The Sheila Variations

The Northern Dispensary

After my haircut ... I went downtown to meet up with Allison.

And we walked by the Northern Dispensary in the Village - You can read more about this mysterious abandoned empty building here - and another link - with a great photo here - it just sits there, prime real estate - and you can still see the old dentist equipment, rotting away through the windows - it's on a corner - so you can peek into the windows on one side and see straight through to the windows on the other side. There are some great stories behind the building - Allison told me some of them - but follow the links in that post above to read more. I used to have my appointments with my analyst in the building right behind the Dispensary in that photo - and i walked by it all the time, not really thinking about it - or wondering why this Willy Wonka's factory nobody-comes-in-or-goes-out building was just sitting there ... empty ... at the intersection of Waverley and Waverley.

It was a nice little pilgrimage, and dammitall I didn't have my camera with me (which ended up being an even bigger bummer because on my way home I inadvertently got trapped in a raucous parade of angry lesbians - marching and drumming and dancing - I could not get out of the throng, they were jammed into the narrow streets of the Village - and they had taken over the entire block - and I had no idea what they were protesting - but there was nothing to do but join them, so I marched along blissfully oblivious, my new haircut bouncing buoyantly in the night breeze, clapping my hands, dancing to their drumbeats - hoping the lesbians got whatever they wanted - but in the meantime, ahhh, that's a nice drumbeat, let me dance along to my train station since I cannot seem to escape ... laughing at the weirdness of my life) - so back to the Northern Dispensary: I settled on 2 shots with my crappy cell phone.

It's a haunting building. Allison kept saying, "What I wouldn't give to go in there and have a look around!"

Pampering

I went and got my 700 dollar cut and color yesterday. I seriously feel like I could write a 50 page essay about everything I observed and experienced in that salon - it was overwhelming! The decor is sleek, modern, and all black and white. The stylists wear all black - and there are glassed-in rooms where you can see bizarre experiments going on, with hair color, and makeover tints - and the stylists there wear white lab coats. The amenities of the salon are amazing. People stroll around offering you iced tea, or lemonade, or seltzer ... Other people stroll around carrying little trays of pastries ... Everyone who works there is drop-dead gorgeous. Everyone who GOES there is drop-dead gorgeous! I was intimidated but determined to not let it crush me. I just asked questions, and blatantly allowed myself to be in a fluster of confusion. I did not try to KNOW the system ... I was like: "Oh ... so ... where do I hang my coat?" "Take a left over there ... you can get changed in the rooms over there ..." Oh! Rooms! Changed! Got it! Then once I was over in the room-changing area - I again was in a bluster of confusion ... "Do I check my coat? How about my purse? Do I need to ... Oh, I go right over here ... thank you." (Thankfully, there are people who work there EVERYWHERE - and anyone who looks even mildly lost - for 2 seconds - is approached. "Can I help you?" "Do you need anything?" So, with a lot of hand-holding - I made my way through the maze of changing into the black gown thing - and checking my coat - and then they gave me a big plastic bag to keep my purse in - since I was getting my hair colored. Now that's nice. I suppose if you walk in there with a bag that costs 1500 bucks, you don't want to check it and you also don't want to risk having it stained. Got it). Bag in a plastic bag. Coat checked. Black gown on over my dress. And .... now what? Where do I go? Help me? Mummy? I was lost. Naturally, I was approached immediately by a staff member who asked if I needed anything ... "Yes ... I'm having my hair colored by ... Olivia?" "Okay - go up the stairs, take a right - and another right - she'll be at the window." Oh! Okay!

I mean, the whole day was like that. Baffled, confused, staring around ... like the most elementary things were beyond my comprehension: where is the bathroom? Could I have a glass of water? I needed help AT EVERY MOMENT. It was hysterical - but everyone was so nice and helpful that I felt perfectly comfortable being discombobbled. It was honest. If I had let myself HIDE how intimidated I felt - I would have been stressed out and paralyzed.

I got my color done first - Olivia rocked the house with the color - it's a coppery red - but she got rid of the grey, and also gave it some tints and shades throughout that look REALLY nice - natural. She pretty much colored my hair strand by strand.

I need to discuss my deep deep love for Mohammed, her assistant. I crushed on him the entire time I was there. First of all, the gorgeousness of the man is hard to even discuss - he looked like a young Marlon Brando. I mean: YUMMY. We talked about sky diving and bungee jumping. He said he always wanted to skydive - but his wife was expecting - and he didn't feel comfortable doing such a dangerous thing, now that he was about to be a father. We also talked about our shared love of Bloody Marys. Seriously. I am crushing on him so hard. He washed my hair - and gave me a head massage. Hence: my love for him. I have never felt anything so good in my life. I texted a friend of mine as I was sitting in the chair waiting for Mohammed to come back. "I am deeply in love with Mohammed, the assistant. I don't want this part of the day to end - because I'll have to say goodbye to him." She texted me back within 5 minutes: "I am so telling Dean!" (as in Stockwell. hahahahahaha)

But all love affairs must end. And once the coloring was done - Olivia passed me off to Rich - the guy who was going to cut my hair.

So much people-watching I don't even know what to say about it! Rich was running a bit behind because a gaggle of girls (yes, a gaggle) had come in to get their hair done for a wedding - and they were running him ragged. But I took one look at what he made this one girl's hair looked like, and thought: Holy shit, he is an artist. That is AMAZING. But I watched everyone, as I waited. I bonded with Bessa - who rinsed my hair out - we discussed the ins and outs of Britney's career for about half an hour. It was so fun. We discussed all of her VMA performances, the hits, the misses, how we both kinda love her, how we were horrified by the latest debacle ... We talked about the tragic loss of JT and how Britney went downhill from there ... we discussed our yearning for a big ol' awesome comeback - but how we are losing hope in that regard. It was hysterical - Bessa was very busy, moving around - assisting other stylists - being called over to hold hair as it was blow-dried or whatever ... but in between, she'd come back over to me, and say, "So how 'bout her reality show, huh?" It was great. People are people, wherever you find them.

If you can talk to me about Britney - and if you know what I'm referring to when I casually reference, "the python" or "her appearances on Star Search' - then we'll be able to hang.

Rich finally was ready for me and we had a long conversation about my hair - and I have to say - I don't think I've ever had such an incredible haircut. It's just full and kind of sexy - but it looks tousled and natural - He's incredible. Olivia popped over with Mohammed, my long-lost love - to see what it all looked like - blow-dried out, the color, the cut - and was so sweetly excited for me. Rich and I actually (it turns out) have some mutual friends (life is so weird) - he lives with his wife down on the Jersey shore - so his daily commute is 2 hours. But obviously it's worth it. He says, "It's hard to get a job here because stylists never want to leave. It's a great job." At one point - both he and Bessa were blow-drying sections of my hair - I have never felt so PAMPERED in all my life. It's not altogether a pleasant sensation ... I mean, it is - of course it is ... but it's also a bit embarrassing.

When I left, I was frightened about how to handle the tipping. I knew I would tip everyone who touched my hair - but ... do I wander around handing them wads of cash like a Mafia don??

A guardian angel appeared. I came back down the stairs, in my black gown - to the front desk area - The girl behind the desk - who had a short glamorous Louise Brooks bob - bright red hair - pale skin - just gorgeous - Anyway, she looked up, saw me, and said, "Oh my God - that haircut! You look so great!" (After all, she had seen what I looked like when I walked in. Not that I'm a Gila monster on the prowl - but you know ... It was a big transformation.) So to have her say that - scary girl at the front desk - was sooo nice - and it turns out she wasn't scary at all. We were talking about how wonderful the salon is - how much of a difference it makes to have a nice haircut - She said to me, "I'm an actress - I work in a preschool, too - but i work here one day a week so I can get my discount." I loved that! First of all, she was intimidatingly beautiful - she's the first thing you see when you get off the elevator- so naturally they're going to have BABES working the front desk, because it's the best advertisement for the salon within. So I was scared of her at first. But then she reveals that she's an actress, and a preschool teacher, and works reception one day a week ... so I was like: Oh. You're just like me. I love you now.

So I felt comfortable taking her into my neuroses and said, "How does one handle tipping in this environment?"

And she said, "Here are some envelopes - just put the tip for whoever into different envelopes - write their name on it - and then drop it off in that little dropbox over there. They'll get it at the end of the day."

Thank you, Redheaded Goddess! For walking me through the mysteries of salon life!! Easy-peasy! I'm SO GLAD I asked. I mean, it would have been fine if I had tramped back up the stairs and wandered around looking for Olivia, or Mohammed or whoever ... but it was so much more civilized to just put the bills in an envelope and pop them into the little drop-box.

I wrote on Bessa's envelope: "Go, Brit-Brit!"

Anyway, I'm really happy with it. It was a long afternoon - I was there for 4 hours - which is a bit much!! But what a generous gift ... and it turned out to be (as things usually are for me) kind of an adventure.

Blurry bad cell phone pic of the haircut - me in the PATH station later that night. You can't really see the gorgeousness of the haircut - and I'm eager to try to "do" it myself, later today. It was pretty simple - his styling of it (I had told him my low-maintenance lifestyle - and that very often I "air-dry" my hair. He was hugely approving of this.) ... But I am eager to try to make it look as good as he did - on my own.

I miss you, Mohammed.

Happy birthday, Truman Capote!

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite writers - Truman Capote.

Truman Capote has been one of my many life-long obsessions - so forgive my autuistic knowledge of this man - his life, and his work. Also - I just had to go out and find all the great photos of him, and post them here. People LOVED to photograph this man (at least in his early wunderkind days) - and all of them are online, which is so exciting. So I've found some of my favorites, to post them here for you.

Example:

Most of my generation only remembers Truman (his Public Persona, I mean), from his appearances on various talk shows, mainly Johnny Carson, when he was a bloated guy with a high lisping voice who was vaguely embarrassing to watch - At least I felt that way. He was obese, he had face lifts, he wore a white Panama hat, he was kind of grotesque. I didn't know that he was basically caricaturing himself by then - which is always death to an artist of any kind.

But he was stuck. He had horrendous writer's block at the very end - which tormented him. The end of his life was full of despair. It's wrenching to read about - you just want his suffering to stop.

But as a youngun? As the new writer in town? He was a golden boy. He was a creature like Thomas Mann had written about. The golden-haired child-man who led others to do naughty naughty things, and then pled innocence. Photographers lined up to capture this guy.

See what I mean?

Hard to realize just how provocative those photos were back then. Especially because he was openly gay. And not just "openly gay" - but openly PRISSY and gay - which some people find unforgivable. Fine, be gay ... but ... do you have to be so ... GAY about it?? Can't you just PRETEND to be straight so I don't have to feel so ... ikky? Truman, even back in the early 40s, didn't put on an act for the straight world. He didn't turn himself inside out to make people feel comfortable with his gayness. He just was who he was. If people felt uncomfortable, then that was THEIR problem. He was prissy, he lisped, he flounced about like a Southern belle - AND he happened to be a kick-ass writer with a literary voice that no one could forget.

I still remember the impact that The Grass Harp had on my heart when I first read it.

I was too young then to really understand regrets, or loss - the way I understand them now - but his elegaic writing in that story touched some deep universal chord in me - the part of me that is HUMAN, and not just an age on a timeline. There was a kind of soul-growth spurt that happened to me when I read that sad beautiful story. I still have a real fondness for it.

(Excerpt here)

His first book, published in 1948, was Other Voices, Other Rooms, and it took the literary world by storm. It was one of THOSE debuts. High level reviewers praised the book - in glowing terms - and it truly is a wonderful book. Not as good as his others, and CERTAINLY not as good as In Cold Blood (just saying the name of that book gives me a chill up my spine) - but you could tell that there was a real VOICE in that book.

Just to add to the controversy - here is the "author photo" that appeared sprawled across the back of the book:

hahahahaha Truman! Please! It caused an outrage. A stir. (Tennessee Williams, down in Key West, had heard about it - and wrote letters referencing it) People loved it. People hated it. People TALKED about it, and that was what Truman cared about. Truman had talent - yes - but he understood the whole 15 minutes of fame thing long before Andy Warhol came along. Truman wanted to be FAMOUS as well as being a good writer. He wasn't one of those writers who holed themselves up in their apartments (at least not until In Cold Blood when he disappeared off the face of the earth for almost 5 years - he said later that writing that book nearly killed him.) ... But before In Cold Blood he was out at every party, he hung out with the rich and famous (at least until the huge debacle at the end of his life when he alienated all of them in one fell swoop)

This photo is just ... kind of says it all, don't it?

Look at how he's holding her wrist!!! Like - hold her HAND, Truman. But also - look at how sweet she is. The two of them were actually very good friends and he wrote one of my favorite pieces about her, which appears in the gorgeous collection Music for Chameleons. The piece describes a day in New York when he and Marilyn attended a funeral of a mutual friend. I love that piece. It's called "A Beautiful Child", because that's what Truman saw her as. Not the sex goddess. But a beautiful child.

(Excerpt here)

He was the darling of New York. He wasn't just friends with celebrities - whose wealth is a rather transitory thing. He became friends with REAL rich people. The international tycoon types. The Onassis types. He was invited to all of the "society" parties.

And one day - he read a little snippet in the newspaper about an entire family who had been slaughtered in their own home ... and something sparked in him ... He spoke to the folks at The New Yorker - he wanted to do a piece on how such a brutal murder would affect the small town ... He went to Kansas - and basically did not emerge from that nightmare for another 5 or 6 years. The result, of course, was the great great In Cold Blood.

(Excerpt here)

More on In Cold Blood in a bit.

Once that book stopped taking up every second of his life (he was never really the same again, after writing it) ... he was ready to re-enter New York society, with a bang.

And he threw a party that is still famous. It was called The Black and White Ball, and he threw it for Katherine Graham - who he didn't even really know.

She wrote in her autobiography (which I've read): "I was truly baffled as to why I was the guest of honor. But it seemed really important to Truman ... so I said yes."

Odd. It was, many people say who care about this stuff, the "party of the century".

Everyone had to come wearing masks, and everyone had to dress in black and white. Truman had just finished In Cold Blood - or maybe he had just returned from Kansas - not sure - but he needed to let off steam, he needed to shake off In Cold Blood which had literally taken over his life. So he threw this party - where everyone who was anyone showed up.

Here's Candice Bergen at the party:

Here's Norman Mailer and his wife - hahahaha

Here's Mia Farrow and Frank Sinatra- who had just gotten married:

People jostled to get invited. People sucked up to Truman. He was in his glory. But even then - he had the oddest mix of desire and contempt when it came to the rich. He wanted to hang out with them - but he had contempt for them as well. On some level, I think he knew that they would drop him like a hot potato the second his friendship became inconvenient. He knew that his friendships with these people were were pretty one-sided: Truman was there to entertain, to keep things light and amusing. The second he started falling on hard times later in life, they stopped tolerating his company.

Perhaps all those rich people just liked the cache of having a literary star at their parties - it made their parties seem more ... substantial. Maybe they really did like him. But I don't think so. And I don't think Truman liked them all that much, either. He saw right through them. Only he kept that to himself, and let the rich people think that he bought their game, that he was fooled, that he did not see the essential shallowness beneath their facade. When he finally came out and wrote about them and their pettiness, their stupidity - they could not and would not forgive him. One chapter of his book was published - and set off a shitstorm through the international rich set - all of whom had welcomed Capote into their midst.

(Excerpt here)

He never finished that book.

(By that point in his life, long after In Cold Blood, Truman had actually lost a lot of what had made him a success in the first place ... and that was his compassion for others. His ability to love his fellow man, and to try to step into their shoes and describe for us, the reader, what it is "like" to be that person. By the 1960s, drugs and drinking had taken hold ... and Truman was angry. He wrote about his former friends with bitchy - but spot-on - RAGE. He had NO compassion for THEM. He could find it in his heart to be compassionate for Dick Hickock and Perry Smtih even though they had committed such a heinous crime. But he was NOT compassionate for the fat Upper East Side cats. He unleashed his wrath on them, and it was like a bomb going off in international society.)

Truman Capote found himself bereft, and alone. He never recovered from that shattering of his world, even though he said over and over, "I'm a writer! What did they think I did in my spare time? I observed life - and I wrote about it!" They did not forgive him for telling the truth. Years later, when Gerald Clarke wrote his tremendous biography of Capote - there were people who refused to be interviewed for the book becaue they were STILL seething at Truman's "betrayal".

I'm going to post something I wrote a long time ago on this blog - which ended up being published elsewhere. It's called "Fairy on the Prairie", and it's about the writing of In Cold Blood which is pretty much on my Top 10 favorite books ever written. Certain books come and go on that list - titles get bumped off - moved on - but not In Cold Blood. There are a couple of others that never get bumped off - Harriet the Spy, Wrinkle in Time, Catch 22. These are great great books.

I'm proud of the piece I wrote on Truman.

Before we get to that, though, I would like to share my favorite photo of Truman Capote. It's done by the great photographer Irving Penn. I like it because - it's not the "carefree" look of his golden-boy self - which was a pose, to some degree. It's not the provocative just-got-out-of-bed look he sported as an early writer - which was also a pose. And it's not a photograph from his later years, which just really hurt me to see.

Irving Penn had photographed Spencer Tracy, famously, boxed up in a corner. (That was one of Penn's "things" - he put famous people into corners of rooms and photographed them. Strangely effective.)

Look. Amazing photo of Spencer. Look at the EXPRESSION on his face.

Penn took basically the same photograph of Truman - boxed him up in a corner. I looked for a larger version of the photo - a clearer one - but couldn't find it. This is the best I could get.

There is something about this photo that not only haunts me, but strikes me as deeply painfully TRUE. The oversized coat, it makes him look so small and frail. The cramped quarters, the walls pressing in. Now, I did not know Truman Capote, and it is not for me to say who is the "real" Truman Capote - but something about the look on his face in this photo, its flat blank-eyed stare, the gaze is a bit confronting, but also - so accepting of himself, of the soul behind those eyeballs - something about it lands for me. I feel that I am getting a glimpse not of a personality, a famous person ... but someone's soul. I feel the same way about the Spencer Tracy photograph - so I don't know what that's about, and I'm sure it has all to do with Irving Penn's gift. It's extraordinary to me.

And now. Onto In Cold Blood, and my old post about him. There may be some repeats of information here.

Happy happy birthday, dear dear Truman.

Truman Capote said later that if he had known what he was getting into, when he traveled down to Kansas ("a fairy down on the prairie - who'd have thought?") to write a piece on the murder for The New Yorker, then he never would have gone. He went to Kansas only 2 weeks after the murders took place. The killers had still not been found, the community was in an uproar of suspicion and paranoia. Capote's main interest was to do a long profile of the townspeople, how regular church-going farmers handled such a disaster. Little did he know what the book would eventually be! The project took up years of his life. He had to wait for the executions of the 2 murderers, in order to complete his book. So he waited, and waited. Appeal after appeal ...He was unable to write anything else. Nothing else interested him. He was a man obsessed, in the grip of his obsession for years. His health was ruined. His friends were sick of hearing about the Clutter family. He tried to take vacations with his long-time partner, and would just drink, and try to sleep, and have fits of despair. He thought those boys would never be executed, he thought he would be in limbo forever. Yet - the morbidness of his entire life being on hold because of commuted death-sentences in Kansas - the morbidness of trying to go on, when really all you want is for those 2 boys to be killed - so that YOU can go back to YOUR life ... This selfish attitude (necessary for the project) took a huge toll on him. It felt inhuman.

Finally - there were no more appeals and Capote traveled to Kansas, to watch the execution. Hickock and Smith had asked him to be there. In the intervening years, he had interviewed the 2 killers numerous times. Their first-person descriptions of their own sorry lives make up important parts of the book. Capote became their conduit to the outside world. Hickock would draw self-portraits of himself and send them to Capote. Capote was playing a double-edged game here. He became "the listener", the one who would sit and ask them questions, and nod understandingly. The 2 of them got addicted to his concern. Yet Capote was horrified by most of what he heard. He wasn't without pity for these men, who had pretty much been beaten like dogs from the second they were born - and yet Capote hadn't had an easy road either, and HE hadn't killed anyone in cold blood. He had grown up with alcoholics, he had been abandoned by his father, his parents were ashamed of having a "fairy" for a son, he was sent to military school - can you imagine how awful that must have been for him? Capote may have acted like a cream-puff but that man was cold and hard as steel inside. He had to be.

Capote needed quotes, he needed access, he needed to enter into the psychologies of these 2 men. He was able to paint the graphic picture of the Clutter family through interviews with people who knew and loved them. But the Clutters were no longer around to speak for themselves. Hickock and Smith were alive for a couple of years, so he visited them often. On his way out of Death Row, he would feel the urge to vomit. It would take him days to recover, emotionally, from these macabre "visits". And he said, later, that he never recovered from the "shattering" experience of watching the two men hang. The letters he wrote to friends afterwards are nearly incoherent. Watching how hard the hanging body clings to life, watching the kicking feet, the flailing, the letting-go of bodily functions ... Capote was really never the same man again.

And he then sat down and wrote the book like a bat out of hell.

Truman Capote always thought that he had a "great book" in him. This mythical "great book" haunted his dreams, he would lie awake at night aching with ambition, dreaming about this great book ... He didn't think In Cold Blood was his masterpiece. He looked back on the experience of researching that book and writing it as a grim one, an almost universally unpleasant and grueling experience. I've read all of Capote's books. I love that guy's writing style. I even read his unfinished work - the 2 chapters of the novel he was working on when he died. He claimed to have it almost finished, but the rest of it (if it even existed) was never found. The 2 chapters are okay - it's a gossipy bitchy look at high-class New York society. It's merciless. It's very funny. Nobody is spared. Human beings are seen in their worst lights. Everyone is selfish, cynical, out for themselves ... It is quite funny, but it's very very mean. He was nearing the end of his life, and he had been abandoned by most of his friends. His outlook was not good, he was addicted to drugs, filled with anxiety and loneliness ... The 2 chapter are his way of lashing out at all those people who left him, who tossed him out with the trash. Hence, the mean-ness.

The thing in the rest of Capote's writing that, for me, sets him apart is his undeniable love of humanity. His tenderness. His ability to SEE people, with all their flaws - and to see them as beautiful. Much of his best writing is all about nostalgia, wistfulness, yearning for childhood ... Yes, it is sentimental, but it also has a depth of sadness beneath it, a grief ... which elevates it from mawkishness.

In Cold Blood taps into something else. In Cold Blood doesn't fit into either of the Capote categories: the bitchy mean queen telling all the nasty secrets of his high-class friends, or the lonely sweet man filled with hurtful nostalgia for childhood.

It was something completely new. For him, and for us. I don't even know if I can describe it. All I can say is - he never accomplished such a thing again. His writing never seemed so effortless again. You read that book and you feel like if you cut ONE WORD, the entire thread will unravel. It is so tight.

The other thing I had forgotten from the biography is Capote's personal experience leaving his home-environment of ritzy New York City (where there were lots of "fairies"), and venturing into the Kansas prairies to investigate a murder. Capote was openly gay. He wasn't a macho gay, either. He didn't try to blend in, or act straight, or hide his gayness. He was a small rotund man, who wore wide white hats, spoke with a lisp, fluttered about like Blanche DuBois, and literally said things like, "I declare!"

He took one of his best friends, Harper Lee (yes - THAT Harper Lee) as a co-researcher. She was much more "normal"-acting, and was able to blend in a bit more. She could get people to talk to her, because she seemed like one of them.

But Truman Capote was so relentless, and not only so relentless, but so committed to justice, so committed to discovering what had happened in the Clutter household, that people started opening up. The people in the town started competing about who had had him over for dinner the most times. Alvin Dewey, the head of the investigation, a tough gruff 3 pack a day smoker, eventually counted Truman as a valued partner. Truman was there when Dewey got the call that the 2 murderers had been picked up in Las Vegas, AND that they were still wearing the boots with the distinctive soles (that had left footprints - If the 2 hadn't confessed, the boots alone would have convicted them). Truman was standing right there, with Dewey's wife, listening to Dewey hear the news.

The people of Kansas, who had never met a person like Capote in their lives, who were Bible-Belt ranchers and farmers, took him into their homes, their families, their hearts. Without them, the book would not have been written.

It is a massive accomplishment.

Truman Capote went to his grave thinking that his "great book" remained unwritten. I beg to differ.

The Books: "Bad Behavior" - 'Something Nice' (Mary Gaitskill)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - a short story collection - I'll excerpt from the third story today: 'Something Nice'.

Classic Gaitskill. This story is told from the point of view of the male - a kind of shlubby average guy - married - who frequents a certain house of prostitution in Manhattan about once a month. Gaitskill's rendering of what such places are like have such a stamp of reality that anything else pales in comparison. She KNOWS these places. We all have ideas about what prostitutes are, and who they are on their off-days - but Gaitskill actually KNOWS ... Then - the narrator's wife goes away for a month - and there is no longer a compulsion for him to go home - so he starts to go to the sex house every night. He's a veterinarian (although he lies to the prostitute, for some reason - and says he's a lawyer - very interesting: he's a sad guy - he makes me sad, anyway)- he's got money, so it's no issue. And he requests the same girl every time. The interesting thing about this story is that Jane - the prostitute that the narrator likes best, and requests over and over ... is, objectified by him - but not in the way that you would think. You don't get the sense that he goes to whores for the hot kinky sex that his wife won't do with him. You get the sense that he is lonely, and he feels protective towards this young girl who has sex with him once a month - and that he wants to talk to someone. A friend of mine was a prostitute and she said that that was overwhelmingly the case. That sometimes the guy would just want to talk. Be listened to. It's kind of pathetic, but again - Gaitskill doesn't overtly JUDGE this man ... but I gotta say: he's hauntingly awful. You just know he's living in a fantasy world - which turns the whole event on its ear. Our expectations of what prostitutes are like are not fulfilled by this sad pathetic little story. Jane, the prostitute, doesn't seem to have the hard edges yet - the true "professional" vibe - she's young, and still kind of fresh. Our narrator fantasizes about her - but not sexually - He is filled with yearning towards her, he wants to give her things, he wants to take her out to dinner (he'll pay for her time, of course) - he wants to know who she is (but then when she reveals things - like what she does on her days off - and it doesn't fit with his perception of her, he kind of doesn't know what to say). It is another way of objectifying a human being: to fall in love with an IDEA of them, and not really be able to deal with the reality. Gaitskill doesn't take the simplistic view, though. Jane is not an awesome sex goddess, in charge of what she's doing. And he is not a sad sack of a loser. Jane is rather unpleasant. Indifferent, event. She's a prostitute because she wants to go to art school. She's a painter. She's cut off so much from what she is actually doing that nothing matters to her. Not really. And she is baffled - and kind of cold - towards this lonely man who just wants to do something nice for her. It's a love story, in Gaitskill's universe. Based on ideals and misunderstanding. If we only see prostitutes as victims who need to be saved ... we are missing a vast WORLD of people who do it for all KINDS of reasons. (Same thing with porn stars and exotic dancers and all that stuff.) And it's very dangerous, anyway, to romanticize ANYONE out of their humanity. I've had it done to me. I can tell that whatever the dude is in love with - it's not really ME. It's an IDEA of me. He's made up his mind who I am, from the bat ... and that is what he goes for ... and anything that doesn't really fit in is treated with confusion - as opposed to interest. That's really what this story is all about. It's very very sad. And the ending is AWESOME. Jane disappears from the house o' prostitution. It is disorienting for the narrator. You really get, through Gaitskill's prose, how much space Jane took up in his mind. In a funny way, you ache for him. But it's a cold world out there - and you best not mess with prostitutes if you're looking for anything other than sexual release with no commitment. Know what you're doing before you start doing it. Anyway - months pass. Jane recedes from memory. And then one day - in a cafe in New York - he sees her sitting at a table with some friends. He is stunned to see her out of context. He eavesdrops - and it's obvious that she is now in art school, and her and her friends are sitting there gossiping (uncharitably) towards another friend. They're self-righteous, in the way that gossips can be about other people's "bad behavior". Anyway, I can't describe how Gaitskill does it in this last moment ... but you are left with the feeling of the lost-ness of everyone, that everyone is looking for ... something ... sometimes we intersect - and all along the narrator thought, sadly, that Jane might have looked up to him, or looked to him for protection. Like: he had a fantasy of himself that he was a "nice guy", as opposed to all the other assholes who go to prostitutes. But that's the big lie - that you are different, somehow unique - special.

It's a great story about loneliness and isolation. Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - 'Something Nice'.

The minute she came into the room, he went to her and put his arms around her hips. "Hello, Jane."

"Hi."

"It was strange not seeing you out there waiting for me."

She looked puzzled.

"I guess I somehow got used to thinking of you as my own little girl. I didn't like the idea that you were with some other guy. Silly, huh?"

"Yes." She broke away and snapped the sheet out over the bed. "Do you say things like that because you think I like to hear them?"

"Maybe. Some of the girls do, you know."

He could feel the sarcasm of her silence.

He watched her pull her dress off over her head and drop it on the aluminum chair. "I guess it's only natural that you've begun to get jaded."

She snorted. "I wouldn't call it that."

"What would you call it?"

She didn't answer. She sat on the bed and bent to take off her heels, leaving her socks on. When she looked at him again she said, "Do you really think it's a good idea for you to come to see me every night? It's awfully expensive. I know lawyers make a lot of money, but still. Won't your wife wonder where it's going?"

He sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. "Don't you see how special you are? No other girl I've seen like this would ever have thought to say something like that. All they can think of is how to get more money out of me and here you are worrying about how much I'm spending. I'm not trying to flatter you, you are different."

"Aren't you worried about getting AIDS?"

"From a girl like you? C'mon, don't put yourself down."

She smiled, sad and strained, but sort of affectionate, and put her hands on his shoulders. She felt to him like one of his puppy patients embracing him as he carried it across the room for a shot.

"I'm sorry I'm being so shitty," she said. "I just hate this job and this place."

"Here," he said. "I'm going to buy two hours, so we can just relax and unwind. You just lie down and get snuggled up in the sheet." He got up and turned off the light. He found a romantic jazz station on the radio. He undressed and got under the sheet with her, wrapping them both in a ball. He held her neck and felt her forehead against his shoulder. Her limbs were nestled and docile, as if all her stiff, pony-trot energy had vanished. The dim light of the gurgling fish tank cast an orangy glow over the room. "This is so nice and glamorous," he said.

"When is your wife coming back?" asked a voice from the nuzzling bundle on his arm.

"In three days." He sighed and stared at the stupid, lovely slivers of fish darting around their ugly castle.

Brokeback 1776

hahahahahaha - hysterical parody of Brokeback Mountain using footage from the movie 1776 - I love when it gets all slo-mo and romantic. I practically know 1776 by heart ("But I burn, Mr. A!!" "So do I!") - so the clips they pick, out of context, work perfectly. Funny!!!

Found the video here, naturally - and he relates one of my favorite stories from the early days of the American Revolution - of John Adams and Benjamin Franklin sleeping in the same bed, and arguing about whether or not night air is good or bad for you. It's just such a funny image to me - these two Founding Fathers bickering through the darkness. (It's not as funny as Ben Franklin suggesting they fight the war using bows and arrows ... and the other dudes all being like, "Uhm, Ben? We have cannonballs and stuff now? Sooooo ... thanks for sharing ... but no." - but ALMOST as funny.)

Reading

A beautiful photo - on a site full of beautiful photos. One of my favorite sites on the web, period.

Sarah Vaughan

Woah - unbelievable video clip of her singing 'Send in the clowns' ... what she does on "my usual flair" (putting the "flair" of the lyric into her voice - but simply, perfectly) ... and then where her voice goes on "sure of my lines" in the next moment. GOOSEBUMPS.

Her voice has always pierced thru right to my very core.

(Alex. Yo. You ever gonna return my calls, woman????) tee hee I miss you.

Dean Stockwell's in Moscow

Or ... at least his photograph is. Dennis Hopper has a big show of his photography going on at Moscow's Museum of Photography. Here's a nice review of it. About 10 years ago, there was a great exhibit at the Whitney (I can't believe I'm saying those things in the same sentence: "great exhibit" and "Whitney" - there's a funny story about my dad and me going to the Whitney and we walked into one room where there was some light-and-color installation - with strobe lights and reflections - a big empty room, and my dad, an art connoisseur, saying loudly, "So. Where's the art?" hahahahaha But I digress!) Anyway, the Whitney did a whole "Beat generation" exhibit - and it was fanTASTIC. I literally wanted to EAT some of the art I saw. hahaha There were tons of photographs - of Ginsberg and all those dudes - doing readings at City Lights, stuff like that - Kerouac's typewriter and the long ROLL of the On the Road manuscript - it wasn't separate pages, it was a scroll - Dennis Hopper's work was everywhere throughout the exhibit - and if you've never seen his photographs, I suggest you look them up. They're wonderful - my kind of Americana. He's from Kansas - there's something in his eye that really understands space, and horizon, and small towns - little diners, and coffee shops, and floozy waitresses - I love all that stuff. Like this. (Love the title of that one too - it resonates) But then there's whimsical photos of his friends - like this one. hahahaha The photo of Stockwell that is included in the show is below. My question is: Guys, how much pot have you actually smoked? I mean, seriously!! It's 1964, and Dean Stockwell has a fried egg on his face, and he's shining a flashlight on it. Goofballs. Friends. Love it. And I'm glad Hopper's show got a nice review - his work certainly deserves it.

All Dean Stockwell stuff here

Going to do my best to re-cap Episode 3 of Quantum Leap this weekend - but I am not making any promises!

Grey Gardens

I loved reading this review of the documentary. It pretty much describes my first response to meeting Big and Little Edie.

The Books: "Bad Behavior" - 'A Romantic Weekend' (Mary Gaitskill)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - a short story collection - I'll excerpt from the second story today: 'A Romantic Weekend'. Gaitskill sets up expectations with the title of the story. We think we know what " a romantic weekend" means. She has other things in mind. The way she writes about sex can be frightening. She writes about women who either do NOT have the "fight or flight" instinct in them - or that instinct is there, only turned on its ear. Where other women would run away, Gaitskill's characters run toward. It's tough stuff. But it's real. It's the Gaitskill Voice. Beth is the lead in this story - she is going away on a romantic weekend with a man she has fallen in love with. He's married. I think he and Beth met at a party. Oh, and he is un-named in the story. He's just "he". The narration includes both of their thought processes - we're not just inside Beth's head. He's a sadist. And he senses the masochism in Beth. The first time they sleep together, he hurts her. She's frightened but she takes it. He tells her he won't give her any more pain than she can handle. There's something in this comment of his that seems so loving to Beth, so kind, that she falls head over heels for him. Even though on some level he terrifies her. They make a plan to go away for the weekend. The story is a dark pit. You need a strong stomach for some of it. You feel like this guy is a total lunatic. He hates women. But, as always with Gaitskill, she is uninterested in making judgments. She just describes what they do, and what they think - and Gaitskill never blinks! You wait for her to intervene - as a narrator, a writer - but she does not. Hard to explain - but it's startling stuff. Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill - 'A Romantic Weekend'.

They had more drinks on the plane. They were served a hunk of white-frosted raisin pastry in a red paper bag. He wasn't hungry, but the vulgar cake appealed to him so he stuck it in his baggage.

