The Sheila Variations

Her eyes follow me around

Some background. Back in December, somehow a conversation started up in a comments thread about Hope, and the idea came up that someone should turn one of my photos of Hope into the famous Obama poster with the word "HOPE" under it. The most humorous thing is that Mark, who hadn't been involved in that particular thread, suddenly showed up saying, "Sorry I'm late ..." knowing that it was HE we had been waiting for.

In a matter of moments, the deed was done. Much hilarity ensued and Mark received no less than three proposals of marriage, based on his sheer awesomeness.

It was one of my favorite moments ever in the history of my blog. Look at that image!!

So then a couple weeks later I go home for Christmas. It was the day after Christmas, and Siobhan came up to me with a package - another gift? - and said, with the weirdest look on her face, "This is for you."

"Wha ..? Huh?"

I was more confused by her expression than anything else. It was obvious she was just the messenger. I opened the thing and saw that there was a card from a "Dave E." Now I know a "Dave E." - he and I have been blog-buddies for, oh, five years now? Something insane like that. Awesome guy. But ... but ... this package was sent to my PARENTS' house. He wouldn't know that address. Or anything like that. So ... how would he have known where to send it? Also, what the hell? I was VERY confused and thought: "no ... it must be some other Dave E ..." I was discombobulated, also discombobulated because Siobhan was basically hovering over me, watching my reaction.

It was a cardboard roll, like you use for posters - and there was something inside it, a roll of ... fabric? I pulled it out ... and dudes. It was a giant BANNER of the Hope image that Mark had created. I started laughing and CRYING at the same time ... what? How had this happened?

Siobhan was the accomplice. From what I gather, Dave E. got the idea to make a banner for me. He somehow contacted Mark (they don't know each other outside of my blog, as far as I know - but through emails or whatever, he contacted Mark for the jpeg) ... then he took the bold move to track down my sister's email address, and tell her his plan ... that he wanted to send me a surprise gift, and could she possibly send the address??

Poor Siobhan got an email from this random guy and for a second she was like, "Who the hell is this? What does he want?" But I imagine he (because he is so nice) was able to explain himself in a way that DIDN'T sound creepy and bizarre (you know, not like, "I got a gift for your big sister. Gimme your parents address. Thanks. Love, The Unabomber") ... but friendly and funny. So Siobhan complied - and the thing arrived on Christmas Eve, I think.

The amount of work that that took ... Dave contacting Mark, Mark responding - then Dave contacting Siobhan - and creating the banner - everything ... truly is one of the nicest gifts I have ever received, and couldn't have come at a better moment.

I was beyond touched ... especially because I have not met Dave and I have not met Mark (although that seems like a technicality at this point) ... but they went out of their way to send me this thing they had created, and seriously, it meant the world to me. You guys are the best.

So.

The era of Hope has begun. After all, she's on my wall.

Joan Acocella: "Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints"

Joan Acocella has been a staff writer for The New Yorker for I don't know how many years, and I am just now starting to pay attention to her. She writes mainly about dance (her dance columns are amazing - and I don't go to see much dance, but it's a testament to her writing that I always read her column anyway) - but on occasion covers other topics too. My first encounter with her was in 1998, when she wrote a massive piece on Mikhail Baryshnikov for The New Yorker called "The Soloist". It's one of the best personal profiles The New Yorker has ever run, and certainly one of the best profiles I've ever read, period. It was over 20 pages long. It was brilliant.

She's an amazing writer. Her stuff is quite eclectic, perhaps delicate, and so there isn't the mass appeal of someone writing about movie stars or something like that - but she can't be beat as an author. I don't know her background, she has mentioned that she was basically a dance fan - it wasn't her vocation at first, she was a writer, but she found her "niche", almost by accident and she's been writing about dance for years. It is obviously her calling.

Finally, a collection of her essays over the years has been released in a wonderful edition called Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays. I have been working my way through it, ever so slowly, unable to read more than 2 or 3 pages a day ... but a collection of essays seems to suit me right now. Anything longer is too much of a commitment.

It's been marvelous to get to know her better as a writer, first of all, and to realize the sheer DEPTH of her knowledge, not just about dance, but about many things. She is the kind of essayist and journalist I most admire. I can kind of get that her area of expertise is the early 20th century and the birth of modernism. She knows what she's talking about. The lives intersect - Joyce and Freud and Nijinsky and Stefan Zweig - and you get the sense that she is writing about a time that is still fully alive for her, a vibrant frightening time of upheaval for European artists. She's marvelous.

Many of the essays in the book, of course, focus on dance. There is a huge essay on Nijinsky. The Baryshnikov essay is included. She has essays on Suzanne Farrell, Balanchine, Lincoln Kerstein, all the giants of 20th century ballet. But also, delightfully (for me - who is just getting to know her) - she also has in-depth essays on authors of that period, too, some whose names I have heard of - but many whose work I don't know at all. Joseph Roth. Heard of him, knew nothing about him, never read him. I must rectify that immediately. Stefan Zweig. When I get back into fiction, Beware of Pity will be first on the list (Acocella wrote the foreword to the latest edition). She seems to have a fondness for Austrian writers of the early 20th century, the assimilated Jews who were big supporters and defenders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and watched, horrified, as it collapsed, leaving them stateless and unprotected. She has a magnificent essay on one of my favorites, Primo Levi, basically defending him against a psycho-pathological biography which annoyed her. Acocella is awesome when she gets annoyed. I find her very funny, too.

As I read some of the essays, I realized I had read one of them before as well - her review of a biography of Lucia Joyce, Joyce's daughter. I had referenced Acocella's article here, in my annoyed blog-post about it.

One of the themes that emerges, as I read her work all together, is her interest in the business of art, how artists do what they do, how they compromise and sacrifice, and what it takes, psychologically. For some it is easy, for others it is torment. There are no easy answers. Acocella wants to examine the process. She is fascinated by people's processes. Some are delighted by fame, others hounded by it. To say one is right and the other wrong is to place a highly simplistic value system on something that is quite complicated - the diversity of human personality. I love her perspective.

There's an entire essay on the phenomenon known as "writer's block", and she recounts some of the most well-known stories (Ralph Ellison, primarily - what a tragedy - but others, too - Fitzgerald, Eugenides - the terror of the "second novel"). I think a lot of my affinity for Acocella is that, obviously, I agree with her point of view. She is more interested in the work, than in the explanations or psychologizing placed on motivation, etc. Her essay on Nijinsky (which is, actually, a book review of a psychiatric history of the poor doomed dancer) is a masterpiece in this regard. I love her focus.

I also love her for making my reading list longer, for introducing me to huge gaps in my education, and I am always grateful when someone does that, and with such elegance and wit.

I can't even count the times I have put down the book and just let myself THINK about what she just wrote. There's something very satisfying about it. These are not just profile pieces, but intellectual analyses, and I find myself getting very worked up thinking about all of it.

Just a smattering of her startlingly eloquent and funny and moving paragraphs below:

From "A Fire in the Brain", her essay on Lucia Joyce, the mentally ill daughter of James Joyce:

Many people are brilliant, and from that you may get one novel, as Zelda Fitzgerald did. But to write five novels (Scott) or seventeen (Nabokov) - to make a career - you must have, with brilliance, a number of less glamorous virtues, for example, patience, resilience, and courage. Lucia Joyce encouraged obstacles and threw up her hands; James Joyce faced worse obstacles - for most of his writing life, publishers ran from him in droves - but he persisted. When the critics made fun of Zelda's novel, she stopped publishing; when Scott had setbacks - indeed, when he was a falling-down drunk - he went on hoping, and working.

From "Blocked", her essay on writer's block:

A story that haunts the halls of The New Yorker is that of Joseph Mitchell, who came on staff in 1938, wrote many brilliant pieces, and then, after the publication of his greatest piece, "Joe Gould's Secret," in 1964, came to the office almost every day for the next thirty-two years without filing another word. In a series of tributes published in The New Yorker upon Mitchell's death, in 1996, Calvin Trillin recalled hearing once that Mitchell was "writing away at a normal pace until some professor called him the greatest living master of the English declarative sentence and stopped him cold."

There are many other theories about Mitchell. (For one thing, "Joe Gould's Secret" was about a blocked writer.) It is nevertheless the case that, however much artists may want attention, getting it can put them off their feed, particularly when it comes at the beginning of their careers. That may have been the case with Dashiell Hammett.

From "True Confessions", her beautiful profile of Italian modernist Italo Svevo (whose life was changed from an encounter with James Joyce):

Svevo simply did not have enough certainty to join the ranks of Balzac and Zola. His world was not theirs, the world of causes - social, historical, economic - but something almost causeless, the mal du siecle, in its turn-of-the-century form: the crippling of action by thought, the erasure of the present by the future (fantasy) and the past (remorse). Bad as his circumstances are, Alfonso's main problem is internal. He cannot seem to do anything; he is too self-conscious, too busy watching himself. Like Joyce and Proust soon afterward, Svevo had discovered the subject of the twentieth-century novel, the self-imprisonment of the mind, but he didn't know how to write anything but a nineteenth-century novel.

