The Sheila Variations

Showoff

I have no idea what I'm doing.

I just joined Amazon's Affiliate Program, because I figured I've been sending them business for years - for free - and I'm going to see if I can make a little money off of it, since I blog about books and movies on a daily basis.

I need to re-do my blog. I know it looks crowded and messy but I honestly don't have the energy to deal with it right now. I hope the page is still loading fine for everyone and everything. I'm still messing around with adding links and stuff like that to products I mention ... and frankly I don't like the look of it, it's so blatantly commercial, but again, whatever: I link to Amazon probably 3 times a day, all put together ... and I want to see what happens with Ye Olde affiliate program.

I set up a store (which you can see over in the side bar) - but I'm honestly not sure what that is. You just go over there and shop there and whatever you buy I get some percent of it? That doesn't seem quite fair ... but whatever, I set it up. Then I also set up a list of my "faves" - which I just can't STAND what that widget looks like (UPDATE: I took it down. It was too gratingly awful to look at)

I realize I sound manic right now.

If the shoe fits.

But mainly I wanted to set this up for my Daily Book Excerpts - and I'll start experimenting with adding widgets to those posts every day ... so you can click to buy, should you feel the need.

For example.

I highly recommend Blood Meridian. Ahem:

If you buy the book from following that link, I'll get a few coins in my metal cup. That's how it works, I guess. Something like that.

Offside, dir. Jafar Panahi

5 or 6 years ago, Iranian film director Jafar Panahi was headed off to a soccer game at Azadi Stadium in Tehran. His 10 year old daughter begged to come with. Females are not allowed to go to the stadium to watch soccer games. It is the rule. Panahi explained to his daughter - No, you cannot ... it is the law that you cannot go. It's a stupid law, but it is the law. But she begged. Panahi was not about to stay home - he wanted to go to the game - so he struck a deal with his daughter. He said, "Okay - we'll go - and we'll see if we can sneak you in somehow. But if they catch us - you have to come back home, because I want to go to the game." His daughter agreed. Of course, they get to the security gates at the stadium, and immediately the guards said, "Nope. She can't go in." As agreed, the daughter walked off - in the direction of home - and Panahi went on in to his seat in the stadium. About 10 minutes later, he looked up - and saw his daughter strolling down the steps towards him. She sat beside him. He was gobsmacked to see her and asked, "How did you get in?" And she said, "There is always a way."

That comment ("There is always a way") was the germ of the idea for Offside, Panahi's 2006 film about a group of 6 girls who dress up as boys and try to get in to see a soccer match in Tehran.

The girls are not trying to sneak in to see just a soccer match - but THE soccer match in 2005 - when Iran played Bahrain and won, therefore qualifying for the World Cup. Much of Offside was filmed in real-time, during that game. The celebrations you see at the end of the film were actual celebrations. Panahi filmed with handheld cameras much of the time, since he did not have permission to do what he was doing ... but since it was a national event with media there, to cover the soccer game, he was able to blend in, and nobody wondered who that guy over there was, filming things. Offside feels like a documentary in many ways, there are no "extras", no set-up interiors ... it's all out in the open, with the sound of the stadium roaring in the background.

Panahi is known for his documentary-like films, much of which take place out in the streets of Tehran. He doesn't like to do domestic dramas because when you film inside a house - because of the restrictions placed on actors - you cannot have it be realistic. For example, in real life - a woman comes home, hangs out with her husband and children - and she takes her veil off. She sits in her own home, and doesn't need to be veiled. But because it is a FILM, the woman then has to be veiled at all times, even privately in her own kitchen. Panahi doesn't like that. It grates on him, film should be as real as possible. So he likes to shoot out in the streets, he likes to use unprofessional actors - people who are right for the part, look right, whatever ... Most of his films have to do with restrictions anyway - and he is truly inventive, in how he goes about doing what he's doing, working under such conditions, trying to get around the censors, and the moronic Director of Culture, or whatever his title is. But he still gets into trouble anyway.

Panahi's film Crimson Gold was being considered for an Academy Award nomination - but one of the requirements of the Academy is that any film under consideration must have been screened for at least one week in its native country. Crimson Gold had not been screened at all. It hadn't made it past the censors (it was too "dark"), and the Dipshit of Culture refused to distribute it at all. Sony wrote letters to the powers-that-be in Iran, mullahs and bureaucrats, begging them to screen it for one week only - so that it could be in the running for an Academy Award nomination. (First of all, Kudos to Sony for that.) Sadly, the answer was a resounding No - and so Crimson Gold couldn't be on the short list. Panahi has had many notorious moments such as that - and he is always on the outskirts of being in trouble, somehow.

I love his stuff. It has a real-time feel to it. He rarely uses professional actors. There is a rawness and an honesty to the performances - and he takes credit for that (in a good way). He believes that it is the director's job to make sure the actor feels confident enough to give the performance. So if an actor is bad, unprofessional or professional, the director shares much of the blame. And Panahi tells the actors that right off the bat, especially the unprofessionals - those who have never worked before - who say to him, anxiously, "I don't know how to act!" He reassures them - Yes. You do. I will not let you look bad. You are perfect for the part. You're going to be great - and if you're not? It's MY fault, not yours.

Iranian directors need to find ways to get around all the malarkey, the draconian censorship, the fact that 30 groups of people (not artists) have to sign off on the film before it can even be considered for distribution. So if you're portraying a guy in the army - you have to send a copy of the film to the damn army and say, "Is it okay how we are portraying you?" And so it goes. Many Iranian films do not open at all in Iran - but have much success abroad. But now, with the bustling traffic in bootleg DVDs - most people in Iran are fully aware of the vibrant awesome films their countrymen/women are making. And that's great. Their film industry is something to be proud of. (Excerpt here about Iranian cinema).

Offside did not open at all in Iran, for obvious reasons (I mean: the reasons are obvious if you think like a mullah.) Offside is not subtle. It is a truly subversive film, in the best sense of the word, a sharp-edged piece of political and social art - but on the other hand - it's not ponderous, or intellectual, or heavy-handed. Quite the contrary. Offisde is hysterical, exuberant, fun, exciting - there are moments at the end when I found myself on the edge of my seat, and then found myself bursting into applause, along with the girls.

Panahi makes his points though. He makes his points. So much so that at a soccer game last year, a group of Tehrani women showed up at the gates of the stadium, wearing white scarves, and holding up big signs saying, "WE DON'T WANT TO BE OFFSIDE". Pretty awesome.

So obviously, despite the fact that those in control did not allow Offside to be shown - it was available, bootleg, on the sidewalk, whatever. Even though it made no "actual" money, as in tickets sold, it's one of Panahi's most successful films - he thinks everyone in Iran has seen it, probably! His view is: denying women their basic rights (going to see a soccer game, participating in the national celebration, etc.) is not just bad for women, but bad for everyone. It also forces women to be duplicitous - and that was one of the big points he wanted to make, too. Instead of women being allowed to go into the stadium dressed as women, with veils and skirts, etc - women who want to go HAVE to be sneaky, and cut their hair, and put on pants, and dress up as boys, and take these huge risks. They have to participate in the mindset that says that they are "other". Maybe the woman is very religious, maybe she is devoted to wearing her chador because it expresses her religious feelings - but she ALSO happens to be a soccer fan ... so she must abandon that essential part of herself, her religion, and dress in a way that doesn't feel right to her. This is obviously a crazy-making situation - and it's not just with soccer but all levels of Iranian life. Panahi has daughters. He sees it at work in his own life. And he doesn't think it's right. And so his films try to address these issues - for future generations, who hopefully will not have to live under such restrictions. But he believes his films will stay "fresh", because they will be documents "of how we lived once".

I really admire Panahi, in case you haven't guessed. I admire him for his courage - I mean, imagine being a director and KNOWING that the film you are making will not be shown anywhere in your native land. It's like Vaclav Havel writing plays for decades which garnered critical praise around the world - yet his own countrymen were never allowed to see the plays. It is the typical story of being exiled within one's own nation. And so it gives Panahi's films, and Iranian films in general, a very specific intensity, a piercing sense of courage and import - because you know what it took to get them made, and you know that they are rarely congratulated by their own nation's bureaucrats - for doing Iran proud. Panahi feels that being considered for an Academy Award is an honor, and not just for him - but for all of Iran. The mullahs and the ruling regime obviously feel differently.

What is so terrific about the films from Iran is that you do feel the overshadowing sense of a State with a capital S ... and yet the individual is not crushed. The individual survives. But because of censorship, they are forced to be subtle. And thus, in some cases, way more inventive. My review of Fireworks Wednesday addresses some of those issues. Fireworks Wednesday is, essentially, a soap opera - but underneath, you can sense a social critique, a critique of the class divide in Tehran, and an honest look at the chador and what it represents. It's breathtakingly courageous, when seen in the proper context! Without the context, you might just think: Whatever, it's a soap opera. But no. Movies represent individuals, and it is the individual who is most feared in a theocratic or totalitarian government. It is the individual who is the most dangerous. Crowds can run you over, it is true ... the masses are quite powerful in and of themselves ... but there is nothing more frightening to a ruling power than the individual. And that is why Offside, with its fond and funny portraits of these 6 girls trying to bust into the stadium to see the soccer game, is subversive. As subversive as a secret political movement or underground newspaper or jailed dissident. Because it says: We are individuals. ALL of us.