They had a brief discussion about shoes, from the point of view of expense and aesthetics. They talked about intelligence and art. There were large gaps of silence that were disheartening to both of them. She began talking about old people, and how nice they could be. He had a picture of her kneeling on the floor in black stockings and handcuffs. This picture became blurred, static-ridden, and then obscured by their conversation. He felt a ghastly sense of longing. He called back the picture, which no longer gave him any pleasure. He superimposed it upon a picture of himself standing in a nightclub the week before, holding a drink and talking to a rather combative girl who wanted his number.

"Some old people are beautiful in an unearthly way," she continued. "I saw this old lady in the drugstore the other day who must've been in her nineties. She was so fragile and pretty, she was like a little elf."

He looked at her and said, "Are you going to start being fun to be around or are you going to be a big drag?"

She didn't answer right away. She didn't see how this followed her comment about the old lady. "I don't know."

"I don't think you're very sexual," he said. "You're not the way I thought you were when I first met you."

She was so hurt by this that she had difficulty answering. Finally, she said, "I can be very sexual or unsexual depending on who I'm with an in what situation. It has to be the right kind of thing. I'm sort of a cerebral person. I think I respond to things in a cerebral way, mostly."

"That's what I mean."

She was struck dumb with frustration. She had obviously disappointed him in some fundamental way, which she felt was completely due to misunderstanding. If only she could think of the correct thing to say, she was sure she could clear it up. The blue puffball thing unfurled itself before her with sickening power. It was the same image of him holding her and gazing into her eyes with bone-dislodging intent, thinly veiling the many shattering events that she anticipated between them. The prospect made her disoriented with pleasure. The only problem was, this image seemed to have no connection with what was happening now. She tried to think back to the time they had spent in her apartment, when he had held her and said, "You're cute." What had happened between then and now to so disappoint him?

She hadn't yet noticed how much he had disappointed her.

He couldn't tell if he was disappointing her or not. She completely mystified him, especially after her abrupt speech on cerrebralism. It was now impossible to even have a clear picture of what he wanted to do to this unglamorous creature, who looked as though she bit her nails and read books at night. Dim, half-formed pictures of his wife, Sharon, Beth and a sixteen-year-old Chinese hooker he'd seen a month before crawled aimlessly over each other. He sat and brooded in a bad-natured and slightly drunken way.

She sat next to him, diminished and fretful, with idiot radio songs about sex in her head.

Had drinks last night ...

at a bar called "The Galway Hooker". (There is, of course, a nice double entendre in the name - Galway Hooker is a BOAT - but the immediate impression of "hooker" is not, shall we say, a boat!)

I was laughing later with my friend about it - about how offensive that really is, if you think about it in terms of "hooker" being "prostitute" - (and also how funny). We were laughing about it ...

"I mean, it would be like being in a foreign country and seeing a bar called New York Sluts. Or Cleveland Whores. 'Hey, want to meet up for a drink later?' 'Sure, let's go to Happy Hour at Chattanooga Bitch-Ass Losers.'"

The Body

Two beautiful posts by two separate people - I read them yesterday within an hour of each other ... and somehow they seemed to inform each other, talk to each other - add nuance and shade to the same beautiful message ... Both messages I really needed to hear right now.

Camera-Shy?

Penny for your thoughts, a nickel for your kiss, and a dime if you tell me that you love me.

Nostalgia

Man. I relate to this post. Chicago still, if I think about it too much, makes my heart ache with longing. I've been reading along Wendy's journey with getting ready to move ... so her final good-bye post, with the Chicago Reader really really got to me.

Lovely writer.

The Books: "Bad Behavior" - 'Daisy's Valentine' (Mary Gaitskill)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill

Mary Gaitskill is what I would call a "scary-good" writer. She has been since her startling debut - with the short story collection Bad Behavior. I think she was 23 or 24 when it came out and the author photo on the back looks like it could have come out of a high school yearbook. She's tiny and young and ... well, she terrifies me, let's be honest. She's just so freakin' GOOD. The NY Times Book Review is excerpted on the front cover with the words: "Wise beyond her years, utterly unsentimental, Gaitskill is ... glorious." It's that "utterly unsentimental" part that is truly startling about her work - especially for such a young woman. Her stories are COLD. Her prose is spare, yet - deceptively simple. It is not easy to write the way Gaitskill writes. And believe me. I have tried. One of the nicest compliments I've ever received on this here blog was when Jon said that something I wrote reminded him of Gaitskill. I don't say that to brag - or hell, maybe I do. To be compared to her - especially in a piece that I wrote pretty much off the cuff - gave me a nice moment, and one of those encouraging feelings of: "Keep going. You can write. Just keep going." Her work is so so so good. What is it that makes her so good? To me, it is that "unsentimental" thing that stops me in my tracks. Gaitskill does not write about "nice" people. Many of them are assholes, actually. In the post I wrote about her on her birthday (lots of information about her there) I write:

I have to feel on pretty sturdy ground in order to be able to deal with Gaitskill. If I'm having a blue day ... or a blue month ... she's one of the writers I stay FAR away from. She doesn't wallow. She doesn't mope. None of her characters mope. That is what is so tragic about them. They survive. They are survivors. And there is something beautiful about survival but oh, there can be such sadness there too. When you have a consciousness of what you have lost along the way. Gaitskill writes about those moments ... those moments when you realize what you have lost.

I actually can't think of a writer to compare her to. Her idol is Nabokov - and I can definitely see his influence - there's KIND of a Margaret Atwood feel, at times - but not really. Atwood is also "utterly unsentimental" - which is why she's so great ... but Gaitskill - it's like she's living on a frozen ice-cap - It's not that she doesn't care about people, there is great compassion in her writing - just from how she observes things, she sees EVERYTHING. It's that she doesn't waste time psychologizing, or trying to understand WHY or give reasons for her characters behavior (their "bad behavior"). She just tells us what they do. Gaitskill was a runaway as a teenager. She lived on the street, and was a callgirl for a while. She's quite open about that period of her life. Many of her characters are prostitutes, strippers, drug addicts, runaways - and then there's the whole sex thing. Gaitskill writes about sex in a way that makes you (at times) want to run away screaming. These are not people who are yearning for intimacy, in the women's magazines definition of the word. To Gaitskill's characters, intimacy exists when someone punches you in the face as he's fucking you. Gaitskill does not pity such people, who yearn for pain, who only understand love when it hurts. She doesn't glorify them either. She is not interested in judging them in one way or another. She just tells us what they do. That's why I say: if I'm feeling shaky, or on the verge of a depression - Gaitskill is the last writer I will look to. She's not interested in comforting me. She's not interested in shocking me, either - this is not about shock-value.

The movie Secretary is based on a Gaitskill short story - and they definitely Hollywood-ed it up - but I was amazed how much they were able to get away with. (I love that movie, by the way. And I love that relationship. Read into that what you will!)

It's not so much her subject matter that I am drawn to - but the sheer virtuosity of her prose. She's as good as it gets. She just came out with a novel Veronica - it's her second novel ... In my opinion, her "milieu" is the short story - her two novels, while filled with unbelievable writing, didn't work as well for me as her short stories - where she knocks it out of the park, page after page after page.

I often wonder what it would be like to be able to write like Mary Gaitskill. I know I have my own gifts, my own style ... but I do wonder what it would be like to have something within me cauterized to such a severe degree, that I would be able to write about rape and rough sex and homeless runaways and drugs and users ... with such a cold clear unblinking eye. Gaitskill is terrifying. Terrifyingly good.

Bad Behavior like I said was her debut. And if you're gonna have a literary debut, then you want Gaitskill's literary debut. Because she writes so much about sex - and because it's not the kind of sex you normally hear about - she got a lot of attention for that. There are some parts of some of her stories that even I wince at. But Gaitskill doesn't. That's the power of it. She's not rubbing my face in shit, and saying, "LOOK! THESE ARE PEOPLE TOO!" or whatever - her interests as a writer are not: "Let me humanize a subversive group of people ..." She's not an evangelist. She's not polemical. She doesn't care if we've never heard of sex clubs and S&M joints and runaways who like to get punched in the face and look for men who will punch them in the face. She knows those people, she lived among those people, she probably IS one of those people - and so she, without blinking, writes about what they do.

I dislike writers who want to "shock" me (and, it's funny - 2 of the writers in the last 5 years who seemed interested in "shocking" me turned out to be frauds!!) Gaitskill is not a fraud. These are her people. Gaitskill, despite her subject matter, couldn't care less if I was shocked or not. She's still gonna keep writing about these people, and telling me what they do. The title of her book is a wonderful little wink - at those who would judge, at those who couldn't "take" such stories - because they would need a moral, or they would need SOME narrative voice to say, "This woman is abused and needs to be healed - her behavior right now is 'bad' - and she needs to get past it ..." or some other such Glamour mag sentiment. Gaitskill does not satisfy in this regard. She does not look at her characters as needing to go through 12 step programs to join regular society. She does not concede ground to those who would mutter, "Wow. That girl is so SICK."

Maybe that girl IS sick. Gaitskill, again, doesn't care about diagnosing her characters. She doesn't go for easy labels. There is nothing about Gaitskill that is easy. And, to be honest, I know a lot of these people. I've known "Gaitskill characters" in my life. Her observations are so clear, so RIGHT, that you yourself as a reader feel exposed by them.

She's one of the best writers alive today - certainly in America at the top of the heap.

The first story in Bad Behavior is called 'Daisy's Valentine'. Her stories don't really have "plots". At least not that would be interesting to relate. Suffice it to say: Joey and Daisy work in a second-hand bookstore in Manhattan together. They are dating. Joey is also living with a woman named Diane - his girlfriend of 8 years. Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Bad Behavior - by Mary Gaitskill

When Joey first noticed Daisy, he wondered why this pretty young woman had chosen to work in a filthy, broken-down store amid unhappy homosexuals. As time went on, it seemed less and less inappropriate. She was comfortable in the typing pool. She was happy to listen to the boys talk about their adventures in leather bars, where men got blow jobs in onpen wooden booths or pissed on other men. She told jokes about Helen Keller and sex. She talked about her boyfriends and her painting. She was always crouching at Evelyn's desk, whispering and laughing about something, or looking at Evelyn's back issues of True Detective magazine. She wore T-shirts with pictures of cartoon characters on them, and bright-colored pants. Her brown hair was bobbed in a soft curve that ended on either side of her high cheekbones. When she walked, her shoulders and long neck were erect in a busy, almost ducklike way, but her hips and waist were fluid and gently mobile.

The heterosexual men were always coming to stand by her desk and talk to her about their poetry or political ideas while she looked at them and nodded. Even the gay men developed a certain bravado in her presence. Tommy kept on reassuring her that her prince was just around the corner. "I can feel it, Daisy," he would say exultantly. "You're on collision course with Mr. Right!"

"Do you really think so, Tom?"

"It's obvious! Aren't you excited?"

Then Ariel would get up from his desk and lumber over to her and, bending from the waist, would put his large fleshy arms around her sholuders. Joey could see her small white hand emerge on Ariel's broad flank as she patiently patted him.

And, as if it weren't enough to be the heartthrob of the basement crowd, she was kind to helpless, repulsive people. There was a grotesque old woman who would come into the store from time to time to seek out her kindness. The woman was at least sixty years old, and covered her face with heavy orange makeup. She bought horrible best-sellers and self-help books with lurid red covers. She'd stand by Daisy's desk for half an hour and talk to ther about how depressed she was. Daisy would turn off her typewriter and turn toward the woman with her chin in her hand. She'd listen gravely, agreeing sometimes, letting the woman give her small bags of hard candy and kiss her on the cheek. Everyone made rude comments about Daisy and "that crazy old dyke." But Daisy remained courteous and attentive to the distressed creature, even though she often made fun of her after she left.

Joey didn't think of having sex with Daisy, at least not in detail. It was more the idea of being near her, protecting her. She was obviously so confused. She looked everywhere for answers, for someone to tell her what to think. "I just want your perspective," she'd say.

There was a customer she called the "answer man" because he claimed that he could predict the future through "automatic handwriting". He was a handsome elderly man who wore expensive suits and looked as though he'd had at least one face lift. He had been coming into the store for years. Every time he came in, Daisy would walk him off into a corner and ask him questions. He would scrawl down answers in thin red ink and hand them to her with an imperious, terribly personal look. She would become either stricken or joyous. Later she would run around talking about what he'd said, examining the red-scrawled pieces of store stationery. "He says my painting is going to start being successful in a year and a half." "He says there are no worthwhile men around me and that there won't be for months." "He says David will move out next month."

"You don't take that stuff seriously, do you?" asked Joey.

"Oh, not really," she said. "But it's interesting." She went back to her desk and stuck the papers in her drawer and began typing, her face still glowing and upturned because someone who was possibly crazy had told her that she would eventually be a success.

Tennessee Williams!

Starting today and running through the 30th, up in Provincetown, is the yearly Provincetown Tennessee Williams Theatre Festival. This year's festival will focus on Williams' less-successful but no less interesting later work.

David Kaplan, the artistic curator of the festival, and author of Tennessee Williams in Provincetown, contacted me and asked me to write something on Camino Real for the festival catalog - which I happily did. (Speaking of favorite passages in literature - in the post below about Howards End - the Camino Real script has my favorite of all Williams' lines: "Make voyages -- attempt them! -- there's nothing else.")

I was thrilled to be asked to write something, and thrilled to be, in some small way, a part of the festival - which someday, dernit, I will get to!! Next year, perhaps!!

Check out the schedule of events this year! Drool! Best of luck to all the actors and directors and organizers - I am sure the festival will be a huge success!

"My emotionalism is much too great for my intellectual capacity, it is like having 16 cylinders in a jalopy. Ultimately this will lead to complete disaster, but let us hope that evil day is postponed until I have completed my stint of creative work in the world."

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to Lawrence Langner, August 22, 1940

Carlyle ...

An amazing letter from Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson - where she describes Thomas Carlyle.

I have been reading Carlyle's incredible history of the French Revolution for, oh, 2 years now, off and on ... I can only deal with a couple pages at a time, it's so dense - you can't even believe what you're reading ... you also can't even believe that his star of fame has set so decidedly - he was once one of the most famous writers in the world!! THE historian. There's definitely a feeling that that should not be the case - he should be read again - anyhoo, that's neither here nor there. He is not an EASY read - not one sentence is easy, as a matter of fact - and sounds like, from the letter, that he was not an easy man in real life as well. I know he had a strange and long unhappy marriage ... but perhaps a great brain such as himself could not really be happy amongst other human beings. Who knows. I love the glimpse we get of Carlyle here.

A blog I love

It's called The Art of Memory

I won't try to describe it. I visit the blog and I go into a zone ... almost like when I stroll around in a museum, and let the impressions wash over and through me. Beautiful beautiful stuff.

The Books: "Howards End" (E.M. Forster)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Howards End - by E.M. Forster

I wrote yesterday a bit about Howards End. This book feels like it becomes more relevant with each passing day. Aside from the intricacies of the characters lives - it's about England - city vs. country - and what faster transportation will mean - or do ... the divides between us, the misunderstandings - that have, at times, lasted centuries ... they are engrained. These larger themes of course are reflected in the lives of the characters - the two Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen - and their encounters with the Wilcox family. The Schlegels are intellectuals - on their own - they're "modernism" ... the Wilcoxes, ensconced on their estate in the country - are about tradition - but there's an elegiac feeling to them, as though this is their last decade of being on the top of the heap - and somewhere they know it. For them, life is about LAND, and possessions - the traditions of their family bound up in trees and houses, etc. These two strands of English life come together - there are multiple plots - spinning away on their own - until finally, they all start to merge. I'm not writing about the book brilliantly - but it is a brilliant book. One of the true greats.

Normally I try to find an excerpt that might be a little unexpected - I usually stay away from "openings" of books - and I certainly stay away from the endings!! In this case, I can't help myself - I'm posting the most famous passage from the book.

I read the book at a time of huge upheaval. I was heartbroken because of a man. I was falling in love with another man. But ... but ... I was young enough to be dismayed that the love for the NEW man didn't feel the same as the love for the other man! I wanted it to feel the same as that OTHER love. There was such a sadness in me then, such a loss - and Michael - who was not a day over 20 years old - tried to deal as best he could. And along comes Howards End, which I was reading at the time for the first time. (I had seen the movie, but that doesn't count.) And along comes this passage. I had probably heard it before - because it's one of THOSE passages - like "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times ..." Whether or not you have read Tale of 2 Cities you probably have heard of that. But in the blazing fall that I read this book - the passage came across to me not just as beautiful writing, or good philosophy ... It came across as something I NEEDED. RIGHT THEN. It was a message I needed in that very moment. You know how books can sometimes do that? And it comes out of nowhere - but you realize: this is what I have been looking for, this is what I have been missing ....

So normally I stay away from the most-famous passages - just because it's funner to find alternatives, flipping through the books, etc. But in this case I'll make an exception. Because I read it and I see the fiery autumn leaves, and I see me and Michael lying in the park, reading our books, drinking coffee, and I remember my struggle, my internal struggle ... The book helped me FRAME my own life in that autumn. This love with Michael is, as great as it is, PROSE. The other one was POETRY. But still. This PROSE is pretty nice. Not everything has to be poetry. Accept the prose. Accept the prose. That experience with the other man does not have to "disconnect" you from love forever ... or from other men ... only connect, only connect ... Integrate it somehow ... integrate it ... live with it ... Prose has its place. Prose has its place - no less than poetry ...

Only connect. Only connect.

It was a deeply profound thing for me - in that moment ... so. Here's the passage. Interestingly enough, it is a description of Margaret's feelings about love.

If I could pick one passage that describes how I want to live my life - in every aspect - it would be the "only connect" passage below.

EXCERPT FROM Howards End - by E.M. Forster

Margaret greeted her lord with peculiar tenderness on the morrow. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the grey, sober against the fire. Happy the man who sees from either aspect the glory of these outspread wings. The roads of his soul lie clear, and he and his friends shall find easy going.

It was hard going in the road of Mr. Wilcox's soul. From boyhood he had neglected them. "I am not a fellow who bothers about my own inside." Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism. Whether as boy, husband, or widower, he had always the sneaking belief that bodily passion is bad, a belief that is desirable only when held passionately. Religion had confirmed him. The words that were read aloud on Sunday to him and to other respectable men were the words that had once kindled the souls of St. Catharine and St. Francis into a white-hot hatred of the carnal. He could not be as the saints and love the Infinite with a seraphic ardour, but he could be a little ashamed of loving a wife. "Amabat, amare timebat." And it was here that Margaret hoped to help him.

It did not seem so difficult. She need trouble him with no gift of her own. She would only point out the salvation that was latent in his own soul, and in the soul of every man. Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Nor was the message difficult to give. It need not take the form of a good "talking". By quiet indications the bridge would be built and span their lives with beauty.

But she failed. For there was one quality in Henry for which she was never prepared, however much she reminded herself of it: his obtuseness. He simply did not notice things, and there was no more to be said. He never noticed that Helen and Frieda were hostile, or that Tibby was not interested in currant plantations; he never noticed the lights and shades that exist in the greyest conversation, the finger-posts, the milestones, the collisions, the illimitable views. Once - on another occasion - she scolded him about it. He was puzzled, but replied with a laugh: "My motto is Concentrate. I've no intention of frittering away my strength on that sort of thing." "It isn't frittering away the strength," she protested. "It's enlarging the space in which you may be strong." He answered: "You're a clever little woman, but my motto's Concentrate." And this morning he concentrated with a vengeance.

Moonstruck

The moon is high and full and bright red tonight. Soaring ... just soaring over the glittering cityscape across the water ... She leaves a bright red moonpath in the Hudson ... bright red! I knew she would be there tonight when I came home from the city - last night had been a moonstruck night too, although there was a bit of a fuzzy edge to one side of her - so I knew she wasn't quite full. Tonight, as my ghetto bus emerged from the tunnel, and we swooped up on the highway made famous in the Sopranos opening credits - I peered out the window eagerly at the city - my city - across the way - looking for her. I knew she'd be there. The Hudson had a deep purplish tint to it, a startlingly weird color - very rare - and the buildings were alight - catching the dying glows of sunset. I love it when that happens: the Magic Hour of light. Gleaming shards of red glowed out of the walls of glass over there - but I was looking for something else. It's hot today, a muggy smudgy hot - so things don't have the clarity they normally do. The edges are blurred. It's hard to see things clearly on such nights. Dusk makes things fuzzy. It's not like a crisp wintry twilight, where the lights of the buildings frost up against the stark black of the sky, and you can see every corner clearly from a mile away. On a summery dusk, the river blends into the docks into the skyline into the sky, everything is charcoaled and smudged. So it took me a moment to find what I knew was there. A massive swollen glowing red moon, rising from up behind the new New York Times building - so huge that I could see the peaks on the moon mountains, and the shadows of the valleys. Oh my God, what a sight. She looked HUGE. The man I was sitting next to on the bus, a short squat man wearing a baseball cap who, I imagine, is fearful of immigration services tracking him down at every minute of his life (probably 99.9% of the passengers on my regular bus are in this category), noticed the moon at the same time and visibly started. He glanced at me and breathed, "Wow."

Wow, indeed.

I have spent the last 2 hours wandering up and down Boulevard East - right where Mr. Clooney and his ladyfriend had the crash (glad you're okay, bub! Let's remember - there's only one degree between you and me, George! It is just a matter of time before you're at a Thanksgiving dinner at some O'Malley home or other - so you should know I have your back - and I am glad you are okay! You crashed right near my house, bro - I probably heard it in my sleep it was that close!) Oh, where was I. The moon. I am moondrunk. I have been unable to come home until this moment. I watched her climb up through the sky - she lost the redness as she broke free of the city and the sunset - and now she beams with a brilliant light from high in the sky, unhinged, beyond reach. Her light will wake me up tonight, that's the brightness we're dealing with. I cannot get free of it - I walked up and down and up and down - for miles - staring up. I had some lemonade. I talked with the Trinidadian, briefly - he's leaving for Europe next week for a couple months. We looked at the moon together and talked about it, a couple of miles away from one another. We said stuff like, "Can you believe it??" Normally, you know ... I'm not into that kind of stuff. But with this moon?? Anything is possible. My feet ache from walking, I'm hungry and tired - but I couldn't go home before I got my fill! It was just a moonrise, no big deal, but I didn't want to miss a second of it.

"On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-Five Hardly a man is now alive Who remembers that famous day and year"

Are there more magical words in the world of literature than: "an earlier draft has been discovered"??

As in:

In Longfellow’s papers, Charlie found what appears to be the first complete draft of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

?????

My love of Longfellow's famous poem is all over my dern blog. I post the poem every 18th of April (uhm - almost every April. Right, Ken?) I can recite huge chunks of it. I have grown up with it. And now - God bless America - my nephew is growing up with it too. I read an edited version of this piece about Cashel on the radio a couple years ago. (Let's just load up this post with links, shall we?)

Anyway, let's get back to the exciting matter at hand:

In Longfellow’s papers, Charlie found what appears to be the first complete draft of “Paul Revere’s Ride.”

Yo!!! More information here - on what was going on in that first draft, and speculations on why Longfellow left it out. (Lots of great links to follow over there as well. Terrific site.) How I wish I had been to that lecture! Fascinating thoughts.

And just because it pleases me, here is the entirety of Longfellow's poem.

Best read it out loud. You can hear the clattering of horse hooves on cobblestones in the rhythm. Goosebumps!

Paul Revere's Ride
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
He said to his friend, "If the British march
By land or sea from the town to-night,
Hang a lantern aloft in the belfry arch
Of the North Church tower as a signal light,--
One if by land, and two if by sea;
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm,
For the country folk to be up and to arm."

Then he said "Good-night!" and with muffled oar
Silently rowed to the Charlestown shore,
Just as the moon rose over the bay,
Where swinging wide at her moorings lay
The Somerset, British man-of-war;
A phantom ship, with each mast and spar
Across the moon like a prison bar,
And a huge black hulk, that was magnified
By its own reflection in the tide.

Meanwhile, his friend through alley and street
Wanders and watches, with eager ears,
Till in the silence around him he hears
The muster of men at the barrack door,
The sound of arms, and the tramp of feet,
And the measured tread of the grenadiers,
Marching down to their boats on the shore.

Then he climbed the tower of the Old North Church,
By the wooden stairs, with stealthy tread,
To the belfry chamber overhead,
And startled the pigeons from their perch
On the sombre rafters, that round him made
Masses and moving shapes of shade,--
By the trembling ladder, steep and tall,
To the highest window in the wall,
Where he paused to listen and look down
A moment on the roofs of the town
And the moonlight flowing over all.

Beneath, in the churchyard, lay the dead,
In their night encampment on the hill,
Wrapped in silence so deep and still
That he could hear, like a sentinel's tread,
The watchful night-wind, as it went
Creeping along from tent to tent,
And seeming to whisper, "All is well!"
A moment only he feels the spell
Of the place and the hour, and the secret dread
Of the lonely belfry and the dead;
For suddenly all his thoughts are bent
On a shadowy something far away,
Where the river widens to meet the bay,--
A line of black that bends and floats
On the rising tide like a bridge of boats.

Meanwhile, impatient to mount and ride,
Booted and spurred, with a heavy stride
On the opposite shore walked Paul Revere.
Now he patted his horse's side,
Now he gazed at the landscape far and near,
Then, impetuous, stamped the earth,
And turned and tightened his saddle girth;
But mostly he watched with eager search
The belfry tower of the Old North Church,
As it rose above the graves on the hill,
Lonely and spectral and sombre and still.
And lo! as he looks, on the belfry's height
A glimmer, and then a gleam of light!
He springs to the saddle, the bridle he turns,
But lingers and gazes, till full on his sight
A second lamp in the belfry burns.

A hurry of hoofs in a village street,
A shape in the moonlight, a bulk in the dark,
And beneath, from the pebbles, in passing, a spark
Struck out by a steed flying fearless and fleet;
That was all! And yet, through the gloom and the light,
The fate of a nation was riding that night;
And the spark struck out by that steed, in his flight,
Kindled the land into flame with its heat.
He has left the village and mounted the steep,
And beneath him, tranquil and broad and deep,
Is the Mystic, meeting the ocean tides;
And under the alders that skirt its edge,
Now soft on the sand, now loud on the ledge,
Is heard the tramp of his steed as he rides.

It was twelve by the village clock
When he crossed the bridge into Medford town.
He heard the crowing of the cock,
And the barking of the farmer's dog,
And felt the damp of the river fog,
That rises after the sun goes down.

It was one by the village clock,
When he galloped into Lexington.
He saw the gilded weathercock
Swim in the moonlight as he passed,
And the meeting-house windows, black and bare,
Gaze at him with a spectral glare,
As if they already stood aghast
At the bloody work they would look upon.

It was two by the village clock,
When he came to the bridge in Concord town.
He heard the bleating of the flock,
And the twitter of birds among the trees,
And felt the breath of the morning breeze
Blowing over the meadow brown.
And one was safe and asleep in his bed
Who at the bridge would be first to fall,
Who that day would be lying dead,
Pierced by a British musket ball.

You know the rest. In the books you have read
How the British Regulars fired and fled,---
How the farmers gave them ball for ball,
>From behind each fence and farmyard wall,
Chasing the redcoats down the lane,
Then crossing the fields to emerge again
Under the trees at the turn of the road,
And only pausing to fire and load.

So through the night rode Paul Revere;
And so through the night went his cry of alarm
To every Middlesex village and farm,---
A cry of defiance, and not of fear,
A voice in the darkness, a knock at the door,
And a word that shall echo for evermore!
For, borne on the night-wind of the Past,
Through all our history, to the last,
In the hour of darkness and peril and need,
The people will waken and listen to hear
The hurrying hoof-beats of that steed,
And the midnight message of Paul Revere.

The Books: "A Room with a View" (E.M. Forster)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

A Room with a View - by E.M. Forster

I saw the movie before I read the book - this is the case with all of Forster, actually. I came to Forster late - I read Howards End in the fall of 1994 - why I remember such things, I'll never know - but I was reading it when I was in Ithaca, doing a show, recovering from a horrible love-loss, and finding myself falling in love with Michael. And all we did together (besides ... you know ...) was sit around and read. He was reading the 5,000 page Brando biography and I was reading Howards End. I've re-read Howards End since and it's weird - because of the vividness of the time when I first read it, I still, when I pick it up, feel that blazing autumn of 1994 hovering around its pages. The atmosphere of the world I was living in when I read it - has somehow seeped into the pages. I LOVED that book - it's my favorite Forster - but I pick up Room with a view right now - and naturally I had to check the front page to see when I bought it (I do my little month/year thing on every book I buy). And there it is: Oct. 94. So I bought it while still in Ithaca - still enraptured by Howards End - and knowing I wanted to stay on the Forster kick a bit longer. That's why I write that little month/date ... it can trigger memories that I really want to hold onto.

I re-read Room with a View last year, I think - and had just as good a time wiht it as I did the first time. Howards End is his masterpiece, I think - it's almost like he somehow gets the entire history of England and humanity into one book - NO IDEA how he does it ... Room with a View is a bit more light, although it touches on many of the same issues.

Lucy Honeychurch is traveling with a babbling entourage through Italy. Much of Forster's work has to do with watching how English people deal with "the other". Meaning: anyone who is not English. The fad at the time was to take sweeping trips across Europe - with an entire staff to carry your 25 satchels behind you ... and yes, the point was to 'see' Italy - but Forster also shows how some people need to bring their home country with them wherever they go - they don't REALLY want an exotic experience, they don't REALLY want to be confronted with any scary "other". They want to say they've traveled, it's just what you do ... but they expect England to follow THEM. This makes for MUCH high comedy. Room with a view is a VERY funny book - all of those English people sitting around in the drawing room of the pension, being all British, and moaning about not "having a view" ... meanwhile: RIGHT OUTSIDE is Italy proper! Go out and see it!

Lucy - a lovely character - actually DOES want to have adventures, wants to see the "real" Italy. But she is a young lady, traveling with chaperones - and it's very hard to get any alone time whatsoever.

Her first moment of alone time (in excerpt below) ends in tragedy, fear, a dead faint, and a fateful encounter with George Emerson, another young British man in Italy. In his own way, EM Forster is quite quite radical. Lucy does not have "any system of revolt". A critique of an entire culture is in that line. And notice how often SPACE is mentioned here - the distances, George seeing her "across something" ... the "receding heavens", the "vast panoramas", etc. Lucy feels cramped - not just by her room without a view, but by her whole life. The way it's set up, the rules for women, etc. But the book is full of images of space, and air, and light ... It's like we are inside Lucy's head, in her spinning of airy castles, her yearning for unlimited space and freedom. It is not an accident that she first sees George "across something" ... it's like HE is her view. She doesn't know it yet - but it's all there in the language. It's so romantic!

It's a lovely read. Deep, funny, thoughtful, beautiful prose, great characters.

EXCERPT FROM A Room with a View - by E.M. Forster

Mr. Beebe was right. Lucy never knew her desires so clearly as after music. She had not really appreciated the clergyman's wit, nor the suggestive twitterings of Miss Alan. Conversation was tedious; she wanted something big, and she believed that it would have come to her on the wind-swept platform of an electric train.

This she might not attempt. It was unladylike. Why? Why were most big things unladylike? Charlotte had once explained to her why. It was not that ladies were inferior to men; it was that they were different. Their mission was to inspire others to achievement rather than to achieve themselves. Indirectly, by means of tact and a spotless name, a lady could accomplish much. But if she rushed into the fray herself she would be first censured, then despised, and finally ignored. Poems had been written to illustrate this point.

There is much that is immortal in this medieval lady. The dragons have gone, and so have the knights, but still she lingers in our midst. She reigned in many an early Victorian castle, and was Queen of so much early Victorian song. It is sweet to protect her in the intervals of business, sweet to pay her honour when she has cooked our dinner well. But alas! the creature grows degenerate. In her heart also there are springing up strange desires. She too is enamoured of heavy winds, and vast panoramas, and green expanses of the sea. She has marked the kingdom of this world, how full it is of wealth, and beauty, and war - a radiant crust, built around the central fires, spinning towards the receding heavens. Men, declaring that she inspires them to it, move joyfully over the surface, having the most delightful meetings wiht other men, happy, not because they are masculine, but because they are alive. Before the show breaks up she would like to drop the august title of the Eternal Woman, and go there as her transitory self.

Lucy does not stand for the medieval lady, who was rather an ideal to which she was bidden to lift her eyes when feeling serious. Nor has she any system of revolt. Here and there a restriction annoyed her particularly, and she would trangress it, and perhaps be sorry that she had done so. This afternoon she was peculiarly restive. She would really like to do something of which her well-wishers disapproved. As she might not go on the electric tram, she went to Alinari's shop.

There she bought a photograph of Botticelli's "Birth of Venus". Venus, being a pity, spoilt the picture, otherwise so charming, and Miss Bartlett persuaded her to do without it. (A pity in art of course signified the nude.) Giorgione's "Tempesta," the "Idolino," some of the Sistine frescoes and the Apoxyomenos, were added to it. She felt a little calmer then, and bought Fra Angelico's "Coronation," Giotto's "Ascension of St. John," some Della Robba babies, and some Guido Reni Madonnas. For her taste was catholic, and she extended uncritical approval to every well-known name.

But thought she spent nearly seven lire, the gates of liberty seemed still unopened. She was conscious of her discontent; it was new to her to be conscious of it. "The world," she thought, "is certainly full of beautiful things, if only I could come across them." It was not surprising that Mrs. Honeychurch disapproved of music, declaring that it always left her daughter peevish, unpractical, and touchy.

"Nothing ever happens to me," she reflected, as she entered the Piazza Signoria and looked nonchalantly at its marvels, now fairly familiar to her. The great square was in shadow; the sunshine had come too late to strike it. Neptune was already unsubstantial in the twilight, half god, half ghost, and his fountains plashed dreamily to the men and satyrs who idled together on its marge. The Loggie showed as the triple entrance of a cave, wherein dwelt many a deity, shadowy, but immortal, looking forth upon the arrivals and departures of mankind. It was the hour of unreality - the hour, that is, when unfamiliar things are real. An older person at such an hour and in such a place might think that sufficient was happening to him, and rest content. Lucy desired more.

She fixed her eyes wistfully on the tower of the palace, which rose out of the lower darkness like a pillar of roughened gold. It seemed no loger a tower, no longer supported by earth, but some unattainable treasure throbbing in the tranquil sky. Its brightness mesmerized her, still dancing before her eyes when she bent them to the ground and started towards home.

Then something did happen.

Two Italians by the Loggia had been bickering about a debt. "Cinque lire," they had cried, "cinque lire!" They sparred at each other, and one of them was hit lightly upon the chest. He frowned; he bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin.

That was all. A crowd rose out of the dusk. It hid the extraordinary man from her, and bore him away to the fountain. Mr. George Emerson happened to be a few paces away, looking at her across the spot where the man had been. How very odd! Across something. Even as she caught sight of him he grew dim; the palace itself grew dim, swayed above her, fell on to her softly, slowly, noiselessly, and the sky fell with it.

She thought: "Oh, what have I done?"

"Oh what have I done?" she murmured, and opene dher eyes.

George Emerson still looked at her, but not across anything. She had complained of dullness, and lo! one man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms.