From "Quicksand", her riveting portrait of Stefan Zweig:

Zweig, like many bold writers, posed himself problems that he could not always solve. In such cases, one has to ask oneself what feels true, what feels false, on the page. In Beware of Pity, what feels true are the scenes in which we are shown the futility of pity. This is a horrible lesson; it is also what makes the book radical and modern.

I knew very little about Zweig, although he does show up in Joyce biographies, because they met on a couple of occasions. His life was absolutely hair-raising, and Acocella has made me want to read everything this man ever wrote.

From "The Frog and the Crocodile", Acocella's review of the recent publication of letters between Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren, a man who gave Beauvoir her first orgasm at 39 (take THAT, Sartre - I think my brother would agree), and who reduced the world's foremost feminist into a puddle of need and desire. Good on him. The hottie American proletariat and the prickly French intellectual. A tragic story, though - of missed connections and futile feelings - and when Beauvoir died in the 80s she was buried wearing a ring that Algren gave her in the 1950s, a ring she had never taken off. Pretty wild stuff. Here is the doomed pair, with another woman (who was also one of Sartre's mistresses):

But anyway, I love Acocella here.

When The Second Sex was published, in 1949, Frenchwomen had had the vote for only five years. If Beauvoir's mind, as her detractors claim, was swamped with "masculinist" ideas, those were the only ideas around at the time. If she omitted to tell her public about her lesbian experiences, to do otherwise would have been fatal to the reputation of any woman writer of that period. (Beauvoir's critics should also take another look at her defense of lesbianism - a whole chapter - in The Second Sex. For 1949, that was brave.) It is possible that the best writers on social injustice - certainly the most moving - are those who grew up when the injustice in question was not viewed as a problem, and who therefore say things that get them in trouble, later, with holders of more correct views, views that the earlier writers gave birth to. I am thinking of Abraham Lincoln's pre-Civil War statements on the inferiority of Negroes, so decried by recent historians. It is one thing to free a people whom you regard as equal. But what does it take to free a people whom you have been trained to regard as inferior, and who, by your standards, are inferior? It takes something else, a kind of imagination and courage that we do not understand.

In the recent flap over Beauvoir we see again what might now be called Philip Larkin syndrome: the insistence on the part of modern critics that celebrated authors' lives be as admirable as their books. In the case of Beauvoir one might answer, "Do as she said, not as she did." (That, in fact, is the title of an article that Deirdre Barr was oved to write for the Times Magazine in response to the outrage over the revelations in her biography and in the Letters to Sartre.) But even if we did as she did, we wouldn't be doing so badly. After all, she did not move to Chicago, and her reasons were not just Sartre but also her career, her place in the literary life of Paris. If that career was tied up with her servitude to Sartre, good writing has sprung from more humiliating conditions. And, of course, the relationship with Sartre helped to germinate The Second Sex. The affair with Algren, so sexual, and therefore so searing, may have released her knowledge of the condition of women, but, whatever her denials, the knowledge was certainly there before.

From "Becoming the Emperor", a wonderful essay on another writer I knew very little about, Marguerite Yourcenar, author of Memoirs of Hadrian:

Before she left Europe, Yourcenar had deposited a trunk in storage at a hotel in Lausanne. She had been trying for years to get it back, and one day in 1949 it arrived. Opening it, she looked first for some valuables, but they had vanished. All that was left was a bunch of old papers. She pulled her chair up to the fireplace and started pitching things in. Then she came upon the drafts of a novel about Hadrian that she had begun when she was twenty-one and had later put aside. At the sight of those pages, she said, her mind more or less exploded. It is hard to understand how she managed to produce Memoirs of Hadrian in two years. In a bibliographical note appended to the novel, it takes her seventeen pages to list the sources she consulted (mostly at Yale) in order to make her account factually correct: ancient texts by the score; histories in English, French, and German; treatises on archaeology, on numismatics. Then, there was the matter of writing the book, but she said that she composed it in a state of "controlled delirium". She recalled a train trip she took at the time:

Closed inside my compartment as if in a cubicle of some Egyptian tomb, I worked late into the night between New York and Chicago; then all the next day, in the restaurant of a Chicago station where I awaited a train blocked by storms and snow; then again until dawn, alone in the observation car of a Santa Fe Limited; surrounded by black spurs of the Colorado mountains, and by the eternal pattern of the stars. Thus were written at a single impulsion the passions on food, love, sleep, and the knowledge of men. I can hardly recall a day spent with more ardor, or more lucid nights.

Clearly, she was simply ready to write this novel, as she had not been at twenty-one. She herself said that the crux was time: "There are books which one should not attempt before having passed the age of forty." She was forty-five when she went back to Hadrian.

From "A Hard Case", her essay on Primo Levi, an author I adore. She reviews a biography of Levi that she basically finds annoying, for reasons that I find a lot of biographies annoying. The essays should be read in its entirety, she obviously loves Levi - but here is a bit where she gets her Irish up:

As for his life, the position she [the biographer in question] takes is roughly that of a psychotherapist of the seventies. She's okay. We're okay. Why wasn't he okay? Why did he have to work all the time? Why didn't he take more vacations? And how about getting laid once in a while? She records that as a teenager he mooned over various girls, but whenever he got near one he blushed and fell silent. "What was this?" Angier asks. "Can anyone ever say?" I can say. Has Angier never heard of geeks? They are born every day, and they grow up to do much of the world's intellectual and artistic work. One wonders, at times, why Angier chose Levi as a subject - she seems to find him so peculiar. And does she imagine that if he had been more "normal" - less reserved, less scrupulous - he would have written those books she so admires?

From "European Dreams", her essay on Joseph Roth:

One of the remarkable things about Roth's early writing is its political foresight. He was the first person to inscribe the name of Adolf Hitler in European fiction, and that was in 1923, ten years before Hitler took over Germany. But what makes his portrait of the Nazi brand of anti-Semitism so interesting is that it was done before the Holocaust, which he did not live to see. His treatment of the Jews therefore lacks the pious edgelessness of most post-Holocaust writing on the subject. In one of his novels of the 1920s - the best one, Right and Left - which opens in a little German town, he says that in this place most jokes began, "There was once a Jew on a train," but on the same page he narrows his eyes at Jews who ignore such jokes. In an essay of 1929, he speculates comically on why God took such a special interest in the Jews: "There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and most dreadful blessing" - to be God's chosen people. As for German nationalism, he regarded it, at least in the twenties, mainly as a stink up the nose, a matter of lies and nature hikes and losers trying to gain power. He was frightened of it, but he also found it ridiculous.

And two excerpts from "After the Ball Was Over", her gorgeous essay on Vaslav Nijinsky:

What we need to know about Nijinsky is not what was on his mind but how he transformed this material into art - how this tongue-tied introvert managed to become not only a great, eloquent, and (by all accounts) surpassingly glamorous dancer but also the first modernist choreographer in the history of ballet. In other words, we need a psychology of creativity. And that is exactly what most psychobiographers do not concern themselves with. Creativity - the thing that actually distinguishes their subject from the rest of humankind and therefore needs explaining - is to them a given. They work backward from there, to libido and aggression, the things that in no way distinguish their subjects from the rest of humanity.

Amen, sister!

And:

Whatever Nijinsky was in reality, he is by now a legend, a major cultural fact, and not just because of his extraordinary story but because of the way that story ties in with certain critical issues in ballet. Ballet's relationship to time - the fact that the repertory, unanchored by text, is always vanishing, just as the dance image on the stage is always vanishing - forms a large part of the vividness and poignance of the art. We are always losing it, like life, and therefore we re-create it, mythologize it, in our minds. Nijinsky's life - his rapid self-extinction and the disappearance of his ballets - is like a parable of that truth. If dance is disappearance, he is the ultimate disappearing act. Accordingly, he is held that much dearer. If many people today still believe that he was the greatest dancer who has ever lived, that is partly because there are so few records of his dancing.

And finally, from her masterpiece essay on Baryshnikov, "The Soloist":

What has made Baryshnikov a paragon of late-twentieth-century dance is partly the purity of his ballet technique. In him the hidden meaning of ballet, and of classicism - that experience has order, that life can be understood - is clearer than in any other dancer on the stage today. Another part of his preeminence derives, of course, from his virtuosity, the lengths to which he was able to take ballet - the split leaps, the cyclonic pirouettes - without sacrificing purity. But what has made him an artist, and a popular artist, is the completeness of his performances: the level of concentration, the fullness of ambition, the sheer amount of detail, with the cast of the shoulder, the angle of the jaw, even the splay of the fingers, all deployed in the service of a single pressing act of imagination. In him there is simply more to see than in most other dancers.

She's a fine fine writer and I look forward to the rest of the collection.