Panahi saw the film as a comedy, despite the seriousness of the issue being presented. That's probably one of the reasons why it was banned so fiercely, because nobody likes to be laughed at, nobody likes to be told, "You know what? Your laws are not just stupid - but they are downright silly!!" He said, "It's a funny situation. 100,000 men are watching a soccer game, and because these girls are women they can't go inside. I didn't need to add anything to it."

None of the girls have names. But they all have recognizable personalities, separate characteristics.

There is the "leader", played by Shayesteh Irani: a tough girl who smokes - who really does look like a boy in her get-up. It's hard to tell what her gender is. She is brought to the little "jail" in the back of the stadium, where they put all the girls who tried to bust in - and one of the guards looks at her, says, "Are you a boy or a girl?" and she gives him a cocky look and fires back, "Which do you prefer?" She is tough, she is aggressive, she wants to see the game, and she is PISSED that she is missing it.

There is the quiet worried girl played by Sima Mobarak-Shahi who opens the film. She's on a minibus filled with rowdy guys, and she hopes her disguise will work (although a couple of the guys on the bus figure it out - she's obviously a novice. The other girls are way more tricky, and know how to ACT like a boy - she is still too stylish). She has the colors of Iran painted on her face, and she's pretty, delicate-looking, and very serious. Her energy is a bit different from the other girls - all of whom are, frankly, soccer FANATICS - just as out of control as the boys. She's more subdued, and at the end we figure out why.

It's also a nice touch: along the journey of the day (the film takes place in 90 minutes - the exact time of the soccer match between Iran and Bahrain in 2005) - boys come in and out of their experience ... the boys are everywhere: on the bus, in line at the stadium, in the stands, in the men's room - and there are a couple of moments where you can see the boys, the younger generation, as separate and distinct from the mullahs and the regime. For example, one boy on the minibus looks at her, and realizes: wow. That's a girl. He pulls one of his friends aside and gestures over towards the girl, sitting by herself - and he says, "That's a girl!" His friend says, "It's none of your business. Don't mess up her plan for her." You know, those small moments of solidarity ... of looking the other way ... Totalitarian regimes are expert in creating duplicitous populations - those who behave one way in public and another way in private. I have a Persian friend who told me the parties in private houses in the suburbs of Tehran are some of the best and most insane parties he's ever been to. Of course at any moment the Vice Squad could knock at the door, and then everyone runs around and the girls put on their veils, and the smuggled booze is dumped down the toilet, and someone answers the door and says, "Yes, we're having a prayer meeting ... sorry we were a bit loud." Vice Squad drives off, and then the veils are ripped off again, boys girls dancing together, music blasting, etc. You become adept at lying. Even if you are an honest person. And so there are a couple of boys the girls encounter through the day who sort of make way for them, and let them pass ... let them "try to get in" if they want to ... it's none of our business. If you think about the Vice Squad, and the sense that the women in the country are OWNED by the men - by ALL the men, not just their fathers and husbands - but the "virtue" of women is seen as a national concern - then just those small details, kind boys looking the other way and letting the girls try to sneak in ... is also subversive. Because it says, in no uncertain terms: "WE'RE together - the boys and the girls. YOU in the regime are the ones who are on the outside. "

One of my favorite moments in the film comes when a guard is taking one of the girls to the bathroom. He has to make sure there are no men in there. Finally she goes into one of the stalls. While she's in there, a group of guys come into the restroom - and the guard tells them, No, you can't go in. They fight back. It's 7 against 1. The poor guard is shoving at the guys, and everyone is rowdy and shouting. The girl comes back out from the stall, timidly, and peeks around the corner. She sees the brou-haha in the narrow hallway leading out into the stadium. She isn't sure what to do. She's supposed to be under guard - but the guard, at the moment, is busy fighting with the 7 guys. One of those guys (the one wearing the green flag wrapped around his head above) has already had words with the guard, and had already seen the girl being led into the bathroom. He looks up from the fight, and notices the girl peeking around the corner. Wordlessly, he gestures to her - "Run - I won't stop you ..." and he pushes in against the crowd of fighting guys - so she has more room to run by. Which she does. She runs out.

I just love that moment. Individual acts of kindness. The boy might be perceived as an enemy - since he's a boy, and he can go into the stadium and do whatever he wants. But he's not an enemy. He lets her run by him, he makes room for her. It's her right to run, it's her right to try to see the game. Beautifully played.

One of the girls (the girl mentioned above in the bathroom) is a jock - she's played by Ayda Sadeqi. She plays soccer herself, on a women's league. She is involved in the most surreal section of the film - the section which I felt was most openly angry, when she has to go to the bathroom - so a guard is elected to take her to the nearest men's room (no women's rooms at all in the stadium) - and he has to clear the men's room out first, and he makes her wear a poster over her head with the face of a soccer star on it - so that no one will see she's a girl. So to see her tripping along next to the guard, wearing a man's face over her own ... It is a powerful statement of how insane the rules are. It is a denial of her humanity. Panahi said, about that particular scene - that by putting the man's face over her own - it is his way of showing that women are forced to deny their sexuality, in the current culture. She is a girl. She is also a jock. She loves soccer. She is as big a fan as all the boys raging around her. But she doesn't get to see the game. It is absurd. And when she has to go to the bathroom, the most universal of human acts, she has to wear a poster of a man's face over her own. Damn, that's good stuff. Bravo.

There is one girl (she was my favorite - she is so alive, so expressive!) who has the colors of Iran painted across her face - she's played by Golnaz Farmani, and she had actually come to the stadium that day with her best friend. Her best friend managed to get in, but she was busted. She is taken to the pen. Later, the father of the best friend - who has learned of the girl's plans to sneak into the stadium, comes looking for his daughter. He scans the faces in the pen - and then sees the face of his daughter's best friend. He goes into a rage and reaches out to hit her, and all of the girls (as well as the main guard) intervene. She is frightened, reaches in her backpack, and slowly puts on her chador, obliterating her individuality. She is ashamed, ashamed of herself for being "unwomanly" - in boys clothes ... but then, as the soccer game heats up - she slowly starts to lose her mind - and watching her respond to the play-by-play on the radio is like watching a replay of all of us Red Sox fans in the bar on October 27, 2004. She believes in wearing the chador, she is ashamed in the face of the condemnation of her friend's father ... but then, by the end, she stops caring, and there she is, leaping around in her full veil, jumping up and down screaming at the top of her lungs, pumping her fists in the air, gesturing like crazy for everyone to shut up so she can hear the radio ... Awesome character. I loved her.

Then there is a younger girl played by Nazanin Sediq-zadeh, she's maybe 14 or 15 years old. She rarely smiles, she is so tense and into the game. But she also knows her parents are going to FREAK, especially since she was busted - and now she has to go off in the Vice Squad van to be interrogated, with nary a phone call home. She is panicking. Her parents will worry when she doesn't come home. When we first meet her, she is sitting on the ground in the pen, crying. The other girls, who are all in college, tell her to stop being a baby, and she does. A real growing-up moment for her.

And lastly, there is the girl who dresses up as a soldier, and actually made it to the official stand, where all the big-wigs in the regime sit to watch the game. Her one error is that she sat in the officer's seat. She stretched her legs out, lackadaisacal, comfortable, like, "Ho hum, I'm just a dude in the army, here to see a soccer game" ... and the officer saw her and didn't at first register that it was a girl. He was more concerned that she was in his seat. So she's hauled off to the pen. Her offense is seen as more serious, because she dressed up in an army uniform, so she is the only one in handcuffs. She's a great character, a tall lean Olive Oyl type ... she's led up to the pen, and one of the guards walks over to her, and she gives him a goofy parody of a salute. He is not amused.

An added element to Offside is the 2 or 3 guards watching over the girls. Most of them are not from Tehran - they hail from Tabriz or Mashad or Azerbaijan - a totally different culture, more rural first of all - and one of them, the main guy, played by Safdar Samandar, is pissed at his assignment away from his family. There's a drought at home, his mother is sick, and his cow is dying. He feels responsible for those things, and is furious that he is stuck guarding these hooligan Tehrani tomboys. And the girls don't make things easier on him by making fun of him, shouting at him, and when he tries to be serious and angry with them, many times they burst into laughter right in his face. It shows, subtly, the divide between urban sophistication and rural conservative values - which takes place in every culture everywhere. The guards are the ones in uniform, they are the ones in charge, but they barely have control over these girls. The point is made clear that these guys assigned to guard the stadium are not part of the ruling regime. They are not mullahs. They are grown-up boys in an army uniform, and they, too, are pissed that they are missing the momentous game. They try to be official and stern with the girls, who get more and more rowdy as the game goes on ... but it's a losing battle, because they, too, are caught - in a culture that isn't quite fair ... they start to feel the meaninglessness of this assignment - and there are a couple of great shots of the guards standing outside the pen (the camera never ever goes inside the pen with the girls, by the way - very nice symbolic touch) - looking in at the girls, who are all laughing, and cheering, and talking - and at one point re-enacting a play that one of them saw. And the guards don't say anything, but you can feel that - I guess what I could feel from them was that they were thinking, "What on earth is so wrong with girls going in the stadium? They're soccer fans, just like us."

