: "Murder is a rare occurrence here. We are not a violent people. Serious, but not violent."

"Serious. Yes. The people in restaurants, on the streets, even on the beaches have such severe expressions. They seem so preoccupied. Like Russians."

"One must keep in mind that slavery did not end here until 1848."

Finally!

Ted is reading In Cold Blood!!

I moved it to another shelf, so it wouldn't stare at me.

Can't wait to hear more.

Edits

A wonderful post on the revisions F. Scott Fitzgerald made in The Great Gatsby - a fascinating look at his artistic process.

Happy birthday to Alfred Lord Tennyson

Here's a post I put together for National Poetry Month - with some good quotes about Tennyson. I'm not a huge Tennyson fan - although, man, there are some lines of his that are pretty much as good as it gets, in terms of poetry.

For example - this is one of my favorite bits of language ever (it's on my quote sheet hanging on the wall in my apartment):

The long light shakes across the lakes,
and the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,
Blow, bugle: answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

-- Tennyson, "Princess"

Something in me just CALLS OUT to that. And it feels like it calls out to me - in diminishing echoes. The long light shaking? The wild cataract? It's transcendent. I did a search on my own blog - and found that I wrote about this bit of his poetry in an old Diary Friday - kind of a sad one. Because, after all, the echoes were dying.

Spreadin' the Dean Stockwell love

... one website at a time.

Thanks, Matt.

Awesome friend moments in the last month

-- Alex left me a phone message 2 days ago. She's a wonderfully articulate woman, but her message went something like this: [Said in a very dramatic serious voice, launching right into it - no "hi, how are you", nothing like that]: "Sheila, I am so obsessed with Shirley Bassey right now that I'm actually a little bit afraid. I literally wake up thinking about her." [Long frightened pause] "I have no idea how this has happened. I just ... don't know how it happened. I do not know how this has happened. I can't stop. Sheila, how has this happened?" [She knows she's asking the right person - as I pop in "Married to the Mob" for the 10th time in 2 weeks. How has this happened? But she keeps going.] "I'm quite serious. How has it happened? I can't stop thinking about Shirley Bassey. I have downloaded songs, I have a 74 page document about her that I have to print out, I just have no idea what is happening to me right now. And I think somehow it has something to do with Dean Stockwell." [hahahahahahahahahaha The symbiosis of obsession] "I think somehow your obsession with him - and please, the guy is such a genius - he's a genius - Carol Burnett? Who DOES that? I love actors like that. I love actors who think outside of the box. He's extraordinary. And I think somehow your obsession with him has helped me open the floodgates. But I'm scared a little bit. Sheila, my first thought when I wake up is of Shirley Bassey. How has this happened? Call me." Click.

-- Phone message from Allison - I haven't seen her in about a month, but we email - and she's been reading my blog so she's up to date. After my kickboxing post she calls me and leaves a message: "Hi Sheila! I miss you! First of all, I have to tell you that I taped a special on Jeffrey Dahmer and you HAVE to see it - I have it saved for you - and also I am so psyched that you're doing this kickboxing thing! I think it's gonna be so great for you. You're gonna be able to get rid of all your pent-up SHIT!!" I laughed out loud hearing that. Yes!!

-- a good friend of a certain current obsession of mine emailed me. A correspondence has begun. I love my blog.

-- Mitchell called me. I was in the grocery store, mulling over low-fat mozzarella. The connection was horrible so he went in and out. Here is what I heard before we got cut off: "Sheila, I just saw World According to Garpfor the first time in years and I HAVE to talk about it ... that film is so well-acted ..." [long blackout period where I could not hear him. I comparison shopped in the dairy aisle, saying into my phone, "Mitchell? hello? Garp? Yes! Love it ... are you there??] "First of all ... the actors are just so ...." [blackout period ... could not hear what he was saying. Then he surged back in ...] "... and I had forgotten how PISSED that book is. How ANGRY it is ..." [blackout ... then his voice came back ...] "Every single actor in that movie is just perfect ..." [Disconnected for good. But I loved that he had to call me to rave about that movie.]