Related links

This ...

is related to this ...

is related to this gorgeousness. Hilarious! I love him. (Thank you, Luisa, for sending me that link. I adore him, and I adore how cranky he is about everyone else's perpetual crankiness!)

I agree with every word in every one of those links, contradictions and all. Those who balk at any tiny contradiction are the biggest bores on the planet I can imagine. "But you said THIS in 2003, now you say THIS?" Uhm, yeah. Because I'm still in process, you unimaginative nitwit. I'm also not a public figure who should remain consistent in their positions. I'm a private thinking citizen. I had one gentleman email me recently complaining that he now felt "self-conscious" on my site, because he had had a run-in with me where I asked him to stop being so negative (at least on my site). Well, listen, dude, maybe you SHOULD feel self-conscious about complaining constantly, although that is the public discourse in vogue at the moment. So maybe if it makes you think, "Huh ... am I being a boring person right now?" then a little self-consciousness is a good thing.

I can't believe I'm saying I agree with Gwyneth Paltrow, but I do. 100%. You can feel it, those who get their energy from negativity. It is their actual energy source.

Seriously: stay away, folks. Learn to recognize the signs. That shit is toxic.

And those whose first response to this would be to split hairs ("but ... sometimes it's appropriate to be outraged!") are the worst offenders, because they cannot tell the difference and they are protecting something, some secret, something they don't want to reveal. I don't know what, maybe they don't know what either. Their sense of outrage is really a mask for something much more wounded and childlike - disappointment, loss, embarrassment - who knows what ... (although whatever it is it is certainly more human than the other). I know that in the times in my life when I have been most unpleasant and most angry, it's usually been a mask because I feel helpless and fucking SAD ... so look out when someone is protecting something that they don't want you to see. That's why the viciousness, that's why the exhausting complaints. Because then they get to walk around being "right" all the time (you know, "relishing their rightness") and you either have to agree with their position of how right they are or step out of the conversation altogether or get into a fight with them. That's the whole point. No give and take. I've written about this a lot, and my struggles with staying open and free and vulnerable on my own blog. But I just happened to come across those two links and that great video this week, and they all seemed to dovetail quite nicely, giving me much food for thought in this time in my life when the whirlpool of bitterness is strong indeed. When my entire world has been rearranged and I don't know which end is up - and like my friend Ted said to me, "Loss brings up other loss." All it is is loss right now. I am sure that that is why I am sick now. I held it off as long as I could.

But I needed to really contemplate all of that this week, which was a hard one.

Reminds me of the note that Rosalind Russell's husband found tucked away in her prayerbook, after she had died of cancer. That note, in her handwriting, said:

Keep my mind free from the recital of endless details; give me wings to get to the point. Seal my lips on aches and pains. They are increasing, and love of rehearsing them is becoming sweeter as the years go by.

It is those who love to "rehearse" their negativity who are the toxic ones. Because through rehearsal, they make it perfect, they make it habitual, a way of life.

I don't avoid such people because I feel superior to them. It is just the opposite. I avoid such people because I recognize the trap. I have those tendencies myself. I have been that toxic person, and I could go there, like nobody's business. But what would be my quality of life be then? It is a FIGHT. A fight to focus on gratitude.

So, again, can't believe I'm saying this: but thank you, Gwyneth Paltrow.

Siobhan O'Malley: "Alibi Bye"

My beautiful and talented sister Siobhan has just had her second album released (after a good two years of almost non-stop work on it) and it is now available for purchase! It is called Alibi Bye. The sound on this one is really big, robust - and she had the great pleasure of working with seasoned and unbelievable studio musicians who would be like, "You want a jazzy harpischord solo here? No problem." "You need one tuba blast as an accent before the chorus? Let me call in my world-class tuba-playing friend." Etc. The album is rockin'!

Go, Siobhan!

And go purchase your copy now!

Three dawns

There was the one yesterday and the day before.

Then there was today.

Like I've said, it's the greatest show on earth.

Ah, the happy doomed teens of "Jaws 2"

Their carefree summer fun, of bonfires and making out and sailboat races, is soon to be shattered by a monster of the deep.

In the film, the snotty marine biologist who examines the dead killer whale on the beach, says to Chief Brody, "Mr. Brody, sharks don't take things personally."

Well, this shark does.

It is not interested in filling its belly. It is interested in revenging its friends, and coming back to "get" you after you have set it on fire. It stalks, it lies in wait ... and even though in a matter of 24 hours it has eaten two scuba divers, a water skier, and two horny teens ... it is still not done, and feels that it would be appropriate to try to eat a helicopter, as well as two catamarans and three sailboats, not to mention the ten human beings populating these vehicles. This is not a hungry shark. It is an angry vindictive shark. With a long memory. It wants to right the wrongs done to it. You set me on fire beeyotch? You pour gasoline on my snout and then shoot me with a gun? I will make the entire COMMUNITY pay for your rudeness.

Chief Brody is right to be paranoid, I guess.

I like the kind of world-weary slightly skeezy sexual vibe brought to the Brody marriage - which was there in the original Jaws. They are tired of one another, yet sometimes when they get drunk they like to get naughty. The next morning they look at each other, almost embarrassed, like, Oh God ... we went THERE again ... You can imagine him slapping her ass and her laughing uproariously saying "Give it to me, Daddy", but inside loathing herself for succumbing ... but then the next morning it's like it never happened, and they are back where they started. She cooks bacon in a tired worn-down manner, he looks at her, with the memory of last night's dirtiness on his face. They forgive each other their trespasses, but their energy together is one of tired sexual depletion - which is such an odd choice in what is a summer blockbuster. You can imagine these two not only attending a key party, but throwing the key party, roping the entire town of Amity into sexual shenanigans that will ruin marriages.

So bizarre. Tell me you don't see that dynamic at work in their marriage! But I think it's part of why the original was successful. Because that marriage is pretty shaky, you can feel it. It's not completely broken, but there's something tired there, they're used up.

You can just tell that Jaws was made in the 70s, merely from the energy in the Brody marriage. Only in the 70s were characters in a movie such as this one allowed such adult sexual complexity - not to be explained or resolved, it just IS.

Brody's two sons now take center stage in Jaws 2, with his older son wanting to hang out with his friends, and pursue the pug-dog-faced girl of his current adolescent dreams. The younger son is the tag-along. Brody knows what his son is up to, he's not a hovering father, and it's obvious that Mike is currently about to lose his virginity, as well as have his first experience in overindulgence of alcohol, but whatever, the kid is 17, he's going to do what he's going to do. Brody is no saint. He doesn't care.

But when the vindictive shark who takes things VERY personally comes into the picture, Brody starts to assert his parental muscle.

You can lose your virginity every day of the week, son, more power to you, but I will not let you frolic in the same water as a stalking rolling-eyed monster. Get your damn boat out of the water and get a job!

This is tough to hear, especially when all of the teens in the town apparently live with very little parental supervision, hanging out on the docks all day, cruising on their sailboats, having various sexual experiences and romances, and trying to negotiate their way to adulthood. They're a mixed bag. We have the angry realistic pudgy kid, we have the lanky intellectual, we have the morose kid who knows no girl will ever be interested in him ... then we have the girls, who are more interchangeable, but who eventually emerge with some defining characteristics: the sexually precocious one, the sweet long-haired athletic one (that's Ben Marley's best girl, don't ya know), the wide-eyed romantic one (you just know she's doomed) in love for the first time, and etc.

I'm not trying to compare this to some brilliant teen expose. I'm just saying that without the specificity of the group of teens, the movie would sink into the morass of the shark's ragingly rational and conniving behavior. They seem like a real gang of kids, some more "experienced" than others, and with that strange mix of energies that you see in groups of 16 year old boys in particular: where some almost seem like men - and some still seem like they're pre-teens, anxious, with one foot still in boyhood. It's a huge gap. But they've grown up together, they've known each other forever, so the differences between them are not as noticeable to them as they are to us. But there's the one kid who is good with his boat, and makes cynical comments about the girls' bodies, and he might as well be 25 years old. I knew guys like that. They had a social ease, they were set apart from the pack. There were the guys who were just looking for a girlfriend, which - sure - might mean sex, but it was more important to have a girl to pal around with, especially in the summer. And then of course there were the guys like Patrick, played by Ben Marley, who is athletic, strong, the one you turn to in a pinch, and who has been dating the same girl forever (you know, for, like, five months), and almost seems like a responsible married man. I knew guys like that in high school, too.

So let's take a look, shall we?

I'm sick and worn out. Grabbing screenshots of Jaws 2, with three sneezes per screenshot from me, has been fun.

And yeah, most of these involve Ben Marley.

So?

Two dawns

Yesterday and the day before. It's like a whole new and different world in each photo. 24 hours apart.

My friend Phil talks about sex

My good friend Phil, we go way back, has just put up a new video which has made my day. I will not say any more than that.

So funny.

Phil talks about sex:

The making of Jaws 2:

A couple behind-the-scenes photos with, naturally, one that involves Ben Marley.