They don't SAY that, and many of them parrot the same old tired lines, which the girls pooh-pooh. "Men swear in the stadium! You can't hear swears!" That's the main one. Meanwhile, the lead girl swears like a truck driver, stalking around smoking in the pen, saying, on occasion, "This is BULLSHIT."

It's great fun. It's a serious issue, naturally - but the way it's handled in Offside is so much fun. They're all likable, they all have flaws, they're not always nice, or polite ... but they have one thing in common: they are soccer fans, and they are out of their minds at the prospect of Iran going to the World Cup.

Panahi thinks that soccer is an excellent metaphor to be used in Iranian films - because it's a way for the populace to let steam off, in a government-approved way ... and when you're there, in the crowd, it's so loud and crazy that you can say whatever you want. You can shout, "FUCK THE MULLAHS" and nobody would be likely to hear you in the roar. It's freedom.

Afshin Molavi wrote in his wonderful book The Soul of Iran:

Franklin Foer of the New Republic wrote a great book, How Soccer Explains the World. In it, he referred to Iran's "football revolution," the moment in 1997 when some 5,000 Iranian women defied a ban on entering the stadium, and literally stormed the gates to join 120,000 screaming men in celebration of Iran's just-returned soccer stars, who had qualified for the World Cup. Foer accurately sensed an important marker in Iranian history, one that led to a series of more soccer-related political demonstrations over the next few years.

When Iran defeated the United States in a World Cup soccer match in 1998, the country exploded in celebration and the Islamic Republic found itself in a bind. The Great Satan had been defeated, but the popular celebrations on that night challenged hard-line government orthodoxy. Women danced with men in public, people threw firecrackers at the police, and many chanted slogans against regime hard-liners.

Often after big matches, young men - unemployed and angry - vandalize government property while chanting crude slogans about the opposing team and, occasionally, their own leaders. In 2001, a few thousand Iranians, incensed by rumors that the team purposefully lost a key World Cup qualifying game by government order, clashed with police while chanting antigovernment slogans. Though the rumor - fueld by diaspora television stations - is unlikely to be true, the national team displayed a striking inability to beat lesser teams during the qualifying stretch and failed to make the 2002 Cup. In a sense, the team's soccer malaise mirrored the country's political malaise, as hard-liners tightened their grip on power and the country's reformists took a beating without much of a fight.

Reminds me a bit of the late great Ryzsard Kapuscinski's essay "The Soccer War" (excerpt here).

Soccer: a way to express nationalism in a way that seems "safe" to regimes that fear their own populace. Yet very often, it is NOT safe, and the regimes find themselves having to do battle against their own athletes, trying to control the sport, and therefore the population. Don't get TOO happy ... remember who's in charge here!!

That struggle, that inner conflict - exists in the guards in Offside - who aren't mullahs or bureaucrats ... but they represent the law, obviously, and they do their best to uphold it.

And yet something wonderful happens near the end of the film. The game isn't over yet - there's a little bit left to go - and the girls are hauled into the Vice Squad van, and taken off to God knows where, to be interrogated, arrested, whatever. The funny thing, though, is that none of them seem to care about that. They are just pissed that they're missing the end of the game.

Not even just pissed. They are devastated, antsy, frustrated. They peer out the windows of the van, trying to see televisions in passing delis and houses - trying to get a vibe on what is going on. Finally, the main guard - the one who has been most tormented and angry - caves - and turns on the radio. Sadly, the antenna is broken. So this guard - this guy who is hauling the girls off to Vice Jail or wherever they are going - hangs out the window of the van, propping the antenna in place, jiggering it around until they get reception. You can hear the girls all shout encouragement, as one, from the back. Reception comes in - all the girls shout, "Yes! Yes! Stop there! That's it!" He jiggles it a bit more, and suddenly there is static and you can hear all the girls shout, "No!! No! Turn it back, turn it back!" And he obeys! You know why? Cause he wants to hear the end of the game, too.

The last 10 minutes of the film just made me smile, ear to ear. There is an unbroken shot of the girls crowded in the back of the van, listening to the game on the radio. There is also a boy in the Vice Squad van, who was busted for having firecrackers - and at first nobody likes him ... he makes the mistake of referring to the lead girl as a "chick" and she stands up, walks down the aisle of the van - and head-butts him. Literally! Butts him with her head so hard he falls down! But they eventually make up and finally, as the van careens through the highways of Tehran, they all settle down to listen to the radio. With the poor guard hanging out the window, holding the antenna in place. We hear the announcer giving a play by play (and it was a real game, remember - so everyone in Tehran would remember the blow-by-blow) - and the girls all react, to each play - they surge up in excitement, they subside in despair, they are on the edge of their seats - and sometimes the tension is too much that they have to just get up and switch places, for no reason. They just have to move. As it comes down to the last few seconds of the game, it is altogether too nervewracking, and the 6 girls all grab hold of one another - hugging onto each other, gripping each other's arms and hands - listening so hard to the radio it is like their SKIN is listening. Marvelous. It's SO fun to watch all of them! And when Iran wins (and again, this is no spoiler - since it was an actual game, and made headlines around the world) - everyone just goes APESHIT. I found myself clapping and laughing FOR them as I watched them scream and hug and cry.

Look at their faces in this series of screenshots. Look at what they're going through - collectively and as individuals! I loved watching all of them. They make me laugh.

The film is about participation, obviously. Watching the girls scream out the windows of the van, waving at their celebrating countrymen, waving sparklers, screaming, clapping ... abandoned, free, insane ... you can see their desire to just participate.

That's all. Not to take over, or displace the men, or try to be men. If they could go to the stadium in their chadors, they would. They would rather be women. But desperate times call for desperate measures. These girls aren't radical revolutionaries or political dissidents or intellectual troublemakers. What they are are soccer fans.

And so. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy

I'm not even 100 pages in to Blood Meridian and I already feel backed up with information, impulse, response ... there's so much going on, and the writing is so off the charts ... that I find myself feeling almost anxious. It's like I want to slow it all down, so I can savor it ... but that's not possible. I must just keep going. And not try to hang onto this experience, or prolong it, but let it go ... as it is happening. The book itself is brutal, one of the most brutal I have ever read. It's casually brutal. This is not a world that is fair, or just, or clear. When something terrible happens, there is no preparation. Cormac McCarthy does not ease you into the horror. Because that's not how it goes sometimes. Horror begins, and leaves you - the participant - in a frenzied state of playing catch-up, trying to interpret, organize, make sense ... But life doesn't give you that time.

For some reason it makes me think of one of my favorite small moments in the movie True Romance. Patricia Arquette's character, Alabama, comes back to the motel room to find Jim Gandolfini, the murderer, waiting for her. The fight doesn't break out right away. Alabama knows she is going to be killed. Jim Gandolfini knows he will kill her, so he's relaxed. He chats with her, reminiscing about murders he has committed, in an almost calm fond manner, totally psychotic. She giggles, trying to stall for time. Finally, the fight breaks out. And when it comes, it is horrifying. Sweepingly so. She gives as good as she gets. She's just a girl in a jiggly bra and skintight leopard pants but she wants to live. She fights hard for her life. At one point, Gandolfini throws her into the tub and she crashes through the glass shower door. She falls into the tub, covered in broken glass, bloody - and with a roar he comes at her - and Arquette is so brilliant in this next moment - Instead of screaming, "No" or "Stop" ... she screams at him, "WAIT." Wait. (Clip here) Wait for me to get myself together so we can keep fighting. I'm too bloody, I'm all a mess, I can't see, my eye is swollen closed, I need a second to regroup ... just WAIT. She hopes for a fair fight. I so relate to her in that moment. It makes no sense. Why should he "wait" for you to get yourself together, clean yourself up, before attacking again? But of course she is on another plane, not a logical plane - but a truthful plane nonetheless. It is her life force, her determination to LIVE - even if it means killing him - that makes her scream, "WAIT!" Violence happens suddenly. A car crash comes with no warning. You are chatting, or listening to music - and suddenly you are flying off a bridge. There is no "wait" - and yet as humans, we want it to "wait", so we have a fighting chance. It's desperate. It makes total sense, despite its illogicality. And so Blood Meridian reminds me of that moment of Patricia Arquette, bloody and cut up in the shower, her nose broken, screaming, "WAIT" up at her brutal killer.