-- On July 4th, at 10:30 pm my phone rang and it was Keith M., the boy I loved when I was 9 and 10 years old - who is now back in my life because of this here blog! He was on a motorboat by himself in the middle of a lake, two time zones away from me, he was watching fireworks, had a cooler of beer with him, and thought of me. We talked and laughed and bantered until it began to rain in his time zone - he was like, "Yeah, uhm, it's kind of pouring right now ..." and I pleaded with him to go back to land and be safe. "Please don't pull an Ordinary People on me!!" He gave me some wild compliments, vastly over-stating my charms and refused to let me be self-deprecating. And I tried! I opened my mouth to protest, to talk him down - I didn't even say anything - but he could FEEL it and cut me off: "I don't want to hear one word from you right now ... let me finish ... and you just be quiet and listen!" So I shut up and let him compliment me. My childhood friend. I am so grateful.

-- Friday night. After a day of deadly mugginess and stillness, the heavens opened. Rain battered the windows 29 floors up - and we could see forks of heat lightning jagging across the sky. It seemed close enough to touch. We put on raincoats and ran downstairs. The rain was so heavy that the gutters had become rushing boiling rivers and Jen and I frolicked in the rain, dancing on the sidewalk, standing there, heads thrown back, mouths open, polluted rain pouring down our throats. We laughed and screamed at every fork of lightning - and laughed as dismayed (and laughing) passersby raced for cover. Nobody was grumpy even though everyone was caught out without an umbrella. The rain was cold too. Heavenly. Jen and I sloshed back up to her apartment, soaking wet, and exhilarated.

-- Sitting around the pool with Beth, Mere, and Michele (the only non-perfect thing was the absence of Betsy!) - candles lit, Gilligans Island palms swaying, drinking wine, eating food, and talking about everything under the sun. Marriage, edible squash flowers, Beth's new dog, work, magnetic sexual connections, kickboxing, family ... long overdue, we haven't been together in a long time.

I am blessed.

Naturally I must link to this

World literature tour: Ireland

It's a vote, a world tour of literature with people voting for works of literature for each country. The comments section is spectacularly overwhelming (also, I am happy to note - intelligent, polite, passionate - it's safe for those of us who actually want to listen and talk, rather than bitch and moan and attack others) !! Seriously - so exciting and refreshing. I've read much of the choices - but not all (much of the modern stuff I've not read - which I've been trying to rectify) - so I'm almost getting nervous taking notes on stuff I need to read, and nodding vigorously in agreement with certain choices, etc.

I post such things for my father mainly (he'll be pleased to see this comment: "John McGahern's 'That they may face the rising sun' - is possibly the most important modern Irish novel: it is a wonderful evocation of the ordinary and of the beauty of the ordinary.") - but also for those of you who love books.

Flight

Really cool images. Just keep scrolling. I especially like the one for The Sky Hawk.

The new poet laureate ...

Ernie imagines what it would be like if Geoffrey Hill (a poet I love, too) got the job - and he also wrote a very funny parody of Hill to show the absurdity. ("Public sound, perforce within late gray light, Worst excesses purported, dead fur struck to asphalt") - like: what?? Funny!!

Women in film ...

.... morphing into one another ...

Amazing!

Thanks for sending me the link, David.

Dean Stockwell in "Blue Velvet"

I haven't done a big "Blue Velvet" post yet - there's a lot I still need to cover - but a post Alex made today about Carol Burnett reminds me:

Lynch asked Dean Stockwell to play Ben, the creepy pan-sexual pimp and drug dealer who appears in only one scene in the film. But with all the scary crap that happens in that movie, that scene - and its absurdity - everyone in it obeying a set of rules that are opaque to us in the audience - is the scariest. Who is Ben? The script says very little. All we know about him is:

-- Frank Booth is scared of Ben and looks up to him. We all know that Frank Booth is a psychopath - so this should give us SOME clue of what Ben is capable of.

-- He appears to be in charge of a bevy of overweight prostitutes.

-- He keeps a kidnapped child locked up in the back room.

-- He gives Frank Booth drugs.

-- He has some kind of emotional/sexually charged arrangement with Frank that involves lip-synching. I mean, what? It's never explained to us - it is just something these two apparently do. Frank tells him what song, and Ben goes into drag-queen lip-synch mode. Perhaps it helps take the edge off of Frank's insanity - but again, that's just a guess. The script does not say WHY these two do this.

So Stockwell gets the script. There is no character description in it. The script does not say: "Ben enters, a man wearing white face makeup, eyeliner, and a little hoop around his ear. He wears a satin smoking jacket, and one of his hands has an Ace bandage around it. He is always on the verge of falling asleep. He is completely mellow at all times." The script said NOTHING about him. Lynch knew that whatever Stockwell came up with, in terms of inventing Ben, was going to be great - he just trusted him with the character (a rare thing. Most writers and directors OVER explain characters because they're nervous that the pesky little actors are going to be ruin everything with their interpretation).