They were sitting on some steps in the Uffizi Arcade. He must have carried her. He rose when she spoke, and began to dust his knees. She repeated:

"Oh, what have I done?"

"You fainted."

"I - I am very sorry."

"How are you now?"

"Perfectly well - absolutely well." And she began to nod and smile.

"Then let us come home. There's no point in our stopping."

He held out his hand to pull her up. She pretended not to see it. the cries from the fountain - they had never ceased - rang emptily. The whole world seemed pale and void of its original meaning.

Quantum Leap: Season 1, Ep. 2: "Star-Crossed"

LEAP INTO: June 15 - 17, 1972 - Part 2 of re-cap!

Part 1

EPISODE 2: STAR-CROSSED

The next time we see Sam, he is fully ensconced in Dr. Bryant's digs - even down to wearing a silk kimono and a white scarf. He appears to be reading a book of poetry ... and what's on the television gives us a clue as to where and when we are. Sam comments in the voiceover that he used to care about politics ... but right now, all he can do is think about Donna. And what might have been. And what might still be to come. Sadly, he's going to have to wait a bit longer because Jamie Lee shows up at his window, dressed up as Guenivere, spouting romantic nonsense. At the same moment, Al appears. As Sam tries to diffuse Guenivere's passion, Al snarks off to the side, "You brought this one on yourself, Sam" - because instead of rejecting her firmly in the earlier scene he had said something along the lines of, "I'll see you again when the moon crests the towers of Camelot." hahahahahaha So here she is and it's payback time. She is all a flutter, twirling through the room in her dress and her crown. Al just stands back and watches. You can hear his inward chuckle. Like: would you get a load of this crazy broad? Jamie Lee wants to "play" Guenivere and Lancelot - and whaddya know - Dr. Bryant has an entire closet full of costumes just for the occasion. Jamie Lee brings out some chain mail - and Al is intrigued by what he can't see in the closet - so he strolls in. Through the rest of the exchange between an increasingly nervous Sam and an increasingly worked up Jamie Lee - we can hear Dean Stockwell's amazed voice emanating from out of the closet. "Sam! You gotta see this! There's some really kinky stuff in here! He's got rubber stuff in here!"

Sam tries to veer Jamie Lee off the track, tries to get her to think about Oscar, her boyfriend. Jamie Lee is SO not into Oscar, the meathead. He has no poetry in his soul!!! My favorite moment in this little scene is Stockwell's. He emerges from the kinky closet and stands between Sam and Jamie Lee. He has no lines, but he is completely involved - going back and forth between them like a tennis match. He takes a very cynical view of the whole thing. Jamie Lee is nuts, the professor is a letch ... isn't this all so entertaining?? Nothing is too serious. He's not like, earnest, or pleading with Sam to do better. He's an audience member. And Jamie Lee has one line in response to Sam's - Sam says, "But what about Oscar?" Jamie Lee moans, scornfully, "But he's so stiff!" And you can see Al's face light up hopefully in the background - like: stiff? Well, THAT'S promising! A completely dirty rendering of her innocent line - and Sam, without even looking at Al, holds up a finger at him, in reproach, like: do not even go there. Beautiful moment of their dynamic - very funny, they already, at this early stage in the series, have found a groove with one another. You can tell. Bellisario has said you could see, over the first season, how their friendship actually formed and developed (they are good friends to this day) ... and it's moments like that where it really becomes concrete.

Sam finally (again) gets rid of Jamie Lee and he and Al then get to it. Sam thinks he knows a solution to his problem. Donna has father problems. If they can orchestrate a reunion with her father ... then maybe he can change history? Al: No, Sam, NO. Sam lets loose with a little bit of information (enough for Al to run with) - that her father was career military - No, Sam, no!

But obviously, judging from what happens next - Al goes back to the present day and secretly pulls up information on Donna's father to somehow convey back to Sam, against the advice of everyone. He could lose his job. But Al, crusty tough Al, understands - to some degree - matters of the heart. This is the true key to the character. This is why the show works, if I may be so bold. If Al showed up in every situation, and snarked about it ... we would lose sympathy with him. But that he can show up, randomly, and find compassion for a rape victim, or a floundering trapeze artist, or a blundering TV reporter ... he writes NOBODY off. Nobody is "lost". Let's get in here and do what we can do to make their lives better. Everybody is worth saving. It's a truly beautiful aspect of Al Calavicci - the show would not have worked without it. He never becomes a sappy guardian angel - he always maintains a level of snarky distance from the event - it's a fine tightrope wire to walk and Dean Stockwell does so brilliantly. It was the role he was born to play. He gets to exhibit ALL of the qualities that those of us who are fans value most in him. He is tough. Check. He is no-nonsense. Check. But he's also the guy you want to have around in a pinch. Check. He has sympathy (as opposed to contempt) for the "weaker" sex. He thinks they should be protected. But he doesn't think women are weak. To the contrary. He just understands the REALITIES. He has shown aspects of this in part after part after part. Here - he gets to put it all together.

Next scene we see Sam walking into the Science Building. So obviously Dr. Bryant, despite the Einstein poster, is moving out of his comfort zone, to confront Donna, try to forge a connection. I was so amused by Sam's friggin outfit in this scene. He is wearing a long grey-green blazer - with a matching belt around it, and of course there is the ubiquitous polyester shirt with Peter Pan collar. It's so endearing to see Sam - virile manly Sam - take on all of these different aspects. Like: Okay. I am this guy. It is 1972. I hate the fashions in 1972. Yet I will succumb for the purposes of the quantum leap! He finds Donna - who is, naturally, alone in a dusty classroom, working out physics problems on the blackboard. Of course. The romance of physics, or, as Sam says later, "the poetry of physics." Geeky. Yes. Corny? Unbelievably so. But consider me hooked. Let's remember that poor Donna thinks that he is the lecherous literature professor - she is rightly baffled when he walks into the classroom, corrects her math on the board, and starts talking to her about how she didn't factor in the expanding universe into her arithemetic. Regardless of how unrealistic this is ... it works. She does say to him, "Why do you know so much about this?" And he blunders some answer ... that she buys ... because perhaps maybe in life it is easier to just believe than not believe. Donna doesn't ever FULLY believe - she always maintains a healthy level of skepticism towards Dr. Bryant, she knows who he is, and what he is capable of ... but in this scene, he talks to her about science, and about books she needs to read, and about physics, in a way that hooks her in. Against her will. Terri Hatcher plays this quite nicely ... how she is getting sucked into this against her will. I KNOW that this guy is a jerk and a letch ... yet ... the way he speaks ... I can't help but listen! How many of us have had that experience? Heart leading over head, etc.

And I just have to say one thing about Scott Bakula - who has the straight man's role throughout - the success of the show rides on his shoulders - yet so often he doesnt' get the flashy part - he is the HEART of the show ... and in this scene with Donna, the love of his life, who doesn't even know him yet - he has a moment where he smiles at her - with the full force of that nice Scott Bakula smile - she's getting something that he's talking to her about - a difficult concept ... they're connecting on that deep and intellectual level that would obviously be important to someone like Sam - and Bakula smiles at Donna. A lot of this is just in the ACCIDENT of what he looks like - just a nice rugged handsome face - with piercing green eyes - but just look at his smile here. And tell me you don't get why he became a star.

It's not smouldering, or burning with sensuality and double meaning ... it's just a nice and open smile - filled with his SELF ... and the actor that can actually do that - into the camera - and have us believe it - will never collect an unemployment check. And Bakula never has. Look at that! It's deceptively simple, people. He makes it look easy. It probably, on some level, IS easy. For him. That's called talent.

The lovely encounter with Donna goes horribly wrong. He lets slip that he knows her father left her - and she is devastated. Beautiful work from her. "How did you know that? I have never told anyone that!" She feels betrayed. Sam chases after her and makes it right ... "I have a theory about the universe ... " which he shares with her. She says, disbelieving, 'The universe is infinite." He says, again, with that nice nice smile on his face, "Maybe not ..." He suggests going to the library - a "nice public place" where they can discuss - and she, against her will, perhaps, again, concedes. Then we get a nostalgic montage of Sam and Donna, throughout campus, discussing the universe and its possibilities - just like they would discuss it 10 years in the future. I could have done without the sappy romantic music during this montage, but that's just my bias - which is inherently unromantic. I love LOVE, don't get me wrong - but I have a lot of sympathy with Oscar, the meathead ... who thinks such conversations are "mush".

The next scene is perhaps my favorite scene in the entire series. Period. Donna and Sam, post-montage, sit in The Rathskeller, talking - and it is clear from her first line ("So he can only leap within his own lifetime??") that Sam has probably revealed way more than he should about the Quantum Leap project. She goes off to start her shift - and suddenly Al appears - in one of his most bizarre outfits ever. What I love about this scene is Al's palpably guilty demeanor and Stockwell's freedom in playing it. Al is not alone in the "imaging chamber" - he is being "observed" to make sure he doesn't pass on personal informaiton to Sam - and Stockwell plays this double-ness to the hilt. He is the personification of 1. guilt. and 2. trying to get away with something. He's not even trying to hide it! He's signalling to Sam with his eyes the whole time, like: "duuuuude, I'm not alone on my end ... WORK. HARDER." And it's delightful! And so stupid! It reminds me of what I find most beautiful about actors, and why I am so glad that the majority of my friends are actors and artists: they do not care about being stupid or obvious. Much of life already is a caricature ... but it takes a gifted actor to portray it. Dean Stockwell, in this scene, is over the top guilty - his eyes flit about from side to side, he is trying to convey meaning without language - he is in the most desperate charades game of his life. (Regular non-actor people play desperate charades games - naturally - but could a regular non-actor person embody what that was like ,in take after take after take? Nope. They could not. That takes skill and imagination and freedom in front of the camera.) It's just so fun to watch Stockwell turn himself inside out in this scene with no language. My favorite scene in the whole series. He shows up - and he is obviously not alone, although it takes Sam a while to figure out why he is acting so WEIRD. He is wearing a sash with hieroglyphics on it because he hopes Sam, with his doctorate in ancient languages (that Sam doesn't even know he has), can decipher it and figure out Donna's father's whereabouts. Al has turned himself inside out for this one. But he is TOTALLY in trouble - even with Ziggy - because Ziggy believes, the computer believes, that Al will try to talk to Sam in code - ha ha yuk yuk - code ... can you believe it? (meanwhile Al is gesturing frantically at some random glyph on the scarf). It's a brilliant scene. I love it.

In the shot above, he's trying to get Sam to say "the Pentagon" - using only hand gestures. Like, Al - did you think you would get away with this?? The scene ends with Al suddenly being jerked away by unseen forces and dragged to the back of the room. Obviously the jig is up. Weitzman is onto him - and so is Ziggy - so they take control. As he is dragged to the back of the Rathskeller, screaming in protest, he manages to get out the following words, "I WASN'T speaking in code!! How could I say Colonel Wojohowitz in hieroglhypics???" before he is zipped back into the present day. Ah, Al. We love you SO much. You put your job at risk in order to help Sam maybe - maybe - get a shot at his lost love. It only becomes clear much later in the series how much you understand about lost love ... we know nothing about you at this point - nothing about your love life - we know you;'ve been married multiple times, but that's it ... but the fact that he is willing to lose his job in order to give his friend another chance ... it speaks worlds, doesn't it? We don't even NEED to know his plot-line to know that he "gets" it. Even with his crusty lascivious exterior ... we know he gets it. After Al is yanked back into the future - Donna and Sam have a brief encounter where he basically takes the leap of faith. He asks her to drive to DC with him (he has figured out that "colonel wojohowitz" is in DC due to Al's convoluted clues on his damn sash!!) - He asks her to come "to save a lost love". He doesn't explain any further - but he says he will take a chaperone - Oscar and Jamie Lee. Hmmmmm. Donna - a bit tentative - agrees. Maybe there's something in her that responds to this romantic side of him (as long as it's not directed at her). Later, in the car, when she repeatedly mentions how "romantic" he is ... she says it in a tone of awe, like: "You can't really MEAN this, can you??" Sam Beckett, is, as we know, a very romantic man. The antithesis (or so we think) of Al. He's probably only slept with a handful of women, maybe less - because his rules about love and sex having to go hand in hand are so strong. Donna- battered by childhood memories, terrified of being hurt - responds to this. But not in an immediate "ohhhh I love you" way. Terri Hatcher plays it more like a a doe - tiptoeing out of the forest - to see if the coast is clear. It's very effective. Of COURSE Sam would love a woman like that. She takes the leap, too. Yes, she will come to DC - even though she doesn't know why.

Sam, now armed with the NAME of Donna's father, locates him at his apartment in DC. He calls. There is a very poignant brief conversation - between Sam (playing the literature professor) and Michael Gregory - a wonderful actor who plays Donna's long-estragned father. Colonel Wojohowitz is seen, in an apartment, in his uniform, packing a suitcase when the phone rings. He picks up. Sam bumbles a bit ... and Wojohowitz, impatient, asks him to get to the point because he's "shipping out to Vietnam at 0800." Sam gets to the point. "It's about your daughter Donna." Why I say Michael Gregory is a wonderful actor is because of what happens to him inside, in the following moment. We first see him - and he is a cold hard shell - packing a suitcase neatly - a man on a mission. He is polite to the stranger on the phone, but vaguely impatient because he has other things to do, important things, like fight a war. But at the mention of "Donna" ... just watch his response. That's all I'm saying. It won't change lives, and it won't win him an Emmy - this is just plain old good meat and potatoes acting. Play the scene. Do what the character would do. And do it fully. Dont' hold back. Acting is never about histrionics - unless it is called for. Good acting is all about character and context. Colonel Wojohowitz is a stern man, a man of action - a man who has, perhaps, stuffed down the regret he feels about abandoning his family - in order to live his life competently. He has "forgotten". But then - in a flash - WHOOSH - here is his past, come to claim him again. And Michael Gregory, the actor, stands up - at the sound of Donna's name. It's that simple. He stands up. "Donna? Is she hurt?" It's a quietly moving moment - again, not one that will win any awards - but through such moments are a great series made. So I'm givin' the props. Because they are due! Sadly, Colonel Wojohowitz is not open to "opening that wound" again - and he hangs up on Sam, the issue unresolved.

But Sam decides to go for it anyway. He asks the meathead Oscar if he has a car ... and if he and Jamie Lee want to take a little road trip to DC. And so the four of them start off, from the college in Ohio (I think) to DC. Nobody, except Sam, knows why they are going. But larger forces are apparently at work. Donna definitely feels it. She sits in the front and keeps stealing glances at Dr. Bryant, wondering, wondering ... why would he so put himself out there to make sure that Oscar and Jamie Lee get together?? Why would he so commit himself to wronging a right? To saving a lost love? Is this guy for real?

One word, yet again, on art direction. To anyone who grew up in the 70s, please look at that shot, and tell me you do not see your whole life. This is every gas station I ever went to, throughout that entire decade. My entire CHILDHOOD is in that shot. Perfect. I can't even count the details that are right. All I can say is: nothing clanks with a wrong note, nothing calls attention to itself as kitschy or wrong; It's is 1972, it's a gas station - and that's final! Sam gets out to go to the loo - and runs into (walks through) Al on his way there. He is overjoyed - the last time he saw Al, Al was being bodily removed from the imaging chamber! Now, I realize that much of the nuance will be lost in the following snippet of dialogue - you have to SEE it to get how funny and witty and well-played it is ... but it's an example of why I love this show, why I love these characters. It's so RIDICULOUS - there's a ba-dum-ching humor to the show, a neverending joke in the fact that Al is consumed by his own personal life - to the detriment of the project ... and Sam, dealing with a freakin' quantum leap, has to patiently (or not) wait out Al's lecherous stories. Here's the dialogue:

Sam: Al, thank God you're here! I thought I'd never see you again. I figured they pulled you off the project.
Al: They did. They fed the hieroglyphics into Ziggy and then they fired me.
Sam: They can't do that!
Al: Tell that to Weitzman. But that's not important. What's important is - he's had a change of heart.
Sam: I didn't think he had a heart.
Al: He probably doesn't. But his wife does.
Sam: You slept with his wife???
Al: I would never do anything so unscrupulous as that! Unless it was Bartlett's wife. Now there is a woman to get fired over. Ran into her one time at the fights. Bartlett was at some seminar in Utah or something. And it was her birthday - and do you know that the fool forgot?
Sam: What happened?
Al: Well, we had a couple of drinks, a nice rare steak with green chile --
Sam: [impatient] With Weitzman!!!
Al: Oh! Weitzman! You know Tina?
Sam: Yeah.
Al: [lecherous grin] Weitzman knows her too.
Sam: You set Tina up with Weitzman and then blackmailed him?
Al: ...... Yes.
Sam: That's --
Al: Unscrupulous! But ... effective!

This dialogue is so much fun. I never get sick of it. This is the scene where Al says the chances are 4 to 1 - if Sam reunites Donna with her dad - that she will be able to love again ... BUT! She might love "the jerk she met before you!" Again, Sam is willing to take that chance. Al, having made everything right back in the present-day, by having his girlfriend sleep with his boss for blackmail purposes - I mean, Al - what??? - is willing to go along with this leap now. He's okay. He will play along. Let's get Donna to her father before he ships out.

The team runs into a snag, though, once they reach the apartment complex of Colonel Wojohowitz. There are two stuffy security guards who will not let Sam and Donna pass - even though she says she is the Colonel's daughter. The Colonel has a "do not disturb" message on his phone - and her last name does not match the Colonel's - so no. We can't let you through. Defeat. But Sam - man tenacious enough to get 6 doctorates - will not give up so easily. He and Donna go off around the building in search of an open door. Which, naturally, they find. Abracadabra. Throughout this sneaky espionage section, we keep cutting back to the guards - who have noticed something odd about one of the cars in the visitors lot - and one goes to investigate. It's Oscar's car, obviously - with Oscar and Jamie Lee curled up in the back, getting to know each other. Here is where we come close to the "kiss with history" - because, obviously, it is June 17, 1972 - and Colonel Wojohowitz lives in the Watergate, and we all know what happened in the Watergate on June 17, 1972. So here are Sam and Donna "finding" an open door ... or did they inadvertently open a door, leaving access easier for the Watergate burglars? I don't know - it's "clever" - but for me, it isn't necessry for the OOMPH of the episode, which is there already in the upcoming reunion of Donna and her father.

Next scene: the big finale. Colonel Wojohowitz sits in his room - when a knock comes on the door. There's a flash on his face as he stands up ... like he knows. Who would be coming to his door at this hour of the night? Could it have something to do with that weird phone call he got earlier? He just KNOWS who it is. Lovely moment. And whatever, I've watched this scene now probably 3 or 4 times since buying the series again ... and it always makes me choke up. I'm not necessarily a sappy person - but when something works, on a simple heart-level - I'm all there. And this scene does. His stern staunch demeanor at the door - his frozen soldierly posture as he stares at the beautiful young woman - who is the daughter he left 10 years before. Her fear at the sight of him - huge gleaming tears trembling but not falling - she starts to leave, terrified, "This was a mistake" - and he, manly, steps up to the plate. This is how a man should act. Like Sam said to him on the phone, "I don't know why you left your family - I'm sure you had your reasons - but Donna needs you now - she doesn't think you love her." So the man does not make excuses. He steps forward into the hall and says, "No. The mistake was waiting for 10 years." He owns it. It was not HER issue, it was HIS. No excuses. End of story. And she - staring at him - realizes ... he loves her. He loves her. He has always loved her. Terri Hatcher just crumbles - crumbles into a little ball - and rushes into his arms - it's beautiful, folks, just beautiful!! We hear his voice say, "I'm so sorry, Donna ... I love you ..." and at those words, she winces - it's almost like her joy is too searing and hot to bear - and she actually whimpers. I can't describe it any better than that - her joy is so much that she MOANS in response ... Now look, this is manipulative television at its best. I realize that. But "manipulation" to me is not a bad thing IF IT WORKS. Don't you dare try to manipulate me and FAIL because then it just looks like you think I'm stupid!! But if you manipulate me and it works - like when Terri Hatcher literally WHIMPERS in her father's arms because she is so freakin' happy - then I am DAMN okay with that. I cry, More more more.

Sam stands off to the side, watching this - and there's a sadness in him. Because he knows that by helping to heal this wound - he may, eventually, lose Donna forever. But again - like the great character that he is - he's willing to take that risk. Because having Donna be healthy and happy is more important, ultimately, than her being with Sam. Now these are difficult truths and it's hard to talk about them without sounding cliche. But seriously, it comes down to: what is important in life? What is RIGHT? We cannot predict the outcome. We cannot ASSURE the ending. But we can do our damndest that things come out right for those that we love. And that's all we can do.

Donna, after hugging her father, comes over to Sam - and she doesnt' know what to say - her heart is full - what he has given her has worth beyond measure! Sam has a quiet kind energy in this scene, doesn't push his luck, doesn't get romantic ... just lets her know that maybe one day ... she will be old enough. For them to be together. She looks up at him wonderingly - again, like a naive doe coming out of the forest.

Sam and Al meet up in the stairwell. Sam is ecstatic. He did it! Maybe now Donna will be ready for him in 10 years! Al, though, is now chagrined - because he has realized that they have "broken into" the Watergate on the very night of the ACTUAL "breakin" to the Watergate. (Still: who cares? Do they thwart the breakin? No. Do they CHANGE history? No. Okay, I'll let it go.) Sam couldn't care less about the Watergate - not only that: he doesn't remember anything - nothing, impeachment, Nixon, nothing. "Watergate? So??"

And it is here - in the stairwell - having righted the wrong between Donna and her father - AND having put Jamie Lee and Oscar together (who are now happily humping in the car in the visitors parking lot) ... Sam leaps ...

and finds himself in a boxing ring surrounded by screaming fans, he is facing another boxer, - who punches him in the nose - and dooooowwwwwn he goes.

Oh boy!

Quantum Leap recaps
Overview
Season 1, Ep. 1: Genesis - part 1 of re-cap
Season 1, Ep. 1: Genesis - part 2 of re-cap
Season 1, Ep. 1: Genesis - part 3 of re-cap
Season 1, Ep. 2: Star-Crossed - part 1 of re-cap
Season 1, Ep. 2: Star-Crossed - part 2 of re-cap

Tommy's posts:
Quantum Leap: an overview
Episode 1: Genesis
Episode 2: Star-crossed

Announcing: Luis Buñuel Blogathon

I can barely keep up with my own writing schedule so I've chosen not to participate in some of the great blogathons always going on - the slapstick one, the William Wyler one - I'm sure there are others I have missed, too! - but still: I've gotta point you over to Flickhead- who is hosting the Buñuel-a-thon. Haven't scratched the surface of the posts he has linked to - but hopefully I will be able to catch up this weekend. Here is Flickhead's post Two by Buñuel - and here's a cool compilation of Buñuel movie posters.

List of Blog-a-thon posts here.

Glamour!!

An overwhelming gallery of photos! I am quite taken with the face of Flobelle Fairbanks. I kinda want her outfit too.

The Books: "The Great Gatsby" (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

The Great Gatsby - by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Strangely enough, I did note in my head that yesterday was F. Scott Fitzgerald's birthday - I was just too busy to re-post my birthday tribute to him. Too busy, too, to finish my Quantum Leap post - but that'll come!! I know now to not promise a timeline for these things. Ack!!

This post here chroicles my journey with The Great Gatsby, starting with when I first read it in 10th grade English - which is probably, when all is said and done, the greatest class I have ever taken. With a truly great teacher: Mr. Crothers (known, lovingly, by his students as "Crud" or "The Crud". We called him that TO HIS FACE. "Crud - will there be a quiz on Friday?" I mean - what?? "The Crud says there's gonna be a big paper at the end of the quarter .." we'd mutter to each other. How did we get away with it? We meant it KINDLY, too. We loved him. He was a great great teacher. The best thing about that post above I linked to is if you scroll through the comments ... look who shows up at the very bottom. !!!! My blog is a wonderful thing. People FIND themselves when they Google their own name ... it has happened more times than I can count!)

Anyway, that post about "Revisiting Gatsby" has a lot of the pertinent memories of that class - and how I still remember some of The Crud's lectures, on Gatsby certainly, but on other books - almost word for word. When I came to re-read Gatsby decades later ... I STILL remembered some of his points and observations. Like: the names of the people at Gatsby's party. We spent a whole class analysing all of Fitzgerald's in-jokes, embodied in those names. The Crud was a great teacher. We were 15 year old students ... but he introduced us to literature. I didn't like all of it (cough Billy Budd cough) ... but he gave me SO much in that class. He taught me how to write, too. I mean, I could always write - but he taught me how to write a paper. I can never thank him enough.

When I came back to Gatsby, I was surprised at what a slim little volume it was. It had seemed so HUGE in high school. But I read it in 3 days this last time.

As far as I'm concerned - the opening and closing paragraphs are pretty much as good as American literature gets. It is amazing to think of how young he was when he wrote such lines. The comparison with Michael Chabon is quite a propos, I think ... an old soul, a keen mind, in a young man's body.

Here's a lyrical excerpt from the book - the book has a kind of magical space in my mind, and I'm not sure why. I haven't analyzed it. I know it has its detractors, and I respect their position. But from my experience - you can't explain why something is magic to you. It just is. To me, the book doesn't have a flaw. And it works on me on multiple levels - there's the story level - where you just get into the plot and the characters. And Gatsby is such a character. He could not exist in any other country. He is American. The American tragedy. How did Fitzgerald see it? But the book also works on an intense subconscious level - I would almost use the word "keening" - a word I don't really understand - at least not deeply - The word "keen" in that sense comes from the old Irish - caínim - "lament" - or "I lament" -so when one "keens" with grief, or despair ... it is like a swoon. It is not abrupt or jagged ... it is a dive, a long slow dive. That's how the book works on me.

Here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Great Gatsby - by F. Scott Fitzgerald

There was music from my neighbor's house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars. At high tide in the afternoon I watched his guests diving from the tower of his raft, or taking the sun on the hot sand of his beach while his two motor-boats slit the waters of the Sound, drawing aquaplanes over cataracts of foam. On week-ends his Rolls-Royce became an omnibus, bearing parties to and from the city between nine in the morning and long past midnight, while his station wagon scampered like a brisk yellow bug to meet all trains. And on Mondays eight servants, including an extra gardener, toiled all day with mops and scrubbing-brushes and hammers and garden-shears, repairing the ravages of the night before.

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York - every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler's thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby's enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors-d'oeuvre, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and with cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

By seven o'clock the orchestra had arrived, no thin five-piece affair, but a whole pitful of oboes and trombones and saxophones and viols and cornets and piccolos and low and high drums. The last swimmers have come in from the beach now and are dressing up-stairs; the cars from New York are parked five deep in the drive, and already the halls and salons and verandas are gaudy with primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. The bar is in full swing, and floating rounds of cocktails permeate the garden outside, until the air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and enthusiastic meetings between women who never knew each other's names.

The lights grow brighter as the earth lurches away from the sun, and now the orchestra is playing yellow cocktail music, and the opera of voices pitches a key higher. Laughter is easier minute by minute, spilled with prodigality, tipped out at a cheerful word. The groups change more swiftly, swell with new arrivals, dissolve and form in the same breath; already there are wanderers, confident girls who weave here and there among the stouter and more stable, become for a sharp, joyous moment the center of a group, and then, excited with triumph, glide on through the sea-change of faces and voices and color under the constantly changing light.

Suddenly one of these gypsies, in trembling opal, seizes a cocktail out of the air, dumps it down for courage and, moving her hands like Frisco, dances out alone on the canvas platform. A momentary hush; the orchestra leader varies his rhythm obligingly for her, and there is a burst of chatter as the erroneous news goes around that she is Gilda Gray's understudy from the Follies. The party has begun.

Back by popular demand ... the Phys. Wrecks!!

... or if not by "popular demand" but because I just, randomly, heard from Anne - an old friend from high school, a good good friend once upon a time ... and whaddya know, she Googled something, came upon my blog, and emailed me. I love my life sometimes.

When I was a senior in high school, the girls basketball team (many of the players were good friends of mine) started kicking some SERIOUS ASS. There were sisters on the team - unbelievable girls and unbelievable athletes - and they became Rhode Island stars for a couple seasons. They both were toweringly tall, and incredible on the court. They were referred to as "the twin towers".

I went to a big sports school. A typical public school. We had massive pep rallies for the football team, we had a fierce and ugly rivalry with the team from the neighboring town ... our school was pretty much all about football. (Although the guys who played on our soccer team were pretty much universally lusted after by the girl population in our school. There was always something cool and kind of hot about soccer players. Even before Posh & Becks, thank you very much.) Our boy's basketball team also got a lot of attention ... the games were always packed.

But girls sports? Not so much. Nobody gave a shit about girls sports. There were no pep rallies for the girls basketball team - even though they were, during my senior year, the most successful sports team in our school. (If you really think how obvious and blatant that bias is, it's really shocking. Unbelievable.) Our girls team were going to go to the state championships, probably. And yet ... no glory. The school didn't get behind them - at least not in the way the school typically did for football.

Our champions were having a great season - pretty much unnoticed by the school at large.

And of course - the football team and the boys basketball team had their own cheerleading squads. Teams of girls chosen SPECIFICALLY to cheer on the boys. Fair enough. Tradition and all that.

What I love about this story is that we (my friends) recognized the injustice in the situation - but we didn't write letters to The Rebellion (the school newspaper) - bemoaning the lack of support for girls. We didn't write letters to the Principal, pointing out the sexism in the fact that BOYS teams got pep rallies before a big game ... but GIRLS teams did not. No. We didn't use those normal attention-getting tactics. We did not attack. We didn't ask anyone in authority to fix the situation.

But mark my words. We were pissed.

So what did we do? We took the situation into our own hands. We formed a cheerleading squad. For the girls basketball team.

We didn't clear it with anyone. We didn't ask permission. We just did it.

My friend Anne was the main organizer and the brains behind the idea. Now please understand: None of us were cheerleaders. At least not by trade. We were not gymnasts. We were not dancers. We were not girlie-girls. We did not KNOW ANY CHEERS.

So we conceived of ourselves as: a kind of dark goofy version of a cheerleader. We had passion for our team, we didn't snark about THAT ... but the entire thing, our routines (that we made up) - was about making fun (subtle fun - not mean fun) of the instituion of cheerleading, in general. The institution of cheering for the boys. And how odd it was (and how ODD that it was ODD) to have GIRLS cheering for GIRLS.

But we took ourselves seriously. We had cheerleader practice. We made up cheers. We made fun of regular cheerleader cheers - making up our own versions. We did messy somersaults, but then leapt to our feet, and took a cheerleader pose to finish off the cheer. We were snarky. We were comedic. We imitated regular cheerleaders, but because we so obviously were not real cheerleaders - people would howl with laughter when they saw us. Sometimes that laughter would be mean. More often than not, though - people got the joke, and got into the spirit of what we were trying to do.

We did not give a shit what we looked like. We gloried in our own goofiness.

Our uniform was:

1. Grey sweatshirts
2. Men's boxer shorts
3. Hi-top sneakers

And our name?

The Phys. Wrecks.

Within a couple of weeks of us cheering at the girls games (and I'm not kidding about this - this is one of the accomplishments that I'm proudest of in high school) - the crowds started to grow, at the girls basketball games. We had pumped people up. We did goofy cheers in the cafeteria during school lunches - we manufactured a pep rally since the school wouldn't have an official one - and got people to come to the game. Soon - the bleachers were full to overflow at every game.

And one of our greatest triumphs was that the boys from other sports teams - football players, basketball players, soccer players ... started coming to the girls games. They started to take an interest. They came en masse - huge groups of rowdy jock high school boys - to scream like maniacs for the girls from their school. Unprecedented.

God. That was a proud moment.

And we did it without hectoring the administration, or scolding the boys. We just pumped up the enthusiasm and let people know: Our girls are rocking the house this year!!

I loved, too, how much the boys sports teams LOVED US. They had their own cheerleader squads. They had girls cheering specifically for them, in little flaired skirts, and saddle shoes, and letter sweaters. But they seemed relatively indifferent to them. Oh, they dated them ... probably slept with many of them too .. but with us it was different. They LOVED us.

It was extraordinary ... those guys just LOVED us. After each cheer, they would all hold up numbers to us - as though they were Olympic judges. (The image of them MAKING those flash cards with all the different numbers is truly heart-cracking). We'd finish some goofball cheer, where we did a fake pyramid, or we would all do somersaults in a row - you could hear the waves of laughter erupting across the gym - and we'd finish our cheer - and glance up in the stands at all the jock boys to see what score they would give us.

It was such camaraderie. Such good-natured comedy.

That was what the Phys. Wrecks made possible. In a weird way, the Phys. Wrecks brought the school together. Because the girls teams are, after all, PART of the school. And we forced everybody to deal with that - but we did it in a way that was enthusiastic, comedic, and inclusive.

It was a blast - one of my great high school moments.

Photos below.

Here is our "pyramid" for the yearbook photo. I ruined the symmetry with my mis-placed arms. But that was all part of the Phys. Wrecks charm, I suppose.

We showed great versatility:

We cheered!

We clapped!

We rabble-roused!

We did stunts that took people's breath away - just in terms of the sheer virtuosity and courageous gymnastic skill we displayed.

We DEMANDED loyalty from the school.

Come on, people, cheer for your team ...

Ohhhh, come ON!!!

We also were not above manipulation. We PLEADED with the school to support their own team.

Please, sir, I want some ...

more???

And ... of course ... When our team won ... as they so often did ...

There really was no other appropriate way for me to express myself than this pose (which, I have to say, in all modesty - I executed with perfection):

Gooooooo, team!!

The Books: "L.A. Confidential" (James Ellroy)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

L.A. Confidential - by James Ellroy

God, I love James Ellroy. I love everything about him. I love his books, I love his persona - and he is a great great interview. He's honest to the degree that sometimes you get nervous for him. He's an open wound - which is funny because his writing is so rat-a-tat-tat. But the nuances he manages to suggest - the entire WORLD he gets into and creates ... He's consistently terrific, and I just love him.

Of course this book was made into a massively successful film - one of my favorite movies ever made, actually - and while the book is far more involved - way more going on - the movie is pretty faithful, not just to the plotline but to the FEEL of the book. Entire scenes of dialogue are lifted verbatim. Because why would you change it? It's perfect already. He doesn't do a lot of "he said" "she said" - Ellroy's narrative brain works faster than that. He doesn't sit back from the action - he's in it, ba da bing ba da boom - here's this, then this, and we move on, but now we're back in ... and we, as readers, are just lucky if we can keep up. (Speaking of the movie, here's a piece I wrote on Bud White, and that first close-up in the film)

The book he wrote about his mother's still-unsolved murder (excerpt here) is a must-read.

But so are all his others.

Here's an excerpt involving Jack Vincennes. I could never write like this. It's not my sensibility - my imagination does not express itself in this way ... but what a pleasure it is ... to read prose like this.

EXCERPT FROM L.A. Confidential - by James Ellroy

He found a juke joint, ordered a line of shots. Two drinks killed his shakes; two more made him a toastmaster.

To the men I just killed: sorry, I'm really better at shooting unarmed civilians. I'm being squeezed into retirement, so I thought I'd 86 a couple of real bad guys before I capped my twenty.