I have been laid low by the flu. This week has been very rough for me, although strangely productive as well, with me literally blackberry-ing people I need to contact for this or that project from my sick bed, sending huge attachments via email and then having to delete them instantly because my blackberry can't store all of it. But I am really run down. I'm surprised I haven't gotten sick sooner.

So, from my flu-ridden state, I take comfort where I can find it.

I do enjoy these photos, there's something delightfully absurd about the whole thing (especially the guy with the clapper submerged in the ocean. Ah, making movies!)

Apparently the shoot went on for so much longer than they had originally anticipated that they were filming much of the final sequence (with the smashed sailboats and stranded teens, etc.) in late December. Yes, they were in Florida, but it got chilly as hell, and it was supposed to be the middle of summer, and all of the kids were hanging out on the sailboats all day, filming their scenes, shivering, teeth chattering, and they would suck on ice cubes before a shot so their breath didn't show. Glamour!

Nureyev and gender

I still can't really read, but here are some Nureyev images, since he's been on my mind. I am halfway through the Nureyev book, and hopefully I'll get to finish it some day.

I love the androgyny of Nureyev in the pictures below (especially the one of him and Fonteyn, with him upside down - in the classic swan dive usually associated with females, her head close to his crotch level). It's gorgeous, erotic, but also unsettling to regularized gender roles, up-ending convention, which is one of the main things Nureyev appears to have contributed to ballet. As a youth, in Russia, the style was that the male was basically the "heavy" - he was meant to be statuesque, strong, and classical, and be able to lift the female about. Macho. Unemotional. This sort of static dancing, although highly technical, requiring great skill, bored Nureyev, and he got some intimation of the winds of change going on in the West, through seeing grainy tapes of this or that ballet dancer in the West, and he realized (perhaps without articulating it to himself) that things were changing "out there", outside of Russia, and he needed to be a part of it. Rigid preconceived notions of gender dissolving. Nureyev stopped modeling himself on the male dancers he saw around him, and began focusing on the ballerinas, imitating THEM, bringing their long flowing grace into the male parts ... and at the time it was hugely controversial.

Good for him.

He's so beautiful, and so strong, but there is also a softness about him that lets you, the viewer, in. It was a revelation at the time. It occurs to me that this is similar to the great conversation Catherine, Desirae and I had in the comments section to this post, about Kurt Cobain, that most superstars have a certain amount of androgyny. The hard mixed with the soft, female and male ... We were talking there about rock stars, but you can see it in actors too, especially the old-school actors with their set recognizable personae. Joan Crawford - all woman, all curves and legs, but with a backbone of steel and a hardness to her. Gary Cooper - all man, all lanky legs and straight-edges, but with the ability to show us behind the mask, all the softness and hopes and fears, in a way that would be "typically female". The obvious examples of Marlene Dietrich, who consciously toyed with gender in every role she played. Montgomery Clift, Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russell, Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck ... each had some aspect of androgyny to them, either conscious or no, which (to me) just makes them even more universal.

Nureyev made this androgyny his stock-in-trade. Well, that, and being the best dancer he could be. I think a lot of his persona was not so much calculated and consciously created, but just the result of a killer instinct.

Hope

The long and flat of it is ...

The making of "Jaws 2": "everybody said that was a good idea"

Carl Gottlieb, screenwriter for Jaws 2 (as well as Jaws), was brought in a little bit into the game to flesh out the characters. He was flown down to Florida, where the entire 120-person company was basically sitting in a hotel on the beach, waiting for a script to be ready so they could shoot. No one was working. Everyone was just hanging out. All of the teenagers (including Ben Marley, ahem) were spending their days learning to sail, as well as working with a Navy SEAL to get in shape. According to Keith Gordon (who played one of the kids), there was much grumbling, much boredom ("Oh shit, we have to practice sailing again? When do we get to, you know, make the movie??"), as well as multiple tormented adolescent romances going on. They all were dating each other, and then breaking up, and getting back together, and guys who were friends the day before getting into fights with each other over one of the girls, and etc. and etc., which is so hysterical to me, and sounds like a blast. Can't you imagine the dramas? What an experience. Most of them were pulled straight out of high school, and for many this was their first big credit. The first director was fired a couple weeks into the picture, everything put on hold. The filming of this movie took from start to finish over a year. So there was a lot of down-time.

Gottlieb was called in to fix the script, build it out and make it all come together. The new director (the amusing and intelligent Jeannot Szwarc) was focusing on the special effects and action sequences, Gottlieb had to flesh out the story, and the characters. He describes holing himself up in the hotel room, and writing ... but every time he would leave, every other person would say to him, "How's it going??" Not in a mean or impatient way but like: How's that script going? Can we start shooting soon? As a writer myself, I freak out thinking about such pressure! He finally stopped leaving his hotel room because he couldn't take it. And finally, he lit upon a theme, or an idea, that he could flesh out. He knew that the group of teens, who are basically the linchpin of the whole thing, had to be made clear - each one needed a characteristic an audience could recognize, etc., but then he came up with the idea that I personally think makes the whole movie:

I had this notion that this cruising culture that was very popular with cars at that time - I said, What if kids cruised on the water the way they cruised on the boulevard? They've got these elaborate boats that they fix up, they socialize, all the boy-girl stuff, the interplay between the kids can be in connection with this cruising culture. And everybody said that that was a good idea.

Yes, yes, yes. VERY good idea. When you see Jaws 2, with all the balderdash, one of the things I like about it is its evocation of that boat culture, mixed in with teenagers. I grew up in a tourist beach town, not unlike Amity - where there were the rich cats who would flock there every summer, and then there'd be us - the local kids - working at pizza joints and restaurants, serving the wealthy, and hanging out on the beach all day. After all, it was OUR town.

Jaws 2 does that very very well, and I love to hear Gottlieb's story about how he came to that idea, and how he thought; There. I can write that. I know how to write that.

The many scenes of flirting aimless teenagers hanging out on their little sailboats really reminds me of my own adolescence in a state where there the only thing to do, in the summer, or really in any season, is hang out near or on the ocean as much as possible.

And so the director went with that idea, and he films the sailboat races with kids laughing and screaming from boat to boat as though it is American Graffitti.

What I like about this anecdote (revealed in the very nice DVD extras) is that it shows the amount of thought and, dare I say, artistry - that goes into even something like Jaws 2. Like any other writer, Gottlieb was looking for his "way in" to the story - a hook. Not just for the audience, but himself.

Some screenshots of that "cruising boat culture" below, with, yeah, a glimpse of Ben Marley manning his boat.

The "cruising culture" of American Grafitti was transposed to the world of Jaws 2, and it works. Not only does it work, but it is something that feels real (like I said, I recognize that world from my adolescence) - and in a movie like Jaws 2, with a basically sentient shark who is out for revenge, as opposed to a nice meal, you need as much grounding as possible, as much connection to the real world.

Jaws 2: Ben Marley

Sneak peek.

Boy is a glorified extra (he should have played Mike, Chief Brody's son - he's a much better actor) but instantly recognizable, of course.

More to come.

The "Square Pegs" pilot: In hot pursuit of popularity and Larry Simpson (aka Ben Marley) - Part Two

We left off at the halfway mark, after Patty fills Lauren in on the most amazing experience of her life - "fainting on Larry Simpson". She can be forgiven for exaggerating. She is 14.

Patty and Lauren have been volunteered (by Muffy) to make decorations for the freshman dance. They sit after school and paint posters, and all Lauren can talk about is Larry Simpson and how he LIKES Patty and how they have to somehow work this, because there is no time like the present! AS they are talking, naturally - who walks into the room but Larry Simpson. In gym shorts, help me Jesus.

Lauren sees Larry and his friend come closer and, more aggressive than Patty, calls out to him. Instead of being a douche, and rolling his eyes and strolling by, he sees that Lauren is sitting with Patty, and says, "Hi!" in a nice heart-cracking way that I, personally, would totally have misinterpreted as a 14-year-old, thinking he obviously liked me if he said "Hi" in that manner. Actually, I might mis-interpret it now too! He and Patty have a bond now. He stops to chat, which is even worse (and by "worse" I mean "better"), because he obviously wants to be there. Lauren is both just googly-eyed up at him and his friend.

Larry says something to his friend like, "This is the girl I told you about ... Patty ..."

THE GIRL I TOLD YOU ABOUT?

DON'T PLAY WITH MY HEART, BEN MARLEY!!

He's humorous and nice and makes Patty repeat "that funny thing you said the other day ..." In that moment, he's building her up. He's making her repeat something that made him laugh, to his friend.

This is all just soul-crushing.

Patty is on the moon. She says "that funny thing" again, and Larry Simpson laughs again and says, appreciatively, almost intimately, "You have such an unusual mind."

Where is the fork? I need to plunge it into my solar plexus.