So Stockwell went to work. He created that guy's look on his own - the makeup, the clothes, the energy ... Like I've said before - His talent is such that it has rarely led him astray. He hasn't made too many mistakes. He hasn't over-reached, or missed the mark too much in his 100 plus films, which is quite a record. Who has seen Blue Velvet and doesn't remember Ben? Not possible. Also - doesn't it seem as though Ben HAD to have been written that way? The whole character seems completely inevitable ... and perfect. Of course he wears makeup, of course he dresses like that, of course he stands around in large groups with his eyes closed - communing with candy-colored clowns in the ether of his brain. But no: none of it was set out in the script. Stockwell MADE that guy. I think that is so hysterical, so wonderful. It must have been such fun.

He also said, later, "You know, I was basically just imitating Carol Burnett."

Watch the scene again, and think of those words. It makes the whole thing even creepier, and funnier.

He IS Carol Burnett in that scene.

Apparently, he ran into her a while later at some event - and they chatted - and he said, "You know, in Blue Velvet, I was basically just doing YOU." She thought about it for a second, imagined the scene, and then burst out laughing.

I love it.

Also, one last word: one of his defining characteristics - since he was a kid - is this thing that happens with his eyes when he is deep in thought, or getting an idea, or things are getting intense inside of him. His eyes widen. If you're familiar with him at all, you'll know what I'm talking about. His eyes widen - it's like he's getting ready to change tack, or go to a new level, or say what's in his heart.

Here in Blue Velvet - he takes that natural characteristic - something he habitually does - and turns it inside out, abstracts it, makes it into a "bit". Now that's quite a hat-trick, that involves self-knowledge ("okay, so there's that thing that happens with my eyes ... lets play around with that, see what I can create ...") - and also a sense of parody. He is parodying Carol Burnett - but also parodying himself. Because Ben stands around - like a horse sleeping on his feet. He's either high, or just in some naturally Zen-like state, waiting ... waiting for the violence ... the crisis ... whatever. And then when he speaks, he can barely open his eyes ... until at some freaky moment, whoosh - eyes open REALLY wide. It's incredibly creepy - he is terrifying. He has taken a "gesture" that is in his repertoire, and inflated it, so that it has become something completely "other". I love that.

For example, if you see the movie again - please just watch how he says the simple line: "Fine, Frank, fine, how are you?"

First of all, it's a hilarious line reading, completely bizarre. He is the ULTIMATE mellow. Drawling, eyes closed, slightly swaying on his feet ... and then at the very end - when he says "how are you?" - eyes open reaaaaaally wide. You feel like he's a cobra, about to kill you - even though what he is saying is totally benign.

Great little cameo all around.

Like - what??? hahahahahaha

To me, the look on his face in the shot above is almost more frightening than all of Frank Booth's open manic violence.

Here's the clip of him lip-synching

Bravo!

The Books: "Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel" (Truman Capote)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelves:

Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel - by Truman Capote. This is the notorious book that sunk Truman. It was unfinished. He was always threatening to publish the rest of it - and made hints, publicly, that he was working on it. But at the time of his death, no manuscript was found. To people who knew him and his pack-rat ways, this was very suspicious. Capote probably was making those public statements to either bolster himself up, or try to create some buzz, or maybe because "if you say it, it's so" ... His writer's block was a torment. He completely lost the ease of his prose as a young man. The last years of his life were horrific, in terms of loneliness and loss of work. The publication of one of the chapters of Capote's new novel was like a bomb that went off through high society, the circle in which Capote thrived. "La Cote Basque" is the name of the chapter - and it was highly anticipated. The author of In Cold Blood! His new novel! It was very exciting. Anyway, I won't go into what happened when "La Cote Basque" came out - but it's a fascinating story, one of the huge literary dust-ups of our time. It ruined Truman Capote's life - and it took him a while to fully realize the impact. Entire groups of people took him off their address books. He had been a staple at their parties and yacht outings - he was beloved. As a pet, sure - as a witty bitchy person to have around ... and in one fell swoop, all of that was done. Many of his friends never spoke to him again. It was a devastating blow to Capote and he never really recovered. He tried to plead his case - "I'm a writer! What did they think I was doing all that time at their parties? I was observing them, taking note - I'm a writer!" Yeah, well, "they" did not like it. Every door in New York closed to Capote practically overnight.