To my wife: you thought you married a hero, but you grew up and you learned you were wrong. Now you want to go to law school andbe a lawyer like Daddy and Ellis. No sweat on the money: Daddy bought the house, Daddy upgrades your marriage, Daddy will pay for tuition. When you read the paper and see that your husband drilled two evil robbers, you'll think they're the first notces on his gun. Wrong - in '47 dope crusader Jack blasted two innocent people, the big secret he almost wants to spill just to get some life kicking back into his marriage.

Jack downed three more shots. He went where he always went when with a certain amount of shit in his system - back to '53 and smut.

He felt safe on the blackmail: his depositions for insurance, the Hudguns snuff buried - Hush-Hush resurrected it, got nowhere. Patchett and Bracken never approached him - they had the carbon of Sid's Big V file, kept their end of the bargain. He heard Lynn and Bud White were still an item; call the brainy whore and Patchett memories - bad news from that bad bloody spring. What drove him was the smut.

He kept it in a safe-deposit box. He knew it was there, knew it excited him - knew that loving it would trash his marriage. He threw himself into the marriage, building walls to keep them safe from that spring. A string of sober days helped; the marriage helped. Nothing he did changed things - Karen just learned who he was.

She saw him muscle Deuce Perkins; he said "nigger" in front of her parents. She figured out his press exploits were lies. She saw him drunk, pissed off. He hated her friends; his one friend - Miller Stanton - dropped out of sight when he blew Badge of Honor. He got bored with Karen, ran to the smut, went crazy with it.

He tried to ID the posers again - still no go. He went to Tijuana, bought other fuck books - no go. He went looking for Christine Bergeron, couldn't find her, put out teletypes that got him bupkis. No way to have the real thing - he decided to fake it.

He bought hookers, shook down call girls. He fixed them up to look like the girls in his books. He had them three and four at a pop, chains of bodies on quilts. He costumed them, choreographed them. He aped the pictures, took his own pictures, recaptured; sometimes he thought of the blood pix and got scared: perfect matches to murder mutilations.

Real women enver thrilled him like the pictures did; fear kept him from going to Fleur-de-Lis - straight to the source. He couldn't figure out Karen's fear - why she didn't leave him.

A last drink - bad thoughts adieu.

Jack cleaned up, walked back to his car. No hubcaps, broken wiper blades. Crime scene tape around Hank's Ranch Market; two black-and-whites in the lot. No reprimand note on his windshield - the vandals probably stole it.

* * *

He hit the bash at full swing: Ellis Loew, a suite packed with Republican bigshots. Women in cocktail gowns; men in dark suits. The Big V chinos, a sport shirt sprayed with dog blood.

Jack flagged a waiter, grabbed a martini off his tray. Framed pictures on the wall caught his eye.

Political progress: Harvard Law Review, the '53 election, a howler shot: Loew telling the press the Nite Owl killers confessed before they escaped. Jack laughed, sprayed gin, almost choked on his olive. Behind him: "You used to dress a bit more nicely."

Jack turned around. "I used to be some kind of hotshot."

"Do you have an excuse for your appearance?"

"Yeah, I killed two men today."

"I see. Anything else?"

"Yeah, I shot them in the back, plugged a dog and took off before my superior officers showed up. And here's a news flash: I've been drinking. Ellis, this is getting stale, so let's get to it. Who do you want me to touch?"

"Jack, lower your voice."

"What is it, boss? The Senate or the statehouse?"

"Jack, it's not the time to discuss this."

"Sure it is. Tell true. You're gearing up for the '60 election."

Loew, on the QT. "All right, it's the Senate. I did have some favors to ask, but your current condition precludes my asking them. We'll talk when you're in better shape."

An audience now: the whole suite. "Come on, I'm dying to run bag for you. Who do I shake down first?"

"Sergeant, lower your voice."

Raise that voice. "Cocksucker, I shit where you breathe. I put Bill McPherson in the tank for you, I cold-coked him and put him in bed with that colored girl, I fucking deserve to know who you want me to put the screws to next."

Loew, a hoarse whisper. "Vincennes, you're through."

Jack tossed gin in his face. "God, I fucking hope so."

Quantum Leap: Season 1, Ep. 2: "Star-Crossed"

LEAP INTO: June 15 - 17, 1972

Sam (as Dr. Bryant): What drew you to physics?
Donna: I guess I want to know why things happen to us.
Sam: Don't you think you have a choice?
Donna. Do you?
Sam: Well, I used to. I'm not sure anymore.

Sam Beckett leaps out of Tim Fox as he's sliding into home base - and leaps into alcoholic womanizing literature professor Dr. Gerald Bryant.

Sigh. This is just Part 1. I'm halfway through. Part 2 to come tonight.

EPISODE 2: STAR-CROSSED

Episode 2 begins with anyone's version of The Actor's Nightmare. You find yourself onstage, you have no idea what play you are doing, what your lines are, you have had no rehearsal, you are invariably the lead - an audience is there - and you have to just GO. Sam is happily sliding into home base in the last leap, and shivers with blue electric light ... only to find himself standing in front of a classroom, having just written the word OBSESSION on the blackboard, he is smoking a pipe, and he is in the middle of a lecture. On what? He has no idea? Who is he? No clue. He stands up there, discombobbled, stunned, and terrified. And the googly-eyed smitten class, all girls, are no help. At least not at first. They just sit there, in misty silence, beaming up at him, lovelorn. It's a clear nod to the classroom scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark - and very clever. Sam is too shook up at first to immediately take note of the afros and headbands and peasant shirts among the class. He is more concerned with SURVIVING THE NIGHTMARE he has found himself in! He fumbles, bumbles, his pipe falls out of his mouth, the classroom titters in fluttery excitement. A ridiculous classroom conversation ensues - with Sam having no idea what he's talking about ... it dawns on him that they are discussing Wuthering Heights at one point ... one of the girls in the class says something about Charlotte Bronte being "sexually suppressed", and suddenly we get a disgrunted voiceover from Sam Beckett: "Great. Four of my least favorite cliches. Headbands, bell bottoms, flower power, and English lit."

There's usually (usually, not always, but usually) a chord of SNARK in this show which is one of the reasons I find it so endearing. It's not too precious with the past ... but it also honors that which should be honored. I like it because it's not hostile to the military, at ALL, for example - it doesn't take a naive silly stance towards it (and if you look at Bellisario's production record, it's obvious that this is a pattern) - but it's also honest enough to know that there are actual PEOPLE involved, in all events in history - which, necessarily, make things messy, and perhaps more complicated than the pundits or those with an axe to grind would have you believe.

Tommy mentions in his post that this is obviously a show by Baby Boomers - living through the events of their lives that had meaning. You know, the second half of the 20th century. To my taste, the "kiss with history" stuff is the least effective parts of the show. Now this is not always true. I like the "kiss with history" stuff when it is more whimsical, when it has no historical import - outside of art and pop culture, that is. Like when, in a couple episodes from now, Sam ends up suggesting to a young Buddy Holly that "Peggy Sue" might be a catchier title for his song than "Piggy Sue". And Buddy thinks a bit, nods, and says, "All right!" That, to me, works. It doesn't take itself too seriously. But sometimes the "kiss with history" stuff wanders into Forrest Gump territory - and I believe I have made my feelings on that piece of shit movie perfectly clear. Or who knows, maybe I haven't. So here comes another round of agonized emails about it - from people who seem genuinely hurt that I not only did not like the movie, but despised it. hahaha They beg and plead with me to give it another shot, they write despairing TREATISES on why that movie was profound ... I get it, I get it, lots of people loved that movie - I didn't. I don't despise people who loved the movie - but I'm not changing my opinion about that debacle. Can we please move on?? Okay, let's not open up that can of worms. Sorry. Let's keep it light here!! I don't despise the Quantum Leap kisses with history (and, to those of you who don't know - that refers to the moments in certain episodes when Sam trips into some event of historical importance). So there's a "kiss with history" in this episode (check out the dates Sam leaps into and put 2 and 2 together) - that, I don't know, I don't think they needed it. It didn't ADD, in my opinion. It also didn't take away - but I think something like that needs to 'add' - like the Buddy Holly moment did. That moment was a huge payoff - something Sam had been working up to the whole episode - so when it happens, there's a satisfying "ahhhhh" that happens.

But, as always. I am quantum leaping ahead of myself.

The story of this leap is simple, but what is interesting about it - and perhaps inevitable - is that the powers-that-be of this series immediately got to the JUICE of the concept. If you were leaping around in time, in your own lifetime ... wouldn't you be concerned with yourself and your own journey? Wouldn't you immediately be interested in changing stuff in YOUR past that you wanted change? You wouldn't just accept an altruistic role instantly ... it would take some time. "Star-Crossed" is Sam's confrontation with his own past - which he has already been gearing up to - from the first episode, when he was trying to reach his own father. Sam Beckett is on his OWN personal journey - and that's why I find him to be such a likeable character, and someone that I wouldn't mind spending time with, week after week after week. That's the key to a great series. You need a character you can RELATE to. We, in the audience, ARE Sam. We're not Al, who remains distant a bit - who has a whole lifestory outside the Quantum Leap chamber that we hear bits about, but never really enter into. Al's journey, of course, famously, becomes of the ULTIMATE importance in an episode in Season 2 ... and fans of the show will obviously know that the entire series ended with a resolution for Al. How interesting. How unbelievably perfect. Talk about an "ahhhhhhh" moment! But, in general, we relate to the show through Sam. We can't help but imagine how we would deal with his predicaments, how we would fare in such a project. And Scott Bakula, who pretty much embodies the term "likeable", is our way into this at times difficult concept (and I've gotta say it: that "likeability" is a rare rare quality. Simon Cowell is no dummy when he says to a contestant on American Idol, "You're not the best singer, but you've got something else - and that's the likeability factor." Think about all the actors you know. Not too many just exude niceness. Without schmaltz. I'm not saying they should ... every actor has different gifts. Christopher Walken is fantastic and he doesn't exude niceness or likeability. But in a character like Sam Beckett - in a long-running television series - you NEED a guy that you just flat out LIKE. This is something that is hard to capture ... and makes me realize why Don Bellisario - who created the show - said that when Scott Bakula came in and read for the part, that his (Don's) heart started to beat faster the second Scott started reading. He knew. This was the guy. And if you've seen Bakula in interviews, then you know he's not "acting". He just seems like a nice person and is able to convey that - without ever mugging or being a "moral conscience" bore (which a lot of other "nice" actors do) - You just flat out like the guy.)

In Star-Crossed it comes out that Sam was once in love with a woman named Donna. They were both physicists, involved in cutting edge time travel research. They were in their early 30s. They dated and he proposed. And Donna ended up standing him up at the altar. (This all comes out slowly, since, of course, Sam's brain is swiss-cheesed and the details are not at his disposal immediately). She didn't stand him up at the altar because she's a horrible manipulative person. It was because she's a damaged soul, and could never commit to anyone - because of being abandoned by her father when she was little. But we learn, through this episode, that she was Sam's only real love. She was "it" for him. So in Star-Crossed the opportunity arises: if he could change her mind ... even if he's meeting her years before they actually met in real life ... if he could somehow help heal that old wound ... then maybe when the time was right, in the future, when they met ... she WOULDN'T run away.

Not to get too personal, but if I could go back in time to April 29, 1994 I would. I don't walk around like a wounded person anymore. I'm fine. But if presented with the opportunity? To hear his voice on the other line - a voice that had a question in it ... a question he was afraid to ask ... and instead of ignoring it (not out of being manipulative and awful - but because I was afraid) - confronting it? Speaking out the truth of the moment? Bringing it out into the open? Saying, "What is it you want? Why did you call me today?" Oh, how I wonder what he would have said. And how my life would be different now if I HAD said it. So I'm with Sam in this regard: even though it's "against the rules" of the project - as Al says: "the time-traveler cannot take advantage of his position" ... I would be like Sam. I would say to Al, "Fuck THAT. I'm picking up the phone on the morning of April 29, 1994 and I'm going to change history." Of course there is also the rule of "unintended consequences" - which Al warns Sam about in this episode as well. If you heal Donna's daddy issues, that's great - awesome - but that might mean that she would find love with another man BEFORE she met you. Sam is willing to take that risk. And you know what? I would be too. That's the God's honest truth.

Let's go back to our episode.

Sam finished up class with the lovelorn ladies (quick note: a bell rings, saving him from embarrassment - meaning class is over ... but, uhm, do bells ring in college classes?? I don't think they do!) - and walks outside, still trying to figure out where and who he is. (The fact that he is wearing a corduroy suit and a silky shirt with a Peter Pan collar should give him a clue!) A breathless young lady rushes over to him to talk with him. It becomes immediately apparent, first of all, that her name is "Jamie Lee" (her name is written all over her notebooks) - second of all, that she is in love with the character Sam has leapt into, and third of all, that she is batshit crazy. She speaks in hi-falutin' poetic tones - about "you give me life", etc. - and Sam is struggling to keep up. Is what she just said a literary reference or ... is she just nuts? Help??? As he's dealing with Jamie Lee, it is suddenly as though he is struck by lightning. He sees someone. Across the way. Walking along. And it is as though the breath catches in his throat, leaving him stunned momentarily. He can't believe it. We don't know yet the backstory - we don't know who she is ... but we know that Sam knows her. That she is important. That she is, to some degree, "his". But he's not himself ... he's this Dr. Gerald Bryant character ... so he can't go running after her. She wouldn't know him. She wouldn't know him anyway because it would be another 10 years before they met! I mean, imagine that! Imagine the self-control it would take!!

That's another reason why Sam (Scott Bakula) is so likeable (and, I think it's not too much to say: ultimately a tragic hero). He must abdicate his own ego, he must step aside from his own concerns - time and time again. the "swiss cheese" effect certainly helps - it means that his sense of his own helplessness does not grow exponentially. He seems to come to each "leap" fresh.

But instead of running after Donna, he goes home to his house. With Jamie Lee breathlessly leading him by the hand.

Again, a nod to the art direction and set decorators. Professor Bryant's house is a perfect example of an academic's abode. The knick-knacks, the controlled clutter, the choice pieces bought while on sabbatical in display in the front hall ... Jamie Lee, drags poor Sam into his own house - he keeps trying to tell her that there should be no "fraternizing" between professor and student ("that's not what you told me last night," giggles Jamie Lee) - she rushes off to the kitchen and then Sam has his moment with the Man in the Mirror. I gotta give props to the guy who plays the reflection, John Tayloe. Often, the reflections are just seen once ... to give us context - but in this one, Sam keeps getting a glimpse of himself throughout the episode, a reality check ... and the actor who plays the REAL Dr. Bryant - is hysterical. A hoot. He really has to do a bit of acting here. He has to look like that, but he has to embody Sam Beckett - who is horrified at the boozy ascot-wearing nincompoop he is now supposed to be. Sam has a very funny moment, staring at his bleary-eyed complexion - where he furiously rips off the stupid arty scarf he's wearing, saying in disgust, "You have GOT to be KIDDING me." But it's John Tayloe who has to act that, since it's him we're seeing. It's very very funny. Jamie Lee, alarmed at her paramour talking to himself, comes back to him, and caresses him, gives him his pipe - which makes it even worse. Sam can't get over his own reflection, his own silly outfit, the fact that a co-ed is feeling him up ... he is horrified. HORRIFIED. We know what a "prude" (Al's word) Sam can be. So to be this lecherous dude, taking advantage of his students and his position over them - just to get laid ... Sam is beside himself with contempt. Jamie Lee is quite an aggressive young lady, but also quite insane. Her whole life is about poetry - she wants to LIVE in a great romance novel ... and obviously the real Gerald Bryant encouraged this for his own nefarious reasons, unaware that he was tapping into a rich KEG of nutso-ness.

Al appears in the living room - while Jamie Lee is shoving her heaving Barbara Cartland cleavage at Sam. Speaking of set decoration, not sure if you can see it in the smallness of the screenshot below - but please take a look at the framed poster lying propped up next to Al. Can you see the words on it? But isn't Dr. Bryant a literature professor? Yes, but he has a poster lying around of Albert Einstein. That's the kind of subliminal subtextual detail that makes this show really good. If you get it, great - if you don't, nothing is lost. But it's there - and it's kind of mysteirous and cool - seeing as this boozy professor is now being inhabited by a physicist. Al, in his deadpan way, tries to guide Sam through the nightmare of dealing wtih Jamie Lee - since Sam is too disgruntled with Dr. Bryant to really play along. Jamie Lee rhapsodizes about Juliet. Sam scoffs. Al interjects, with his blue-light star pin gleaming through the room, "Juliet committed suicide Sam. We don't want to go that way." So Sam starts to play along, get into the game ... tries to talk reasonably to Jamie Lee - and finally sends her off to make some tea so he can talk to Al.

Al is filled with probabilities. He is also wearing shiny silver loafers and periwinkle blue socks, but we'll let that pass. "Ziggy says there's a 99.9 % probability that you can leap out of here right away ..." But Al didn't count on Donna. Al doesn't even know about Donna. Sam interrupts the inevitable Ziggy monologue and says, "No no no ... I know why I'm here." Al is confused, in his dear curmudgeonly way. Sam explains. He saw Donna. He can have a second chance now! He can maybe catch Donna when she's young ... and right the HUGE wrong that is now in his life - meaning him and Donna not being together. Al, of course, vetoes this. And strongly. With many classic Dean Stockwell gestures. He gestures up a negative STORM. "No! No - no - no - no - no." Apparently Al already got in trouble for giving Sam personal information like his last name in the other leap - and his job is hanging by a thread. So - NO.

But we see another side of Sam in this moment. The guy with the tenacity to get 6 doctorates. The guy who was determined enough to get Project Quantum Leap off the ground. He says, "I'm here to get a second chance with Donna. And nobody can stop me - not even you."

Next scene: the campus. Sam and Al stroll along the lanes, and they are still arguing. Dean Stockwell is gesturing up a storm. He's such a GUY, know what I mean? A little toughie. "Sam, you made the rules. The time traveler must not take advantage of his position!" Sam is like, "That's a stupid rule." Or whatever. Al continues to reiterate that the pressure is really on the project and "Weitzman" is threatening to pull the plug. Sam racks his brain for a memory of Weitzman. "Short fat guy wearing knickers?" Al replies, "Tall skinny guy wearing a stovepipe hat."

hahahahahaha I love this script. But Weitzman becomes the threat back in the present-day. Sam isn't seeming to really understand the pressure Al is in. Al has already been reprimanded, and now the entire project is being called into question. Sam gets it, I guess - but he just doesn't care. He is on his way to The Rathskeller - the little bar on the campus - where he has learned that Donna works as a waitress. The "bar" is a perfect college bar set - half cafeteria, half rock club - It doesn't quite know WHAT it is. There are psychedelic posters on the wall - and a brief entryway involving black light - which turns poor Al into a glow-in-the-dark ghost. His entire outfit was black 2 seconds before, and now ... not so much. There are posters of Woodstock on the wall ... and yet it's a kind of calm atmosphere, not too wild. Or, as Sam mutters when he looks around, "Pretty straight for the 70s." This is the 1970s at a conservative women's college. So of course little BONES are thrown at things like Woodstock and Jim Morrison ... but there's also a poster of Beethoven on the wall, and people are just eating cheeseburgers and drinking Coke, as though it's Happy Days. Again, all of this is great "period" detail. Because, naturally, each decade was not monolithic across the nation! 1968 in Haight Ashbury was probably very different from 1968 in the Texas panhandle. Not totally different - fashions still spread across the land in the same way they do now ... but the FEEL would be very different. And 1972 in the East Village would be very different from 1972 in Ohio at a women's college. The set decorators in this little "bar" understood that very well. Nice details.

Sam excitedly points out Donna to Al, and Al is horrified. "Oh my God. It is her." He has no idea how to stop Sam from doing this, he's trying to keep him on track. Apparently, in the real history - Dr. Bryant and Jamie Lee got married and it was a disaster. Al mutters, "It was a nice intimate little shotgun wedding. 12 gauge, I think it was." Sam is supposed to stop them from ruining both their lives. But Sam stares at Donna. How young she is ... how much she has ahead of her ... how much he loved her once ... This, in the black-light entrance, is where Sam remembers that Donna stood him up at his own wedding. "It had something to do with her father ..." he struggles for more detail. At some point here, Al disappears. He just can't take it. Sam doesn't get the pressure he's under so BUH BYE.

Sam tentatively sits at a table, and Donna comes to serve him. She knows him (or Dr. Bryant) - because she's taking one of his classes. A word here: Donna is played by a very young Terri Hatcher. I'm not a huge fan of hers - well, that's not true - I really enjoyed Lois & Clark - I just think she has turned into a kind of scary skeletor version of herself. I understand growing old is difficult for women in Hollywood - but Terri Hatcher shows that desperation more openly than others. But God love her - here's what I wanted to say. I'm not saying she's a brilliant actress but I am saying that based on her performance here - it does not surprise me at all that this woman has never been out of a job. Seriously. She is STILL going. Based on the simplicity and sweetness of her persona here - and how she doesn't overact - she has one or two truly beautiful moments ... it is not surprising at all that her career has been very long-lasting - especially for a bright young pretty thing like she is here in Quantum Leap. Bright young pretty things in Hollywood are a dime a dozen. That's why I'm always like - Girls, ENJOY IT. Enjoy it while it lasts! Like Mischa Barton. Hon. You were great in Sixth Sense. You were in a hot series. You have some tabloid cache. But you have got to FOCUS if you want to still be in this game in your 40s. Focus on the right things, hon! It's about the work! Because when you're 38 ... 40 ... 42 ... you had BEST have your priorities straight, because work dries up for people then. Especially women.

Sam and Donna have a short interaction. She is kind to him, but you also can tell that she knows his reputation, and guards against it. "Dr. Bryant, I am perfectly able to get an A in your class by doing the work." Sam goes for the gusto and says, "I'm not what I appear to be ..." He doesn't say his name, because that would be meaningless for her ... he just tries to convince her that he is NOT what he looks like. Tells her to look into his eyes and she'll see "another soul". (Again, kudos to Scott Bakula for pulling off such a corny line. He has a lot of corny lines in the series ... but his sensibility is so nice, so normal - that he somehow gets away with it without making me want to gag). He is talking quite literally here - and I think that's why it works. I have the face of a washed-up booze-hound. But I'M IN HERE. Someone else is IN HERE and if you look - you'll see it! Donna does look, and for a second or two - she does see something. She steps back, startled. Goes back to work. Just a moment, but enough for Sam to hold onto. She SAW.

Maybe this will work!!!

In the next moment, poor Sam is accosted by a Neanderthal. Poor actor may be a Rhodes Scholar, but he'll never play one looking like that! Turns out that this guy is Oscar - Jamie Lee's boyfriend - and he is here to beat the shit out of Dr. Bryant, who has stolen his girl. Sam tries to reassure Oscar - no no no she wants YOU ... she's trying to make you jealous ... She doesn't want ME! This turns into kind of a deeper conversation, though, when Sam tells Oscar (who very threateningly throws darts at a dartboard near Sam's head) that Jamie Lee needs someone to be romantic with her. She's DYING for it. "Maybe you should read her a poem!" Sam says in desperation. Oscar says he DID read her a poem and he starts to recite, "There once was a man from Portland ..." hahahahaha Sam tells him limericks don't count. He's fighting for his life now - because Oscar is getting more threatening - so Sam blunders, "No, no, not limericks! You need to read her Sheets and Kelly ... " Sheets and Kelly???? HA! Oscar is all about how "horny" Jamie Lee makes him, and Sam tries to give him advice about how to romance a girl. "That's mush!" scoffs Oscar. "To guys, yes, it is mush," Sam replies - "But to girls it's romantic!"

Okay. So Oscar's gonna give it a try.

Sam has just done his part to make sure that Bryant and Jamie Lee don't get married. He has barely been focusing on the job at hand at all, caught up as he is in the Donna thing. His advice to Oscar is, of course, cliche - but when you think about the two people involved - nutso Jamie Lee and meathead Oscar - you think: it just might work!

Part 2 to come tonight!

Link to all other Quantum Leap posts here

The Shamus ...

shows, yet again, in this post about Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises why his is one of my favorite sites on the web. Wow. I haven't even seen the movie yet - although I will - but what an analysis!! What a great great eye you have, Shamus - I so appreciate your responses to things, in case I haven't told you.

The Books: "Middlemarch" (George Eliot)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Middlemarch - by George Eliot

I finally read this monumental book - one of the greatest achievements in English literature - a couple years ago. It intimidated me. Or - no, not intimidated. It was daunting, in the same way that picking up Anna Karenina for the first time was daunting. Its reputation precedes it. And you know that you are in for a RIDE. The comparison with Tolstoy is deliberate. Middlemarch - while about this one small town in England - and all its inhabitants - is actually about an entire society, and culture. It's a BIG book - in the way Tolstoy wrote BIG books - but it is only big through the concentration on the most intimate details of life of the characters, and how they fit in to the larger picture, even if they are unaware of it. The books encompass an entire world. Jane Austen wrote great books too - but you would never have known about the wars England was fighting at the time, or Napoleon, or any of the other current events from her books. Her books are strictly interior books - and she excavates interpersonal relationships in a way that has barely been topped since. But someone like George Eliot puts the entire WORLD into her book. And it's somehow still not top-heavy or ponderous! (Again: see Tolstoy for the similarity). In Middlemarch - we learn about land laws, and politics, and economics, and educational systems, and the class divide - the book also has one of the most perceptive and SEARING descriptions of what it actually feels like to be way over your head in debt. Lydgate's agony goes on for chapters ... and it's a secret shame (being in debt back then was seen as MUCH more shameful than it's seen now - when most people carry at least a small load of debt). You just FEEL for Lydgate - George Eliot lays it all out - the slow creep of debt, the hiding of it, the growing feeling of panic - the increasing sense of entrapment and doom ... Great stuff. There are love stories in Middlemarch, of course - but - in her omniscent way - Eliot goes to make larger points about the society, about women (and how women not being educated beyond a "toy box history of the world" is bad for everyone - not just women), about marriage itself - through these smaller one-on-one stories. Dorothea Brooke is a TYPE ... but I have to say she's not a "type" written about all that much ... and I often wonder why. I wonder this because I see so much of myself in Dorothea Brooke - she's a cautionary tale, of course ... AS Byatt (who is the main heir to George Eliot) writes about such types all the time ... and convincingly. She does it from the inside, rather than just as an observer. She KNOWS that world. It is the focus on intellectuals - or, no, bad word, with all its connotations. People who are CEREBRAL rather than strictly emotional. That's not quite right, either. But something along those lines. Byatt (in Possession certainly - but in all the Frederica Potter books too) looks at the experience of love through the eyes of someone who is mainly cerebral, perhaps over-educated, weighed down by CONTEXT - not able to come to anything pure. Everything is a reminder of something else ... and so the modern-day experience of something like, oh, love ... begins to feel second-hand, not to be trusted. This is highly specific - and to many people it would not be relevant at all - perhaps interesting to read about, but not reflective of their own experience in any way. But that IS my life. Byatt writes about ME, over and over and over. Dorothea Brooke, with her ideals, is part of that continuum - although she hasn't had the educational advantages of Byatt's characters. But she yearns for them. She yearns to live in the world of ideas. And her life is, on some level, meaningless - she has the opposite of the Byatt characters - she has NO context ... just a vague yearning for a life that has meaning. But give her a doctorate in English lit, and put her in 1980s London - and she'd step right into an AS Byatt book. She would become ALL context and there is a paralysis that accompanies "all context" people. I should know.

One of the things that is so stunning to me about this book is George Eliot's freedom in inserting herself into the narrative. There's quite a presence there - a watching presence - someone who inserts herself (or himself - it's not specific) into the writing, to make philosophical observations, to pull the telescope back, so to speak. It's like you're in the middle of a conversation between two characters - and suddenly - with one sentence - you're orbiting the earth, looking down on all humanity.

And she pulls this off on almost every page! It's a hugely philisophical book, meant to make you think and question and look within, and either go: Yes, I recognize that in myself! Or: No, I do not recognize that in myself - but I do recognize it in my neighbor ... I had never quite thought of it before though!

A couple examples of the pulling-telescope back - but these are just two of many:

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts -- not to hurt others.

Or

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store accorded to their appetite.

Then of course there is the humor of such lines as:

Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

Middlemarch has it all. George Eliot obviously has some issues, shall we say, with the institution of marriage - and she lays it all out, to devastating effect, in this book ... It is the opposite of "happily ever after". And this is not your typical book where the wealthy are unhappy and the working class are happy ... Middlemarch, on that telescopic level, is about the emerging middle class in England, the merchants and traders - and the upheaval in society that will come about because of it. It's an examination of marriage, and economics, and religion - how modern transportation will change the world forever (Forster echoes this in his books, of course - but Eliot was there at the beginning - trains across England, faster communication - what will it all mean?) and then also - just good old observational writing ... what certain people are LIKE - like Mrs. Cadwallader - or Rosamond (Lydgate's naive wife - I wanted to slap her about the head for being such a nitwit - but again: who can blame her? Life had not prepared her for anything serious. It had prepared her to be a pretty little wife who cared only about silverware. She was an undeveloped human being, and that is what happens when an entire section of society is denied educational freedom. EVERYONE suffers - it's like Ibsen's plays). So in that way, the book is quite radical.

It's also a soap opera. With a bazillion recurring characters - all of whom have journeys that are interesting to read about. It's not QUITE a page-turner - because it doesn't have that one thruline of a plot that makes you unable to put a book down - like Tess of the D'urbevilles, for example ... but it's a magnificent book, one of the greatest accomplishments in the English language.

Excerpt below. I've chosen an excerpt that is of a more interpersonal nature - Dorothea trying to be intimate with her husband - but having no idea how. There is no dialogue in the scene - it's all just interior - and it's encyclopedic. What we do to each other, the misunderstandings and misinterpretations of teeny moments ... these things last a lifetime sometimes.

And I have to say that the line below about Dorothea: "for her ardor, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder" - that line fills me with recognition, and despair ... I know that. I know that feeling, Dorothea. If one's ardor is continually repulsed ... then you end up navigating your relationships in a state of heightened dread. And who needs that. Not me, that's for sure.

Not that Mr. Casaubon is totally to blame. George Eliot is way too much of a humanist to take that easy way out. Dorothea Brooke - whose life has not set her up to have meaning outside of marriage - whose society and culture has decreed that she shouldn't be too educated because of her sex - has nothing to DO with all of her ardor ... except yearn for a husband who is kind of a father figure, a man she can yoke herself to - and learn from. She is looking for intellectual intimacy. And sorry. Physical intimacy is easy peasy. Intellectual intimacy? Not so much. This is Byatt's territory as well ... but Eliot just barges right into it, fearlessly, and breaks it all down into its components.

it's just so ACCURATE. And again: the point is made: It is not just Dorothea Brooke who suffers because of women's second-class citizen status, and lack of education. Mr. Casaubon suffers too. Neither of them can see outside of the box - and who of us really can, in our lives - we get glimpses maybe, of what else might be out there ... but we are all limited by our own horizons.

The rejection of Dorothea's impulses below sends a chill to my heart. I've been there, hon.

EXCERPT FROM Middlemarch - by George Eliot

Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him; and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence of a sorrow. Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death - who was passing through one of those rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace, which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue. When the commonplace "We must all die" tranforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die - and soon," then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first. To Mr. Casaubon, now, it was as if he suddenly found himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons. In such an hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward - perhaps with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties of self-assertion. What was Mr. Casaubon's bias his acts will give us a clue to. He held himself to be, with some private scholarly reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of the present and hopes of the future. But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love. And Mr. Casaubon's immediate desire was not for divine communion and light divested of earthly conditions; his passionate longings, poor man, clung low and mist-like in very shady places.

Dorothea had been aware when Lydgate had ridden away, and she had stepped into the garden, with the impulse to go at once to her husband. But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her ardor, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder; and she wandered slowly round the nearer clumps of trees until she saw him advancing. Then she went towards him, and might have represented a heaven-sent angel coming with a promise that the short hours remaining should yet be filled with that faithful love which clings the closer to a comprehended grief. His glance in reply to hers was so chill that she felt her timidity increased; yet she turned and passed her hand through his arm.

Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behiind him and allowed her pliant arm to cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.

There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this responsive hardness inflicted on her. That is a strong word, but not too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge. You may ask why, in the name of manliness, Mr. Casaubon should have behaved in that way. Consider that his was a mind which shrank from pity: have you ever watched in such a mind the effect of a suspicion that what is pressing it as a grief may be really a source of contentment, either actual or future, to the being who already offends by pitying? Besides, he knew little of Dorothea's sensations, and had not reflected tha ton such an occasion as the present they were comparable in strength to his own sensibilities about Carp's criticisms.

Dorothea did not withdraw her arm, but she could not venture to speak. Mr. Casaubon did not say, "I wish to be alone," but he directed his steps in silence towards the house, and as they entered by the glass door on the eastern side, Dorothea withdrew her arm and lingered on the matting, that she might leave her husband quite free. He entered the library and shut himself in, alone with his sorrow.

She went up to her boudoir. The open bow-window let in the serene glory of the afternoon lying in the avenue, where the lime-trees cast long shadows. But Dorothea knew nothing of the scene. She threw herself on a chair, not heeding that she was in the dazzling sun-rays: if there were discomfort in that, how could she tell that it was not part of her inward misery?

She was in the reaction of a rebellious anger stronger than any she had felt since her marriage. Instead of tears there came words: ---

"What have I done -- what am I -- that he should treat me so? He never knows what is in my mind -- he never cares. What is the use of anything I do? He wishes he had never married me."

She began to hear herself, and was checked into stillness. Like one who had lost his way and is weary, she sat and saw in one glance all the paths of her young hope which she should never find again. And just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her husband's solitude - how they walked apart so that she was obliged to survey him. If he had drawn hertowards him, she would never have surveyed him - never have said, "Is he worth living for?" but would have felt him simply a part of her own life. Now she said bitterly, "It is his fault, not mine." In the jar of her whole being, Pity was overthrown. Was it her fault that she had believed in him - had believed in his worthiness? - And what, exactly, was he? -- She was able enough to estimate him - she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.

A thought I need today. And every day.

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

-- Orson Welles

Speaking of which ...

Quantum Leapers:

Episode 2 re-cap to come this weekend! Stay tuned!

For those playing catchup:

Overview
Season 1, Ep. 1: Genesis - part 1 of re-cap
Season 1, Ep. 1: Genesis - part 2 of re-cap
Season 1, Ep. 1: Genesis - part 3 of re-cap

Tommy's posts:
Quantum Leap: an overview
Episode 1: Genesis
Episode 2: Star-crossed

The Books: "Geek Love" (Katherine Dunn)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Geek Love - by Katherine Dunn

The less said about this book the better.

All I can do is tell you to read it. But don't ever say that I didn't warn you.