But then Lauren, whose social skills leave a bit to be desired, butts in. She can't help herself. As a grown woman I would call this moment a "cock block", and I believe that it is essential to have female friends who intuitively understand what a cock block is, and why you should not do it ... it's just a sense that should be developed by the time you're an adult. Seriously. Bump it up the priority list if you don't have it down-pat, because nobody likes a cock-blocker. Anyway, Lauren doesn't mean any harm (many cock blockers don't - that's the worst part - and Lauren's too young to really get it yet) - but Patty and Larry are having a nice (to quote Eddie Izzard) "splashy-splashy" moment, when Lauren blurts out, "Larry, are you going to the dance?" all breathless and agog.

It stops the action. It interrupts. It is not on topic. The cock is blocked.

That's a no-no, Lauren.

Oh, and just in case you think I'm being too hard on the poor hapless cock-blockers, on one or two awkward occasions I have actually cock-blocked myself, so I do understand the problem. But get it together, and GET OUT OF THE WAY. I have often thought that my friends Ann Marie and Mitchell should give seminars (together) on how NOT to cock-block. They could make a killing. They bring not only non-cock-blocking but encouragement of the friend's romantic action going on to a high art form. It's sometimes impossible NOT to get laid when you go out with those two. They set you up as the funniest coolest person in the world, and then disappear into the night, leaving you to navigate the situation yourself. Brilliant!

Anyway, there's an awkward shrieking-on of the brakes when Lauren blurts out her comment, and you can see everyone awkwardly dealing with it. Larry Simpson says, "Yeah, sure ..."

Lauren gushes, "We'll see you there!"

It's one of those weird high school moments where you can totally tell that one group is 14 years old and one group is 18 years old. From a long-distance view, all teenagers may seem the same, but don't you remember on the ground when you were 14 and those senior classmen seemed like ADULTS? Like, they had RAZORS in their bathrooms and stuff like that. You were just a KID who still had teddy bears.

Larry says, "Okay ..." Again, he's nice to Lauren. He's not a douche, even though he probably can see what she is up to. He doesn't say, "Yeah, you wish you'd see me there ..." He nods and says, "Okay." But, inevitably, his eyes drag back to Patty.

Let us revel in the moment.

For as long as possible.

I'm guessing Patty feels the same way I do.

Granted, it's not the iconic American-male-movie-star hotness-with-years-of-similar-images-behind-it of something like this:

But in Square Pegs, he's playing a different kind of character, a regular boy from the suburbs, good at school, nice, obviously plays soccer, and cute as hell.

He then says the fateful words, "See you there", and strolls off with his friend, leaving the girls in a state of complete emotional dishevelment (and poor Marshall, who has to look on at the drool-fest going on).

Look at them watch him go!

Of course Patty and Lauren are whipped up into a frenzy about the words "See you there" which seems to hold some kind of ... promise?

Oh, girls. Watch out.

Change of scene, change of cock. Marshall and Johnny Slash are in the listening library at the school (well - Johnny Slash is listening to Devo or something), and Lauren and Patty are strategizing about how to get to the dance, and how romantic it will be. They actually believe that Patty is going TO the dance with Larry. At some point, Marshall comes up, and with many a "but seriously folks" interjection, asks Lauren to the dance. She is openly dismayed. She is at the point where Patty's life is far more important to her than her own. But they end up agreeing to go to the dance with Marshall and Johnny (who has a car), as long as Marshall and Johnny agree to stand six paces behind them at all times, like Prince Philip. Hahahaha Poor Marshall and Johnny agree to that. Johnny appears to be terrified of girls, in general. He may have a cool exterior, but inside he is a trembly mess.

Now, finally, the dance. The sad foursome stand out on the steps of the school, and they are all basically waiting for Larry Simpson to show up. Horrible! God, it brings me back to how embarrassing I could be in high school, waiting around for some dude to walk by, so I could maybe have eye contact with him and then write 20 pages about it in my diary.

Johnny Slash has completely divorced himself from the situation (what a shock), and is deeply engrossed in the music coming out of his headphone. Lauren and Patty peer off eagerly into the night. Marshall is still hopeful that the wind will swing his way, so he murmurs to Johnny that eventually they'll probably get to dance with Lauren and Patty. Johnny freaks out. "Dance? With them? I don't dance. I'm New Wave. Totally different head. Totally." Marshall, again stuck in the days of Sid Caesar, tries to teach Johnny how to dance, and they do an awkward waltz up and down the steps, much to Lauren's mortification.

Where is Larry? Why is he not coming?

Then the most romantic heart-stopping shot in the whole pilot.

Not just because it's Ben Marley, and he's running his fingers through his hair, but because I remember what it was like to be 14, and LIVING for a certain dance, because maybe I would see that upper classman I was so smitten with, and I had no classes with him, no interactions ... but at a dance, I could actually be in his presence in a social situation and maybe ... just maybe ...?

Damn Square Pegs for giving me flashbacks like that. They really are rather unpleasant.

Lauren gives Patty advice on what to say - that his presence makes her stomach go into butterflies, that "we will remember this night for the rest of our lives", and other such balderdash, and then drags Johnny and Marshall off, leaving Patty alone on the steps.

Larry, unaware of the brou-haha that he has caused, casually strolls up the steps in his washed-up 18th-century-French-literature professor's blazer ... and he's not looking for anyone (because, you know, he knows he's NOT on a date) so he almost walks right by Patty, and she calls out to him, "Hi, Larry!"

Awkward!

He's a smart guy (that's set up in how he's talked about), so he has a moment where he realizes what's happened. That she's standing on the steps forlornly waiting for him. But because he's also nice, he doesn't cringe away from her, or play it cool, or any of those other things that would crush her even more. He's nice. He stops and they have a sweet interaction. She's not wearing her glasses, and he comments on it. She pretends like she only wears the glasses "for reading sometimes", and he says, "You look nice" - in a way that has to be seen to realize its effectiveness. (Again, imagine you are an un-kissed geeky 14-year-old ... very important.) She, freaked out, blurts back, "You look nice, too" and he starts laughing and makes some self-deprecating comment about his clothes, although he DOESN'T say, "Yeah, my dad is a professor of 18th-century-French-literature and I borrowed his blazer."

He then says, "Well, we might as well go in, right?" As though they are together, pitter pat, and in they go. You like him. You feel bad for Patty. Life will go on.

Inside the dance is going on. I can't get over the music or the outfits. It's awesome. The Waitresses haven't shown up yet for their gig (they're such rock stars), and Muffy is getting very angry about that. The same dude in the full American Indian regalia is STILL in the full American Indian regalia dancing around, and he is the background of almost every shot, and it's hilarious!

Larry doesn't just ditch Patty when they walk in. They stand there together. It's the most exciting thing ever. Larry has the vibe of one of those guys in high school (again, calling Keith M.) - who was at the top of the peak, yet somehow still had a foot out of high school, giving him a better perspective. He knew there were more important things. That how you treat each other is what really matters. That life would go on after high school. Unlike those who truly believed that this was the most crucial time of their lives. Maybe it's being a senior, but I think there's more to it. Like the way he looks around at the dance. He's not making fun of it, but there's a part of him that does look around and find it all rather funny. That is SUCH a relaxing energy when you are a square peg underclassman and everything is so important!

So then Jami Gertz has her big moment introducing The Waitresses, on they all come, and they start to play "I Know What Boys Like". The place freaks out and everyone starts dancing. Except for Patty and Larry who kind of look on, chatting about nothing. He's being kind and sweet, and asking her if she wants a soda. She is awkward and bumbly, and making no sense at all. Meanwhile, Lauren watches like a hawk from across the gym, peering through the crowd.

Ah, memories!

At one point Larry says, "I like this song" (you know, the man is desperate for conversation at this point - but he takes it easy, not giving her a hard time - he's doing all the work as she bumbles about) - and she gushes, "Me too!" even though she probably doesn't even know what the song is.

One of my favorite moments that Ben Marley has in the episode is while the two of them are talking (with the American Indian war-whooping in the background). He asks Patty if she would like a soda, and in the middle of his comment, you can see him see something across the room, and it cracks him up. He tries to hide it - hand up over mouth - but it's too late. He says, "Uh ... I think your friend is trying to get your attention."

Cut to Lauren standing on the bleechers, waving and gesticulating at her like a maniac. Like - she can't WAIT for the update - she must have it now!!! But I just like how he catches a glimpse of the wind-mill-esque motions across the gym, knows exactly what's going on (it's nice to see a boy not be contemptuous of girls and how they operate, and treat it all with a bit of friendliness), and he tries not to laugh, but you know, she looks ludicrous so he can't help it.

It's MORTIFYING. Sarah Jessica Parker is MORTIFIED that her friend is making such a scene. But what is she to do? Windmill-arm her back, "LEAVE US ALONE. STOP COCK-BLOCKING"?? She cringes!

Larry Simpson, good boy, jokes, "Do you think she wants a soda too?"

Patty doesn't even know what she is saying ... the moment, so precious, is already slipping away. God, don't we all remember what that is like? She says, "She doesn't even drink soda!" and he looks at her with a nice expression, like, Okay, okay, it's okay, Patty ... and he exits the scene, to go get them some sodas, but also to allow the frantic friend to rush over and get the update. He gets it.