The three chapters of the unfinished novel have been published under the name "Answered Prayers". Capote had always hinted that this was going to be his greatest book. And when you read it - I don't know, it makes me sad. In no way, shape or form would this ever be considered his "greatest" book - and so his words, to me, seem desperate, like he's trying to imagine himself back into the groove he once had. But so much has been lost. The writing of In Cold Blood sapped him of strength, perhaps forever. He was never the same again after it. I don't know, I'm such a fan of Capote's stuff, I'd read a grocery list written by him ... but "Answered Prayers" is too bitchy - he has lost ALL the heart in his work. And my God, what heart he has. A Grass Harp, Christmas Memory, Other Voices, Other Rooms ... what a beautiful human heart he has. None of it is in evidence in the three chapters of "Answered Prayers". What I get from his writing here - is that he is angry, he has a bone to pick with the wealthy elite (even though they invited him into their circles) - and he his going to show them to themselves. He is going to unmask them. He is going to say, in the bitchiest tone possible, "You thought a book written about you would be flattering - but that is only because you are so vain, so empty inside - So here. Here is what I REALLY think of you." Capote can plead his innocence all he wants - that's what he's doing here. And the readers recognized themselves - he told their secrets, amped up what they whispered to each other, he named names - He used pseudonyms (but not always - the book is also a big name-dropping extravaganza) but with enough detail that identities were unmistakable. Infidelities, impotence, possible murder, shallow, whatever - he revealed it all here. Every single person in this book is heinous.

So I wonder. Oh, Truman. What happened.

Gerald Clarke's biography of Truman Capote is a masterpiece of the genre and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Capote. The chapters on the publication of "La Cote Basque" and the fallout afterwards are great - tons of details and quotes and context given. I'm just sketching it in here.

Here's an excerpt from the "La Cote Basque" chapter.

Excerpt from Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel - by Truman Capote.

Mrs. Matthau and Mrs. Cooper lingered over cafe filtre. "I know," mused Mrs. Matthau, who was analyzing the wife of a midnight-TV clown/hero, "Jane is pushy: all those telephone calls - Christ, she could dial Answer Prayer and talk an hour. But she's bright, she's fast on the draw, and when you think what she has to put up with. This last episode she told me about: hair-raising. Well, Bobby had a week off from the show - he was so exhausted he told Jane he wanted just to stay home, spend the whole week slopping around in his pajamas, and Jane was ecstatic; she bought hundreds of magazines and books and new LP's and every kind of goody from Maison Glass. Oh, it was going to be a lovely week. Just Jane and Bobby sleeping and screwing and having baked potatoes with caviar for breakfast. But after one day he evaporated. Didn't come home night or call. It wasn't the first time, Jesus be, but Jane was out of her mind. Still, she couldn't report it to the police; what a sensation that would be. Another day passed, and not a word. Jane hadn't slept for forty-eight hours. Around three in the morning the phone rang. Bobby. Smashed. She said: 'My God, Bobby, where are you?' He said he was in Miami, and she said, losing her temper now, how the fuck did you get in Miami, and he said, oh, he'd gone to the airport and taken a plane, and she said what the fuck for, and he said just because he felt like being alone. Jane said: 'And are you alone?' Bobby, you know what a sadist he is behind that huckleberry grin, said: 'No. There's someone lying right here. She'd like to speak to you.' And on comes this scared little giggling peroxide voice: 'Really, is this really Mrs. Baxter, hee hee? I thought Bobby was making a funny, hee hee. We just heard on the radio how it was snowing there in New York - I mean, you ought to be down here with us where it's ninety degrees!' Jane said, very chiseled: 'I'm afraid I'm much too ill to travel.' And peroxide, all fluttery, distress: 'Oh, gee, I'm sorry to hear that. What's the matter, honey?' Jane said: 'I've got a double dose of syph and the old clap-clap, all courtesy of that great comic, my husband, Bobby Baxter - and if you don't want the same, I suggest you get the hell out of there.' And she hung up."

Mrs. Cooper was amused, though not very; puzzled, rather. "How can any woman tolerate that? I'd divorce him."

"Of course you would. But then, you've got the two things Jane hasn't."

"Ah?"

"One; dough. And two: identity."

Bergman and Antonioni

A spectacular tribute piece.

RIP dear dear Tommy Makem

Dear Tommy Makem: Your voice basically WAS my childhood. I still listen to those old Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem albums, and it's always the oddest feeling, a mixture of present/past. Am I a child? Are these records playing on a battered turntable as I dribble a popsicle down my T-shirt? Or is it now? These songs are woven into my life, they're just a part of who I am. I will leave it to others to talk about how the Clancy Brothers influenced an entire generation of singer/song-writers (Dylan is eloquent on this) ... For now, I mourn the loss. A fragile thread of connection to my childhood, the continuum.