I read it years ago when I was living in Philadelphia and quietly having a nervous breakdown that didn't show to the outside world. I was sitting on my front porch when I finished Geek Love. We lived in Mt. Airy, surrounded by forest preserves and mountain bike trails, a lushness of green literally 20 minutes outside the city proper. Trees overhung the porch, the green pressed up against our house from all sides, the street was misty and quiet. I had a big mug of cold coffee next to me. It had been hot when I came out onto the porch ... but I was near the end of the book and so I sat there, horrified, struck dumb and still - not taking one sip from the cup next to me. At the last sentence of the book, I literally burst into tears. That's only happened to me a couple of times at the end of a book. Sometimes I'll mist up ... get moved in an intellectual way ... but a bursting into sobs is something that has rarely happened. Geek Love pierced through my armor - what I had erected to shield me from how depressed I was, how sad, how lonely ... and it wasn't just about me, and what I was going through ... it was about Olympia - and how much I had entered into her psyche, her pain, her love. To me, Geek Love is a book about love (obviously, with that title). Love that is eternal, and altruistic, and essentially GOOD. With all the pain that it causes. My boyfriend came home from his run and found me lying on the wicker couch on the front porch, drenched in tears. I don't think I stopped crying, not really, for a good 2 days after finishing that book. I have never picked it up since.

It's like a strange little club - those of us who have read the book. It's a bit of a litmus test. If someone says, "I loved Geek Love" ... I am immediately drawn to that person, like a moth to the flame ... who are you, it says something about you that THAT would be your favorite ... One of the falling-in-love moments I had with the great love of my life was during a "what books do you love" conversation. I said, casually, "I don't think I've ever cried harder when a book ended than when I finished Geek Love." He looked at me as though I had struck him. He seriously did a double-take. But then didn't say anything for a while. He wasn't a big "let me share with you every thought that goes through my head" type of guy. He was a bit shyer than that. The conversation went on. I had noticed his response but didn't really "get" it ... and later, a couple of people came over and joined us, interrupting our tete a tete - and he said to me, privately, underneath the chatter of the other people, "I don't think I've ever met anyone who also has read that book."

It meant something to him that I had read it and loved it. It meant something about who I am.

It's that kind of book.

One of the most assaultive books I have ever read. With prose you could cut with a knife - an original voice, a truly original voice. Extraordinary book.

I can't even bring myself to give a plot summary.

Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the book.

EXCERPT FROM Geek Love - by Katherine Dunn

Now Crystal Lil holds the phone receiver clenched against her long flat tit while she howls up the stairwell, "Forty-one!", meaning that the red-haired, zit-skinned, defrocked Benedictine in room Number 41 has another phone call and should come running down the three flights of stairs and take this intruding burden off Lil's confused mind. She puts a patented plastic amplifier against the earpiece when she answers the phone and turns the knob on her hearing aid to high and screams, "What! What!" into the mouthpiece until she gets a number back. That number she will shriek up the mildewed staircase until someone comes down or she gets tired.

I am never sure how deaf she is. She always hears the ring of the pay phone in the hall but she may pick up its vibration in her slipper heels. She is also blind. Her thick, pink plastic glasses project huge filmy eyes. The blurred red spurts across her whites like a bad egg.

Forty-one rattles down the stairs and grabs the receiver. He is in constant communication with acquaintances on the edge of the clergy, cultivating them in hopes of slinking back into his collar. His anxious muttering into the phone begins as Crystal Lil careens back into her room. She leaves the door open to the hallway.

Her window looks onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Her television is on with the volume high. She sits on the backless kitchen chair, feels around for the large magnifying glass until she finds it on top of the TV, and then leans close, her nose scant inches from the screen, pumping the lens in and out before her eyes in a constant struggle to focus an image around the dots. When i come through the hall I can see the grey light flickering through the lens onto the eager blindness of her face.

Being called "Manager" explains, for Crystal Lil, why no bills come to her, why her room is free, and why the small check arrives for her each month. She is adamant in her duties as rent collector and enfeebled watchdog. The phone is part of the deal.

When Crystal Lil howls, "Twenty-one!", which is my room number, I stop by my door to grab the goat wig from its nail and jam it onto my bald pate before I take the single flight of stairs in a series of one-legged hops that is hard on my knees and ankles but disguises my usual shuffle. I pitch my voice high and loud, an octave into the falsetto. "Thank you!" I shriek at her gaping mouth. Her gums are knnobby and a faintly iridescent green - shiny where the teeth were. I wear the same wig when I go out. I don't trust Lil's blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.

When Lil calls, "Thirty-five!" up the stairwell, I wobble over to the door and stare one-eyed through the hole drilled next to the lock. When "Thirty-five" comes hurtling down the staircase, I get an instant glimpse of her long legs, sometimes flashing bare through the slits in her startling green kimono. I lean my head against the door and listen to her strong young voice shouting at Lil and then dropping to its normal urgency on the phone. Number Thirty-five is my daughter, Miranda. Miranda is a popular girl, tall and well shaped. She gets phone calls every evening before she leaves for work. Miranda does not try to disguise herself from her grandmother. She believes herself to be an orphan named Barker. And Crystal Lil herself must imagine that Miranda is just one more of the gaudy females who trail their sex like slug slime over the rooms for a month at a time before moving on. Perhaps the fact that Miranda has lived here in the big apartment for three years has never penetrated to Lil. How would she notice that the same "Thirty-five" always answers the call? They have no bridge to each other. I am the only link between them, and neither of them knows me. Miranda, though, has far less reason to remember me than the old woman does.

This is my selfish pleasure, to watch unseen. It wouldn't give them pleasure to know me for who I am. It could kill Lily, bringing back all the rot of the old pain. Or she might hate me for surviving when all her other treasures have sunk into mold. As for Miranda, I can't be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.

We are all three Binewskis, though only Lily claims the name. I am just "Number Twenty-one" to Crystal Lil. Or "McGurk, the cripple in Twenty-one". Miranda is more colorful. I've heard her whispering to friends as they pass my door, "The dwarf in Twenty-one," or "The old albino hunchback in Twenty-one."

I rarely need to speak to either of them. Lil puts the rent checks in a basket just inside her open door and I reach to get them. On Thursdays I take out the garbage and Lily thinks nothing of it.

Miranda says hello in the hall. I nod. Occasionally she tries to chat me up on the stairs. I am distant and brief and escape as quickly as possible with my heart pounding like a burglar's.

Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter's face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener.

snapshots

-- I love Judge Judy. Desperately. I want her to approve of my life choices.

-- Not as much as I love Bret Michaels and Rock of Love. I think that Rock of Love is the best show on television. Ever. It's a high water mark of unbelievableness. I have fierce opinions about everyone involved, I am totally engrossed, and I must watch it as often as I can. Doesn't matter if it's a rerun. I watch it again. I think I need to own the entire series. So I can dip into that glorious pool whenever I want to. And believe me. I will want to. "Will you stay in this house and continue to rock my world?" WHAT???? it is GENIUS. I think he and Heather are soulmates. I really do. Lacey can cry her crocodile tears all she wants. It won't make a damn bit of difference. At least I hope it won't! Jess seems way too sane to really be Bret's girl. But Heather is as nuts as Bret is. It's a match made in heaven. Go, Heather!!

-- I've been sick for the last 2 days. Every month when I get my period, there's a day where I think: "It has NEVER been this bad before." And then it passes, and my female mind willfully forgets it until the next month. I was in agony last night. I reiterate: it has never been as bad as it was last night. It's still pretty bad today but last night was the nadir.

-- While I was in agony, I sat down and read the entirety of this - which I do on occasion when I need some damn fine writing, as well as a laugh-out-loud funny read. It doesn't matter how much I've read it ... certain sentences still pierce through the glaze of familiarity and I find myself literally GUFFAWING at my laptop. Bless you, Ali, for the funny!!! I saw her do her one-woman show of that material and she is just as funny in person. Great stuff.

-- My feet are all messed up. Again. I'm feeling very OFF, physically.

-- Meeting with my trainer tomorrow morning at 10:30. I'm dreading it. I have gained 20 pounds in the last 2 days from water retention alone. I feel horrific.

-- Rachel was describing to me, tonight, a restaurant she loved - where she recently had dinner with her husband. "It's like college food. You know. Every sandwich has avocado in it."

-- My days have been really long recently. Long and busy. I'm exhausted when I finally get my ass home. The weekends are a black hole of nonproductivity. I am going to try to change that this weekend.

-- Because of a favor I did recently for the assistant of a celebrity hairstylist (that is indeed his job description) - she's arranged for me to have a cut and color at his salon in New York (NOT the one in Beverly Hills!) - gratis. As a thank you for what I did for her (and him). What she is offering me would probably end up costing about 700 bucks all togehter but it's going to be free for me (I will still, however, tip everyone and anyone who touches my hair during my time there!). So I am kind of terrified of going to this salon - terrified as I always am by anything truly high-end - I'm such a proletariat - but the conversation in my head at this point is an interesting one, something to be duly noted. Am I not worth it? Is she not giving this to me out of a true sense of gratitude? Why do I feel ashamed about it? And slightly guilty? A truly odd state of affairs. It was the kind of situation too where she offered it to me and then it took me 2 weeks to get up the nerve to take her up on it. ??? So weird. I sent her a shamefaced email today: "Uhm ... if the offer still stands ..." She emails me back immediately: "I thought you'd never ask!!!!!!! Just say when!!!!!!!" (Her emails are always like that. I love her.) I say a time that might work for me, but give her a HUGE opening to say back, "Well, that is celeb stylist's busiest day ... can you pick another day?" This is what I expect from life. Barriers at every step of the way. Small ones, but barriers - one that intimidate, and say, "You are not in THIS club." This is what I expect. Instead, I hear back from her: "You pick the time!!!! Whenever!" So I did. And that's that. I find myself strangely moved to tears by the entire experience.

-- If anyone makes a comment tut-tutting the frivolousness of anyone spending 700 dollars on a haircut, it will mean you have missed the point entirely.

-- I was on the bus the other morning, coming into the city. The traffic was unusually bad. We were in a dead standstill in the Lincoln Tunnel and it was all I could do to not go postal. We were underneath the Hudson. Stuck. I'm not really a claustrophobic person, but any kind of gridlock coming into the city is always kind of stressful - and brings up memories of 9/11 for me. Especially being UNDER the water. And not moving. For HALF AN HOUR. It was unbelievable. Turns out a car had stalled on the New York side - right at the exit to the tunnel - and backed up traffic all the way into freakin' Newark practically. But we had no updates, no nothing ... just stasis. I couldn't do anything about my situation ... nothing I could do ... so I had on my iPod, and I tried to just zone out as much as i could. I tried to focus on Bleak House - unsuccessfully. I had iPod on shuffle and suddenly out of nowhere ... I heard my own voice. A duet I recorded years ago. I never listen to it anymore, it's from another time and place. So sitting there, underneath the river, I resisted the impulse to click "Next" and listened. Listened to my own voice singing. I sounded so YOUNG. That was my first response. So YOUNG and actually kind of fierce! I surprised myself. Certain nuances and notes and details ... I enjoyed the harmony - it brought a smile to myself - it brought pleasure - after all these years. But god, what an odd sensation. An echo ... coming up through the years ... my own voice ... I can see where I was, what I was wearing when we recorded it (a long black skirt, a blue t-shirt, and a blue bandanna round my head), what I was LIKE then ... I could hear it all in my voice. Who was that girl? And the weird thing, is I know the end of that story. The girl singing didn't know the end. She was in the middle of it. I can hear her oblivion in her voice, the clear tones of positive hope and belief. It wasn't as depressing as I'm making it sound, but it sure was strange.

Norma Shearer

An incredible gallery of photos of Norma Shearer on one of my favorite sites: It'll take the snap out of your garters. I love that site because it's so generous ... Look at the number of unbelievable photos she has dug up - many of which I have never ever seen.

LOVE it.

Academy Award winner Norma Shearer had a very interesting life (more here) - actually, that whole Shearer family is interesting. Athole Shearer - Norma's sister - married Howard Hawks - which is how I came to know so much about her, from all of my reading about him. She was bipolar - and many of the stories surrounding Athole are heart-wrenching. Because of the era - such things as bipolar disorder were barely understood, let alone discussed - and Athole had a torment of a time.

But Norma married Irving Thalberg (talk about interesting people!) - there's something about her face that is quite distinct for me. It's pretty - but it's also not perfect. It is flawed - like most of us are flawed. She looks real, even with all the pancake makeup on. She always looks like herself (in the way that modern-day actresses usually look like themselves.) Unlike many other actresses at that time, who can seem generically glamorous - Shearer doesn't. The studios owned you, then - they controlled your look, your persona, and armies of makeup artists worked to make you look like an MGM star, as opposed to a Warner Brothers star - etc - each studio had its own THING ...

But Norma Shearer, with her drooping eyes, and interesting smart face, is definitely somehow set apart. And she was before she married Thalberg, too - lest anyone cry favoritism!!

Anyway, go check out the amazing gallery.

Lt. Ormer Locklear

Really interesting stuff.

A stove

I can't stop looking at this photo

The Books: "Hunts in Dreams" (Tom Drury)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

Hunts in Dreams - by Tom Drury

My sister Siobhan turned me on to this writer - she adores him - and she gave me this book for Christmas some years ago. It tells the story of a family, over a particularly intense 4 day period - and one of the cool things about the book is that it switches narrative points of view. We're inside Charles - the father - or we're inside Micah - the young son ... Lyris, the daughter - or whatever. I read one of the Amazon reviews that said: "You could call this novel warm and funny and you wouldn't be wrong, although wry and weirdly edgy is probably closer to the mark." I like that. It's not angst-ridden, but it's certainly not without its bleakness either. And Drury knows how to write dialogue - it's quite amazing, actually - you can hear the voices so clearly. It doesn't feel like you're reading when you read his dialogue - it feels like you're eavesdropping.

The excerpt below is a great example. This feels like a totally real conversation to me. And also: hmmm, how to put this. It feels like nothing is going on - at first - it's just some banter in a tavern. But there's an edge to it. Something is underneath. And Drury does this without saying a WORD of narration. It's in the dialogue itself. You can FEEL it, rather than just read about it. I looooooove dialogue like that. It's a rare rare writer who can pull it off.

Like: "when the pickled egg was king" ????

Funny!

EXCERPT FROM Hunts in Dreams - by Tom Drury

Earl the deputy stopped by the tavern a couple hours into his nightly rounds. A sign on the wall said that the maximum number of people allowed on the premises was ninety-five, but there were only seven in the tavern, counting the bartender. "How's the old shillelagh?" he asked Earl.

"No complaints," said Earl. "Give me a Pepsi and a pickled egg."

The bartender uncapped a jar of brine and reached in with tongs. "I'm thinking of discontinuing these. We hardly sell any of them."

"Not like the old days," said the deputy, "when the pickled egg was king."

The bartender put the egg on a sheet of wax paper and handed it over. "Why, the sidewalk would be jammed with people, each with their own egg."

"That was the heyday of the steam-powered adding machine."

"Now everything's changed except the jokes."

"Old jokes for old men."

"All maintenance, here on out."

"How true."

Earl took the egg and the Pepsi to the back of the tavern and pressed coins into the metal sleeve of the pool table. The cast-resin balls rattled down the open shelf. He walked around the table, setting up trick shots. He ate the egg, which had the consistency of glue.

The young man named Follard came over and put quarters on the rail for a game of last-pocket. Follard shot from a crouch, peering over the edge of the table.

"You guys break up a party tonight?" he said.

"Not me."

"Then who would it have been?"

Earl shrugged and sank a bank shot he had no business making.

"Well, I heard some kids got their keg taken from a party at the Elephant."

"Entirely possible, but it's nothing I've heard of," said Earl. "And these were cops that did it?"

"So it was told to me," said Follard.

Earl took a five-dollar bill from his shirt pocket and folded it into a sleeve, which he slid down the cue, ferrule to joint. "What am I again?"

"Little ones."

"I can't even remember what I am. That's where my head is at."

"I got a knife off them."

"Off who?"

"The ones who told me about the party."

"They just offered it up. Out of generosity."

"Out of something. They don't know where it went."

"Well, Follard, what'd you take it for? You see, this is how you get in trouble."

Follard reached under the table for the bridge.

"The ladies' aid," commented Earl.

Follard held the butt of the bridge in one hand and fitted the cue intently into the brass notch. "To tell you the truth, I don't even know why I did it."

"Don't think I won't run you in."

"For a little jackknife? Put it this way: it would surprise me."

"Let me see it."

"I gave it to a girl."

Earl folded his arms with the cue against his badge. "I ought to rough you up or something."

"Why do you say that?"

"I don't know. It's just a feeling. Like it would be an ounce of prevention."

"Well, she's more deserving than the one who lost it. In a sense, I did a good thing."

"I doubt it," said Earl.

"experiments in life"

AS Byatt's must-read essay on George Eliot's Middlemarch.

Excerpt:

When I was younger it was fashionable to criticise Eliot for writing from a god's eye view, as though she were omniscient. Her authorial commenting voice appeared old-fashioned. It was felt she should have chosen a limited viewpoint, or written from inside her characters only. I came to see that this is nonsense. If a novelist tells you something she knows or thinks, and you believe her, that is not because either of you think she is God, but because she is doing her work - as a novelist.

It made me want to read Middlemarch again - but that's normal: Byatt usually makes me want to read Eliot!!

"Lois?"

Wow.

Oops. Wrong date.

A very funny letter.

The Books: "The Brothers Karamazov " (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Next book on my adult fiction shelves:

The Brothers Karamazov - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky - oh, and the link I provided there does not go to the translation I read. I read the Constance Garnett translation - on purpose - she really doesn't bug me like she bugs other people. I get why she is out of favor now - I just don't share that view. I read her Crime and Punishment, her Anna K ... The language does have a formality to it, that some people might find off-putting or too old-fashioned - but to me, it "goes" with the book. I didn't have a problem with it. But there are more recent translations of the book that are highly praised as well - so if you haven't read it, you'd just have to look around for one that suits you.

I read The Brothers Karamazov for the first time in 2004. I found an exhilarated post I wrote about it (but of course, at this point in the baseball season, I am merely struck by the fateful DATE of that post!!) And here's the post I wrote when I finished it. I remember that sensation: of forcing myself to slow down my reading speed as I neared the end of the book, because I so dreaded it to end. Not that it would be a sad ending, but that I was upset that the experience I was having with that book would soon be over. It's tremendous, one of the greatest novels ever written. It's an examination of faith, family, Russia, love, justice - and it stays with you long after it is over. I reference it quite often in my mind. I'm never done with it - it's not a book you read, put down, and move on. It percolates. Sometimes it nags. It makes you question things. It does not have A side. It shows all side. Ivan Karamazov isn't the star of the book - it's divided up between Dmitri and Alyosha and Ivan ... the three "aspects" of the Russian character, as Dostoevsky sees it - and each gets equal time. Alyosha is the spiritual one, the man of faith (in the best sense). Dmitri is spoiled, indulged, a man of great appetites - and Ivan (my favorite) is the tormented intellectual. Alyosha does emerge as the compass of the thing - which is not surprising, considering Dostoevsky's views on human nature, and the value of suffering. The end of Crime and Punishment, with its searing redemption - for ALL - is also Alyosha's journey, and it is not an easy one. Alyosha, a man not just determined to see the good in his fellow man - but under an obligation to do so - is constantly rocked by the suffering and sorrow around him - not just in the town, and in Russia - but in his own family. How did that family, with all its issues, produce him?

The "Grand Inquisitor" chapter is something you hear about often when people talk about this book - it's usually one of the first things mentioned. I went into it knowing some of the context of it, knowing: "Oh. Here is that famous chapter" - so I almost geared up for it, I tried to go into it fresh - to just let myself experience it for the first time, without all the commentary I'd heard about it trickle down and influence my response. I had to calm down, literally, as I went into that chapter. "Okay, Sheila. Breathe. Just start it. And take it slow." I read someone say in an Amazon review that it (the "Grand Inquisitor" chapter) is one of the most "spine-tingling critiques of organized religion ever written". And is it ever. It was so brilliant that I found myself actually blocking it out AS I read it. I couldn't deal with it. Then I had to take a break, clear the ol' noggin', and go back to it. It wasn't that it was dense, or intellectual - it was that it was like a laser beam of light cutting me in half, and it was too intense.

The whole book felt like that (well, except for the Father Zossima section which felt, frankly, endless to me - but once I finished the book, I realized why it was there. The book would not be the same without it.)

If you haven't had the pleasure of reading this feast of intellect and soul and passion: do yourself a favor.

It's a book that you will never forget.

I had a helluva time picking an excerpt. I wanted to stay far away from the Grand Inquisitor chapter - because to excerpt that would feel just WRONG ... and I wanted to stay away from the defense attorneys speech and the prosecutors speech at the end of the book (again: SO brilliant and thought-provoking: each side having their say. Dostoevsky, dude. I tip my hat to you!!) This is one of the best crime novels ever written. With an AWESOME trial.

So I decided to excerpt from a long conversation (it spans many chapters) between the brothers Ivan and Alyosha ... it culminates in the Grand Inquisitor chapter - they obviously are talking (arguing) about God. Religion. Suffering. Russia. Classic Russian stuff. Ivan dominates this particular argument - it's his "turn" to speak without interruption. And he does.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM The Brothers Karamazov - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"I must make one confession," Ivan began. "I could never understand how one can love one's neighbors. It's just one's neighbors, to my mind, that one can't love, though one might love those who live at a distance. I once read somewhere of the saint, John the Merciful. When a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced that he did that from 'self-laceration', from self-laceration of falseness, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone."

"Father Zossima has talked of that more than once," observed Alyosha. "He, too, said that the face of a man often hinders people not practiced in love, from loving him. But yet there's a great deal of love in mankind, an almost Christ-like love. I know that myself, Ivan."

"Well, I know nothing of it so far, and can't understand it, and the mass of mankind are with me there. The question is, whether this lack of ability to love is due to men's bad qualities or whether it's inherent in their nature. To my thinking, Christ-like love for men is a miracle impossible on earth. He was God. But we are not gods. Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely. Another can never know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. And what's more, a man is rarely ready to admit another's suffering. Why won't he admit it, do you think? Because I smell unpleasant, because I have a stupuid face, because I once trod on his foot. Besides there is suffering and suffering; degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me - hunger, for instance. But when you come to higher suffering - for an idea, for instance - he will very rarely admit it, perhaps because my face he thinks is not the face of a man who suffers for an idea. And so he deprives me instantly of his favor, and not at all from badness of heart. Beggars, especially genteel beggars, should never show themselves, but ask for charity through the newspapers.

"One can love one's neighbors in the abstract, or even at a distance, but at close quarters it's almost impossible. If it were as on the stage, in the ballet, where if beggars come in, they wear silken rags and tattered lace and beg for alms dancing gracefully, then one might enjoy looking at them. But even then we should not love them. But enough of that. I simply wanted to show you my point of view. I meant to speak of the suffering of mankind generally. But we had better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children. That reduces the scope of my argument to a tenth of what it would be. Still we'd better keep to children, though it does weaken my case. But, in the first place, children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when they are ugly. The second reason why I won't speak of grown-up people is that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation - they've eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they have become 'like god'. They go on eating it still. But children haven't eaten anything, and are innocent. Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they, too, suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers' sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple. But that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another's sins, and especially such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am awfully fond of children, too. And remember, cruel people, the violent, the rapacious, the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children. Children whil they are quite little - up to seven, for instance - are so remote from grown-up people; they are different creatures, as it were, of a different species. I knew a criminal in prison who had murdered whole families, including several children. But when he was in prison, he had a strange affection for them. He spent all his time at his window watching the children playing in the prison yard. He trained one little boy to come up to his window and made friends with him ... You don't know why I am telling you all this, Alyosha? My head aches and I am sad."

"You speak in such a strange way," observed Alyosha uneasily, "as though you were not quite yourself."

"By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow," Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother's words, "told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in Bulgaria through fear of a general uprising of the Slavs. They burned villages, murdered, outraged women and children, they nailed their prisoners by the ears to the fences, left them till morning, and in the morning they hanged them -- all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts: A beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took pleasure in torturing children, too; cutting the unborn child from the mother's womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother's eyes. Doing it before the mother's eyes was what gave zest to the amusement. Here is another scene that I thought very interesting. Imagine a trembling mother with her baby in her arms, a circle of invading Turks around her. They've planned a game; they pet the baby, laugh to make it laugh. They succeed, the baby laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol four inches from the baby's face. The baby laughs, holds out its little hands to the pistol, and the Turk pulls the trigger in the baby's face and blows out its brains. Artistic, wasn't it? By the way, Turks are particularly fond of sweet things, they say."

"Ivan, what are you driving at?" asked Alyosha.

"I think if the devil doesn't exist, then man has created him. He has created him in his own image and likeness."

"Just as man created God, then?" observed Alyosha.

" 'It's wonderful how you can turn words,' as Polonius says in Hamlet," laughed Ivan. "You turn my words against me. Well, I am glad. Yours must be a fine God, if man created Him in His image and likeness. You asked just now what I was driving at. You see, I like to collect certain facts, and, would you believe, I even copy anecdotes of a certain sort from newspapers and books. I've already got a fine collection. The Turks, of course, are included, but they are foreigners. I have Russian examples that are even better than the Turks. You know we prefer beating - rods and scourges - that's our national institution. Nailing ears is unthinkable for us, for we are, after all, Europeans. But the rod and the scourge we have always with us and they cannot be taken from us. Abroad now they scarcely do any beating. Manners are more humane, or laws have been passed, so that they don't dare to flog men now. But they make up for it in another way just as national as ours. It isso national that it would be practically impossible among us, though I believe we are being inoculated with it, since the religious movement began in our aristocracy.

"I have a charming pamphlet translated from the French describing how, quite recently, five years ago, a murderer, Richard, was executed - a young man, I believe, of twenty-three, who repented and was converted to the Christian faith at the scaffold. This Richard was illegitimate and had been given as a child of six by his parents to some shepherds on the Swiss mountains. They brought him up to work for them. He grew up like a wild beast among them. The shepherds taught him nothing, and scarcely fed or clothed him, but sent him out at seven to herd the flock in cold and wet, and no one hesitated to treat him in this way. On the contrary, they thought they had every right, for Richard had been given to them as chattel, and they did not even see the necessity of feeding him. Richard himself described how in those years, like the Prodigal Son in the Gospel, he longed to eat of the mash given to the pigs, which were fattened for sale. But they wouldn't even give him that, and beat him when he stole from the pigs. And that was how he spent all his childhood and his youth, till he grew up and was strong enough to go away and be a thief. The savage began to earn his living as a day laborer in Geneva. He drank what he earned, he lived like a brute, and finished by killing and robbing an old man. He was caught, tried, and condemned to death. They are not sentimentalists there. And in prison he was immediately surrounded by pastors, members of Christian brotherhoods, philanthropic ladies, and the like. They taught him to read and write in prison, and expounded the Gospel to him. They exhorted him, worked upon him, drummed at him incessantly, till at last he solemnly confessed his crime. He was converted. He wrote to the court himself that he was a monster, but that in the end God had given him light and shown him grace.

"All Geneva was excited about him - all philanthropic and religious Geneva. All the aristocratic and well-bred society of the town rushed to the prison kissed Richard and embraced him: 'You are our brother, you have found grace.' And Richard did nothing but weep with emotion: 'Yes, I've found grace! All my youth and childhood I was glad of pigs' food, but now even I have found grace. I am dying in the Lord.' 'Yes, Richard, die in the Lord; you have shed blood and you must die. Though it's not your fault that you knew not the Lord, when you coveted the pigs' food and were beaten for stealing it (which was very wrong of you, for stealing is forbidden); but you've shed blood and you must die.' And on the last day, Richard, perfectly limp, did nothing but cry and repeat every minute: 'This is my happiest day. I am going to the Lord.' 'Yes,' cried the pastors and the judges and philanthropic ladies. 'This is the happiest day of your life, for you are going to the Lord!' They all walked or drove to the scaffold behind the prison van. At the scaffold they called to Richard: 'Die, brother, die in the Lord, for even thou hast found grace!' And so, covered with his brothers' kisses, Richard was dragged to the scaffold, and led to the guillotine. And they chopped off his head in brotherly fashion, because he had found grace. Yes, that's characteristic. That pamphlet is translated into Russian by some Russian philanthropists of aristocratic rank and evangelical aspirations, and has been distributed gratis for the enlightenment of our people.

"Richard's case is interesting because it's national. Though to us it's absurd to cut off a man's head, because he has become our brother and has found grace, yet we have our own specialty, which is worse. Our historical pastime is the direct satisfaction of inflicting pain. There are lines in Nekrassov describing how a peasant lashes a horse on the eyes, 'on its meek eyes,' everyone must have seen it. It's typically Russian. He describes how a feeble little nag had foundered under too heavy a load and could not move. The peasant beats it, beats it savagely, beats it at last not knowing what he is doing in the intoxication of cruelty. He thrashes it mercilessly over and over again. 'However weak you are, you must pull, even if you die doing it.' The nag strains, and then he begins lashing the poor defenseless creature on its weeping, on its 'meek eyes'. The frantic beast tugs and draws the load, trembling all over, gasping for breath, moving sideways, with a sort of unnatural spasmodic action - it's awful. But that's only a horse, and God has given horses to be beaten. So the Tatars have taught us, and they left us the knout as a remembrance of it.

"But men, too, can be beaten. A well-educated, cultured man and his wife beat their own child with a birch rod, a girl of seven. I have an account of it. The father was glad that the birch was covered with twigs. 'It stings more,' said he, and so he began stinging his daughter. I know for a fact that there are people who at every blow are worked up to sensuality, to literal sensuality, which increases progressively at every blow they inflict. They beat for a minute, for five minutes, for ten minutes, more often and more savagely. The child screams. At last the child cannot scream, it gasps, 'Daddy! daddy!' By some diabolical unseemly chance the case was brought into court. A lawyer is engaged. The Russian people have long called a lawyer 'a conscience for hire'. The lawyer protests in his client's defense. 'It's such a simple thing,' he says, 'an everyday occurrence. A father punishes his child. To our shame be it said, it is brought into court.' The jury, convinced by him, give a favorable verdict. The public roars with delight that the torturer is acquitted. Ah, pity I wasn't there! I would have proposed to raise a subscription in his honor! ... Charming pictures.

"But I've still better things about children. I've collected a great, great deal about Russian children, Alyosha. There was a little girl of five who was hated by her father and mother, 'most worthy and respectable people, of good education and breeding'. You see, I must repeat again, it is a peculiar characteristic of many people, this love of torturing children and children only. To all other type of humanity these torturers behave mildly and kindly, like cultivated and humane Europeans. But they are very fond of tormenting children. It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor, just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets the tormentor's vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden - the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat at the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on.

"This poor child of five was subjected to every possible torture by those cultivated parents. They beat her, kicked her for no reason till her body was on ebruise. Then, they went to greater refinements of cruelty - shut her up all night in the cold and frost in a privy, because she didn't ask to be taken up at night (as though a child of five sleeping its sound sleep could be trained to wake and ask), they smeared her face and filled her mouth with excrement. It was her mother, her mother who did this. And that mother could sleep, hearing her poor child's groans! Can you understand why a little creature, who can't even understand what's done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her? Do you understand that, Alyosha, you pious and humble novice? Do you understand why this infamy must be and is permitted? Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth, for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he know that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much? Why, the whole world of knowledge is not worth that child's prayer to 'dear, kind God'. I say nothing of the sufferings of grown-up people, they have eaten the apple, damn them, and the devil take them all! But these little ones! ... I am making you suffer, Alyosha. I'll stop if you like."

"Never mind. I want to suffer too," muttered Alyosha.

I Heart ...

New York Daily Photo for interesting posts like this one: a photo and a small post about Myers of Keswick. New York really is just a conglomeration of small neighborhoods. Follow his links - they're all really fascinating.

I am not a Brit, but I've shopped in that store. I love the details he puts in his small posts to go along with each photo. He gets all this great information I didn't know - and it's presented in a lovely open manner, I think. That site is now a daily stop for me.

Along these same lines, here is the daily poem on Garrison Keillor's site (another daily pitstop for me). It's connected to what that New York Daily Photo site makes me feel like, and also my general feeling these days - with autumn approaching, and the city sidewalks seeming renewed and crisp, the air moving, the Hudson blue and sharp. Autumn in New York, now, is understandably connected with melancholy and grief. But it's all part of it. I feel like a stranger here in the humid stinky sticky filthy summer. Fall is my season.

Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets (I posted about her here) Here's her poem below. Love it.

"Letter to N.Y." by Elizabeth Bishop
For Louise Crane

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

“I’d sell my grandmother for a cup of water.”

Backstage at Edwin Drood. I'm dying ... I don't even know these people, but I love them for being so funny.

Quantum Leap: Season 1, Episode 1: Genesis

Part 3! The leap OUT of Tom Stratton and the leap IN to Tim Fox, 3rd baseman for the Waco Bombers!

Part 1
Part 2

Sam (as Tom Stratton) stands quietly by the X-2 in the big hangar. There is a feeling of reverence in his gestures, and in the music. Reverence because it's a beautiful machine and he has no idea how to fly it. He will have to fly it tomorrow. He will be dropped out of the belly of a big jet and be expected to break Mach 3. There's a loneliness sometimes to the character of Sam Beckett - especially in this first episode when he doesn't quite trust Al yet - and he's more alarmed when Al shows up, rather than relieved. Al, who has basically had it with the Swiss Cheese effect, pops into 1956, standing right by the nose of the plane, scaring Sam half to death. They have this dialogue which, for me, encapsulates what is so funny and great about the show:

Sam: (startled at Al's appearance) Can't you just 'fade in'???
Al: (irritated, gesturing all over the place in true Stockwell fashion) You tell me how to 'fade in' agitated carbon quarks and I'll make the Scientific Journal!

It is in this scene by the airplane that Al finally catches Sam up to speed on "Project Quantum Leap" - using the piece of string as an example - although he doesn't yet reveal that the entire thing is Sam's brainchild - that comes later. For now, he just has to give him the basics of what is going on. A. I'm a hologram tuned into your brain waves. B. You can leap around in time within the span of your own lifetime. Sam starts to remember things - although pieces are missing. The name "Ziggy" is familiar to him. He is confused. But he's starting to get into the swing of the thing. It's in this scene by the plane that the whole "make things right" theory is spoken for the first time (although, thankfully, it is spoken by Dean Stockwell - who gives a cynical "whatEVER" spin to it, rolling his eyes apathetically - so it doesn't come off as earnest, sincere, ie: disgusting.) Al is basically throwing it out there as a theory, good or bad as any other.

(Oh. And my favorite moment in this scene? Sam gets alarmed when Al walks THRU the plane. Grumbles, "Can't you walk around it next time?" Al stops, with that flat dead look on his face that I find so funny - remarks, "You want me to walk around something that isn't there?" He deliberately walks around the nose of the plane, with such an annoyed bored air, like: fine, I'll humor you. "All right, I'll walk around it!" It's just the dynamic in that moment - and Stockwell's face. Makes me laugh.)