You know, it's moments of kindness like that that can make the wilderness of high school not seem so hostile.

Lauren then races over demanding to know if he has kissed her yet. Patty is horrified. "We just GOT here!" But she needs her friend and says, "Okay, quickly - what am I supposed to say to him again?" And Lauren launches into the butterflies in stomach and "we will remember this night for the rest of our lives" monologue. Patty nods, trying to burn it into her brain. Okay, got it. Larry returns, without sodas, and Lauren dashes off to leave them alone. Subtle!

Larry does NOT have sodas when he returns, and by now it's a slow song. They stand there, side by side, not speaking for a while.

It's killer. It killed me as a 14 year old ... that moment BEFORE something really happens. (Please look for the Indian doing his thing in the background. It kills me.)

Then he says, as though the thought just occurred to him, "Hey, you want to dance?"

She gushes, "Sure!"

Best moment of her life.

Of mine as well.

Oh, it's so sweet how he puts his arms out, and she steps into them (all with tomahawk man gyrating in the background - hysterical) and they slow dance for a while. It's achingly awesome.

They dance. They don't speak. She is obviously madly in love with him, and he ... well, here's what I think. He meant what he said earlier in the episode. He loves her mind. He thinks she's a kick. He's a smart guy, and he likes her smarts. He finds her amusing. And maybe, somewhere, he thinks she's cute too. (The way he said "You look nice" tells me that). He's aware that she is crush-ing on him big time, and so instead of being a dick to her about it, he is kind. He basically ignores her awkwardness, letting her get herself together, without punishing her for it ... and is kind and sweet in the face of someone else's insane regard for him. So. Basically what I'm trying to say is he is playing all of that as he dances with her. He's not "just" dancing with her, or staring over her shoulder. He's thinking about something. Best kind of acting. It doesn't matter if you're in a Pepto Bismol commercial or a Woody Allen movie. Think about something when you're acting. Especially on film where it is always the thought that counts.

Hmmm.

All of this is reminding me of something else.

What could it be?

Oh, yeah.

Not quite as palpitatingly hot and tormented, but just as sweet.

Patty, however, cannot just be in the moment. Of course she can't. She's 14. She's out of her MIND. She doesn't know you need to hold onto moments primarily by letting them be. She tries to force her hand. Basically so that she won't have to break the news to Lauren that she didn't say the right words.

She breaks the slow dance (and this is a very nice scene coming up, very nicely written), and says, in an overly dramatic voice, "Larry, we will remember this life for the rest of our nights."

He stops and says, "What?"

Uh-oh. She got her one line wrong.

Instead of correcting herself, or digging herself in deeper, she steps back away from him a little bit and basically pleads (and it's a lovely moment, very cathartic and high school-ish), "Well, don't you have that feeling??"

Good for you, Patty. Speak your truth. YOUR truth, not Lauren's.

Now comes Larry's moment in the sun and I'm sure this is why he was brought back for a later episode. His sweetness here is hard to describe without making it sound ... schmaltzy ... sweet is not the word, anyway. I know I keep saying "kind", but that's the word-clue that keeps coming up for me. I am also remembering who I was when I first saw it, ostracized and pudgy, and feeling such a sense of self-loathing that I would NEVER approach a guy to ask him to dance, or whatever. I was disgusting to myself. It makes me want to cry, looking back on it. Over the next couple of years of high school, there were, indeed, boys who were kind to me in my distress over them. They handled me gently (or as gently as they could, being only 16 themselves), and I will always appreciate that. They all turned me down, I had no success in high school, and finally - my senior year in high school started dating a 22 year old guy - which seemed my only hope! That turned into a major tragedy too, but my milieu was obviously not high school. I just couldn't get a grip on ANYthing.

So Larry here, and how he sees how flustered and upset she is, and instead of backing off from it - decides to speak directly to it - really made an impression on me.

He sees her face, pauses, and then says, "Patty - when you were out front on the steps ... were you waiting for me?"

Horrifying. She exclaims in defense, "No!"

He doesn't say anything (again, a kind moment - he lets her defend herself without scoffing at her or saying, "You were too, Patty, come on"), and she then caves and says, "Yes." She's already near tears.

It's crushing.

Here comes the nicely written scene, which - naturally - I remembered almost word for word. The time is now, he has to be honest with this poor girl, so he starts to say,

"Look, I don't know how to say this, but ..." when she interrupts, she can't help it, saying, "I thought you liked me!"

He says (and I believe every word - that's the gift Ben Marley brought to this nothing little part. You have to believe him - otherwise he's just another high school douchebag and we've all seen them before), "I do like you. It's just that I'm seeing somebody else." Gentle, gentle ... he knows it will hurt her.

Again, if you roll your eyes at this stuff totally then you miss so much. How often in life do I wish I had been let down just a little bit easier. With some understanding on the part of the man that this is going to hurt, and I'm sorry ... It's nice, you know?

She's really in it now, not trying to protect herself or play it cool, and she says, "Who?"

He says (and he does that thing guys do that kills me - his eyes kind of roam over her hair, her face, back to her eyes - it's hot, frankly - and tender), "You don't know her. She's in college." Terrible line for Patty to hear! How can one compete with a girl in college? He's REALLY a man! She can't speak, lowers her head, and he lifts up her chin with his hand. Ouch. Says, "You're not gonna cry, are you?"

I DIED watching this as a teenager. DIED.

She replies, "Yes. I mean no."

He's gentle, he feels bad. He starts to say, "I never meant to make you think that -" and this is when Patty gets herself together, starts to channel Lauren (who obviously loves old movies) and starts to put poor Larry at ease. She stands taller and exclaims, "Larry, you needn't reproach yourself. I understand perfectly. I've had some experience with this sort of thing before, you know."

He doesn't laugh. He says, "Really?" She nods, reassuring him. She is a woman of the world. She can handle this! Again, he doesn't laugh at her. He says (and this is a heart-cracker of a line - totally sincere, but what a knife in the heart): "Because I think you're a terrific kid with a lot of potential."

Kid?? But how nice he is there. And that's not an easy line to pull off and make it sound like, yeah, Larry Simpson says shit like that, and THAT is why he is popular - but Ben Marley pulls it off. He means it. But "kid"? Throw me in the open grave right now.

I love this next line of Patty's, because she channels Now Voyager (hmm, a connecting link to Bette Davis!): "Don't give it another thought. Why ask for the moon when we have the stars?"

Now he feels it's safe to smile. She's being very dramatic, but not obnoxious, and he appreciates her. It's okay to appreciate her. Killer closeup of him staring at her, with a strange mixture of tenderness, humor, and "if you were four years older" regret - and he says, "You certainly have an unusual mind for a kid your age."

She is sad but brave, and says, "I think I'll go join my friend now." and turns to leave when he says (and it's startling), "Patricia ..."

Out of nowhere, he calls her "Patricia". Patricia? What a grown-up name, after he's been calling her a "kid" for five minutes.

Nice writing. Nice touch.

She stops, and he walks over to her and slowly bends down and kisses her on the cheek, lingering there for a bit, and when he pulls back from kissing her, this sort of calm happy light comes over her face - and as he walks off, you can see Lauren dash over to get all the details ("I wish he wore lipstick so we could see the exact place where his lips touched your flesh!") ... but what was nice about the moment was that he made turning her down into a work of art, where he actually left her in a better spot than where she was before. He was tender enough that she would never be humiliated in looking back on it, he was honest with her, and then, out of nowhere, he calls her "Patricia", intimating, "some day, kid, some day ..."

Afterwards, although Patty is crushed, and Lauren is now plotting their next move ... they decide to finally allow poor Marshall and Johnny (who have been trailing around behind them like Prince Philip all night) to dance with them, and the pilot closes with the four square pegs gyrating around to the Waitresses ... they will survive!

When the world is too much with me late and soon

... and the world is often too much with me late and soon ...

I get in my car, loaded up with a thermos of coffee, a bottle of water, maybe some carrot sticks (you know, South Beach), or unsalted pistachio nuts ... and go to a certain parking lot along the Hudson River, a lot which is usually empty. It's not up on the cliff, it's on river-level - so you could step right into the Hudson should you feel so inclined. I like to go there when it's raining. I park my car, plug in my iPod, maybe bring a book - under the illusion that I will be able to read - or my writing - under the illusion that I will be able to write - and sit there for hours. Staring out my windshield, through the rain, at the grey Hudson and the mirage of Manhattan on the other side. It sometimes takes me an hour or so to "let the world go". I blank out, I time-travel, I enter the dreamspace completely. The music (I'm all Everclear now, all the time) infiltrates, and I lift up out of the muck, and float ... sometimes dipping down into memories, sometimes remaining detached, but looking on ... with fondly, no bitterness. But then sometimes bitterness comes, and I work on imagining myself out of it. Or I'll cry, head in hands. And then the music helps lift me out again.