I was a bit afraid of Tommy Makem when I was a child. Because he was NOT a Clancy and I just didn't really understand that. I don't know why I found it baffling, but I did. "What's HE doing there?" was my basic reaction. I also found his face slightly frightening. The Clancy brothers look like O'Malleys. They all could be my uncles. But Makem had something different to his look, and I guess it freaked me out. I remember my father saying to me, and I had to have been 6 or 7 - I must have announced, "I don't like Tommy Makem!" - and I remember my dad saying, "Ahh, but he's the real singer."

In time, I have come to know the truth of that statement.

Funny what you remember.

Rest in peace, Mr. Makem.

I wonder if you have any idea what you have truly meant to people. I hope so.

I'll play some Clancy Brothers and Makem tonight, in memoriam. I can't raise a glass because I'm not drinking ... but I will raise one in my head and my heart.

Thank you.

Here's a link to the Intl Herald Tribune obituary of this amazing artist.

Major nostalgia below:

Dan and I had identical childhoods. Beautifully said, Dan.

"It all started with these big fat Puerto Rican lesbians living next door to me, when they got all high or something and tried to burn our apartment building down. "

Patrick Hughes' latest:

A small excerpt but then go over there and read.

But anyway the two big fat Puerto Rican lesbians living next door skipped softball practice to fry up a bunch of coconuts and bananas, I guess, and I suspect they got all high at some point and forgot about the hot grease and shit caught on fire.

I don’t know for sure if they were high. I mean, I didn’t think to ask them for a blood sample. In fact, I was kind of out of it myself when it all went down, drifting off to sleep by spacing out to a preposterous CD full of electronic drones and bleeps and blips. But even in this drowsy state, I noticed a particularly shrill bleep continuing between tracks. Eventually, smelling smoke, I realized I had been nodding off to the relaxing sound of a fire alarm.

Also: “Dark oblivion, where is thy sweet midnight caress?” what??? hahahahaha

Here's the whole sad story. (Speaking of Patrick, I'm bringing his book on vacation with me, and can't wait to read it. He's one of my favorite writers on the web.)

Ouch

I had my session with my trainer tonight. I have to do 4 kickboxing classes a week and then meet with her once a week for an hour for weights.

Ouuuuch.

I am in love with her though. She was supportive, encouraging - but tough. A small Filipino fireplug of a woman, and aweeeeesome. The hour flew by - because I was so focused at every second - and I think I sweated off 20 pounds. It was frickin' HARD at points - but I made it thru. I'm going to get into unbelievable shape. I can feel it.

I also saw my husband again. Sadly, I was a red-faced sweaty maniac, so my charms were a bit dimmed. It's also the first day of my period when, typically, I cannot button my jeans and I lie in the fetal position on my bed, heating pad on the abdomen, moaning as the cramps pulse through me, eating peanut butter directly from the jar with a spoon. I am a DELIGHTFUL creature on those days!! Simply irresistible. It's only one day - I don't have prolonged horrible periods like some of my friends - but I walked to the club, and felt the waves of the cramps and the bloat and all that stuff - and there was a part of me that wanted to reschedule unti the crisis moment passed. But I'm so glad I stuck it out. It helped that the Fireplug stood right by me, making me do another round, making sure I did it right.

I can feel it now. I'll feel it even more tomorrow I imagine.

And Friday I'll take my first kickboxing class.

Chivalry

A hilarious photo essay

Daily Dean Stockwell fix

Here he is in Song of the Thin Man - another movie where his main job is to be adorable and sweet. That was his "thing" as a child actor. He was photogenic, his face expressive, and your heart just goes out to him, because he's a little kid, and when little kids are upset or happy or scared - your heart naturally goes out to them. (Not all child actors have this, obviously. Many of them seem like precocious little show-biz brats who have spent their Saturdays in acting classes since they were in diapers. Stockwell never seems like one of THOSE kids. It's part of his major appeal.) His job also is to be a weak spot in Nick and Nora Charles, he can be used against them by their enemies.