So. Tom Stratton, we learn, was killed back in 1956 the following day trying to break Mach-3. Al thinks that Sam has to break Mach-3 and live. Sam's panic starts to bubble up. Dude - I CAN'T FLY. "I can help you." Al says. "You're a hologram!" "I'm also an ex-astronaut." I love this part of Al Calavicci: the military dude, the guy who is NOT a fuck-up, the one who knows how to do shit. The one who, even with being a wild man, respects the rules of something enough to learn how to do it, and do it well. Like fly a rocket, for God's sake. It gives a great nuance to the character. He's old-school. He went to MIT. He's smart (and not just "street smart" - he's book smart too), and kind of no-nonsense about things when it counts. It's a nice balance. (Oh - and in the scene outside the hangar, as Sam is panicking, and Al is trying to calm him down - there's a great moment where Scott Bakula imitates Dean Stockwell: "That's called ...'DEATH'" and he imitates Dean's gestures. Al is a bit of a creature to be mocked, even though he's smart, and Sam's lifeline back to the present. I mean, the bolo ties, the silver shoes, the over-the-top gestures, the ubiquitous cigar ... Seeing Sam DO Al back to Al in that moment is very satisfying and funny ("That's called .... DEATH" I like Sam then. A lot.)

The next morning - SEPTEMBER 13, 1956- is the big day!

My question is this: Al doesn't show up until AFTER the X-2 has dropped. Thanks a LOT, Al. As Sam is being strapped in, he looks around him, saying, "Al? Albert? Al?" Now maybe it's just me: but don't you think someone should have said something?? Like: Dude. Who is Al. You have a huge dangerous mission right now. Focus. FOCUS. And as the X-2 is dropped out into the wild blue yonder, we can hear Sam scream, at the top of his lungs, "AAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLL!" Bruce McGill, on the ground, is like, "Is there a problem?" And poof - this is when Al appears, in the X-2 with Sam ... ready to walk him through the steps. But Sam has a couple of lines of dialogue with Al - like, "Where the hell were you?" Etc. Wouldn't someone on the ground ask him, "Are you talking to us? Who are you talking to ?" Any conversation he has in that jet - anything he says out loud - will be heard by multiple people. But nobody says anything! And he says things that are obviously NOT about Mach-3 or whatever. Like Al, sitting there in the cockpit, basically on top of Sam (I love those shots) says, "Sorry I'm late. I was at a Lakers game." Sam, rightfully so, is furious. "You almost didn't get here because of a BASKETBALL game??" (Now: wouldn't someone on the ground say: "Basketball? Who are you talking to?")

Al, having left a woman named Martha back in his bed, sits there, and coolly walks Sam through the steps. He's a hologram, so he can't touch anything, of course - just shows Sam what to do, tells him which rockets to fire off, and also tells him what to say back to the dudes on the ground. This, for me, is classic Al Calavicci - and Tommy is right when he says that that character was "set" from this first episode. You know how sometimes you watch early episodes of a show that later becomes a hit ... and you can feel the actors haven't settled in yet? They're still psyched to have a job - and THAT shows - or they're working too hard - or the writing isn't really there yet ... The whole thing is still a bit unsettled. This is definitively NOT the case with Al Calavicci. I think a lot of that has to do with the writing, but naturally - most of it has to do with how Dean Stockwell plays it. I have no idea who Dean Stockwell is, as a man - but at least as Al Calavicci, he seems totally comfortable inside his own skin. He NEVER pushes, he never hams ... he never tips over into maudlin behavior ... He keeps Al's edges sharp, a little bit jagged - and a lot of the humor comes from that. It's wonderful to watch. First episode. It's all there.

Then comes the tense "action" sequence where Sam is pushing the plane to Mach-3.

And with the explosion - we're back in the little house - and we see the ubiquitous glass coffee pot - explode from the sound waves.

A metaphor, I suppose ... we don't see the wife's reaction ... but we see her coffee pot exploding, and that tells us all we need to know.

There is a MARVELOUS slow-mo shot of debris falling to the desert from the sky. SO well done. And then, we see Sam - who has ejected - AFTER breaking Mach-3 - crumple to the ground, his parachute billowing around him. Ouch. Ouch. It takes Sam a while to realize the import of what has happened ... and how much it sucks. I mean, yay for Tom Stratton, but BOO for Sam Beckett! He peers across the desert and sees all the emergency rescue vehicles screaming towards him in clouds of dust, and the voiceover is back: "Why didn't I leap? Al?? Why didn't I leap???"

There's a VERY funny sequence where Sam is in the ambulance, racing across the desert - the doctor is checking his heartrate, blah blah, talking to him ... and poof, Al appears. The script here is great - because the doctor is talking, Sam is talking to Al, Al is talking to Sam ... but the doctor only hears Sam's responses of course - so he's responding to what Sam is saying to Al ... it's a melee of dialogue and it's very well done, very funny. Al, meanwhile, is chagrined and a little bit embarrassed because his big "if you break Mach 3 and live you'll leap" theory obviously didn't pan out. He can barely look Sam in the eye, and he is also distracted because he left "a dish named Martha" in his bed and if she wakes up "and finds me not there ... without me even saying 'good morning' ... that's just ... not nice ..." Sam is dumbfounded. A DISH NAMED MARTHA takes precedence over why I didn't leap? Are you kidding me??? But Al is gone. To take care of his complicated personal life, leaving Sam to figure the rest out. Which he does.

At the hospital it is revealed that Peg has gone into premature labor at the sound of the crash (coffee pot exploding). This is 1956. It is a situation of: save the mother's lilfe or the baby's life. The doctor explains to Sam that the nearest neo-natal clinic is in LA but he doesn't feel he can risk moving Peggy. It's dire. (I just have to give a shoutout to WK Stratton - who plays the military medical doctor. WONDERFUL actor, with a pinched-up funny face ... he actually shows up again in Quantum Leap - in Season 5 - he plays a recurring role in one of the multi-part leaps, and Sam actually ends up leaping into his character in Part 3. He's a lovely actor. And I love how he deals with Sam in these hospital scenes. Good stuff.) Sam, in the moments in the hallway, sort of realizes - without realizing it consciously - that he knows how to stop labor. He starts to babble technical terms at the doctors - but then says (what must be to them) very confusing things like, "Those didn't come out til the late 70s!" Etc. Sometimes the reactions of other people are ... er ... NOT so realistic. Like: if I suddenly said I was a doctor, would someone believe me? Like - there is an argument in the hallway (again, wonderfully played by all parties - but just not realistic) - where Sam - who is supposed to be Tom Stratton - a PILOT - suddenly is talking like a doctor - and he's so specific about it that the other doctors, who are faced with losing a patient, take it on faith and decide to try his suggestions. Uhm, can you say law suit?? Hahahaha. Oh, and there's also a funny moment when Peg is having a contraction and Sam holds onto her and says, "Look at me - do what I do ..." and he shows her a Lamaze breathing method, which she imitates - as everyone looks on, like: what the hell is THAT?

Of course, though, his suggestions work. They give her an IV full of Deenedrienke and diruefdkudextrose (whatevs) ... which stops labor and gets her "instantly drunk". Here is where Doris Day comes back into the picture. Peg, wasted, lies in the hospital bed, singing "Que Sera Sera" at the top of her lungs. The doctors are relieved, yet confused. How ... how did he know ... how ...?

The "real" Tom Stratton is going to have a lot of explaining to do when he returns from the future.

That's another weird unanswered thing from the show. When the real person leaps back - and Sam leaps out ... how do they adjust to the new reality? Won't everyone around them be like, "Man, you have been acting SO WEIRD for the last couple days ..." How will they not remember sitting in that futuristic Waiting Room? I can't remember if it's ever explained or not ... how they deal with the person who has leapt out ... and how they "erase" the memory of having been ejected from their own lives into some alternate reality for 4 or 5 days. Like - won't Tom Stratton be asked, "How did you know all that medical stuff?" And wouldn't Tom Stratton say, "I DON'T know any medical stuff."??

Obviously - Sam was not put here JUST to make sure that Tom Stratton survived. Sam was put there to make sure that Peg and the unborn baby also survived. He goes to the window, where his son and Birddog are waiting below, nervously - and gives them a thumbs up. Call me corny, but the response of Birddog (he starts clapping, huge smile on his face) - and the elated look on the son's face - brings a lump to my throat, and I'm sitting here typing, with tears in my eyes. Yeah, I'm a geek. It doesn't take much for me to "believe", let's just say that. I know there are holes in the show, but if it works on an emotional level (and for me, for the most part, it does) - that's what I'm in it for. And that shot - from above - with Birddog clapping and laughing, and the beaming face of his son - makes me realize that I have come to kind of care about Peggy Stratton and her husband - and I'm glad she's okay. She's a fictional character. I'll never meet her again. But I'm glad she's okay. That's the simple level of reality the show is meant to work on. And it DOES.

The son - overjoyed - throws a baseball up into the air - we follow its arc - and (for the only time in the series history) - we do NOT "see" the leap. We do not see Sam engulfed in blue lightning. We HEAR the leap - but we're watching the baseball fly up into the air - and then boom - we're back ... only now we see Sam, baseball glove in the air, catching the ball - the same ball thrown up to him by his son - only ... Sam is now in a baseball uniform ... on a baseball field ...

and ... what???

Poor Sam. Leaps must be terrifying. Like: waking up and there you are ... on the spot ... in somebody else's life ... It is funny, too - like Tommy mentions: whoever (God, or time) is leaping Sam around has a sick sense of humor. Wouldn't it be okay to have Sam leap into someone who was asleep? Or who was in a calm moment where nothing big is happening? Why does he always leap in medias res? Can't you give Sam a little break here, please?? So. Okay. Sam is on a baseball field. It's a night game. There are people in the stands shouting at him, "What are you ... posing for a picture?" The inning is over, it's time for him to run back to the dugout, but he ... still half-attached to Tom Stratton's life ... isn't sure where he is yet, or what has happened. This is his first "sideways" leap, remember. He thought when he leapt out of Tom Stratton, he'd leap back into 1999 - into himself ... but no. It didn't work that way. OBVIOUSLY.

To quote Al Calavicci: "You are part of a time travel experiment that went ... a little caca."

A little caca indeed.

Sam, a fast learner, doesn't spend this particular leap telling everyone around him that he's not who he looks like. He succumbs. Runs back to the dugout. Playing along until he figures out what's going on, or until Al shows up and he can tear him a new asshole for messing up his leap. Again! I love the dynamic in the dugout - it all feels very real to me. Like - Donald Bellisario - who wrote this epiosde, not only knows the world of test pilots - but is also a baseball fan. For example - one of the Waco Bombers is at bat. A pitch comes, dude swings and misses. The crusty perpetually angry coach turns around and bellows at the team in the dugout, "Next son of a gun who swings at the first pitch ... I'm gonna fine 50 bucks!" (If Nomar were on that team, he'd be fined every time he went to bat!!) Anyway, that bit of dialogue could only come from someone who knows baseball.

Sam, no idea who he is, what has happened, sidles back into the dugout ... his name is "Fox" apparently ... he's trying to act all nonchalant, like, "Yeah, I'm this guy, whatever, I'm TOTALLY this guy ..." when Al shows up. In a shimmery silver jacket and a purple shirt. Smoking his cigar, staring out at the baseball game, completely unconcerned with anything that has "gone wrong". His mind is not at all on Quantum Leaping. He wants to watch the game. Sam tries to pull him aside ... "I need to talk to you ..." "I want to watch the game!" Al is like a recalcitrant bratty little kid here, it's hilarious. Like: DUDE. FOCUS. The ONLY thing you should be thinking about is MY WELL-BEING! "But I want to watch the game!"

Favorite line in the "baseball leap" - and how Stockwell says it - it makes me laugh every time, and I won't be able to describe it - you just have to keep your eye out for it: It's in this first scene, they're in the dugout. Someone on the field has gotten a hit and a couple of the players in the dugout clap, lackadaisacally. Al, noticing this, says flatly, "No wonder they're in the cellar. They've got about as much enthusiasm as a ten dollar hooker." Please just watch HOW he says that line. How his eyes go to slits, contemptuous slits ... And the way he says "ten dollar hooker" - you know he speaks from painful experience. It's just hilarious.

Sam finally gets Al down into the locker room - but it is still some time before Sam can get Al to focus on why he did not leap back, and who he has leapt into this time. Al is not concerned about why things went wrong - he tells Sam about the party they've been having over the last week, celebrating the fact that the Quantum Leap worked in the first place. The party went until all hours of the night and appears to have turned into some kind of orgy. Again, Sam doesn't want to hear any of the details, but the snippets we get are so stupid and funny. Like: your colleague is leaping through time, and you're printing out pornographic pictures and making out with "Brenda from coding"???

Al, though, starts to take on the role that he will take through the rest of the series. He shows up with some information about where/who/what/when. He tells Sam the backstory of this Tim Fox - a baseball player who broke his leg in the majors and was sent down to recover. It's been 5 years - he's never been called back up again. This whole leap is a takeoff on The Natural - Al even makes a Roy Hobbs reference later - and also, when Sam eventually does go to bat - he's a leftie. (Scott Bakula, in one of the little interviews, says that watching his swing in slow-mo hurts him to this day - because he's not a leftie - but he IS a pretty good baseball player - so he still wishes that he had said to the powers that be, "You know what? I need to bat righthanded ... this isn't gonna look good.")

I'm actually kind of unclear on what Sam is supposed to "put right" in this leap. There is no big drama, no 8 Men Out background, no murder impending, no "you must marry this woman or all will be lost" urgency. In the real game (which is in 1968) - Tim Fox "flied out". And I guess that's what Sam is supposed to do ... but ... I don't know ... if anyone can tell me what needs to be "put right" in Tim Fox's life, that would be great.

It's in this "leap" that Ziggy starts to take on shape as a character. Ziggy is a computer. But Al tells Sam that Ziggy is "depressed" because "he messed up the leap". How can a computer be depressed? Al says, "He has a big ego." (I won't harp too much on the fact that in Season 3 it is revealed that Ziggy has a sexy woman's voice and everyone starts referring to her as "she". It's just one of those things that happens over a long series. I must accept that!!)

I love the following exchange between Al and Sam. Al hears the crowd cheering above and gets irritated. "I want to watch the game!" he says for the 10th time. Sam says, "You already know what happens!" And like a flash, Al is up in Sam's face, saying (and you gotta watch how Stockwell says this ... and the gestures ... and the pauses ... I won't bore you with taking you thru it beat to beat ... it's just a delicious moment of ridiculous human behavior): Al says, emphatically, lasciviously, with gestures galore: "I knew what would happen when I took Brenda into the filing room." Long pause. "I still took her."

Ba-dum- CHING!!

We also get more backstory about Sam Beckett. Al lets him know that he has 6 doctorates. He gives him an update on Tom Stratton - Peggy gave wife to a healthy baby girl - and they lived happily ever after. Sam is still baffled at why "they" cannot retrieve him. He gets annoyed. "Who designed this ziggy, anyway?"

Al finally speaks the truth. "You, Sam. So. If there's one guy who can figure out how to bring you back .... it's you, Sam."

(This goes along with the "who's running this show" theme that comes up time and time again - and is the main focus of the very last episode in the series. God, or time, or whoever is leaping Sam around? Or maybe ... it's just Sam himself? Could that be? Despite his desire to 'go back'? Like Al told him in the earlier Tom Stratton section: "We tried to retrieve you this morning. You wouldn't leap!")

So Sam now knows the truth. He will leap. Around. Until he can figure out a way to leap "back" into himself. And Al, against his better judgment, against the advice of Ziggy and everyone - tells Sam his last name. Which is Beckett.

Sam realizes - by himself in the dugout - that it is only 1968 ... which means his father is still alive. Contacting his father had come into his head in the Tom Stratton leap, only he didn't know his own last name. Now, though, he actually ... could speak to his father ... who has been dead for 20 years.

All I can say is: great work, Scott Bakula, on that phone conversation. Not too cheesy, not too self-pitying ... it's what you would do ... if you could talk to your dead father, and NOT let him know that it was you, from the future. (Uhm, what?) He's holding back a tsunami of emotion, he's pretending to be a long-lost nephew ... and there his father is, on the other end, being kind and supportive ... sweet ... and Sam is just having a helluva time not LOSING it ... listening to, and remembering, the simple homely kindness of his dead father. And how much he misses him. And still loves him. It's lovely work - that's where the series (for me) really operates - on that level. Because yeah, it's cool to leap around in time ... but who could resist ... trying to go back and see your family, have an Our Town moment, talk to your dead father again?

As Sam walks back up to the game, he's in tears - just totally FULL - and he looks up (again - could be cheesy, but somehow is not) and says (to God, or time, or whoever): "Thank you!" There's a voiceover here, too - which I'm not wacky about - because it goes into "tell, not show" mode. A voiceover should never be used to tell us what we already know, or what we are seeing - and that voiceover does. "Maybe this leaping around in time wouldn't be such a bad thing ..." Etc. Yeah, yeah, we got it. Trust the actor, please - Scott Bakula, with his glance to the sky, is already PLAYING that. We don't need you to add onto it.

But it is an important moment - because it's where I see that Sam Beckett actually accepts his fate.

Maybe the next leap WON'T bring him back home. But maybe leaping around won't be so bad. Because ... this feeling in my heart of having healed something with my dad ... of having talked to him again ... will inevitably, in its small way, make the world a better and loving place. And isn't that a worthy way to spend your life?

The series wouldn't work if Sam were perpetually frustrated and irritated that he couldn't "get back". That energy would get old really quick!

Then there's the ending - with Sam's at-bat as Tim Fox - and a series of errors - missed throw at first and third - means he got a homerun off of a catcher error. Slow-mo running around the bases, Al in his mylar jacket - freaking out at home plate - acting like a jacked-up running coach - Sam running the bases - and then sliding into home. He's safe! His teammates swarm him!

Again, not sure what that whole leap was about ...

but now ... for the first time ... we see the blue electric light shiver through him ... and the SOUND of the leap - that Cullen has mentioned - that shivery sound ... and in a flash Sam has gone.

What a bummer. To go through all that and to not be allowed to celebrate? For even just 2 seconds, God??? Come ON, give me a break!!

Sam leaps "into" a man, standing in front of a blackboard, smoking a pipe - looking out at a listening group of college students. What? Who? What am I teaching? Where am I now?? Help??

Quantum Leap: Season 1, Episode 1: Genesis

Part 2. We left Sam in the cockpit, tilting dangerously to the left, screaming at the top of his lungs. (Here's part 1)

(I know it's hard to believe but I'm gonna have to make this a three parter. Once I get up to speed, I won't have to talk so much about the overview of the show ... but for now, I gotta get it out of my system!)

SO HERE IS PART 2!!!

Bruce McGill, on the ground, is trying to understand why the plane is tilting - do they have a problem? Meanwhile: Sam, poor passive Sam (he's a MUCH more active participant in later leaps - once he knows the rules of the game), sits there and screams - afraid to touch anything. Captain Birddog returns from the back, takes over the plane, corrects the mistake, "covers" for his buddy by saying they had a "glitch" in the instrumentation of something - and all is well. Sam, drenched in sweat, basically whimpers, "Just don't ask me to fly again." The point of these missions is to drop the X-2 out of the jet, and have the pilot start from that height and try to reach "Mach-3". Pilots can discuss in the comments what all this means. Because I'm damned if I know. I, as an audience member, who knows mainly about test pilots from movies and from certain friendships with certain people, do not understand the technology. But that's okay: Quantum Leap is not made for experts. I know what I need to know, they've set me up perfectly. The mission is to break Mach-3. But they've had issues with this recently - fire warning lights going on, pilots having to eject ... it seems, at times, that the aircraft is not built to even handle the stress of such speed. But that's the whole point of being a test pilot. To push the limits. Regardless of personal danger. They were heroes, pioneers, wild men. And poor Sam - a brainiac - who obviously pushed the boundaries in science - is definitively not (at least in this moment) a courageous hero. You must know how to fly a jet, after all, to - you know - fly a jet!

One of the pilots (who actually looks, strikingly, like "Joe" - the doomed pilot in Only Angels Have Wings - as a young man I mean - who has his mind on "that blonde" and can't see to land through the fog - I have enough faith in Bellisario that I do NOT think that this is a coincidence!) gets into the X-2, cradled in the back of the jet. Sam, stilll sweaty and shaken up, glances back there and sees ... uhm ... TUXEDO DUDE ... standing there ... smiling right at him and waving!! What? Who the hell IS that guy? Why is a man in a tuxedo standing in the back of a huge roaring jet? Sam nervously asks Birddog, "Uhm ... is everyone back there ... where they need to be ... or ..." Birddog, cool as a cuke, glances behind him. We see what Birddog sees. There is no guy in a tuxedo in the back of the plane. As far as Birddog can see. (The episode is structured brilliantly - to lure the audience in. There seems, at first, to be something almost malevolent about the Al character ... we aren't sure yet what the project is ... we are as baffled as Sam is ... and remember, at this point - we don't yet know that he is a "hologram".) So the X-2 drops. And "Joe" (I'll just call him that - an homage to Howard Hawks and Cary Grant: "Who's Joe??") flips the switch for rockets 1 and 2. (This, for a newbie like myself, is great information - because it sets up the later scene when Sam has to go through the same thing. We've already seen "Joe" go through the procedure.) There is some sort of sonic boom at one point, and - we are back in the "period" kitchen with Peggy, Tom Stratton's wife - and in one shot, we understand her fear. This will be very important later in the episode. It's important, in general, because it brings to the crazy fly-boy atmosphere, the female element - the WIVES element - which is just as much a part of the test pilot experience as anything else. Those boys had wives. Those wives were brave, too.

Small tangent, forgive: One of the things I enjoy about this episode (and, largely, about the whole series) is the respect that it has for its characters. I never feel like Sam leaps into a past era - with its prejudices and gender roles - and condescends to that era. Now yes - progress has occurred - and the fact that a black man can't sit at a freakin' counter with white people is something rightly to be scorned (episode 6) ... that's what progress means - those who yearn for the "good old days" often conveniently leave out such pesky details as water fountains for "coloreds" and little things like, oh, a polio vaccine. So I'm all for progress. HOWEVER.

The stance that Quantum Leap takes - over and over again - is that people are doing their best. They are, perhaps, doing their best for 1956 - but should we judge them for NOT being able to see the future? Like Sam can? What kind of condescending nitwit would look at the past and ONLY see bad things? (like the little old white lady in Episode 6 - she is not judged. She is limited, definitely, because of the racist world she lives in ... but she is not some white villain. She, too, like the black people in that episode, has been formed and shaped by the racist society. And the show has compassion for her. White people, too, were victims of racism. Not to the same degree - but we all suffer when some of our countrymen are oppressed. And the show didn't soft-pedal that, by making her some racist horrible woman. I SO appreciate that about the show. I'll get into that more later.) So. Now. Back to one of the other things I appreciate about this show is its LACK of condescension towards people from different eras. It is very easy to "look back" and think: "Wow. Everyone was so ignorant back then." And in many ways, I think this is a valid response. I'm reading Bleak House right now, and anyone who reads Dickens and DOESN'T think that child labor laws are inhumane has something wrong with them! That being said, I, personally, have gained so much from NOT looking at the past as some black hole of ignorance ... but as being filled with people, pretty much like you and me, who have struggles, and issues, and are trying to live the best lives they can. People in future generations, no doubt, will look back on us and tut-tut at how little we knew. This is as it should be, for God's sake!

But let us not make a virtue out of nostalgia! Let us not think that things were automatically BETTER back then because they aren't the present day (a viewpoint I find absolutely abhorrent and fight against it whenever it comes up - you know, the "God, things were so great 'back then'" viewpoint! Oh really. They were? Wow! I won't concede ground to people who feel that way. I will. NOT. I call them "the world is going to hell in a handbasket" people. A boo hoo, the world's going to hell in a handbasket!! a boo hoo. Cry about it to someone else, I ain't buying it.) Let us not add ignorance onto ignorance! I love movies and television shows that take place in other times that respect that "back then" there was complexity, too - that "back then" people struggled, and were doing their best ... that human nature doesn't really change. Husbands and wives had fights. People had affairs. People had sex before marriage. People got wasted and said things they shouldn't say. Then, the next day, they cleaned up their mistakes and apologized. You know, same ol' same ol'. The only thing different were the wardrobes. (And the 24-hour media cycle which puts us all in touch with each other at every moment ... the effect of which on our modern world cannot be exaggerated). But please. Let us not be truly ignorant and think that all that crap wasn't going on back then.

One of the fun things about Quantum Leap is that it could offer a panorama of American experience - and sometimes it took on deep subjects - like women's liberation, or racism, or homophobia, or domestic abuse - and sometimes it didn't - but no matter what: the characters in the episodes were revealed as three-dimensional people. They each had their journey to go through. Nobody was "written off" as "lost".

I write all of this because I wanted to say a couple of words about Jennifer Runyon's portrayal of Peggy, the pregnant wife, in "Genesis". She has a son who is about 8 years old. She is 6 months pregnant and very jittery about it. She drinks coffee all day long. Her husband goes on death-defying missions every day, and she has to stand in her house, as her appliances shimmy towards her, and listen to the sonic booms, and NOT freak out. Of course she DOES freak out ... but quietly. To herself. She looks up in the sky. She swallows her terror. She tries to be strong. And when push comes to shove, she wants her husband to be "the fastest man alive". Because that's what HE wants. It is the opposite of a condescending portrayal of a wife in another era. She is a three-dimensional woman - and I don't want to make it sound like it's some huge serious thing ... I'm just saying: that as a woman, I very much appreciated her compassionate and deep portrayal of this character. She isn't the "wet blanket" cliche of the wife. (Cue my post about the wife in Field of Dreams) But she isn't also a starry-eyed Doris Day who just stands by her man with no personality of her own. That's not satisfying for me, as a woman, to watch (and also, I imagine, for men - who have wives they love, wives who have complexity, who call them on their shit but who also have their back when it counts ... etc. We're all in this together, people!!)

The funny thing (and the brilliant thing) is that Doris Day is referenced a couple of times in this episode, and again - I can't imagine it's a coincidence. The references are: when Sam is awakened in the first moment by the alarm clock - it's by Doris Day singing "Que Sera Sera". And then later - in the last scene - when his pregnant wife is drunk in the hospital - she lies in bed, wasted - singing "Que Sera Sera" and one of the doctors jokes, "Doris Day is our patient." When Al first says to Sam (in a couple scenes from now) that maybe he is 'here' to 'put things right' - he assumes that Sam is here to break Mach-3 and LIVE, as opposed to DIE, like the "real" Tom Stratton did. So that is what the two of them focus on: getting Sam thru the ordeal of breaking Mach-3. Once Sam breaks Mach-3 though, he lies on the ground in the desert, twisted up in his parachute, and we hear the voiceover again, the agonized voiceover, "I'm still here! Al! Why am I still here??"

The answer is in the Doris Day references.

The answer was there all along.

Peg stands in her kitchen. She hears the sonic boom. She puts her hand nervously on her stomach, kicks the washing machine back into place, and takes a sip of coffee. When "Joe" from Only Angels Have Wings pushes his plane past the point of no return, and it explodes - she gasps and runs out onto her lawn, looking up, looking up, looking up. The other wives, many of them pregnant also, all of them wives of test pilots, join her ... they look up, they look up, they look up ...

Guys, I'm not overstating this. I love this scene. It captures that whole world. It doesn't condescend to that world. It respects it. But without the lying golden glow of nostalgia ... which leaves out the bad stuff. The experience of the wives on the ground is PART of that pioneer journey ... and Quantum Leap shows that ... in the beautiful sunset-lit shot (or dawn-lit shot) of the pregnant wives, looking up in the sky, for evidence of their exploded husbands.

Without that affection for other eras, without that willingness to see them as being just like us - only with different wardrobes, and different contexts - the show would not have worked. It would have been schlock. Condescending schlock.

Please, fans of the show. I know it's a tiny moment, and it's not the "point" of the episode. But just watch all of those wives flood out onto the lawn, looking up. And tell me you don't feel for them, tell me you don't think: "God ... what was it like for you????"

That's the entire purpose of the show.

It's not just about what it was like for Sam Beckett to suddenly be a test pilot - although, of course, the show is totally about that! It's also about: who is Peg?? What are HER concerns? And who is Tom Stratton, this guy Sam has leapt into? How can I figure out what HE needs? The whole show is an exercise in altruistic thinking. It appeals to me, because it's in my nature, I suppose - to wonder what it's like to BE another person. And Sam Beckett has to learn that, which he does - episode by episode. He wants to "leap back" ... with every leap he thinks: "will this be the one? will I wake up in familiar surroundings again?" But, as it keeps NOT happening ... he realizes his mission is larger than he thought, or hoped. He, for whatever reason (and they even touch on it in this first episode) - is an "instrument" of something bigger than himself. And the greater good demands that he succumb to it, that he give up his own personal concerns ... and care about people like Tom Stratton ... which ... how many of us, when faced with the choice of our own life - or the life of someone we've never heard of ... would choose our own? The show (at its best) confronts such existential questions. Again, don't mean to go too deep here - but that's what I get from this show, at its finest. And, if you remember how it ends, if you remember that last episode ... that's the journey Sam Beckett is on. He is the ultimate sacrifice. He (for whatever reason, again - it's never stated) has chosen to sacrifice HIMSELF.

Back to our plot. Joe from Only Angels Have Wings survives the explosion by ejecting. The next scene finds us in a divey bar in the middle of the desert, full of test pilots, military men, and blonde chicks wearing full skirts, red lipstick and heels. (Please. Let ME Quantum Leap to that place??) Sam Beckett, as Tom Stratton, sits in a booth with his pregnant wife, and all his fly boy buddies ... and he starts to relax into his new role. He glances at Peggy at one point, who is laughing up at something Birddog is doing ... and the way she is filmed in that moment, Sam realizes what Tom sees in her. Not that it wasn't obvious before - but up until this moment, Sam has basically been terrified of her because - DUH. She is the wife of someone he doesn't know - and she is pregnant - and he has no idea who he is!!! Imagine having to pretend you're married to someone you've never met! Sam finds her terrifying. But suddenly, at the bar, he sees her beauty, he softens ... they dance ... She does show surprise that he actually CAN dance ... and he bluff his way out of it: "I've never had such a ... well-rounded partner before." She laughs. They're having a good time. A young married couple in 1956 on a date.

Until. He sees that damn dude in a tux again. Standing by the jukebox and looking around him as though he is having the best time of his life. Who the hell is that jagoff? It's infuriating. Especially because Sam asks his "wife", "Who's that guy over there in the tux?" and she can't even see him!! "A tux? In this place?" Okay. So he's crazy, obviously. Sam doesn't even know he's Sam at this point, he cannot remember his first name - he has accepted "Tom" as his first name ... and yet he has SOME semblance of sanity to know that seeing dudes in tuxes where no one else sees them is a very very bad sign. With an ominous manner, Sam approaches the stranger, who seems completely oblivious to why anyone should greet him with hostility. Tux-Dude says, happily, "Ain't this something??" looking around as though he never wanted to leave. Sam pretends to look at the jukebox, and Tux-Dude begs, "Oh - do they have Be-Bop-a-Lu on there? That got me through some long nights at MIT. That and a little Lithuanian girl named Danessa." (Many many clues to Al's character and history in this small set of sentences.) Sam, still baffled as to who this dude is - who was standing in the back of the plane, unseen by Birddog - and now unseen by his own wife - treats the entire encounter with suspicion. "Am I dead? Because that would explain a lot if I were dead."

Tuxedo-Man (who is, of course, the wonderful rumpled and sex-focused Dean Stockwell) treats Sam gently - but it is only over the course of this conversation that Admiral Al Calavicci truly realizes the level of swiss-cheesing that has occurred in his friend Sam Beckett. His DEAR friend Sam Beckett! Imagine if your dear friend didn't know you anymore! Sam doesn't even recognize Al! What a total loss that would be. What a sad thing it would be. Like Alzheimers, something I know something about. One must give up on the relationship that WAS, and accept the relationship that is THERE. What a hard thing to do. This is what goes down between Sam and Al at the jukebox. Al realizes: "ohhhhhh myyyyyy gooood, you don't remember?? You have no idea who I am? Do you even know your own name, Sam?" The name, the first time we've heard it, gets through the fog. We can see it LAND on Bakula's face. It gets through. "You know my name." But Al - this creature from the black lagoon as far as Sam is concerned - a guy who looks at him knowingly - without knowing him!! - disappears without explaining more to Sam. Al, obviously, is frustrated and freaked out by the Swiss Cheese factor, and angry at Ziggy for not factoring this in. The last we see of him is him ripping open a door in the atmosphere, and disappeareing behind it, muttering angrily. Leaving Sam (Tom) alone. With most of his questions unanswered.

The next morning:

now this will be important later: The whole episode (after the prologue with Al and Tina) starts with a tracking shot over the desert, speeded up - tumbleweed, brush, sand ... and the camera zooms very quickly at a house - into the window - into the bedroom - the clock turning over ... and then: Sam's quantum leap begins. It's almost like in that moment we are Ziggy. Or - the "quantum leap" itself - rushing through time/space ... into another life. So the next morning - we see the same shot again. An echo. Tracking shot over the desert, speeded up - tumbleweed, brush, sand - the camera zooms towards the little house - and then - abruptly - zooms backwards and up and away.

Huh?

What was that?

Sam wakes up - in bed with Peg - and we get a voiceover: "Not time to get up yet. After I milk the cows ... I'll get to school ..." and BOOM. Sam's eyes open. Alarmed, alert. Cows? Milk? Where did that come from and what did that have to do with Tom Stratton? Suddenly: some details come back. Rushing, in a flood. He grew up on a dairy farm. In Indiana. He remembers! He remembers too -with a flood of sadness - that his father has died. Yet ... hope comign back ... his father was alive in 56!!! So ... what? Sam still doesnt' know much - his last name - anything - but he's got enough to go on. So he goes to the phone. To try to call his dad.

This moment will become VERY important in future episodes - and CRUCIAL in the last episode. If Ziggy, the hybrid computer, is NOT in control, then who is? Thank goodness the show did not go in a Touched by an Angel direction because that would have ruined it and made it sanctimonious and evangelical, which would have turned me right off. It's not about a particular message. Al and Sam always refer to the force leaping Sam around as "God ... or time ... or whoever ..." which I appreciated. And I believe in God. But to me, God is a private business and any relationship I have is between me and Him. Don't try to "tell me" about God. Especially not if you have the arrogance to think that you "know". That is not just insulting, but HARMFUL to something that is actually divine to me. And I will protect that which I believe to be divine from LITERAL-minded people. The irony is that those people are "religious". Spare me, Lord, from the "religious"!! I add my cry of protest to the many others before me who have cried out such a thing! But I appreciated that non-specific spiritual vibe about the show. It was about people being GOOD, about making the right choices, about getting a second chance, about redemption - all things that we, in our measly little lives, could also see, and use ... if we just opened our eyes, stopped for a second, and got beyond our own egos. What would it be like to get a second chance? To forgive? To let go? To make right? The show didn't attempt to answer the big questions - however!!! It certainly POSED the questions - and left it at that. I loved that. Who the hell is leaping Sam around? We THOUGHT it was the computer itself ... but if Ziggie is playing catch-up and isn't the boss ... then who is in charge here?

The last episode, in Season 5, attempts to address this. But what I love is that here - in the first episode of the whole series - with the computer (signified by the zooming tracking shot over the desert) TRYING to retrieve Sam ... and then ... uhm ... for whatever reason ... being unable to do so... and bouncing back off into the space/time continuum ... the struggle has already begun. The struggle always was: Will Sam allow himself to leap back? Or, as Al puts it bluntly later, "You wouldn't leap!!:

Now WHY wouldn't Sam leap?