At times I feel brutalized reading Blood Meridian, and feel frightened that I wasn't given time to prepare. And I scream "Wait" up at Cormac McCarthy, but by then it's too late. The attack has already begun. And I just have to endure it, the best I can. But that's the way life is sometimes. The moments of kindness (like the cavalry guys giving the kid a blanket, and some food) are few and far between - and end up making even less sense than the moments of violence. Kindness doesn't add up. It's nice, sure ... but it has very little resonance. Not up against the violence of that world - its people and the landscape. So there's that level of reader experience ... which actually works on two separate planes: the writing is so fucking good that I am having a hard time even processing it. It's not clever or verbose or ... it doesn't even feel literary, although it is indeed literature, of the highest order. The words on the page thrum through me, like a drum heard in the distance. I read Michael Chabon and think, My God, I wish I could use words like that!! Cormac McCarthy doesn't bring up that response in me ... it's something else entirely. It's like being confronted with something grand and eternal and terrible ... and having to somehow process it, or try to understand it ... before just giving up, surrendering to the mystery. Throwing up your hands and saying, "What the hell. I have no idea how to process this." It's language that doesn't even feel written to me.

And so - in a similar way that the characters are confronted, on a visceral level, by the landscape - the desert, the mountains, the lack of life anywhere - the way it makes them feel small, and yet also highly visible - frighteningly visible - I am confronted by the book. I have no words for it, I can only speak in metaphors about it. Plot seems secondary, although I am already aware of events moving into place with a terrible inevitability. I am only 100 pages in. It leaves me wanting to cry out, "Wait". I had a similar sensation when reading The Road (excerpt here). I do not know how he does what he does, and I find it difficult to even talk about, or try to describe. It is an experience. It comes through the senses - it's an overwhelmingly sensory experience - which is why I sometimes find it hard to process any of it. Sensory overload. I can feel that major themes are coming up. That this book is Biblical in its scope and intent. But meanwhile, I am blinded by the sun, and I can feel the parched dehydration, and I am dazzled by the endless plain in front of me. Hard to focus. Hard to hone in on what is going on. Fantastic. And then there's the moments of violence which surge forward, take over with no warning, and then dissolve - as we all move on. The Comanche attack is one of those moments ... and you realize that McCarthy has been building up to it in the chapter before, with the endless trek through the lifeless plain ... the landscape itself takes on a malevolent aspect. Like it is out to get them. Or like it is trying to communicate something to them ... but they don't know how to listen. All they know is that everyone has a really bad feeling. So when the Comanches appear, as one, out of the dust - too late to flee, too late to mount an attack - you feel a dread, overwhelming ... and then before you have a chance to prepare, you're in the thick of it. And it feels like McCarthy writes the attack in one continuous sentence - although I went back and re-read it, and no ... there are many sentences. It's written in a normal grammatically correct way, with commas and periods. But it feels like one unbroken flow of terror, events hurtling forward at breakneck speed, horrors witnessed and endured, horrors upon horrors. You scream "Wait" ... but no one hears. Or if they do, they certainly don't give a fuck that you need more time to prepare for it.

Here's an excerpt. It's lengthy. It's from the section before the Comanche attack, that I mentioned above. I read it in probably 5 minutes my first time through - and I could feel the depth of it, the bottomless pit of it, I could feel the sheer mastery of this writing - almost invisible in its skill - it feels like a first-hand experience, but my God, it is not - it is writing. And as I read it, I found myself thinking - "Okay. Gonna need to re-read this. I can't take it all in right now." Had to just keep moving, keep going, don't stop, don't look back ... let it wash through, over, under ... don't interpret. Because interpretation is laughable in such a universe as the one McCarthy describes.

EXCERPT FROM Blood Meridian, by Cormac McCarthy:

In two days they began to come upon bones and cast-off apparel. They saw halfburied skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in that blazing heat and they saw panniers and packsaddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the whitehot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a namelessness wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagon-tired grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now.

They took to riding by night, silent jornadas save for the trundling of the wagons and the wheeze of the animals. Under the moonlight a strange party of elders with the white dust thick on their moustaches and their eyebrows. They moved on and the stars jostled and arced across the firmament and died beyond the inkblack mountains. They came to know the nightskies well. Western eyes that read more geometric constructions than those names given by the ancients. Tethered to the polestar they rode the Dipper round while Orion rose in the southwest like a great electric kite. The sand lay blue in the moonlight and the iron tires of the wagons rolled among the shapes of the riders in gleaming hoops that veered and wheeled woundedly and vaguely navigational like slender astrolabes and the polished shoes of the horses kept hasping up like a myriad of eyes winking across the desert floor. They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing.

All night the wind blew and the fine dust set their teeth on edge. Sand in everything, grit in all they ate. In the morning a urinecolored sun rose blearily through panes of dust on a dim world and without feature. The animals were failing. They halted and made a dry camp without wood or water and the wretched ponies huddled and whimpered like dogs.

That night they rode through a region electric and wild where strange shapes of soft blue fire ran over the metal of the horses' trappings and the wagonwheels rolled in hoops of fire and little shapes of pale blue light came to perch in the ears of the horses and in the beards of the men. All night sheetlighning quaked sourceless to the west beyond the midnight thunder-heads, making a bluish day of the distant desert, the mountains on the sudden skyline stark and black and livid like a land of some other order out there whose true geology was not stone but fear. The thunder moved up from the southwest and lightning lit the desert all about them, blue and barren, great clanging reaches ordered out of the absolute night like some demon kingdom summoned up or changeling land that come the day would leave them neither trace nor smoke nor ruin more than any troubling dream.

Faces I saw at the China Out Of Tibet protest

It was a cold night, really windy. The sound of chanting - hundreds of people chanting - filled the air. Candles flickered in little glass jars, set up in geometric patterns across the pavement. There were no speeches. Flags whipped in the wind.

Full photo set here.

The Cool School, dir. Morgan Neville

Last night I went to see The Cool School, a documentary about the LA modern art scene (which was pretty near non-existent) in the 50s and 60s. And a group of artists, mostly male - it was a very macho atmosphere - created a "scene" from scratch. The Cool School examines how this happened. There were a couple of key figures - Irving Blum, Walter Hopps - they were the visionaries, the ones who made it happen. They were facilitators. They worked on multiple levels: they knew they had to give space to the artists, and have great shows, great publicity - but they also needed to cultivate the collectors, or potential collectors - who might be living in the Los Angeles area at that time. One doesn't need to cultivate collectors in a city like New York City, or Paris. The collectors are already there. But Los Angeles in the 50s was a wasteland, artistically - at least in terms of an art scene. Los Angeles is a one-industry town, and it was difficult to get any support or recognition if you were not in the film business. New York had no interest in what was going on in Los Angeles, and the major national magazines, like Newsweek, didn't have art sections - so if you lived in Los Angeles, and you loved art - you were screwed, at least in terms of what might be going on. This has all changed now, of course - and Los Angeles is a major art town. There was a QA with director Morgan Neville after the movie, and he said he was speaking to one of the artists in the film - who teaches at Cal Arts ... and that artist said that 20 years ago he told his students that if they wanted to have any success in the art world, they should move to New York when they graduated. And now he tells them to stay in Los Angeles, there's plenty going on there, galleries, museums, and also national coverage. One of the theses of Cool School is that the vibrant (and wealthy) art world in Los Angeles now was born in the scrappy days of the 1950s, when a bunch of bohemians, living in Venice, started showing their work in storefront galleries, competing with one another, making each other push harder ... and that is a forgotten, and yet very major, chapter in American art history. Morgan Neville, the director, said that as he started doing research for the film, he thought to himself, "Surely there has to be a book about these guys, and that time, and the Ferus Gallery ..." and was amazed to find that there wasn't. (Now there will be. A coffee table book is coming out, a companion piece to the film - so that's an awesome start.)

By the end of the 1960s, art had become sexy and fashionable. Andy Warhol had something to do with that. Suddenly, you would go to art openings and there would be heiresses and people in Chanel strolling around. The same evolution happened out in Los Angeles. In the late 50s, early 60s, the galleries were storefronts, on hidden streets ... out of the way ... and they would have shows and nobody would come. Nobody with money, anyway. You don't want to have an art show where ONLY beatniks and students come! The Ferus Gallery, run by Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, opened on La Cienega Boulevard - and they cultivated a small group of artists (all of whom are still working today - the ones who are alive, I mean) - and set out to draw the wealthy of Los Angeles to their shows. They brought Andy Warhol out for his first show - the "soup can" show. It was not a smashing success. Only 4 pieces were sold. (Irving Blum then bought them back and bought the entire collection - because he felt they were all of a piece. And now, of course, they are worth millions and millions of dollars.) It is only in retrospect that the soup can show can be seen as major.

The Cool School is put together with terrific home movies of the time, and amazing photographs - of all of the guys at work and at play. There was awesome historical information as well, about Los Angeles as a town, and its development. Anyone interested in California as a whole should definitely see this film. It reminded me a bit of Robert Towne's obsession with Los Angeles, and water, and culture ... it is one of the driving forces of his artistic life. The artists themselves were such characters - each with their own passion, interest ... and because Los Angeles was so isolated, in terms of an art world, many of these artists developed their work in a vacuum. Yet, as so often happens, what they were doing in Venice Beach was being done all over the world: collages, assemblage, using found objects ... the whole American abstract expressionist movement. Yet the artists in the film had a specifically Los Angeles feel to their work, and I found that fascinating. These guys were car freaks, and surfer bums - in a way that artists in New York would never be, because the culture is totally different. So the Los Angeles artists were incorporating lots of new materials - chrome, and plastic ... You can tell these guys loved cars when you look at their work. I love their stuff.