One of the things that is amazing to watch, in these childhood performances of his, is that he is always thinking between the lines - now this is very rare, even in adult actors, and nobody could tell him to do that. It's one of those things that CAN'T be taught. And it has to do with knowing how to listen (which was what started my Dean Stockwell obsession in the first place.) Knowing how to listen is even more important than knowing how to talk and memorize lines and say them correctly. Anyone can do that. But to seem like youre really listening? When you already know what the other person is going to say to you because it's in the script? That's acting. The little kids who can do that have a gift. It's just a gift, it's not a "craft". By thinking between the lines, I mean: he's in a scene, Myrna Loy is telling him that he can't go play baseball because he has to practice the piano. He has one line in the exchange: "But Mom, I'm supposed to pitch today!" She cuts him off and says something about how there will be no baseball today, he must practice the piano because he has a recital coming up. As she speaks, Stockwell starts to say something - you can see the shift in his face - at first he has been dismayed, but then he thinks perhaps he knows a way out of his predicament, so a new hope and a new idea dawns on his face - and he opens his mouth but then realizes: Nope. She's not gonna give on this one. And so he deflates a bit. He has NO lines to support this ... it's just a logical commonsense choice. Instead of behaving like an actor ... he behaves like a real person. He flat out never seems like he's acting.

Stockwell has been quite open about how unhappy he was as a child. He had no childhood. He was a working man by the age of 8, and he supported the family with his movies. He felt the pressure, he didn't enjoy acting - it just happened to be something he was very good at. His education was very spotty - he has said he had to go back, as an adult, and teach himself how to read. He didn't go to a normal school until he was 15, 16 ... He dropped out for a while, changed his name, moved around the country, had girlfriends who didn't know who he was (remember, he had been a major star as a kid, no experience of anonymity) - and finally came back in his 20s, because he realized - I have no skills to do anything else, I'm an actor, I can do this and do it well - it's a SKILL. He has said he didn't really enjoy acting until he was in his 40s. Kind of amazing. He was GOOD at something, very early on, and he was amply rewarded for it. But the rewards meant nothing. He wanted to be a normal kid and play football and not have to do those stupid crying scenes in movies. He was a worried person, very early on.

I guess one of the things I admire so much about this whole trajectory is his knowledge, self-knowledge, that he had a gift. And it was up to HIM what to do with it. He could totally have done other things. He was not ambitious like other actors. He did some key roles in his 20s - Compulsion, Long Day's Journey ... he got married ... divorced ... and then dropped out altogether to be a hippie biker dude in San Francisco, living with 5 women at the same time. Go, Dean. He has said that that was his childhood. He hadn't had any fun as a kid, so he made up for lost time in his 30s. A decade passed. And when he decided to go back to acting - when he was ready to re-enter - it wasn't that easy. The doors were now closed. 15 years of struggle commenced. He did dinner theatre. He did monster movies. He did television. He has said that most of those years he didn't make more than $10,000. "It was a long, lean time." Amazing. Again. I just admire him. (Obviously).

He was in his 40s, doing some B-movie in Mexico - and David Lynch was filming nearby and Stockwell heard that he was doing Dune. Stockwell was a huge fan of the book, and he basically approached Lynch one day to introduce himself. They both tell the story of that meeting - Lynch saw Stockwell walking towards him, and got this blanched look on his face, almost panicked. Stockwell held out his hand, introduced himself, and Lynch said, "I thought Dean Stockwell was dead." So THAT'S how far out of the consciousness of Hollywood Stockwell, once a huge star, had become. Stockwell said he'd love to be in the movie, he didn't even care which part. Lynch said it was already cast, and Stockwell went back to his Mexican B-movie set. Months later, Lynch called - saying that somebody had backed out of the project and would Stockwell like the part?

This was the beginning of the big comeback.

Dean Stockwell is an actor whose real pay-offs did not start until he was in his 50s.

He has said he has no craft beyond intuition and instinct. This is apparent in everything he does. Even as a kid. His intuition led him to know (just KNOW) that while Myrna Loy was telling him to go play the piano - he should START to protest ... but then stop, and be defeated - all without a word. He KNEW this because he never thinks like an actor, he always thinks like a person. And that is what you would do in that situation.

His acting still has that breath of originality and reality to it - even in some of the cheesy horror movies he made during the 'long lean time'. He didn't sell himself out. Ever. And so now - as a man in his 70s - the rewards are even sweeter, more potent.

He's always been on my radar. I've always been happy when he would "show up" on a Law & Order, or JAG, or in movies like Air Force One.

But I feel lucky to have re-encountered his work in this new and intense way.

Some moments from Song of the Thin Man below, including the "in between the lines" moment with Myrna Loy where he goes to say something, then stops himself.

All Stockwell stuff here