Ahhhhhhhhhh, that is the question.

Stick around til Season 5. It's STILL the question ... and the series confronts it head on in the very last episode and it nearly burst my heart into a million pieces.

Back to our current episode: "Genesis". Sam (or Tom) has promised his young son to take him fly-fishing (even though Sam has no idea what he's doing with fly-fishing!) It is during this father-son trip that Sam bumps into Al, yet again ... only this time Al has appeared, out of nowhere, wearing pumpkin-orange pajamas, a black and white patterned bathrobe, and is drinking coffee = out in the middle of the wilderness - moaning about his hangover-headache. "Pleeeeeeeease don't yell!"

Now there is NO reason for Tux-dude to be out in the mountains in his pajamas ... so Sam finally confronts the weirdness. "Who. Are. You." Al, who is coming off a bender and looks pretty much the worse for wear, says, nonchalantly, "I'm a man. Just like you." Sam, who has already swiped his hand through Al, says, "No. Not like me." Al relents and gives him a BIT of information ... but warns him that "most of what you're gonna want to know is restricted ... so it would probably be better if you don't ask too many questions."

Just a small bit of trivia: This pajama scene was the scene that Dean Stockwell auditioned with. Tommy mentioned in his post (sorry, no permalink!!) that it was his favorite scene and it's one of mine as well. It establishes who Al is. Al has a complicated social life back in the present day ... and he's not a "drop everything for work" kind of guy. Even though he's totally dedicated to the project. Tommy puts it perfectly in his post:

Al,hung over and in his pajamas, while Sam is fishing? Classic, and probably my favorite scene from this episode. I just like the whole thing where Al Calavicci is dealing with what could be the most groundbreaking development in history and science, with the Quantum Leap technology. Add to that the whole deal where his friend is trapped in history, quite possibly in great peril. But Al, at times, looks at the whole thing as something of a hindrance to his social agenda. I enjoy that idea, that the whole "Save Sam" thing might just fall to second or third on Al's social agenda, from time to time. Al personifies the whole "work to live, not live to work" mindset.

Al shows up - in the wildnerness - in his pajamas ... and you know there's a whole swirling cornucopia of sexual dysfunction and debauchery that is behind his bedraggled appearance ... but Sam (and that's part of the humor of their dynamic) never wants to hear the details. He's not the kind of male friend who will be like, "Tell me everything!" He's always mildly horrified at Al's indulgences. So here is Sam, terrified that he is going to have to fly the X-2 on Tuesday!! A death-defying act for a trained pilot - and Sam doesn't even know how to fly!! And here this "Al" dude shows up, in pajamas, hung over, with some woman at home in the future, wrapped up naked in his crumpled-up sheets? What the hell? THIS is the guy assigned to the project? Couldn't we have gotten a guy who was married ... who had more focus? And not so ... on the prowl, for God's sake?

Sam says to Al, cold, panicked, "This Ziggy will be ready to retrieve me on Tuesday? That'll be a bit late. I'm scheduled to fly the X 2 on Monday." There's a long pause, and then Al says ruefully, "Have you ever thought of taking flying lessons?"

Part 3 (the last part, I swear!) to come tomorrow ...

Quantum Leap: Before we begin ...

Part 1: Episode 1 of Quantum Leap: Genesis

Let's try Tommy's permalink: He's already on Episode 2 - I love his observations ... it's making me see new things in the show. Go check out his reviews (scroll, scroll!)

...sins of "neglect" and "oppression." ...

Catching up with Faustus - following his links - I came across an old post - with a letter from his father, written on Yom Kippur. Tears are streaming down my face. Shining beauty and love and courage. An example to follow.

A parade of divas

An incredible clip (below the fold) of Christine Pedi doing different divas, all singing "And I am Not Telling You". It's amazing!!

(link found via Joe.My.God)

"feculent sarcasm", etc

I won't excerpt or explain. I just know that he is a damn funny writer. I can't breathe.

Cab on fire

Ah, I love the smell of a FIERY INFERNO right around lunch time!

I'm like Zelig now. I was a block away from the steam pipe explosion and I just experienced this up close. Nothing like looking out your window 17 floors up and seeing thick black smoke billowing UP from below. Yikes. I made Patrick take the stairs with me. Sorry, Patrick! I'm not gettin' in no elevator with no black billowing smoke!

It wasn't until we reached the street that we realized that it was probably a car on fire - and not the building. As Patrick and I tramped down 17 flights, we started to smell the fire at around floor 4. My flip-flops made a DEAFENING sound on the concrete stairwell (highly annoying for any evacuation procedure)

Black smoke poured out of the cab - which I saw up close - it was burnt to a crisp. Still no word on what the hell happened. Tons of firemen but no ambulances while we were there - so hopefully nobody got hurt - but I still can't find any updates on it.

Sucky cell phone pictures below.

Congrats!

To the wonderfully talented and ambitious Scott Beehner for this great review of Bert - not just a good review of the film, but a review of what it took to get it made (which was all Scott's doing!) - well-deserved. I saw a screening of Bert a while back - a bunch of friends are in the movie, and I know Scott - and I am VERY happy to say that dear friend David is pulled out of the review, and given special attention: "A friend from New York and 'Law & Order' regular David Raymond Wagner plays Ike and gives the most attention-grabbing performance in the movie."

Damn straight, friend!!

Congratulations to everyone involved!

Quantum Leap: Season 1, Episode 1: Genesis

LEAP INTO: September 13, 1956

Sam: I can't fly!
Al: I'll help you!
Sam: You're a hologram!
Al: I'm also an ex-astronaut.

Sam Beckett - on his first quantum leap - finds himself in the body of Tom Stratton, a test pilot in 1956.

UPDATE: I have naturally gone overboard. Here's part 1 of my re-cap. Part 2 to follow. I have it written up, just need to get it together.

So enjoy the NOVEL that is Part 1!!

EPISODE 1: GENESIS

The episode opens on a dark desert landscape, with towering dark mesas, and a starry sky overhead, a nod to Close Encounters. We see a road stretching off into the night. Then we see headlights in the distance, and in what feels like a VERY short time (dude is driving way too fast) - the car zips into the foreground. This is our introduction to Admiral Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell). We get a closeup of him at the wheel. He is wearing a tuxedo, a silk scarf, and a glow in the dark blue pin on his lapel in the shape of a star. He's listening to music and zoning out to the beat. He's obviously coming from some function, dressed like that. Or, knowing Al's wardrobe choices from the rest of the series, perhaps not. Perhaps he just saw the tux in his closet and thought, "You know what? I look damn good in that. I'm wearing it to the movies tonight." Then you can see him get a glimpse of something coming up on the road. And the eyebrows - the thick eyebrows - raise, and the eyes go flat and focused. Like a snake. Or a shark. Whatever: like a predator who has spotted its prey.

We see what he sees. I love Tommy's point about how funny it is, sometimes, to see interpretations of the future. We know, later (it's not revealed in this first episode) - that the present day date in the show is 1999. The show was filmed in 1989, so this is their interpretation of what life/fashion/cars might be like 10 years in the future. Women, (who are not strippers, I mean), will wear stilettoes with flashing lights in the heels, apparently.

Now I want to talk a bit about this female character. She is a babealicious woman, wearing a tight pink dress, and she stands by her car on an empty desert road. Al ends up picking her up, and they have some sexy chatter about Al's car ("It's an experimental model," Al tells her) - and then, at some point, as they drive - she notices billowing white "clouds" off in the distance. She wonders what is going on. He lies and says, "It's sheet lightning." She doesn't buy it. "I can still see the stars. Thats not lightning." She begins to wonder, "That's near where they let off the first atomic bomb ... Apparently there's still some top secret program being run out there ..." Al, looking at those white strange clouds, starts to get nervous and calls the office. Gushie (the technician running the thing) is screaming that Sam has decided to "leap" ahead of schedule, and he's already in the accelerating chamber. Al is shouting into his phone: "WE'RE NOT READY!" Etc. Finally, it's too urgent, so he says, "I'll be there in 2 minutes" - and off the car goes, towards the white clouds.

Now Pink Lady gets a lot of "chatter" on the Quantum Leap airwaves. Throughout the entire series, Al is dating (and cheating on, and getting back together with, and obsessing over) a woman named "Tina". He's always popping back into Sam's world saying, "Tina's mad at me ..." or "I should have stayed in bed with Tina" ... Like: Sam is dealing with some life or death stuff, he's quantum leaping through time, and Al appears, all upset over some relationship drama he's having in the present. It's hysterical. In, I think, Season 3 - when we finally get to see what the "offices" of Project Quantum Leap look like - and we get to meet Gushie and the rest of the staff - we meet Tina. She is just what you have pictured, from how Al talks about her: she has a high squeaky voice, a Brooklyn accent, and she wears clothes so tight that you could read the date on a dime in her back pocket. She also wears bright flashing earrings and heels, like the dame in Episode 1. If you check it on IMDB - the dame we see in Episode 1 is named "Tina". So. Hmmm. There's a bit of a mystery here, for us obsessives. Is this THE Tina? Even though it's not the same actress we see a couple seasons later? By putting her in flashing light accessories, aren't they telling us: Same gal? But it appears in Episode 1 that Al is meeting Tina for the first time. So there are some theories that this "ooh, I have a flat, I'm so scared in the desert, and you're a guy in a tux who picks me up" is a sex-game that they're playing, where they take on roles and act stuff out. You know, Tina drove ahead, punctured her tire, and posed by her car, waiting for Al, the "scary stranger" to come get her. And if you watch the scene that way, it does work. (Kind of.) The two of them immediately leap to the sex innuendo and double entendre - it's not just him. But then a couple seconds later, as they drive off together, and she sees the "quantum leap" clouds on the horizon and starts to ask questions about it ... it really seems like they have just met. So there is also a theory that this is the first time Al picked Tina up, this is their first meeting - and because of the emergency situation with Sam leaping ahead of time - Al had to involve her in the top-secret project, which gave her high classification, and so she went on staff. This doesn't QUITE hold water, though - because in a couple of episodes, Al mentions that he and Tina met "over a poker table in Vegas" - and he also, in that same episode, talks about Tina's tattoo - and he asks Sam, "Have you ever seen her tattoo?" which means that Sam and Tina have met - which means that Al had to be dating Tina BEFORE Sam leapt. Ahhhhhh, tis one of life's most enduring mysteries! Is the woman in pink with the flashing heels THE Tina? Her name is never mentioned ... but she is listed in the cast as being "Tina". If Sam HAS met Tina, then we have to go with the theory that Al and Tina are already dating, and they are doing a role-playing game: "Okay, you be the damsel in distress on the dark highway. And I'll be the guy in the tux who picks you up." Which would totally make sense in terms of what we know about Al, and his kinky-ness.

Obsessive ramblings over.

I love their dialogue in their first interaction. He leans out the car window, looking at her like she is DINNER. Muses, looking her up and down: "Do you know what I would love to do? ... I would loooove to .... fix that flat for you. But I can't." He makes a gesture at his tux, like: I can't grease up my fine digs. What a gentleman! She says, cool, sexy, "Let me guess. You're late for your wedding." And Al replies, suave, "How could I be late? We've only just met."

HA. I mean: the CHEESE of the guy!! But he says it with such confidence and unselfconsciousness - it somehow isn't gross, but funny and honest. Love it.

More importantly, what the first scene tells us is: Sam (whoever he is) has "leapt" ahead of time. The project is not "ready" yet. And Sam, against the advice of everyone, has jumped into the accelerating chamber (the famous blue-lit Leonardo DaVinci pose in the post below) - and "leapt".

A couple things that are very interesting about the pilot episode (and sorry, I know I'm all over the place here):

-- Throughout the rest of the series, it becomes a convention that the "leaps" "Swiss-Cheese" Sam's brain. Yes, "swiss-cheese" becomes a verb on this show. There are holes in Sam's memory. He forgets (for example) that he knows how to play the piano ... until a very crucial moment when it comes back to him. It helps a lot in terms of the charm of the show - because he's not strolling around in a state of expertise, thinking, "Oh! I know how to fix this! Piece of cake! I'm a doctor in my 'real' life - this will be no problem!" No - he just has chunks of his memory, chunks of his old personality ... and suddenly, in an improvisational urgent moment ... he'll remember. Wait a second ... I know how to do this. (Or he just relies on Al, who has lived a wide life, with many different experiences, and can say, "Hey, I was a trapeze artist once ... here's what you do ...") Etc.

But in the pilot episode: Sam wakes up in a bed. There is a voiceover (which they use, as a convention, much more in the first season than in others ... they're filling us in, they're finding their way ... ) Sam opens his eyes, looks around. "Who am I?" says the voiceover. He can't even remember his own name. How disorienting and frightening that would be! He realizes he is in bed with a woman. Voiceover: "I have no memory of going to bed with this woman ..." She gets up and goes to the door ... murmuring, "I'll put the coffee on ..." and Sam sees then that she is about 6 months pregnant. He is stunned. WHO THE HELL IS THAT? Did I just have a drunken one-night stand with a pregnant lady? She is calling him "Tom". Poor Sam. "Is my name Tom? Why don't I remember anything?" He doesn't remember Project Quantum Leap. He remembers NOTHING. She comes over to him and hugs him. He hugs her back, but he is scared. Of her stomach, of his amnesia ... he doesn't know why she knows him!

By the second episode of Quantum Leap, Sam gets the hang of things. He may not know why he is "there", and he may not know how to, oh, drag-race, or disco dance ... but he knows the rules of the game. Meaning: pretend you ARE the person you've leapt into, just go with it, and information will come, if you sit back and let it. Don't tell anyone, "I'm not this guy - my name is Sam!" Don't reveal the project. Don't reveal who you are. As far as the world is concerned, you are the person you've leapt into. But in the pilot episode, Sam Beckett has not learned all of those rules yet. He wanders around, at first, like a sleepwalker - and then throughout the episode, he keeps telling people - his wife, his co-pilot, his buddies, "I'm not Tom." "I can't fly." The script has it set up that Tom Stratton, the character, is a big practical joker - and that he also is trying to hoodwink the military doctor on the project - just as a joke. The test pilots are all breaking records, flying faster than any man has ever flown before - and, just to bust on the overly serious doctor, they'll report back, "You know, after I broke Mach-2, I forgot where I parked my car." It's in the script that Tom Stratton is the ringleader of all of this, so SOME of his "I can't fly" stuff makes sense to those around him. "Are you setting up a gag or something??" his wife asks him.

In later episodes, no matter how dire the situation gets - Sam never "breaks character" and pleads: "I can't do this - I don't know how to do this - I'm Sam Beckett!" He figures stuff out, he accepts the rules of the Quantum Leap.

But when he wakes up in bed with a pregnant woman, he doesn't know the rules.

And when he gets into the shower (wearing his underwear - his wife thinks he's lost it) and sees himself in the mirror for the first time, he is terrified. I mean, just imagine the freakout. You look - and it's not you! Later on in the series, Sam knows the drill. He leaps in - and after getting the lay of the land, figuring out the situation - he does his best to find a mirror or some reflective surface so he can see what other people see when they look at him. But in "Episode 1", Sam looks in the mirror, and sees another guy. Scott Bakula does a great job with all of this. You want to shake him and say, "Just go with it - it's gonna be okay ..." but that's part of the effectiveness of those first couple scenes - Sam's complete disorientation. He's trying to deal with the information as it comes to him. His wife mentions something about how if he's feeling sick he "won't fly today ..." The horror begins to dawn: "Fly?" Sam realizes he has a son. "I'm a daddy?" says the voiceover.

The voiceover keeps saying, like a mantra, "This is a dream ... it's just a dream ... you'll wake up soon ... this is just a dream ..." Bakula has a really nice acting moment around here: He's in the shower, just standing there, and the voiceover is saying, "This is a dream ..." Sam, moving on autopilot, gets some shaving cream and rubs it on his chin - and in that moment, that sensory moment of smelling the shaving cream, of feeling it on his face - the reality of it ... it starts to dawn on him that this really doesn't feel like a dream. This seems REAL. It's all in how Bakula smells that shaving cream - and I, in the audience, can practically smell it myself from how he plays that moment.

Sam begins to realize that he has gone back in time. Howdy Doody is on the damn television. Out of the blue, the phone # to the Quantum Leap offices comes into his head and he tries to call it - but obviously cannot get through. He asks, "What's the area code?" and his wife says, confused, "Area code??" He runs outside to take a look around and sees all the 1950s jalopies parked about. A jet zooms by overhead and Sam watches it pass, the shaving cream still on his face, whipping off in the wind. (Apparently that was an effect Bellisario wanted: the bits of shaving cream flying off his face. So they had enormous fans pointed at poor Scott Bakula, and he was half naked, and freezing to death - but it just goes to show you the level of detail Bellisario had in his mind, and the moment truly helps, in the larger context of the story: If this were a DREAM, would you have bits of shaving cream flying off in the blast from the jet? Isn't this too REAL to be a dream?)

In the next scene: Sam (with little pieces of Kleenex on his face from where he obviously cut himself shaving - nice detail. Sam would obviously be used to an electric razor, so in trying to shave using Tom Stratton's razor, he cut his face up) is in the car with Captain Birdell (or "Birddog") - a good friend, and also a test pilot. It's all very Right Stuff-ish, their dynamic. Those dudes were tough. And wild. I'll also say this: There's a HUGE nod to Only Angels Have Wings in Episode 1 of Quantum Leap. Donald Bellisario was a pilot. And anyone who was a pilot and who has any love for aviation has seen Only Angels Have Wings. There's a moment a couple of scenes later when two of the test pilots are bantering about a blonde girl they're going to fight over later - once they land their plane. This is a direct nod to Only Angels Have Wings - and the rivalry between two pilots for Jean Arthur, and Cary Grant, the boss, shouting into the microphone up to his pilot, "JUST KEEP YOUR MIND ON THE JOB AND FORGET ABOUT THAT BLONDE!"

Enter Bruce McGill. And I'm with Tommy: he's never been "that guy" to me, even though he's one of our best character actors. He is ALWAYS memorable, and one of my favorite actors, period. The scene where he blows up in The Insider? "WIPE THAT SMIRK OFF YOUR FACE." Seriously, you can see the other actor in the scene suddenly get frightened. He's SO good. So so good. Now: sorry, I know these posts are gonna be all over the place, but I figure it's my party and I'll ramble if I want to: The mysterious and haunting final episode of Quantum Leap - which I won't talk about yet - also features Bruce McGill, in a very very important role. Way more important than the one he has here in Episode 1. Now I know that when they filmed the "last" episode, they were not aware that it would be the last ... but still; there is a beautiful symmetry at having Bruce McGill in both the first and the last episodes (especially considering the character he plays in the LAST episode.) I love Bruce McGill. He's my kind of actor. A journeyman, basically. Just damn good at what he does. Makes the "stars" look better than they are, just by supporting them so well. And never (or rarely) gets the glory. A fine actor. So. Here he is! Bruce McGill plays "Weird Ernie", the "boss" of the project. The test pilots have all gathered together before their next run, to go over some things. Bruce McGill, in his soft-spoken utterly real way, rules the scene. Sam (as Tom) sits back, trying to smile, trying to look as cocksure and nonchalant as the other guys (and failing miserably). He already tried to tell Birddog that he "can't fly" and Birddog laughed it off.

And it is in this scene that we first see Al - the hologram - appear. Sam, with the Swiss-Cheese effect, does not remember anything about anything - so he thinks it's just some weird guy wearing a white doctor's coat OVER a tuxedo (hilarious - Al is still wearing the tuxedo from the first scene) smiling at him like he knows him. Who is that guy? Why is he staring at me when I'm not talking?? He's creeping me out. Totally. Does he know me? But how could he? Why is he looking at me like that??? Al tries to talk to Sam, and Sam, confused, keeps walking on. He has to go, uhm, fly a PLANE now ... he can't be bothered with crazy tux-wearing doctors who act all cozy and familiar with him.

Now just a few words about production design because it MUST be said. The production designer, the art director, and the cinematographer - worked so well here (and in other episodes) to create an entire look and feel. This does not feel thrown together. It does not feel like it is filmed on a backlot at a studio. It has a feeling of reality to it. Like a mini-movie. The attention to detail, first of all: check out the kitchen. Everything in that kitchen is "period". And there's the detail, too, that when the planes take off - the vibrations are so strong that the little round washing machine in the corner shuffles across the room, like a little R2D2, and she, as she pours a cup of coffee, pushes it back into its corner with her foot. THAT is "detail". THAT makes you realize that you are not looking just at a 'set' - but at somebody's home. They live there. It is 1956. The wife (played by the wonderful Jennifer Runyon, now retired - Ghostbusters fans will recognize her immediately) kicks the washing machine back in a casual "Oh, you again?" manner that breathes life into the "set", into the "period". She doesn't seem to be an actress wearing a "period" costume. She seems to actually live in that house. And that takes a group effort, not just a good actress. That takes an art director to give her a kitchen that looks like that, that feels lived in ... and a writer/producer/director who knows that when jets took off in those earlier days of aviation - houses would shake, and appliances would dance across the floor. DETAIL. Art Direction by Cameron Birnie (was nominated for an Emmy 4 times for Quantum Leap) and Peg McClellan, Set Decoration by Robert L. Zilliox (see the clock on the shelf? The little salt shakers? that's Zilliox) and the cinematographer was Roy H. Wagner. So Wagner is responsible for the look of the following spectacular shots:

This is not your regular "television" cinematography. This is high-level artistry. These shots feel real. Not only do they feel real - but never for a moment do I not believe that we AREN'T in the desert in 1956, with a bunch of test pilots. They use some stock footage of jets - which also gives a documentary feel to the episode ... but shots like those above were generated by the Quantum Leap team. No wonder the show was a hit. Look at that. Let us not forget David Hemmings, the director of the whole episode, for keeping this all a somewhat coherent whole.

Sam must now face the music, the thing he has been dreading. He has to get into that huge jet ... and ... fly? But ... nobody seems to be listening to him when he says he can't fly! However, much to his relief - it appears that Birddog is the pilot, and he just has to sit in the co-pilot seat and relax. Until Birddog says the fateful words, "I gotta take care of Mother Nature - could you bring her up to 25?" and leaves the cockpit ... with nary another word! Sam is now at the controls. The nightmare has begun. I love hearing Bakula basically just start screaming, as the plane tilts to one side. The scream starts low, and then builds: "ahhhhhhhHHHHHHHHOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH...." Like: seriously, dude. His co-workers and the guys on the ground must be like: what the HELL is he screaming about????

Part 2 to come .... almost done!!

Quantum Leap: Before we begin

A few words of overview. (And, like Tommy said in his starting post (his permalink function doesn't work - so you have to scroll down - he has two posts up on Quantum Leap - one an overview, and one on the first episode - which I LOVED reading!!) - Anyhoo, like he said, this will develop. I'm not sure how I will tackle this project right now ... so I'll make it up as I go. And probably some episodes will warrant more commentary by me than others ... so be it.)

Quantum Leap first aired in 1989 and ran for 5 years. It was hugely successful, as series go (and it's rather amazing to think that there are only two "leads" in the show. It's not an ensemble ... the entire thing hinges on the believability of those two guys, and their chemistry together - not a small feat) ... and it is still hugely missed by its fan base. It made Scott Bakula a household name and catapulted Dean Stockwell, already famous for 40 years by that point, into a level of fame he had never known. Nothing like a hit TV show to put you over the tipping point. It was never a mega-hit - but it had something that is even better and more valuable: a loyal fan base. That cannot be bought, it cannot be managed by a studio, it cannot be marketed or planned for. Or - it can - but something like that depends quite a bit on magic, sorry to say. Right place right time. Excuse me, but the fans of Square Pegs are STILL loyal to that show and it's been off the air how long? Long-running "hit" series WISH that they could engender the type of fanatical loyalty of Square Pegs! (In this case, "loyalty" is just another word for "love").

I liked Quantum Leap when it was first on. My boyfriend and I watched it pretty regularly. It had an interesting premise, and we liked the message aspect of it. It was usually a very satisfying hour of television.

I haven't seen 5 seconds of the show since it went off the air almost 2 decades ago . Until recently. When Dean Stockwell loomed over my horizon like some gorgeous overwhelming thick-eyebrowed dirigible! First I had to see all of his movies. That kept me quite occupied since he made his debut when he was an embryo in 1945. But then I knew - and I tingled with excitement - that I still had five seasons of Quantum Leap to watch! I didn't have to just keep watching The Boy with Green Hair to get my fix ... he had done a hugely successful series, with, whatever, many episodes a year ... and so that's what I've been doing over the last couple of months. Slowly but surely making my way thru all 5 seasons. It's been so fun. Some of the episodes I remember quite well - others not so much. Some are more successful than others - of course - but what is interesting to me, having just watched the entire series now ... is how consistent it was. You can feel them start to grab for ratings a bit in the last season - which I won't talk about yet. At least not in depth. They started to do multi-part episodes (there's a 3 parter, for example) - and also they have this whole "evil leaper" subplot (which totally did not work for me) - You can feel a bit of a grasp, like they know that perhaps it is the end. But even with that, which doesn't always work - the tone and feel of the show is remarkably consistent. The scripts are good, the art direction remains stellar (which I'll get into quite a bit - KU-DOS!! Major motion pictures should have such good and detailed art direction as Quantum Leap had), the two leads grow and develop - they are not just repeating themselves ad nauseum. Sam Beckett grows. As a man. Watch him in the first episode and then watch him in the last. He is still the same guy ... but he has developed, his soul has stretched, he's learned so much. Same with Al. Now Dean Stockwell's part could have been insufferable, a neverending bunch of SCHTICK. Not to dis schtick - and lots of Stockwell's stuff is schtick (the rolling eyes, the cigar behavior, all that) ... but he also has opportunities to show us WHY he's got the schtick, and WHY Al is the way he is ... and it just makes for really good television. Because what keeps people coming back week after week is not just the gimmick of the show - the "leap" - but the dynamic between these two guys that we came, very quickly, to care about.

It's worth its weight in gold - actor chemistry like the two of them had!

Also, just to say this - without too many spoilers: Having just watched the whole series, they did quite a good job of keeping the starting seasons loose enough, in terms of what we know about the two guys - that once you know the "end" - once you know where it's going to go ... the beginning still makes sense. We didn't have to do too much re-adjustment - like I said: it was consistent. There was no "Oh! It was all Sam Beckett's DREAM! He dreamt the entire 5 seasons!" copout. Sam's behavior in that last episode is completely consistent - and we realize that he has been moving towards that moment since Season 2.

And that wasn't even supposed to be the last episode! They didn't know that that was going to be "it" when they filmed it - which makes it even more amazing because, in a funny way, in a heartbreaking way, it was a perfect way to end the whole thing. I didn't feel gypped, or cheated, or like: Wait ... is it over??? No!

It had a beautiful symmetry to it.

So that's a testament to the solid writing throughout the series. It was always about the relationship between Sam and Al.

The "leaps" were just the context. The real MEAT of that show was with those two guys. And the payoff at the very end was immense.

Oh dear. (Or I should quote Sam Beckett: Oh boy) I am getting way ahead of myself.

But these are my thoughts on the overview. I'll get into more specifics as I go through episode by episode, which should keep me occupied until March, 2019.

Episode 1 re-cap coming up ...

Ready to Quantum Leap?

Wonderful

A wonderful analytic post about Bringing Up Baby. I've seen the movie probably once a month in the last 5 years - what can I say, I'm a sad woman, a dog with a bone (pun intended!!) - if something works, then it just keeps working for me, regardless of repetition. It's never not funny to me.

"You told them my name was Bone, and you didn't tell me."

"That was the loon's mating cry!" "Now don't be rude, Horace."

"I'll be with you in a minute, Mr. Peabody!"

"Now look here, young lady, that is my car!" "Your car, your golf ball. Is there anything in the world that doesn't belong to you?" "Yes - YOU. Thank heavens!" "Now don't lose your temper."

I love his thoughts there in that post - makes me see a couple of things anew. Especially the bits about Hepburn's character's amorality - definitely - the woman knows no societal restraints!! And how good Hepburn is in that realm!

Excerpt from the post:

Hawks here introduces us to his distinctive take on the comedy of power and powerlessness: he likes pushing the protagonist's loss of control into the realm of humiliation, and then, in a compensatory gesture of equal force, he shifts the focus to the humbled protagonist's recovery of his dignity and power - sometimes via detachment, sometimes via exasperation. In the other corner, Susan Vance is explictly amoral, in rebellion against every rule society is selling - and extremely feminine, her strategems couched in the language of girlish seduction, her threat coded as the threat of femininity. Somehow Bringing Up Baby seems more explicitly about sex than other screwball comedies: partly because the focus remains squarely on the boy-girl thing, and partly because Hawks pushes Susan's antisocial qualities so far that it's easy to imagine her breaking the Hays Code as well.

And also I love his observation about the entire cast basically tromping into the jail in single file at the end for the finale. It's hysterical!

Here's the whole post

via - the wonderful Girish

Lost in Translation

A fascinating and disturbing article about the mangled translation of Jules Verne's work. (And check out the comments, too - the bit about Hans Christian Andersen really sparked my curiosity - I would love to read the original!!) Translation has always been an interest of mine - how languages correspond, the troubles of finding a perfect match - but also to retain the feel of the work itself. For example, I came across this amazing article about translating James Joyce's Ulysses into Chinese - written by the translator Jim Di. How to maintain the glorious sweep of that last "line" in Chinese? Watch how he worked it out. More evidence that translation is, actually, an art. I read Chekhov for years - since high school - in what I see now as a very stilted translation. I loved it - I loved Chekhov - but I found it VERY difficult to play, without sounding like a parody of "Chekhovian" language. It was a surface rendering of the language. It did not get inside the Russian - and try to translate the tone, and the energy - to MY ears. When I started branching out, recently, to try other translations (most notably Paul Schmidt's - I wrote about that here) - I felt this prickling of excitement. It was the same thing, obviously ... "I am in mourning for my life", etc. ... but it was made new. The prose lived - rather than sitting on the page, as some monument to a long-dead dusty relic. I think it's about time Jules Verne was re-issued in a new translation. He deserves that, most definitely.

John Quincy Adams

An event I would LOVE to attend. His travels through Russia as, basically, a teenager, at first - and then later as a young man - have always fascinated me. Also: it's awesome because he kept a journal, and wrote copious letters ... so we have his first impressions. Russia in the late18th century. Quite an extraordinary experience for a young man.

More on John Quincy Adams in Russia here

"their true nature"

This quote from Kierkegaard feels quite connected, in a way, to Crime and Punishment - which obviously I was thinking about this morning. It's been a couple years since I last read Crime and Punishment - but something about that quote (on the beautiful Mental Multivitamin's site) reminds me of Raskolnikov. And also: of all of us.

New York City: early morning montage

Pre 8 a.m. on a rainy fall-ish morning.

I love being in Times Square that early ... it's so creepy, melancholy. Beautiful. Photos below I took: starting out on MY side of the river ... and continuing over on THAT side.

From the end of my street. It's about 7 am here - a light mist of rain. And check out the huge ocean liner coming up the Hudson.

My 'hood.

42nd and 8th

Peeking in at a big construction site. Corner of 42nd and 8th.

Through a scrap of fabric: the lights of 42nd Street.

BB King's joint - on 42nd. I just love it - because it was literally about 7:30 in the morning ... but damn, those lights were on!!

Weird. The hot gold of the lights above - but then you can see the cooler blue and muted rainy neon of the rest of the street underneath.

Reflection in a rain-puddle.

Times Square. 7:45 a.m. I like it best at this weird hour of the day. Lights still ablaze ... but almost empty of people.

Check this out. An entrance to, oh, some corporate office or something. I have not doctored this at all - or messed with the colors. I was walking across town - in the grey rainy morning - grey streets, watery neon, muted yellow cabs - everything soft and grey - and saw this bright blue entranceway. Like a spaceship or something. And check out what the security guard's station looks like in the photo below this one. It's so Quantum Leap Imaging Chamber, isn't it??

The Books: "Crime and Punishment" (Fyodor Dostoevsky)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt - on my adult fiction shelves:

Crime and Punishment - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As per usual, I always get a little bit nervous when I realize that one of my favorite books is next on the shelf. How to talk about it? Without, like, sounding, uhm, stupid and, like, inarticulate? How can I discuss Crime and Punishment in any normal way? How can I not just SHOUT: "THIS BOOK FREAKIN' ROCKS." Which it does. I've written before - if you have any curiosity at all about the criminal mind, about psychopaths and sociopaths - and what it is actually like to be them ... then you really have got to read the book. No "crime library" is complete without it. It's like an excavation of a human mind. Or ... surgery or something. Surgery on someone's psyche. I never get over this book. And I've read it a couple times - it's a workout, to read - I have to gear up for it. And each time I read it, I find myself getting caught up in it - and caught up in Dostoevsky's brilliant trap: I do not want Raskolnikov to succeed. Because he is planning a senseless murder and you can soooo feel his madness in how Dostoevsky methodically and painstakingly describes his thought process. I don't want him to succeed - and yet I feel for him. Tremendously. And when the investigation begins - when the "punishment' phase begins ... and the inspectors are starting to narrow in on Raskolnikov - I have an odd feeling of urgency and nervousness. Like, in spite of the fact that I know he should be caught ... I am somehow on "his side". (Really good thriller movies do that, too - if they have an awesome villain. Even if you hate the villain's actions, somehow you find yourself on the villain's side).

And as far as I'm concerned - the ending of the book - and how it all comes out - the possibility of redemption - is one of the most difficult and healing things about it. It elevates it. From a great crime story (THE great crime story) to a work of almost divine healing energy. I remember the first time I read it - and it was years ago - and the ending made me want to cry - I got this hot sensation in my throat, my eyes burned - it was such a painful glimpse: yet beautiful too. Evil burning itself out. If there is a chance for Raskolnikov to be forgiven ... then we all have a chance. Dostoevsky (as always) does not take the easy way out.

And there is a reason that I was "rooting" for Raskolnikov - in that weird uncomfortable way. Because he is redeemable. We are all redeemable. Dostoevsky wrote from the dregs of the earth, he wrote from within the muck - the forgotten throngs - the bitter aggrieved Travis Bickles of the world. What does it do to someone's psyche - to someone's outlook - to be hated and scorned from the day you are born? To have no chance? Dostoevsky doesn't let society off the hook, of course. That's one of his main points. But he also doesn't hang it all up on society. Raskolnikov is mad. He must be punished. And he will be.

But then what??

Dostoevsky is one of our greatest and most human writers - because to him, he always asks: Then what????

This book shows that there is an undeniable logic in madness. And that there are no easy answers.

Here's the frenzied part of the book where Raskolnikov is trying to keep to his plan. And that's the thing: I read this, and part of my brain disconnects from it ... observing: "Wow. He so shouldn't go thru with this." But then another part of my brain is thinking, along with Raskolnikov: "He has to get GOING! He can't be late!!!!" Meaning: late for the murder. I am implicated by the book, because it makes me think such things as: "He can't be late for the murder!!!" That's the genius of it.

Note the kind of creepy omniscent narrator inserting itself here and there. "We may note, in passing ..." You can tell that even though Raskolnikov is in the full frenzy of his murderous impulse ... the writing itself is looking back on it. It FEELS like a crime report, is basically what I'm trying to say.