The editing of the documentary was wonderful. For example, as the "character" of Walter Hopps was introduced, we saw photographs of him from that time. He looked like one of the guys from mission control in Apollo 13: white shirt, tie, cleancut, glasses with thick black rims. He was (at least in appearance) the epitome of "square". Totally unlike the biker surfer aesthetic of the artists. Hopps, of course, was crazier than all of them, and just as brilliant - in the way he created an art scene. If you wanted to be an artist in Los Angeles in the 1950s, you had to know Walter Hopps. And one by one, each of the artists was interviewed about Hopps and they all said the same thing - and it was so funny the way it was edited: One guy said, "We all thought he was CIA." Next guy, "I assumed he was in the CIA." Next guy: "It seemed like he must have been CIA or FBI ..."

Another example of this artfully done editing is when Irving Blum was introduced. He was the one who taught Los Angeles about art, basically. He was the one who sought out potential collectors - young couples who had a lot of money, who wanted to build up their private collections, but didn't even know where to start, in the wasteland of LA at that time. Irving Blum found those people. And many of them were interviewed for the documentary, and they strolled around their gorgeous houses, showing their collections, much of which was bought at that crucial time - end of 50s, early 60s. And Irving Blum was a handsome cleancut guy with a bit of a dazzle to him. He was all about the illusion of success. For example, he was on a street and there was a gleaming Rolls Royce parked on the sidewalk - and he had his friend take pictures of him standing by the Rolls Royce, as though he owned it. If you're going to run an art gallery, you had better be at home with rich people. Blum was not rich at that time (although, boy, he is now) - so he went about creating an illusion that he was wealthy. He spoke in a very specific way, and again - one artist after another said the same thing. It was so amazing and funny the way it was put together - 6 artists in a row, 7, said the same thing: "He spoke kind of like Cary Grant." "His accent was like Cary Grant's." "He sort of looked like Cary Grant." "I heard him speak and I thought, 'Is that Cary Grant?'"

It's that kind of detailed editing that makes a documentary, in my opinion. Because the topic may be interesting - but if the format is not compelling, and if the film doesn't, in some way, comment upon the topic - it's not a successful documentary. The spliced-together interviews of all of the artists is a great example of how to do it. They are all fierce individuals, macho to this day, tough tough guys, competitive ... and yet there were these similarities in their experience of that time. The editing of those sequences was very effective.

I mainly went to see the film because Dean Stockwell and Dennis Hopper are both interviewed (and it was a dual interview, they were in the same room at the same time, chomping away on their cigars, answering questions). Hopper and Stockwell finish each other's sentences like an old married couple. The two of them were highly involved in the LA art scene at that time, the whole beatnik generation - and having seen Stockwell's stuff in person - you can feel the influences emanating from his work. Wallace Berman was a main influence - the collages and assemblages ... Berman was a big character in the film. His show at the Ferus was closed - due to "obscenity" and he was arrested. It was his first and only solo show. His stuff is fantastic.

The film is interesting on multiple levels. It was a part of American art history that I did not know. And also, it was great to get to know all of these people, many of whom are still alive. You can see how their work developed - how one guy started paring down his work so much that he ended up only working in light. One guy pushed his work to the limit using plastics - futuristic stuff, sleek, cool, vibrant colors. It's a great story, an important part of our national culture - and I'm glad the story is being told.

The QA was great, afterwards. The theatre was very small, maybe 70 or 80 seats, and they were all filled. The questions were thought-provoking, curious, intense ... about the topic, about Neville's influences - and what drew him to the story, and also about the artists themselves - a fascinating group of alpha males!

Highly recommended.

Today in History: March 28, 1941

TO: LEONARD WOOLF
Rodmell,
Sussex
Tuesday (18? March 1941)

Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again. I feel we can't go through another of those terrible times. And I shan't recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can't concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don't think two people could have been happier till this terrible disease came. I can't fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can't even write this properly. I can't read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that - everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can't go on spoiling your life any longer.

I don't think two people could have been happier than we have been.

V.

March 28, 1941. After writing that note to her husband, Virginia Woolf put rocks in her pockets and drowned herself in the River Ouse.

Diary Friday

Let's get mortified, shall we? This diary entry describes a Hawaiian dance in my sophomore year of high school.

Fri. Jan. 21

Tonight was a Hawaiian dance. I tell you, I was not looking forward to it, because the last dance was a disaster area. I didn't go Hawaiian, but I did borrow a lei when I got there. It wasn't even half-way full, but practically everyone was Hawaiian.

Travis had on a grass skirt made out of garbage bag strips. And Joel had a grass skirt and man-hole-cover sized glasses. Betsy had on a long wrap-around skirt with huge blue flowers, and the DJ had on all white, a white top-hat and a white ruffled suit and this blue light was on him, so he sort of glowed. And he took requests so I asked for Devo, The Clash, J. Geils, Adam Ant, Loverboy.

(I love that I listed all of the band names. Total time-travel hilarity)

God, I love music!

And when he put on Stray Cat Strut, I did my tap dance. (Oh my God, I sound like such a geek. You DID YOUR TAP DANCE?? And then you WONDERED why no cute guys asked you to dance??? Meredith: if you are reading this, you will know exactly the tap dance I am referring to.)

All those great songs - I go WILD. We all do. We SWEAT! (Right, Beth?) It is so fun. The minute I hear the beginning notes of "Jerkin' Back and Forth" or "Rock Lobster" or "Workin' for the Weekend", we all race out onto the floor, going INSANE. I dance until my throat is dry and my legs ache.

I'm not fooling myself. I had an awful time. I loved the music, but John was there. (hahahahaha "I danced until my legs ached! I had an awful time!" Also, when I read over this this morning, I thought: who the hell is John? And then - I remembered. Some guy I had a crush on, who said about 3 words to me, and I convinced myself it was true love.) I saw him come in and I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn't take my eyes off him and then Betsy grabbed my arm and said sternly, "Forget him, Sheila!" (And here I am, 280 years later, and I still find myself in situations where my friends have to speak to me sternly, and say stuff like, "Forget him, Sheila!" Such as we are made.)

Betsy went on sternly, "He has on a girl's headband. Please forget him."

(Best putdown ever)

Then we walked off, arms around each other, and for a while I did forget. (Little did I know that I eventually would forget so completely that I would read over this entry decades later and think, dimly: Who the hell is John? Ha! Revenge.) I talked to Mr. Hodge, and some good songs came on, and there were some songs that Mere and I had to make fun of. We would strut around, eyes closed. (Uhm, girls? That's how you make fun of the songs? You strut around, eyes closed? I'm not sure I get the joke.)

Oh, and a TV cameraman was there for some reason, and he was filming us, and he took close-up shots of me charleston-ing to "Goody Two Shoes" (How unbelievably embarrassing. CHARLESTON???), he also filmed me and my friends going WILD to "Rock Lobster". He filmed all of us going "down ... down ... down..." onto the floor. The entire gym full of kids falls down onto the floor at the end of "Rock Lobster". Anyway, I asked him later what the film was about, and he said that it was for a special on teenage alcoholism.

What? I said to him, "I'm not drunk!" And he laughed and went, "I'm not going to say you are."

John was dancing with another girl and when he knew I was nearby he kissed her. (Uh, Sheila, are you sure of your facts here? Are you sure that it was because of YOUR hovering presence that he kissed her?)

So I'm really proud of the way I handled myself. I didn't look at him, or look jealous, or even acknowledge him, and I danced like I never danced before. (Flashdance?) I feel like I looked pretty bubbly, with my mini skirt, sweatshirt, tie, white tights, and skips, (HAHAHAHA. My TIE??) and with my - ahem - peripheral vision I knew he kept looking over at me. My heart cracked in two and all I wanted to do was sob, but I danced and laughed - Man, it was hard work. I wanted to cry. I HATE MYSELF FOR LOVING SO MUCH.

So I acted "up". I was crazy. I felt insane. I had no control. After cavorting madly to show John I didn't give a fuckin' shit about his buns, I went over to sit down cause it was a slow song, and Patty sat beside me and said, "I'm really sorry. I tried to warn you, but I feel bad for you." I said to her, "What has it been? 3 girls in 2 months?" And she said, "Well, just be glad you weren't one of those girls." I nodded.

So I sat through the slow song, chin in my hands, staring out at the big silver ball twirling above. I felt kind of bad. Kate hugged me. I just sat staring off. Why do I STILL like him, even when he's been a bastard? Probably cause I know that underneath he's really a nice guy. (And here the womanly pattern begins. Falling in love with an asshole's hidden potential.)

Frozen in Grand Central

I am in totally in love with all of these people. I want to go on a mission like that! And I love Alex's comment: "The Shapes they took are so natural and so forward in their thought and action it looks like the audience are the ones in the wrong world."