I'm unable to go through all of this stuff at home.

So when I know I need it ... I pack up my car and off I go.

I'll be crushed if that parking lot starts being used on a regular basis by a large group of people. I couldn't go where I need to go if my car was hemmed in on all sides. As of now, the lot is next to an empty building, waiting to be filled with new tenants (good luck with that). I love that spot.

I've been doing this a lot lately. Sometimes I wake up at 6 in the morning and drive to my parking lot, after picking up a giant Dunkin Donuts coffee.

If you need me, I'll be in the only car in that one random rainy parking lot.

But only knock on my window if you really need me. Because it might not look like it ... it might look like I'm just sitting there not doing anything ... but believe me ... I am doing a lot. It's hard work.

The "Square Pegs" pilot: In hot pursuit of popularity and Larry Simpson (aka Ben Marley)

Square Pegs opens with a collage-style credit-sequence, with flashing images of various high school scenes (unpopulated, in a kind of bleached-out color scheme): the biology lab, the library, the hallway, the bathroom ... all with the frenzied voiceover of the two girls as accompaniment.

Let's go through it, shall we?

Memory Lane, revisited. First, let us revel in, what is for me at this moment, the most important fact of all.

Mkay?

Crucial to my emotional well-being.

The pilot starts with a pep rally for the freshman class on their first day of school at Weemawee High. A high school kid dressed in full American Indian regalia runs around the auditorium brandishing a tomahawk, wearing a full feather headdress, and doing an Indian war whoop. Today he would be sent to mandatory sensitivity training. But in the world of Square Pegs, he is revered. Such is progress.

Patty and Lauren (Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Linker) sit amongst the crowd, and look around, ogling at the other students and trying to figure out who is the "in" crowd. Actually, that is more Lauren's job, who is more ambitious than Patty. Patty has given her glasses to Lauren, so she can't see anything anyway.

Tracy Nelson and her boyfriend Vinnie make a big entrance, and walk down the aisle of the gym as though it is a red carpet. Member those couples in high school? They were celebrities!

Does she look just like her father or what?

The laugh track on the show is really subtle, barely there. It's kind of refreshing.

Lauren is plotting her way up the social ladder. You know it will be an uphill battle.

We meet Muffy Tepperman who shouts at the gathered students as though she's running an Aryan Youth camp. She is obsequious towards the principal (Mr. Dingleman), so obsequious that you wonder if Jim Lipton had something to do with her portrayal. Mr. Dingleman introduces LaDonna, who will give "her rendition of the Weemawee Alma Mater - in her own style." LaDonna sashays onto the stage, in full Cyndi Lauper slash Jane Fonda's workout tape regalia - all leggings and long sweatshirts, and she performs the alma mater as though she is DEBORAH Gibson. Muffy Tepperman looks on, horrified, as though LaDonna has decided to rap the Gettysburg Address. LaDonna doesn't care what Muffy thinks. She dances around, singing, the class claps, it is an impromptu concert. The Weemawee song involves the words "virgin spring" which I imagine causes much hilarity among the students. As LaDonna sings, the American Indian cliche dances around the gym. Off to sensitivity training for you, bub!

Let the school year begin!

Patty and Lauren make their way into the hellhole that is a high school cafeteria. Where to sit? Lauren, of course, knows they need to sit with the "in" crowd, so they plop themselves down at a table with Jennifer (Tracey Nelson) and LaDonna (Claudette Wells). Jennifer and LaDonna act as though little squirmy bugs have just joined their party. Ew. Jennifer is particularly relentless, honing in on Sarah Jessica Parker's lunch box. "Did your mommy pack that for you ... with, like ... baggies and everything?" So mean.

The good thing about Lauren and Patty, and why they were fun heroines, is that they weren't crushed down by this kind of behavior. They didn't slink away, victimized. Parker saves the day by making a big lofty speech about how they realize they are not wanted, using huge vocabulary words, and the two friends flounce off, somehow becoming the victors of the moment.

BUT.

BUT.

Let me backtrack a moment. Jennifer and LaDonna have a conversation before Patty and Lauren barge over to sit with them.

Jennifer is bemoaning the fact that Vinnie isn't all that deep (which is hilarious because Jennifer is the least deep fictional character ever created). She says to LaDonna (although she calls her "LD"), "You know who I, like, like?" LaDonna who is horrified and kind of judgey (because Jennifer already has a boyfriend) says "Who??" Jennifer glances longingly across the cafeteria and says, with import and meaning, "Larry Simpson."

We see who she is looking at.

Larry Simpson (aka Ben Marley) is being fed ... like a PASHA.

Isn't that how hot nice guys seemed in high school when you stared at them from the faraway vantage point of freshman geekery? They seemed like desirable PASHAS, surrounded by giggling gorgeous acolytes, and there was no way on earth that you could ever get "in there" ... Girls like that acted as a Praetorian guard of sorts! Territorial, protective, loving, vicious.

So anyway. Larry Simpson. In all his cute high school glory.

At this moment, Patty and Lauren race over and sit down with Jennifer and LD, Lauren saying, "Who's Larry Simpson??"

Scene goes along as follows, with brief moments when all the girls drool over said Larry across the room.

But of course Jennifer and LD do not allow Patty and Lauren to infiltrate their clique, and make snotty comments about braces and lunch boxes until the two losers are forced to flee.

They then sit down with these two characters.

Man, doesn't it bring you back? Unlike Jennifer and LD, Marshall and Johnny Slash are NOT horrified at Patty and Lauren. Just the opposite. Marshall sees an opportunity to try out his new comedy routines (his sense of comedy was arrested with Sid Caesar apparently), and also to hang out with the mysterious entity known as GIRLS. Johnny Slash is hidden behind shades and walkman, and when he realizes there are GIRLS at the table, he gets very nervous. Marshall calms him down. Johnny Slash has obviously been kept back many times, he appears to be about 25 years old ... and he is "New Wave" ... his whole life is "New Wave". He is a rigid fascist about music, style, and labels. Patty innocently asks him if he is "punk" and he gets all offended.

Lauren, of course, is kind of a snob, and realizes immediately that these two guys are on the same echelon ... and barely gives them the time of day. They need to move UP, not SIDEWAYS.

Marshall is so insistent with his ba-dum-ching comedy routines that Johnny Slash eventually picks him up and walks him away.

What ridiculous rapscallions. I love them both.

Patty and Lauren are now in a dilemma. They begin to flush Patty's food down the toilet at school so that she need not go through the humiliation of lunch boxes any more (but also not piss off her mother who packs the lunch with "like, baggies and everything ...") I think flushing it down the toilet is rather high maintenance and believe that just stuffing the sandwich and yogurt and whatever else into a trash can would also do the trick, but no ... flushing is what needs to happen.

The two girls huddle in the bathroom during lunch time, and they run into Jennifer and LD who say kind welcoming things to them like, "Gross me out the door ..."

Muffy Tipperman also barges in at one point, in monogrammed preppy garb, and basically ropes them into the decorating committee for the upcoming freshman dance - "because you don't have anything better to do ..." she states.

Lauren, however, has other plans. She has set her sights on Larry Simpson. If they can somehow get in with him, they will be golden. Patty is doubtful. How will they ever get close to Larry Simpson who is, first of all, Ben freakin' Marley, is, second of all, a senior, and lastly, a PASHA? Impossible!

But lo and behold, a miracle occurs.

Patty has been skipping lunch all week, due to the lunch box dilemma, and she walks up the stairwell, and suddenly gets weak in the knees, and has to sit down.

And who sits down next to her, joking, "Do you come here often?" but the pasha himself, Larry Simpson.

The worst part (and by "worst" I mean "best") of this portrayal is that not only is he cute and desired by everyone, but also a nice guy. (Calling Keith M., phone call for Keith M.!) Killer combo. He saw the freshman Patty collapse on the stairs and he sits down, and is nice to her. He wonders if he should go for the school nurse. She tries to reassure him she's okay. He jokes with her, and he's so sexy (in that kind carefree high school boy way that is so effective you basically want to commit hari-kiri immediately) and also nice that it takes her a second to realize what is happening. That Larry Simpson is talking and joking with her. She doesn't freak out immediately. She starts to talk about her lunch, and how she felt light-headed and just had to sit down. He's trying to lighten her up, joke with her, being charming. Says, "What do you think Marcus Welby would do in a situation like this?"

Talk about looking like your father.

At some point, Patty realizes what is happening, and interrupts her monologue about fainting on the stairwell, with saying, "You're Larry Simpson!" You know, guys like that were like stars in high school. I loved Tina Fey's observation about that in the DVD extras for Mean Girls, how there were certain people in high school who were like celebrities - and the student body knew everything about them ... what they wore, their relationship ups and downs, their fights, their dramas ... the consciousness of the class revolved around these lucky few. So Patty breathes, "You're Larry Simpson!" in the same tone that one would say, oh, "You're Ben Marley!" (for example).