There's an arrogance in Raskolnikov. The arrogance of madness and a feeling of superiority. Reminds me of Leopold & Loeb ... how they truly felt they were ABOVE being caught ... they were "supermen" ... they would be able to murder someone and first of all, have no emotional response to the murder - and also, to be so smart, smarter than other criminals who were just MORONS - and never be caught. But then, ha ha, frickin' Leopold leaves his GLASSES at the crime scene. Because, wow, whaddya know ... you DO get panicked when you murder someone, you DO have an emotional response to killling ... and you DO get discombobbled. And of course, the glasses were found ... and led the investigators right to Leopold's door.

But it was the arrogance, in the first place ... the belief that there was such a thing as a "perfect crime" ...

Raskolnikov, below, seems to believe that at some point - his calculations and his planning will stop ... and he will then move forward, inevitably, still himself, still with his brain working - and go and do the deed. He fears thoughtlessness, he fears the frenzy of murder - because that's when criminals get sloppy. But - to his horror - he finds that he cannot stop the obsessive planning, and going over and over and over all the probabilities in his mind beforehand ... That he keeps thinking and planning ... and he wonders if it will ever stop ... and if he will not only be able to go thru with it, but believe in it beforehand ....

Brilliant psychological observations. The need of criminals and psychopaths to believe they are smarter than ordinary mortals ... that they are above certain things. So when the house of cards start tumbling - the sense of inferiority is enraging - way more than it would be to a regular person who knows he is NOT a "superman intellect".

EXCERPT FROM
Crime and Punishment - by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

He still had the most important thing to do - to steal the axe from the kitchen. That the deed must be done with an axe he had decided long ago. He had also a pocket pruning-knife, but he could not rely on the knife and still less on his own strength, and so resolved finally on the axe. We may note, in passing, one peculiarity in regard to all the final resolutions taken by him in the matter; they had one strange characteristic; the more final they were, the more hideous and the more absurd they at once became in his eyes. In spite of all his agonising inward struggle, he never for a single instant all that time could believe in the carrying out of his plans.

And, indeed, if it had ever happened that everything to the least point could have been considered and finally settled, and no uncertainty of any kind had remained, he would, it seems, have renounced it all as something absurd, monstrous and impossible. But a whole mass of unsettled points and uncertainties remained. As for getting the axe, that trifling business cost him no anxiety, for nothing could be easier. Nastasya was continually out of the house, especially in the evenings; she would run in to the neighbours or to a shop, and always left the door ajar. It was the one thing that landlady was always scolding her about. And so, when the time came, he would only have to go quietly into the kitchen and take the axe, and an hour later (when everything was over) go in and put it back again. But there were doubtful points. Supposing he returned an hour later to put it back, and Nastasya had come back and was on the spot. He would of course have to go by and wait till she went out again. But supposing she were in the meantime to miss the axe, look for it, make any outcry - that would mean suspicion or at least grounds for suspicion.

But those were all trifles which he had not even begun to consider, and indeed he had no time. He was th inking of the chief point, and put off trifling details, until he could believe in it all. But that seemed utterly unattainable. So it seemed to himself at least. He could not imagine, for instance, that he would sometimes leave off thinking, get up and simply go there ... Even his late experiment (i.e., his visit with the object of a final survey of the place) was simply an attempt at an experiment, far from being the real thing, as though one should say, "Come, let us go and try it - why dream about it?" - and at once he had broken down and had run away cursing, in a frenzy with himself. Meanwhile it would seem, as regards the moral question, that his analysis was complete; his casuistry had become keen as a rzor, and he could not find rational objections in himself, and doggedly, slavishly sought arguments in all directions, fumbling for them, as though someone were forcing and drawing him to it.

At first - long before indeed - he had been much occupied with one question; why almost all crimes are so badly concealed and so easily detected, and why almost all criminals leave such obvious traces? He had come gradfually to many different and curious conclusions, and in his opinion the chief reason lay not so much in the material impoosibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself. Almost every criminal is subject to a failure of will and reasoning power by a childish and phenomenal heedlessness, at the very instant when prudence and caution are most essential. It was his conviction that this eclipse of reason and failure of will-power attacked a man like a disease developed gradually and reached its highest point just before the perpetration of the crime and for longer or shorter time after, according to the individual case, and then passed off like any other disease. The quetions whether the disease gives rise to the crime, or whether the crime from its own peculiar nature is always accompanied by something of the nature of disease, he did not yet feel able to decide.

When he reached these conclusions, he decided hat in his own case there could not be such a morbid reaction, that his reason and will would remain unimpaired at the time of carrying out his design, for the single reason that his design was "not a crime ...." We will omit all the process by means of which he arrived at this last conclusion; we have run too far ahead already ... We may add only that the practical, purely material difficulties of the affair occupied a secondary position in his mind. "One has but to keep all one's will-power and reason to deal wtih them, and they will all be overcome at the time when once one has familiarised oneself with the minutest details of the business ..." But this preparation had never been begun. His final decisions were what he came to trust least, and when the hour struck, it all came to pass quite differently, as it were accidentally and unexpectedly.

One trifling circumstance upset his calculations before he had even left the staircase. When he reached the landlady's kitchen, the door of which was open as usual, he glanced cautiously in to see whether, in Nastasya's absence, the landlady herself was there, or if not, whether the door to her own room was closed, so that she might not peep out when he went in for the axe. But what was his amazement when he suddenly saw that Nastasya was not only at home in the kitchen, but was occupied there, taking linen out of a basket and hanging it on a line. Seeing him, she left off hanging the clothes, turned to him and stared at him all the time he was passing. He He turned away his eyes, and walked past as though he noticed nothing. But it was the end of everything; he had not the axe! He was overwhelmed.

"What made me think," he reflected, as he went under the gateway. "What made me think that she would be sure not to be at home at that moment? Why, why, why did I assume this so certainly?"

He was crushed and even humiliated. He could have laughed at himself in his anger ... A dull animal rage boiled within him.

He stood hesitating in the gateway. To go into the street, to go a walk for appearance' sake was revolting; to go back to his room, even more revolting. "And what a chance I have lost for ever!" he muttered, standing aimlessly in the gateway, just opposite the porter's little dark room, which was also open. Suddenly he strated. From the porter's room, two paces away from him, something shining under the bench to the right caught his eyes ... He looked about him - nobody. He approached the room on tiptoe, went down two steps into it and in a faint voice called the porter. "Yes, not at home! Somewhere near though, in the yard, for the door is wide open." He dashed to the axe (it was an axe) and pulled it out from under the bench, where it lay between two chunks of wood; at once, before going out, he made it fast in the noose, he thrust both hands into his pockets and went out of the room; no one had noticed him! "When reason fails, the devil helps!" he thought with a strange grin. This chance raised his spirits extraordinarily.

He walked along quietly and sedately, without hurry, to avoid awakening suspicion. He scarcely looked at the passersby, tried to escape looking at their faces at all, and to be as little noticeable as possible. Suddenly he thought of his hat. "Good heavens! I had th emoney the day before yesterday and did not get a cap to wear instead!" A curse rose from the bottom of his soul.

Glancing out of the corner of his eye into a shop, he saw by a clock on the wall that it was ten minutes past seven. He had to make haste and at the same time to go some way round, so as to approach the house from the other side ...

When he had happened to imagine all this beforehand, he had sometimes thought that he would be very much afraid. But he was not very much afraid now, was not afraid at all, indeed. His mind was even occupied by irrelevant matters, but by nothing for long. As he passed the Yusupov garden, he was deeply absorbed in considering the building of great fountains, and of their refreshing effect on the atmosphere in all the squares. By degrees he passed to the conviction that if the summer garden were extended to the field of Mars, and perhaps joined to the garden of the Mihailovsky Palace, it would be a splendid thing and a great benefit to the town. Then he was interested in the question why in all great towns men are not simply driven by necessity, but in some peculiar way inclined to live in those parts of the town where there are no gardens nor fountains; where there are most dirt and smell and all sorts of nastiness. Then his own walks through the Hay Market came back to his mind, and for a moment he waked up to reality. "What nonsense!" he thought, "better to think of nothing at all!"

Some questions I've seen about.

1. Is your second toe longer than your first?
No.

2. Do you have a favorite type of pen?
I am extremely picky about pens. I wonder if this is a question that seems strange today - to people who write ON the computer. I still write long-hand so I am veeeeeery particular about pens. If a pen has any "scratch" to it - I can't write with it. If it snags at the page - if the point is too snippety and rigid ... I can't write with it. I need a pen that flows. I need a pen that WORKS with the paper, that leaves a nice mark but doesn't scratch or FIGHT. You don't have to pay big bucks for a pen that flows. The PMOP in the left nav there is my preferred pen. I love that that page says "the world's most loved pen". Damn straight. I love that pen so much that when regular stores stopped carrying them - favoring newer flashier styles with the "grip" and all that crap - I got boxes of them from my dad so I am now all set for years with that pen. That pen has the best FLOW I know - and I've been using it since I was in high school.

3. Look at your planner for March 14, what are you doing?
I don't plan that far ahead. Although, let's be hopeful: I will be in the Balkans next March! Yeah, that's it!

4. What color are your toenails usually?
Nothing usual. Right now they are a gleaming Snuffleupagus purple.

5. What was the last thing you highlighted?
Probably some voiceover script.

6. What color are your bedroom curtains?
Dark brown - with a paisley print. I love them.

7. What color are the seats in your car?
I don't own a car. Love the bias of this questionnaire already.

8. Have you ever had a black and white cat?
No. Just one very very special grey cat.

9. What is the last thing you put a stamp on?
Some stupid thing I had to send to Actors Equity.

10. Do you know anyone who lives in Wyoming?
No.

11. Why did you withdraw cash from the ATM the last time?
What a personal question. I withdraw cash because, uhm, I need money? To get by in the world? Sheesh.

12. Whose is the last baby that you held?
My friend Janine's latest probably.

13. Unlucky #?
I have a weird thing about the number 29 but it's way too long to go into.

14. Do you like Cinnamon toothpaste?
NO NO NO NO NO.

15. What kind of car were you driving 2 years ago?
Again, with the bias. NOT ALL OF US OWN CARS.

16. Pick one: Miami Hurricanes or Florida Gators?
No.

17. Last time you went to Six Flags?
WAY too long ago. I wonder if Alex, Shannon and I going on the scariest roller coaster ever built in Las Vegas counts. I remember Alex clutching my hand as we climbed up vertically - I remember her shouting, and sobbing as we climbed, "I'M SO SCARED, I'M SO SCARED, I'M SO SCARED." Most fun I've ever had. I think I've written this before - if I were a bazillionaire, I would have an amusement part of ONLY roller coasters right in my back yard. And I would ride them every day.

18. Do you have any wallpaper in your house?
Uhm - HOUSE?

Thanks for the bias.

No. I do not have wallpaper in my APARTMENT.

19. Closest thing to you that is yellow?
My walls are a pale pale yellow

20. Last person to give you a business card?
Some producer for Bravo

21. Who is the last person you wrote a check to?
My massage guru

22. Closest framed picture to you?
Framed photo of me, Jackie and Maria in the parking lot outside a James Taylor concert we went to a bazillion years ago. I loooove the photo.

23. Last time you had someone cook for you?
My massage guru made me lamb about a month ago. I call him a "guru" just to be silly. But he did make me lamb. And it was scrumptious.

24. Have you ever applied for welfare?
No. Unemployment? Hell, yes. Welfare? No.

25. How many emails do you have?
Accounts? Is that what you mean? I have about 4 email accounts. Maybe 5. No idea.

26. Last time you received flowers?
When I did my one-woman thingie last winter.

27. Do you think the sanctity of marriage is meant for only a man & woman?
Duh. No.

28. Do you play air guitar?
I'm more of an air-DRUM girl myself.

29. Has anyone ever proposed to you?
I've had three marriage proposals. Two I said "no" to (one of those was a no-brainer - but the other one? I cannot believe I had the presence of mind to say "no". It was my first relationship, my first love. And he proposed ... and I got this weird sense of doom, a portentous feeling about it ... even though I was so young, and in love with him. And I said No. I often shiver to think what would have happened if I said yes.) . And one proposal I said "yes" to. But hmmm. I'm still single. Welcome to my life.

30. Do you take anything in your coffee?
No. Well ... that's not true. Sometimes - if I'm having ICED coffee - I like a DROP (just a drop) of cream in it.

31. Do you have any Willow Tree figurines?
I don't even know what a Willow Tree figureine is and I don't WANT to know.

32. What is/was your high school's rival mascot?
I know the rival - but I can't remember the mascot. Beth? Mere? Betsy? Help a girl out.

33. Last person you spoke to from high school?
I speak to my friends from high school all the time. We email each other constantly. And I read "Frotoe's" blog (she's one of my best friends). And my friends all read mine and comment. I think the last email I got was from Frotoe herself and she told me about some horrible God/devil/sex comment she got on her blog - which is basically a karate blog - so God/devil/sex bullshit has NO PLACE on her blog. We commiserated via email on the douchebags who show up on our blogs, occasionally. I love my friends.

34. Last time you used hand sanitizer?
Hand sanitizer is a new thing for me and I have recently become addicted. It's not healthy. I get a teensy coffee grind on my finger when I'm taking out the trash - and suddenly feel the need drench my hands in sanitizer for 10 minutes afterwards. It's not good. But I've always been a bit OCD about washing my hands.

35. Would you like to learn to play the drums?
I play air-drums like a prodigy, thankyouverymuch.

36. What color are the blinds in your living room?
I love how this quiz assumes I have more than one room.

My 'BLINDS' are the same color as the CURTAINS in the other question ... because: I ONLY HAVE ONE ROOM.

38. Last thing you read in the newspaper?
I read about OJ's latest nonsense. And I laughed! I laughed at his trials and tribulations! Serves you right, murdering fuckhead!

39. What was the last pageant you attended?
Never been to a pageant.

40. What is the last place you bought pizza from?
Dominos.

41. Have you ever worn a crown?
On my birthday.

42. What is the last thing you stapled?
My food charts to give to my trainer.

43. Did you ever drink clear Pepsi?
I don't drink soda if I can help it. But if I did? I drink Coke. Not a Pepsi girl.

44. Are you ticklish?
Horribly. Ask my massage guru. I kicked him in the face once. And he still cooked me lamb. That's why he's a GURU.

45. Last time you saw fireworks?
July 4th

46. Last time you had a Krispy Kreme doughnut?
Word to the wise: It is impossible to just have A Krispy Kreme doughnut. They are DESIGNED to be PLURAL. So I stay away from them altogether.

47. Who is the last person that left you a message & you actually returned it?
My mother.

The bias of this question is that I don't return messages. I usually do.

48. Last time you parked under a carport?
Never

49. Do you have a black dog?
No

50 . Have you had your mid life crisis yet?
I'm pretty sure I'm having one now.

51. Are you an aunt or uncle?
Yes!!!!

52. Who has the prettiest eyes that you know of?
Michael is the first one that comes to mind. I never told the story about his eyes - and the weird out of body thing that happened once (to both of us) when I was looking into them - because no matter what, it would sound bizarre. But I still love his eyes. They're green. But sometimes they look brown. I wouldn't call the eyes "pretty" because that, to me, is a word for a girl's eyes, I think. It doesn't quite fit. But I'll stick with my answer.

53. What kind of soap or body wash do you use?
I use rose-scented soap only. I'm not really into body wash - although Crabtree & Evelyn makes a wonderful body wash called "Summer Hill" that I was very very into for a while. Yummy scent.

54. Do you remember Ugly Kid Joe?
No.

55. Do you have a little black dress?
Yes. A couple.

found this at ricki's

Life is good

... as long as Fenway Park is in it.

I am amazed at how poignant it was for me to be in that park again. One of my earliest memories is from a Red Sox game at Fenway!

And last night's game!!!

It was a rainy morning. And as you will see below - when we hit Boston, at around 2:30 ... the sky was ominous and black. An hour later, everything was clear, crisp, blue and sunny. PERFECT baseball weather.

Pictures below. Don't feel like writing now. Great game. Highlights later when I'm not so tired.

Is the photo below from the same day??? Hard to believe that this photo was taken a mere 25 minutes after that top photo.

Hi, John Henry! How are ya??

Josh: make sure you get BOTH feet between the white lines AT THE SAME MOMENT ... otherwise: all will be lost!!

(I love watching him do that. It's so OCD)

Bullpen

Youk being tended to. Cousin Mike texted me that Youk was okay - From where we were sitting, it looked like he might have broken a finger or something - and they don't give you "updates" during the game.

Full set of photos from the game - and the whole day in Boston - here

Perfection: Marilyn in action

Diamonds are a girl's best friend

It's luscious, the colors, the guy's ties, the fact that in all of the women she is the ONLY blonde (she would make sure that no other blonde ever was in one of her pictures- even down to the extras ... She would scan the crowd of extras, looking for any platinum headed chick - and if there was one? She'd quietly speak to someone, and platinum extra would vanish the next day. Look closer next time you see one of her movies, even in crowd scenes - it's all brunettes, and mousy-haired girls ... except for her. Marilyn was no dummy)

The number makes me happy every time I see it. I just lose myself in it - even though I've memorized her every gesture.

And speaking of gestures: just WATCH her. Yes, it's choreography. Someone gave the moves to her. She always had good people working around her. But it takes a star to fill those gestures, to make them mythic, to have them land. Every tiny shimmy, every eensy shoulder shrug - and then every big bold burlesque move - is not just perfectly executed - but perfectly embodied and filled.

It's just so much fun to watch her.

Always and forever.

African Queen

Bogie and Bacall. Smokin', eatin', chillin'. In the African morn.

Quantum Leap: GEARING UP!!!

I know I had said I would start my Quantum Leap re-caps this weekend - but turns out I'm going out of town this weekend, and can't begin until next week. Tommy is ALSO going to be doing re-caps - so hopefully we can have a nice counterpoint thing going - I'm really excited about it - so if you're a Quantum Leap fan, make sure you stop by Tommy's! We'll be going episode by episode.

Because we are geeks.

And we are proud.

Speaking of geeks: In lieu of the re-cap, I'm posting a bunch of quotes I had already compiled. All quotes come from the documentary A Kiss with History: Remembering Quantum Leap - which was a special feature included in my Season 1 set.

Donald Bellisario, of course, was the creator of the show. He wrote many of the episodes - found Scott and Dean for the parts - and basically shepherded the entire thing into existence. An amazing talent, that guy!

So to whet the Quantum Leap whistle, here we go! And don't forget to stop by Tommy's as well!

Quantum Leap: quote

The leap out and the leap in were the best conventions, the best teasers, the best trailers that anyone could have devised for a TV show. What would it be like to be you for a day? It was a delight, this wonderful hour - that was different from anything else.

-- Scott Bakula

Quantum Leap: quote

I was in a hit Broadway show, Romance Romance and I decided that it was time to stop, time to go back to LA, and my family had left in August and everybody in New York was like, "You're crazy. You're the star of a Broadway show, you're Tony nominated, you can't leave!" and I said, "Well, I need to go back to LA." And for whatever reason, 4 weeks after I got back to LA, the Quantum Leap audition came across my door.

-- Scott Bakula

Quantum Leap: quote

[Scott Bakula had] come off Broadway and he sat down and he read the part of Sam. And as he read it, my heart started to beat very fast. And I kept a very straight face, and said, "Thank you. That was really terrific." And he walked out the door, and I went, "I don't care WHAT you gotta do. That guy is Sam."

-- Donald Bellisario

Quantum Leap: quote

A dear friend of mine, Dennis Hopper, said, "Well, that's the end of his career" when he found out I was going to do a series. And Dennis, who is almost always right, was wrong.

-- Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

Dean [Stockwell] surprised us all when somebody said to me, "Would you like Dean Stockwell to play the part of Al?" And I said, "What are you kidding me? Dean Stockwell?" He had just done Married to the Mob - it was a big film hit!

-- Donald Bellisario

Quantum Leap: quote

Dean walked in and was ... kind of ... complete.

-- Scott Bakula, on Dean Stockwell's audition

I kind of sailed through it. I made everybody laugh. All these people back there in the dark. I think they like to sit back there and not let their faces be seen ... I made them all laugh. So in walking out, I knew. I knew because Don wanted me for it. So I knew I had it. And I was very happy.

-- Dean Stockwell on his audition for the part

Quantum Leap: quote

The concept of the show was so unique that - and I wasn't the only one, this was true for Scott as well - a lot of us, at the beginning, couldn't really figure out how it was going to be executed.

-- Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

First of all, when you're creating a show, you want to do something you love. I do a lot of military things, I love it. I'm a pilot - or, I was - so that just appealed to me. I lived out there during that time, I knew a lot of those people, and it was just a natural thing for me to write. So I started to write something else, and then I went, "Well, I think I want to write this." What could be more difficult than leaping into a test pilot?

-- Don Bellisario on the first episode where Sam Beckett leaps into a test pilot, a la The Right Stuff

Quantum Leap: quote

From when I first read the pilot and saw this character of Al - I loved it. And I saw this potential in it for a kind of humor and a kind of demeanor that would be attractive and fascinating, I thought, to audiences. And I think I was right about that.

-- Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

A lot of Al was Don Bellisario. You know, the lecherous, the checking out the girls.

-- Scott Bakula

Quantum Leap: quote

[Don Bellisario's] appreciation of the female form - not only the form, everything female - was injected into this character Al. And I quite liked it myself.

-- Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

The idea of the wardrobe was Don's. And I thought it was terrific. I don't know if anybody ever said, "Why does he ever dress like that?" Nobody ever asked, "Why does he dress like that?" It was just accepted. And it really worked, without any explanation. Where would he get those clothes? My God, where would you find stuff like that?

-- Dean Stockwell on Al's famously bizarre wardrobe

Quantum Leap: quote

Like any show, when you create it, when you do a pilot - the show develops in the season that follows that. That's why the first season is so interesting to me, because you can actually watch the growth and development of the show. Sam, for example, as a character, grew.

-- Don Bellisario

Quantum Leap: quote

When they got me they had somebody who played a lot of sports, who sang, who danced, who could play the piano, play the guitar. My whole life had, in a sense, prepared me to be in this show.

-- Scott Bakula

Quantum Leap: quote

The biggest lead-in I would get was, "You're gonna be a boxer in 2 weeks. How's your boxing?" "Uh - not great." That would be the clue. It became like: what else can we do to Scott? We joked at times: how can we kill Scott?

-- Scott Bakula

Quantum Leap: quote

[Scott Bakula] thinks that I don't know to this day that he used to sneak off and play indoor hockey on lunch breaks which was not allowed by the studio due to insurance purposes.

-- Don P. Bellisario

Quantum Leap: quote

Another thing I gotta say: at the beginning of that show, Scott [Bakula] was pounding nails with the grips the first episode. And nearly 5 years later, on the last episode, Scott was still pounding nails.

-- Don P. Bellisario

Quantum Leap: quote

We would be doing an episode and somewhere around the 4th or 5th day of shooting, we'd get the preliminary for the next episode. And we looked forward to it so much every week. You'd be tingling to open the new script and see where it was going to go. Because every one was different, and that was one of the great charms of the show. The time was different, all the costumes, all the sets, all the people in each show were different.

-- Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

If I could keep it within the modern timeframe, within the span of life of the man who was jumping, there would be tv, there would be automobiles, people basically dressed the same - there would be wardrobe changes, yes, but it would be viable, it would be believable. And so that's what I did. That's why I said: he can only leap in his own lifetime. And that could go into the future, which we did a little but not much. And the next thing was I wanted to see who he leaped into. And that was the famous mirror shots.

-- Don Bellisario - creator of the show

Quantum Leap: quote

Don [Bellisario] worked this convention of me being swiss cheesed each time I leapt. My desire as Sam to get back home didn't build necessarily ... It didn't keep building in frustration, or "I hate this" - especially in the first season.

-- Scott Bakula - he makes an important point here, I think, about one of the appeals of the show. If Sam Beckett had constnatly been in a state of frustration that he couldn't get back home - then much of the compassion he had for the characters he leapt into would not be there. The show wouldn't have worked. Go, Don.

Quantum Leap: quote

He watches. He's a perfect observer. He watches, he chomps on his cigar - he gives you little stuff here and there, that kind of lets you know ... "That was a good one."

-- Scott Bakula on Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

Like a triangle in an orchestra - Ping - and then it would be gone.

-- Dean Stockwell on the "kiss with history" moments in some episodes

Quantum Leap: quote

Some [episodes] were kind of laughers, even fluffy episodes - where the situation wasn't of any social significance, it wasn't a heavy-duty morality type of episode. But then there were others that were important issues, and we kind of gravitated towards those a little bit.

-- Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

The reality is that in television the fans make the show. Because if they're not there, eventually the shows go off. And they were a part of the show. There was a great sense of entitlement with our fans because they felt - with Episode 6 - they all got on board - they went home from that show, they wrote the studio. Halfway through the second season we were taken off for a couple of weeks, and they deluged NBC ...

-- Scott Bakula

Quantum Leap: quote

There's not a doubt in mind that the fan base of Quantum Leap went a long way towards getting that show picked up at a very critical time. The fans are still out there. I was fortunate to be given a star on Hollywood Boulevard the other day, and there were a group of Quantum Leap fans, with their signs: 'Bring back Scott', 'Bring back Al' - 'Ziggy wants to work again!'

-- Donald P. Bellisario

Quantum Leap: quote

I feel fortunate. I mean, there are some actors, I don't know how they do it, they're lucky - they get in these big movies, and they have scenes at the beginning, and here, and there, and next thing you know they're in Hawaii or somewhere for 6 months, on the same movie, picking up a check every week. Never happened to me! But Quantum Leap: 5 years. It was very unique in my career, and I'm very very proud of it.

-- Dean Stockwell

Quantum Leap: quote

It is no doubt the most unique show i've ever made, and probably the one that gives me more satisfaction and pleasure than any.

-- Donald P. Bellisario

Quantum Leap: quote

I'm overwhlemed to this day about how it has affected people around the world and that's the magic of what Don, and all of us, created for 4 1/2 years.

-- Scott Bakula

Quantum Leap: quote

You know, I had a lot of people working for me who would put the show together. All younger than me. And many times I'd come on the set and see something, a hat, a scarf, a piece of material, and I'd say, "Uh uh. That's not right for 1965. That's not right for 1957." And who could argue with me? Even if I was wrong! Who could argue with me!

-- Don Belissario

Quantum Leap: quote

Although I've been recognized my whole life from films, that recognition ... it took a Quantum Leap. The Quantum Leap fans started to become part of a family a little bit.

-- Dean Stockwell

The Books: "Play It As It Lays" (Joan Didion)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt - on my adult fiction shelves:

Play It As It Lays - by Joan Didion

If you do a search on my site for "Joan Didion" you'll probably see she comes up a lot. She's one of my favorite writers of all time. Her essay collections (Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The White Album to name my 2 faves) are addictive - and thought-provoking - and HIGHLY emotional - even though her writing is as cool (sometimes cold) and clear as frost. Her best-selling memoir that just came out The Year of Magical Thinking - about the year after her lhusband's death (her husband was writer John Gregory Dunne - brother to Dominick Dunne) is one of the most astonishing books I've ever read. She doesn't just look into the heart of the sun directly - she writes from WITHIN that burning - That book has to be read to be believed. She has no distance from her experience - she is in the throes of intense grief and longing and the kind of madness that can come when you lose someone so vital to your life ... and yet her skill as a writer is so acute, that she is able to DESCRIBE her experience. The otherworldliness of having him - her mate - NOT be there. And why she can't throw away his clothes. And how she keeps going over and over and over in her mind the night he died ... she is convinced that it could be reversed. That he didn't REALLY die. That's what she means by her title. It is an incredible book.

Her career has spanned decades, and she's done it all. Personal essays, reportage, screenplays, novels. She's a real idol of mine.

Play It As It Lays is one of her novels. Joan Didion started out her career as a writer by moving to New York (she's a born-and-bred Californian) - she wrote for Vogue - eventually, she met and married John Gregory Dunne and they moved back to California. They wrote screenplays together, and lived in Malibu. They had a daughter (who tragically died ALSO in the "year of magical thinking" - an unexpected heart failure at the age of 31 - unbelievable) ... and they settled into life on the outskirts of Hollywood. Occasionally they were main players in that world. Play It As It Lays is a book about Hollywood. In a larger sense, it's a book about America - and America at a certain time - the late 1960s - and a certain set of people: the fringe of the elite in Hollywood. The ones with careers either on the ascendant or the decline. Maria Wyeth is the main character in the book - and sometimes she narrates chapters in her cold creepy voice (she is totally cut off) - and sometimes there is an omniscent narrator. Maria is on the decline. She was an actress. She had a rough past - orphaned, now divorced - she has a daughter who is in an institution. But there's something wrong with Maria, too. You can tell from how she writes. Something has been cut off in her - some ability to respond with warmth. A wound has been cauterized. And she is left forever damaged.

The book goes downhill from there.

It's a bleak read. Joan Didion, on occasion, can be the bleakest of writers. Didion takes a world that many people envy (for all the wrong reasons) - and slices it open to see how it works. It's not pretty.

Didion has written essays about what it's like to drive on the freeways in LA - and in the book Maria Wyeth, a restless woman, running away from something - spends hours driving on the freeways. That's the excerpt below.

EXCERPT FROM Play It As It Lays - by Joan Didion

In the first hot month of the fall after the summer she left Carter (the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills), Maria drove the freeway. She dressed every morning with a greater sense of purpose than she had felt in some time, a cotton skirt, a jersey, sandals she could kick off when she wanted the touch of the accelerator, and she dressed very fast, running a brush through her hair once or twice and tying it back with a ribbon, for it was essential (to pause was to throw herself into unspeakable peril) that she be on the freeway by ten o'clock. Not somewhere on Hollywood Boulevard, not on her way to the freeway, but actually on the freeway. If she was not she lost the day's rhythm, its precariously imposed momentum. Once she was on the freeway and had maneuvered her way to a fast lane she turned on the radio at high volume and she drove. She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs soar overhead at seventy miles an hour. Normandie 1/4 Vermont 3/4 Harbor Fwy I. Again and again she returned to an intricate stretch just south of the interchange where successful passage from the Hollywood onto the Harbor required a diagonal move across four lanes of traffic. On the afternoon she finally did it without once braking or once losing the beat on the radio she was exhilarated, and that night slept dreamlessly. By then she was sleeping not in the house but out by the pool, on a faded rattan chaise left by a former tenant. There was a jack for a telephone there, and she used beach towels for blankets. The beach towels had a special point. Because she had an uneasy sense that sleeping outside on a rattan chaise could be construed as the first step toward something unnameable (she did not know what it was she feared, but it had to do with empty sardine cans in the sink, vermouth bottles in the wastebaskets, slovenliness pat the point of return) she told herself that she was sleeping outside just until it was too cold to sleep beneath beach towels, just until the heat broke, just until the fires stopped burning in the mountains, sleeping outside only because the bedrooms in the house were hot, airless, only because the palms scraped against the screens and there was no one to wake her in the mornings. The beach towels signified how temporary the arrangement was. Outside she did not have to be afraid that she would not wake up, outside she could sleep. Sleep was essential if she was to be on the freeway by ten o'clock. Sometimes the freeway ran out, in a scrap metal yard in San Pedro or on the main street of Palmdale or out somewhere no place at all where the flawless burning concrete just stopped, turned into common road, abandoned construction sheds rusting beside it. When that happened she would keep in careful control, portage skillfully back, feel for the first time the heavy weight of the becalmed car beneath her and try to keep her eyes on the mainstream, the great pilings, the Cyclone fencing, the deadly oleander, the luminous signs, the organism which absorbed all her reflexes, all her attention.

So that she would not have to stop for food she kept a hard-boiled egg on the passenger seat of the Corvette. She could shell and eat a hard-boiled egg at seventy miles an hour (crack it on the steering wheel, never mind salt, salt bloats, no matter what happened she remembered her body) and she drank Coca-Cola in Union 76 stations, Standard stations, Flying A's. She would stand on the hot pavement and drink the Coke from the bottle and put the bottle back in the rack (she tried always to let the attendant notice her putting the bottle in the rack, a show of thoughtful responsibility, no sardine cans in her sink) and then she would walk to edge of the concrete and stand, letting the sun dry her damp back. To hear her own voice she would sometimes talk to the attendant, ask advice on oil filters, ho wmuch air the tires should carry, the most efficient route to Foothill Boulevard in West Covina. Then she would retie the ribbon in her hair and rinse her dark glasses in the drinking fountain and be ready to drive again. In the first hot month of the fall she left Carter, the summer Carter left her, the summer Carter stopped living in the house in Beverly Hills, a bad season in the city, Maria put seven thousand miles on the Corvette. Sometimes at night the dread would overtake her, bathe her in sweat, flood her mind with sharp flash images of Les Goodwin in New York and Carter out there on the desert with BZ and Helene and the irrevicability of what seemed already to have happened, but she never thought about that on the freeway.

Sweeney Todd

Edward has an awesome post commemorating the original television production of Sweeney Todd.

If you are only familiar with Lansbury as crime-solving mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher on TV's Murder, She Wrote or as the malevolent manipulator Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate, you owe it to yourself to watch Sweeney Todd. Lansbury sings, Lansbury dances and Lansbury wows. Her Mrs. Lovett is a hard act for anyone to follow.

(Great comments to that post, too.)

Happy birthday to:

... the Star Spangled Banner!

by Percy Moran

There's Francis Scott Key ... catching a glimpse ... seeing that "our flag was still there" ... on September 13, 1814.

I love this, too - here is one of the original broadsides of the lyrics - which was called "The Defense of Fort McHenry" at the time.

I can't help but think of Eddie Izzard's very funny bit about the singing of the national anthem - and that if you can't remember the lyrics - just be firm, use "big mouths", and keep "confirming and denying" with your hand gestures. hahaha

And yes, like wikipedia mentions, it is one of the more difficult songs to sing - and most anthems are notoriously EASY to sing, because - duh - they are for the MASSES, not for opera singers. But Star Spangled Banner starts low and goes way up high - and it takes a really good singer to pull it off (uhm, Whitney Houston?? Before she became a rickety crack ho? Her live version, for me, is the best. See video clip below. Phenomenal.)

So happy birthday, dear national anthem.

O say, can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming!
And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there:
O say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen thro' the mist of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep.
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected, now shines on the stream
'Tis the star-spangled banner. Oh! long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a country should leave us no more?
Their blood has washed out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's desolation,
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the Heav'n - rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, for our cause is just,
And this be our motto--"In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Who is Gnarls Barkley?

Gnarls Barkley's video "Smiley Faces" won an MTV Video Music Award for best editing (Ken Mowe was the editor).

It's very witty - clever - and I, naturally, love it cause Dean Stockwell is in it. It's so silly ... it's almost like Zelig for hip-hop. And these mockumentary interviews with Stockwell and Dennis Hopper at the beginning and end of the video are very funny. "Milton Corpuscle ..." hahahahaha

See video below. I love Hopper's over-seriousness. "I have made Gnarls Barkley my life's work ..." hahahaha And Stockwell's emphatic gesture: "There is NO Gnarls Barkley ..." yet you get the sense that he might still have some doubt about it.