The Books: "Birds of America" - 'Dance In America' (Lorrie Moore)

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

Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story 'Dance in America'. One of the quotes from a review on Amazon of Lorrie Moore's stuff says: that she has the "ability to catch the moment that flips someone from eccentric to unmoored", and I think that's exactly right. And usually it doesn't take much. Just a moment. Perhaps the pressure has been building. Lorrie Moore's main characters are usually single, but there the similarity ends. They are single girls, looking around at a world that either has passed them by or has openly rejected them. In contrast to the cliche, Lorrie Moore's "single girls" are not blue, or self-pitying, or bitter. They are busy, they have jobs, sometimes weird jobs ... they like to make puns, they crack stupid jokes, they drive around town obsessing about things, they want to get involved, they want to connect ... they don't sit around be-moaning their single state. They have other things on their mind. And so their loneliness ambushes them. In terrible form. In Dance In America, the main character is a dance instructor, and she travels to colleges, giving workshops. As she gives lectures and talks about dance, she thinks to herself what an asshole she sounds like. She's just making shit up. But hey, it's a living. She has had one major relationship, with a man named Patrick, who finally left her because he couldn't stand her selfishness. This seems to confuse her. She doesn't experience herself as selfish. She's just trying to get through the day. For most of the time, she seems too busy to dwell on the past. She goes to one college, in Pennsylvania Dutch country ... and contacts an old friend of hers from grad school, Cal - who is teaching at a nearby college. He offers to put her up. He lives with his wife Simone and their young son Eugene. They haven't seen each other in years. Cal takes the dog for a walk, and she goes with him and they catch up a bit.

I just love how Lorrie Moore describes characters and situations. It's so specific, so ... unlike anything else. In that way, it feels like life. Yes, there are "types" we encounter in life - and in Lorrie Moore's world it's no different ... but it's the words she chooses to boil down a situation or a person that is so breathtakingly specific.

Here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from the story 'Dance in America'.

But I haven't seen Cal in twelve years, not since he left for Belgium on a Fulbright, so I must be nice. He seems different to me: shorter, older, cleaner, despite the house. In a burst of candor, he has already confessed that those long years ago, out of friendship for me, he'd been exaggerating his interest in dance. "I didn't get it," he admitted. "I kept trying to figure out the story. I'd look at the purple guy who hadn't moved in awhile, and I'd think, So what's the issue with him?"

Now Chappers tugs at his leash. "Yeah, the house." Cal sighs. "We did once have a painter give us an estimate, but we were put off by the names of the paints: Myth, Vesper, Snickerdoodle. I didn't want anything called Snickerdoodle in my house."

"What is a Snickerdoodle?"

"I think they're hunted in Madagascar."

I leap to join him, to play. "Or eaten in Vienna," I say.

"Or worshiped in L.A." I laugh again for him, and then we watch as Chappers sniffs at the roots of an oak.

"But a myth or a vesper - they're always good," I add.

"Crucial," he says. "But we didn't need paint for that."

Cal's son, Eugene, is seven and has cystic fibrosis. Eugene's whole life is a race with medical research. "It's not that I'm not for the arts," says Cal. "You're here; money for the arts brought you here. That's wonderful. It's wonderful to see you after all these years. It's wonderful to fund the arts. It's wonderful, you're wonderful. The arts are so nice and wonderful. But really: I say, let's give all the money, every last fucking dime, to science."

Something chokes up in him. There can be optimism in the increments, the bits, the chapters; but I haven't seen him in twelve years and he has had to tell me the whole story, straight from the beginning, and it's the whole story that's just so sad.

"We both carried the gene but never knew," he said. "That's the way it works. The odds are one in twenty, times one in twenty, and then after that, still only one in four. One in sixteen hundred, total. Bingo! We should move to Vegas."

When I first knew Cal, we were in New York, just out of graduate school; he was single, and anxious, and struck me as someone who would never actually marry and have a family, or if he did, would marry someone decorative, someone slight. But now, twelve years later, his silver-haired wife, Simone, is nothing like that: she is big and fierce and original, joined with him in grief and courage. She storms out of PTA meetings. She glues little sequins to her shoes. English is her third language; she was once a French diplomat to Belgium and to Japan. "I miss the caviar" is all she'll say of it. "I miss the caviar so much." Now, in Pennsylvania Dutchland, she paints satirical oils of long-armed handless people. "The locals," she explains in her French accent, giggling. "But I can't paint hands." She and Eugene have made a studio from one of the wrecked rooms upstairs.

"How is Simone through all this?" I ask.

"She's better than I am," he says. "She had a sister who died young. She expects unhappiness."

"But isn't there hope?" I ask, stuck for words.

Already, Cal says, Eugene has degenerated, grown worse, too much liquid in his lungs. "Stickiness," he calls it. "If he were three, instead of seven, there'd be more hope. The researchers are making some strides; they really are."

"He's a great kid," I say. Across the street, there are old Colonial houses with candles lit in each window; it is a Pennsylvania Dutch custom, or left over from Desert Storm, depending on whom you ask.

Cal stops and turns toward me, and the dog comes up and nuzzles him. "It's not just that Eugene's great," he says. "It's not just the precocity or that he's the only child I'll ever have. It's also that he's such a good person. He accepts things. He's very good at understanding everything."

I cannot imagine anything in my life that contains such sorrow as this, such anticipation of missing someone. Cal falls silent, the dog trots before us, and I place my hand lightly in the middle of Cal's back as we walk like that through the cold, empty streets. Up in the sky, Venus and the thinnest paring of sickle moon, like a cup and saucer, like a nose and mouth, have made the Turkish flag in the sky. "Look at that," I say to Cal as we traipse after the dog, the leash taut as a stick.

"Wow," Cal says. "The Turkish flag."

Trains, criminals ... beauty ...

oh ... and a glimpse of Richard Widmark in a crowd:

One of the Art of Memory's gorgeous train travel posts.

(Here's another in that ongoing series).

Snapshots

-- Reading Blood Meridien. Holy shit. Let's see. Who has begged me to read this book? Uhm, how about everyone on the planet? Keith M. My father. Bren. And now David. And it was David's email to me about Blood Meridien that made me finally pick it up. The writing is superb. Terrifying. I'm only 30 pages in but I can already feel it is going to put me through the wringer.

-- Finished my 4th of the Master & Commander series - The Mauritius Command. I am in love with the series.

-- Watched Eastern Promises last night. Very good. Viggo Mortensen is riveting. There were some cliched moments in the plot - it was a little bit too "neat" for me (Naomi Watts' character had lost her baby - so she becomes obsessed with the orphaned baby! And etc. Too neat.) - but he was amazing. You can't take your eyes off him. I also loved the set design of the Russian restaurant "Trans-Siberian". Awesome awesome atmosphere.

-- I have become addicted to the Canadian television series Slings & Arrows, which I have been watching on DVD. More to come. I won't write any more until I finish the whole thing (3 seasons). Kate sent me the first two seasons ... not for any reasons, just because ... and I can't thank her enough for introducing me to this wonderful series. Mental Multivitamin has been raving about it for a while and I totally agree with her assessment: "Perfect and brilliant and perfectly brilliant". It's laugh out loud funny, but also poignant, and also gets - totally gets - what it is to be in the theatre. The absurdity ("Everyone cries when they get stabbed. There's no shame in that!") - but then the moment, the magical moment, when things come together ... and the play comes to life. Marvelous. I can't WAIT for season 3.

-- I had sent a kind of yowl-of-loneliness email to Michael, telling him what's going on right now, and normally I resist those yowls, but whatever, if you can't let your friends in on what you're going through, what good are they as friends? I got home last night and noticed he had called and left a message. Picked up the phone and his message not only brought a huge (almost embarrassingly huge) smile to my face - but it also made me cry. So I stood in my kitchen with a Humpty Dumpty smile and tears on my face. Awesome. Michael said, "I am here to give you a big voice-hug. Are you ready? Here it is." There was a pause. And I then heard him hugging himself and making big "oomph" grunting noises - as though he were hugging me and squeezing me tight. It was hysterical!! I felt hugged, if you know what I mean. Michael also referred to his own voice as "sonorous" ("I figured you needed to hear my sonorous voice ...") and I just love him for being such a jagoff. He also said, "I'm coming to New York soon, so you will be able to see my rapidly aging face ..." I love him.

-- I have discovered the unbelievable pleasures of River Road - the road that goes along the bottom of the cliffs on my side of the Hudson. Much exploring to do. Not only that, but there's a Target along that road. As well as a Whole Foods.

-- I'm kind of obsessed right now with Dan Fogelberg's song "The Phoenix". Can't stop listening to it.

-- I went a little insane over the weekend and impulsively bought about 30 books on Amazon - all used, many of them were only one cent. Of course I have to pay for shipping and handling, so it added up - but not TOO much. I got 30 books for about 30 dollars ... and now they have all started arriving. It's like I went into a fugue state as I ordered the books ... and forgot what I ordered. So it's fun to open up the packages because I have no idea what's inside. I bought all of SE Hinton's books. I realized that it is just not right that I do not have a copy of Tex, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish and needed to rectify that. I also bought all of the Paul Zindel books that I do not have, and that is surprisingly a lot. I have read all of them - like Harry and Hortense at Hormone High (hahahaha), and I Never Loved Your Mind - so I bought all of them. Very happy! Then there were random books I came across - in book reviews, or mentioned in blog posts - that I ordered. I got Laura Kipnis' book about women - very excited to read that ... I bought a couple of Paul Berman's books = and I read 3 pages of his Two Utopias book and am already blown away. I finally got my own copy of the Truffaut/Hitchcock intereviews (for 65 cents - love Amazon!) - as well as a copy of WH Auden's lectures on Shakespeare, which I can't WAIT to dig into. I also bought a biography of Jennifer Jones, and the second volume of Shelley Winters' autobiography which I adore beyond measure - and lost somewhere along the way in all of my moves.

-- I'm sleeping pretty good. So for that I am grateful. Knock wood.

Richard Widmark: tributes

A terrific in-depth obituary in The Washington Post.

David Thomson had this to say about Widmark in his awesome The New Biographical Dictionary of Film:

Widmark came into movies a little later than most male stars, already in his early thirties. But that debut is still haunting, no matter that Widmark was later turned into an authentic hero, suntanned, laconic, and grudgingly aligning himself with proper causes.

Educated at Lake Forest College, he worked there as a teacher, and as a stage and radio actor, befor being cast as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (47, Henry Hathaway). The sadism of that character, the fearful laugh, the skull showing through drawn skin, and the surely conscious evocation of a concentration camp degenerate established Widmark as the most frightening person on the screen. The glee in the performance may even have shocked Widmark himself. It made Kiss of Death untypical of Fox or Hathaway. The studio kept him on a leash, and mixed more conventional heavies with nerve-strained heroes, as if to imply that Tommy Udo was the result of overwork: as the spoiled-child owner of Road House (48, Jean Negulesco); the gangster in The Street With No Name (48, William Keighley); menacing Gregory Peck in Yellow Sky (48, William Wellman); a boy's best friend in Down To The Sea in Ships (49, Hathaway); Slattery's Hurricane (49, Andre de Toth); as a whining coward hounded by the London underworld in Night and the City (40, Jules Dassin); as the doctor racing against time and bubonic plague in Panic In the Streets (50, Elia Kazan); as a hardnosed, bigoted cop in No Way Out (50, Joseph L. Mankiewicz).

But even as a hero, Widmark barely suppressed malice, anxiety and violence; the straight voice readily broke into a sneer or a giggle; and the eyes once had an insolent way of staring a woman out. That was how he lifted microfilm from Jean Peters's handbag at the beginning of Pickup On South Street (53, Samuel Fuller). He was excellent as Fuller's sentimental hoodlum and brought a special relish to the brutal love scenes and to the situation of a guttersnipe able to crow to the police.

Elia Kazan said in regards to Widmark and Panic In the Streets:

I had a great cast. It was a treat in itself just to have Zero Mostel around. I had Jack Palance, making his first picture. And I had Richard Widmark, who was a jewel, as nice a guy as there was in the world. Barbara Bel Geddes played his wife. I cast like a man should. I handpicked everybody just because I liked them ...

Panic in the Streets is the first picture I made that I liked. I don't think you're aware those people are actors, even Widmark had played nothing but heavies before that. He became famous in Kiss of Death, in which he pushed an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs, and he had that wonderfully phony, lunatic laugh. We'd worked in the theater together about four or five years earlier, and I returned him to playing a leading man. He had sort of a minor-league charm. But it was a genuine charm. Almost everything he said was amusing and self-deprecatory, and to me, that self-deprecatory attitude is an essential American quality.

I love his face.

The Books: "Birds of America" - 'Willing' (Lorrie Moore)

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

Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore. With Birds of America, published in 1998, Lorrie Moore hit the jackpot. That book was everywhere you looked. It was on the NY Times bestseller list. Self-Help and Like Life were fine books - but in Birds of America, Lorrie Moore hit her stride. These stories are beyond compare. If you've read the book, you know what I mean. I don't read a ton of short stories - I have to really be into an author to pick up a book of short stories ... I like Joyce's short stories. I like Hemingway's. I like Annie Proulx's short stories, and I like Margaret Atwood's short stories. I love AS Byatt's short stories. And when I read Birds of America (the first of Moore's books I read), I realized I was reading something where I needed superlatives in order to describe it. It's HARD to be "good" at short stories. I mean, how many boring self-indulgent pretentious or kitchen-sink-to-the-point-of-apathy stories have we all read? There's a certain style in American short stories right now, and I can't stand it. I find many of them unreadable. It's not just that they're about minutia - that's fine, Lorrie Moore's stories in many ways are about the tiniest of moments ... it's that the writing itself is lackluster, and nothing pops off the page. Recently, the Willesden Herald famously held a short story contest - and then DIDN'T pick any of the entries and said, "Try again next year." So there will be no winner. It was a huge deal, and everyone was babbling about it. Zadie Smith was one of the judges. It was a huge deal. People went apeshit - but basically the Willesden Herald's point was: "None of the stories sent in were good enough. Sorry." One of the editors came out with a fantastic list called 27 reasons why short stories are rejected - a list I have printed out for future reference. I really recognized many of my own mistakes in that list - things I have either worked to improve, OR am not even aware that I do. But now I am. Anyway, all of this is to say: it's hard to write a good short story. If you're going to write short stories, KNOW that it's hard, and get to know your form. Learn it. Each story in Birds of America is not only a specific three-dimensional world - with food and music and drinks and weather - but an expansive look at a slice of human experience. And again, I am not quite sure how Lorrie Moore does it - but it seems to me (and I've said this before) that it has to do with courage. Lorrie Moore strikes me as a pretty fearless writer. She keeps you in the trivial, and then - with one fell swoop - pulls back the curtain and makes some grand statement that rips your heart out. I suppose, too, that there is something in her characters that really resonate with me. They are doing their best. But something, somewhere, went wrong along the way. And if they could only retrace their steps ... Lorrie Moore just knows how to write about experiences like that, without being maudlin, or dramatic. She just GETS it. Those moments at 3 am where you suddenly sit up in bed, look around, and wonder: "Where the hell am I? Whose life is this?" Horrible moments. Horrible bleak moments surrounded by the banal business of trying to survive, trying to keep your spirits up. Lorrie Moore's stories are always quite funny, even if they sucker-punch you from time to time.

In the first story in the collection - 'Willing' - we meet Sidra, who was once a vaguely famous movie star, who had been up for some kind of award once in her career. Sidra is from Chicago - but she has lived for years in LA. Her career was based on her looks - she had nude scenes, etc. - her father will never go see any of her movies because of that ... but now things have dried up for Sidra. She is 40. Work isn't coming anymore. Life is a howling wilderness. In desperation, she moves back to Chicago - and she stays in a Days Inn. For months. Sometimes she goes and visits her parents. Sometimes she goes to blues clubs with Charlotte, an old friend of hers from high school. Her best friend is a gay man named Tommy - who lives in Santa Monica - and screams at her over the phone, 'What are you DOING?? Come back to LA!" Sidra can't help but look at the big picture ... and that's what gets her, that's what keeps her up nights. She is alone. She has missed the opportunity, it seems, to mate up with someone and have kids. She always thought she would have had kids. So she is disoriented by the fact that she does not. She meets a man at a jazz club - and they start a relationship, sort of. He is not aware that she was once famous, at least not at first. Sidra, though, is weird now. She doesn't respect him, and wonders if that could change - if they could actually make a go of it. Is she still capable of having dreams like that? She's way out of practice.

The whole story is deeply depressing ... and I found myself almost looking away at certain points. Not because I was feeling bad for Sidra, but because I recognized myself in Sidra, and it makes me too sad to even get through the day. But the way Lorrie Moore writes about Sidra's struggles made me feel ... I don't know, it's one of those moments when a really private thought or feeling is expressed perfectly by an artist, someone you don't know - they just NAIL it, in a song, a poem, a book, whatever ... and you point at it and go, 'Yes! That is what it is like for me!"

Courage. Lorrie Moore says things that I might be too afraid to say. And so there's a weird comfort at times, reading a story like 'Willing' - even though it hits too close to home. i still read it and think, "Lorrie Moore knows. She knows what it's like."

Sidra, also, is doing her best. Life has not beaten her. Not yet, anyway. She still cracks stupid jokes, she makes dumb puns on words, she tries to make people laugh. She's still in the game. Life has moved on without her, certainly ... but she's not given up yet. That's the saddest part of all.

Here's an excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore. Excerpt from story 'Willing'

He began to realize, soon, that she did not respect him. A bug could sense it. A doorknob could figure it out. She never quite took him seriously. She would talk about films and film directors, then look at him and say, "Oh, never mind." She was part of some other world. A world she no longer liked.

And now she was somewhere else. Another world she no longer liked.

But she was willing. Willing to give it a whirl. Once in a while, though she tried not to, she asked him about children, about having children, about turning kith to kin. How did he feel about all that? It seemed to her that if she were ever going to have a life of children and lawn mowers and grass clippings, it would be best to have it with someone who was not demeaned or trivialized by discussions of them. Did he like those big fertilized lawns? How about a nice rock garden? How did he feel deep down about those combination storm windows with the built-in screens?

"Yeah, I like them all right," he said, and she would nod slyly and drink a little too much. She would try then not to think too strenuously about her whole life. She would try to live life one day at a time, like an alcoholic - drink, don't drink, drink. Perhaps she should take drugs.

"I always thought someday I would have a little girl and name her after my grandmother." Sidra sighted, peered wistfully into her sherry.

"What was your grandmother's name?"

Sidra looked at his paisley mouth. "Grandma. Her name was Grandma." Walter laughed in a honking sort of way. "Oh, thank you," murmured Sidra. "Thank you for laughing."

Walter had a subscription to AutoWeek. He flipped through it in bed. He also liked to read repair manuals for new cars, particularly the Toyotas. He knew a lot about control panels, light-up panels, side panels.

"You're so obviously wrong for each other," said Charlotte over tapas at a tapas bar.

"Hey, please," said Sidra. "I think my taste's a little subtler than that." The thing with tapas bars was that you just kept stuffing things into your mouth. "Obviously wrong is just the beginning. That's where I always begin. At obviously wrong." In theory, she liked the idea of mismatched couples, the wrangling and retangling, like a comedy by Shakespeare.

"I can't imagine you with someone like him. He's just not special." Charlotte had met him only once. But she had heard of him from a girlfriend of hers. He had slept around, she'd said. "Into the pudding" is how she phrased it, and there were some boring stories. "Just don't let him humiliate you. Don't mistake a lack of sophistication for sweetness," she added.

"I'm supposed to wait around for someone special, while every other girl in this town gets to have a life?"

"I don't know, Sidra."

It was true. Men could be with whomever they pleased. But women had to date better, kinder, richer, and bright, bright, bright, or else people got embarrassed. It suggested sexual things. "I'm a very average person," she said desperately, somehow detecting that Charlotte already knew that, knew the deep, dark, wildly obvious secret of that, and how it made Sidra slightly pathetic, unseemly - inferior, when you got right down to it. Charlotte studied Sidra's face, headlights caught in the stare of a deer. Guns don't kill people, thought Sidra fizzily. Deer kill people.

"Maybe it's that we all used to envy you so much," Charlotte said a little bitterly. "You were so talented. You got all the lead parts in the plays. You were everyone's dream of what they wanted."

Sidra poked around at the appetizer in front of her, gardening it like a patch of land. She was unequal to anyone's wistfulness. She had made too little of her life. Its loneliness shamed her like a crime. "Envy," said Sidra. "That's a lot like hate, isn't it." But Charlotte didn't say anything. Probably she wanted Sidra to change the subject. Sidra stuffed her mouth full of feta cheese and onions, and looked up. "Well, all I can say is, I'm glad to be back." A piece of feta dropped from her lips.

Charlotte looked down at it and smiled. "I know what you mean," she said. She opened her mouth wide and let all the food inside fall out onto the table.

Charlotte could be funny like that. Sidra had forgotten that about her.

Rest in peace, Richard Widmark

Hoods are good parts because they're always flashy and attract attention. If you've got any ability, you can use that as a stepping stone.
-- Richard Widmark

Here's the NY Times obit.

And Kim Morgan's tribute:

"I've got so much more to write about one of my absolute all-time favorite actors, but to put it simply -- he was a rare one."

I know a couple of people who count him as one of their favorite actors ever. He hasn't worked in a long time, the man was in his 90s ... but what a career. I bumped up Kiss of Death on the Netflix queue - a movie I have seen countless times, on big screens and small ... but need to see again, as soon as possible.

Review of Widmark's debut performance in Kiss of Death on Noir of the Week, one of my favorite new sites:

If I had to choose one reason to recommend watching this film it’s definitely the screen debut of Richard Widmark as Tommy Udo. His performance is outstanding, as he doesn’t so much give you the creeps as he force-feeds them to you. Udo is a perfect storm of menace, sadist and sociopath. Widmark commands every scene he’s in with such a forceful presence and performance that as the film continues, you find yourself just waiting for him to appear. He also gets some classic lines such as telling a cop fishing for info that he wouldn’t give him “the skin off a grape.” Without Victor Mature’s understated performance Widmark’s Udo may have lost some of his effectiveness by seeming too over the top or out of place contrasted by a less convincing Nick Bianco. The two portrayals, however, balance each other perfectly and create a solid foundation of tension and excitement for this otherwise moderate noir.

Rest in peace.

People love Richard Widmark, you know what I mean?

Happy birthday, Tennessee Williams

Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?

Thank you!

Thomas Lanier Williams

-- Tennessee Williams, letter to editor Harriet Monroe, March 11, 1933

"You're always having to compete with yourself. They always say, 'It's not as good as Streetcar or Cat'. Of course it's not. At 69, you don't write the kind of play you write at 30. You haven't got the kind of energy you used to have."

-- Tennessee Williams

In 1928, Tennessee Williams wrote in a letter to his beloved grandfather:

I have been reading a good number of biographies this year which I am sure you will commend. Probably you remember how I picked up that volume of Ludwig's Napoleon on the boat and liked it so well that the owner had to ask me for it. I tried to get it at the library but it was out. Instead i got a life of the Kaiser Wilhelm by the same author. Since then I hve read several others of celebrated literary personages. I have one at home now about Shelley, whose poetry I am studying at school. His life is very interesting. He seems to have been the wild, passionate and dissolute type of genius: which makes him very entertaining to read about.

Tennessee Williams said the following about Streetcar (excerpt here), and his main point of that entire play:

There are no 'good' or 'bad' people. Some are a little better or a little worse but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice. A blindness to what is going on in each other's hearts. Stanley sees Blanche not as a desperate, driven creature backed into a last corner to make a last desperate stand - but as a calculating bitch with 'round heels'.... Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see each other in life.

Tennessee Williams wrote the following elegiac essay about Laurette Taylor (who created the role of Amanda so memorably in Glass Menagerie (excerpt here) and made him star) for The New York Times after news of her death in 1949:

I do not altogether trust the emotionalism that is commonly indulged in over the death of an artist, not because it is necessarily lacking in sincerity but because it may come too easily. In what I say now about Laurette Taylor I restrict myself to those things which I have felt continually about her as apart from any which this unhappy occasion produces.

Of course the first is that I consider her the greatest artist of her profession that I have known. The second is that I loved her as a person. In a way the second is more remarkable. I have seldom encountered any argument about her preeminent stature as an actress. But for me to love her was remarkable because I have always been so awkward and diffident around actors that it has made a barrier between us almost all but insuperable.

In the case of Laurette Taylor, I cannot say that I ever got over the awkwardness and the awe which originally were present, but she would not allow it to stand between us. The great warmth of her heart burned through and we became close friends.

I am afraid it is the only close friendship I have ever had with a player...

It is our immeasurable loss that Laurette Taylor's performances were not preserved on the modern screen. The same is true of Duse and Bernhardt, with whom her name belongs. Their glory survives in the testimony and inspiration of those who saw them. Too many people have been too deeply moved by the gift of Laurette Taylor for that to disappear from us.

In this unfathomable experience of ours there are sometimes hints of something that lies outside the flesh and its mortality. I suppose these intuitions come to many people in their religious vocations, but I have sensed them more clearly in the work of artists and most clearly of all in the art of Laurette Taylor. There was a radiance about her art which I can compare only to the greatest lines of poetry, and which gave me the same shock of revelation as if the air about us had been momentarily broken through by light from some clear space beyond us.

The last word that I received from her was a telegram which reached me early this fall. It was immediately after the road company of our play had opened in Pittsburgh. The notices spoke warmly of Pauline Lord's performance in the part of Amanda. "I have just read the Pittsburgh notices," Laurette wired me. "What did I tell you, my boy? You don't need me."

I feel now - as I have always felt - that a whole career of writing for the theatre is rewarded enough by having created one good part for a great actress.

Having created a part for Laurette Taylor is a reward I find sufficient for all the effort that went before and any that may come after.

It was a two-sided deal there. Her performance launched him into stardom. And his creation of Amanda revitalized her career just in time for her to capitalize on it. She would be dead in a couple of years. She had had a great career early in her life, and went on a 10 year binge following the death of her husband. Laurette Taylor was "washed up". Until ...

And now, she's a legend, her performance in Glass Menagerie is legendary. "What did I tell you, my boy, you don't need me..." Ha. That's what you think, Laurette! But in a way, she was completely right. The play is better than any one performance. The play didn't depend on Laurette Taylor's genius, although thank God she found the vehicle. The star of the play is actually the play itself, and Laurette Taylor knew that. The star of the play was this new voice of Tennessee Williams. And so no, Tennessee didn't "need" her. And about Tennessee saying: "I consider her the greatest artist of her profession that I have known." Anyone who knows anything about theatre would be hard-pressed to disagree. I haven't even SEEN the woman act, obviously, but I don't need to. I will take the hundreds and hundreds of eyewitness' word for it. In the same way that I know, in my heart, that Eleanora Duse was one of the "greatest artists of her profession" as well. I don't need to have seen her live. (My post about Laurette Taylor here.)

Here's a treat for all you Tennessee and Laurette fans. Here is one of the original reviews of Glass Menagerie, after its premiere on an icy winter night in Chica