Instead of being cocky about her awestruck face, he is kind. (I mentioned in this post on Skyward the similarity between what he was doing in Skyward with what he did in Square Pegs - minus the cowboy hat and sexy ADD jangling-leg swagger). He played nice guys. Popular, sure, guys who look like that usually end up popular ... but nice, too. So he's kind to Patty. Look out, though, when you are kind to geek wallflowers. It might come back and bite you in the ass.

Ah, teenage adoration. When you are young enough to think that the one you love is perfect, and THAT is why you love him.

Then comes the most exciting moment of all, seen from the perspective of a 14-year-old square peg. Larry Simpson says to her, "You hungry? Want to get something to eat?"

So he takes her out to lunch at the local joint, where pretty much only cool kids get to go (similar to the damn Peach Pit in Beverly Hills 90210) ... it's like getting a glimpse of Xanadu's mythical "pleasure dome" for Patty ... and to show that, the booth they are sitting in starts to whirl around, with romantic music, and he's feeding her, and they're laughing, and time not only stands still, but stretches out, elongates, is made golden, and creamy, and delicious ... In truth, they probably just had some fries and talked about school, but as anyone who was in love in 14 knows, it FEELS like the booth is spinning around in a golden drenched light!

Poor Patty! She's headed for a fall!

I don't know, I'm a grown woman now, and I still find him handsome and adorable. That's not the case with all of my crushes from my youth, where I look back on it and think, What the eff did I see in that guy?

Flies preserved in amber, these Square Pegs episodes. I remembered all of it. Not to mention Ben Marley's huge charm, which was just perfect for me as a young lonely teenager. I could look at him and say, "THAT'S what I want." Ridiculous, I realize, but fantasies like that help get you through rough spots. (Not just when you're 14, I might add.)

SO. OH MY GOD LARRY SIMPSON TOOK HER OUT TO LUNCH.

Yes, she has launched herself into a fantasy-world where there is no escape, except through heartache, but that's part of life too.

During gym class Lauren tries to get all caught up on this miraculous experience as they run around the track. As I mentioned, this is (for me) the main strength of the show: the friendship between the two girls. Lauren could have been jealous that it was PATTY and not HER who was "chosen" by Larry Simpson, but instead she is more excited than even Patty is, and literally collapses into a writhing heap onto the track, moaning, "This is so romantic!" Now that's a friendship moment I recognized from my own life.

Second half coming up ....

"Square Pegs": a personal reminiscence coming from a "totally different head"

Hard to believe that Square Pegs only ran for one season. It's one of those glitches in the programming instinct of the powers-that-be that happens from time to time (I am thinking now of one of the heirs of Square Pegs - My So-Called Life), and you look back on it, thinking, 'That show should have run at least for a couple of seasons." Square Pegs was a hit (well, as I remember it it was, I don't know what the ratings were - WE all were watching it down on the ground) and in the 20-odd years since then, people's affection for it has only grown. People still remember the names of the characters by heart. How often does that happen? Muffy Tepperman. Johnny Slash. You have to be a certain age, obviously, to get the references - but to think that a show that was on for only one season would hit, and on such a deep level, is rather extraordinary. It also had a "cool" factor going on, with guest spots by Devo, The Waitresses, Bill Murray.

Speaking on a personal level, that show hit at just the time when I was moving into the whirlwind of adolescence. What it showed was what I was experiencing. It was similar to the bomb going off in my group of friends when Breakfast Club came out. These things now can be seen as almost relics, almost cute, or coy - because they were so of their time and place, kind of like watching Beach Blanket Bingo or something. "Oh, look how funny they wore their hair back then! Listen to the music!" But on the ground, in the moment, we weren't "ironic" or into it because it made fun of us and where we were at and the music we listened to. It validated us.

Now there is all kinds of art, and I'm not putting Square Pegs on a level with, oh, Andrei Rublev ... but neither should it be. All art does not have the same goals. Rebel Without a Cause or Catcher in the Rye may seem silly when you have passed the stage in life when you need to hear what they have to say. That's fine. But teenagers, in all their messiness and awfulness, are - like all of us still, as adults - looking for a mirror. A mirror that was not given to them by their parents, but one that is out in the world. I had, up until that point, found my mirror in books. Harriet the Spy, Ballet Shoes, Wrinkle in Time, Huckleberry Finn. I was not a pop-culture kid. How could I be? To quote Mark, we "only had three channels". I had parents who loved folk music and The Beatles so that's what I listened to (and still do, although I mix it up with my own taste too). Top 40 didn't make a dent in my consciousness. I wanted to live in the world of Oliver Twist. I was 12, but I was still a little girl. When I started growing breasts in the 6th grade, I doggedly slept on my stomach to try to push them back in again. I wasn't ready. I loved baseball, I was on a Little League team (before they had girls teams), I loved living in my imagination, and making up dances after school with my friends. I was dragged kicking and screaming into adolescence.

But then, along came a mirror called Square Pegs. And it managed to act as a mirror without being ponderous or preachy or too melancholic. It's kind of a hoot, actually. This show was funny. But that deeper level was there, and that's why it is so remembered.

Those two lead girls, Patty (in glasses, played by a geeky Sarah Jessica Parker) and Lauren (the pudgy girl with braces, more effervescent and embarrassing, played by Amy Linker) were like me. I didn't care about being popular, I wasn't a social climber like Lauren - but I certainly didn't fit in, and I had glasses, braces, my clothes were wrong, and I looked around at other girls and they just seemed so put together, and what ... did I miss a memo? Patty and Lauren had missed the memo, too. And better than all of this: they made it FUNNY. The show made the trials and tribulations of geeks FUNNY. It was a precursor to Freaks and Geeks, to all of the wonderful shows about the weirdo yet charming outcasts of the world that now dominate the airwaves. So I kind of could embrace my weirdness. Not totally, because yuk, I wasn't into being weird, and un-dateable. But it, like so many other key things that came along at key times (uhm, Skyward), said to me in no uncertain terms: "Hang on. You're kind of fabulous. You're just a weirdo right now. Don't try to change. Your time will come."

I'M STILL WAITING, BY THE WAY.

So the message was a big fat LIE from where I'm sitting now, but I am trying to imagine myself back into my 14-year-old self who thought it was appropriate to dress up like this on dress-up days at school, mkay? To quote my friend Beth, "And then we wondered why we didn't have boyfriends."

The other great thing about Square Pegs which was a mirror for me was the importance of having a good core group of friends. Now, I already had that. I have always been blessed that way. My friends from high school are still my dear friends, everyday friends, they comment on my blog, we Facebook like crazy, we are still in each other's lives in an intimate way, even though we live in different spots now. One of the strengths of Square Pegs was that it wasn't just ONE geeky girl trying to become popular. It was a constant strategizing session between TWO girls, who were obviously best friends. Their friendship was one I recognized from my own life (and that rarely happens with female friendship on television - which often is depicted in a catty competitive or shallow way - none of which was going on with my group of friends - we were a huge bottomless pit of support and shrieking encouragement.) It had a good heart, Square Pegs. Sarah Jessica Parker and Amy Linker, as Patty and Lauren, created a believable friendship. You believed those girls had been having slumber parties since they were eight. You believed they had known each other forever. Girls can be very intense with each other, and the show got that, and didn't condescend to it. Watching it now can be kind of embarrassing, because you remember all the melodramas you involved yourself in in high school and you want to erase it from the public record (unless you're like me, and you put your high school journals on the internet) ... but thank God you had friends you could feverishly fill in about the big moment of chatting you had with some hottie at his locker, and how important it all was, and how since he said THIS that obviously means THIS and OH MY GOD HE LIKES YOU (etc. etc.) My friends and I have moved on to be capable adults, with relationships and kids and houses and all that, but I love that I am still friends with the people who literally caught me when I swooned at a dance after dancing with the guy I was in love with (who was in a toga, too, so OUR SKIN TOUCHED which was a big deal for a girl who wouldn't end up getting her first kiss until she was 18 freakin' years old), or who listened sympathetically when I SOBBED because he wasn't in school that day, and I was just so disappointed.

Condescend to your younger self at your own risk.

You lose so much when you forget who you were. When you roll your eyes at how "stupid" you were, or "foolish". Embrace it. It's part of you. Sometimes it's the best part. If nothing else, man, I knew how to love back then. I had ZERO success at it, but boy did I know how to love someone! That's nothing to scoff at.

Square Pegs was not released on DVD until May of last year. It was another one of those strange annoying glitches. I have my pet peeves. Why the hell is thirtysomething not on DVD? Is it a music rights issue (which holds so many of these shows back)? I don't care WHAT it is, that show needs to be released. I have a couple others. Secret Garden, starring Margaret O'Brien and a child Dean Stockwell. I cannot BELIEVE that this is not available on DVD. It's a travesty. It seriously MUST happen. Sounder! Are you telling me Sounder is not on DVD? I can't believe it. I have it on VHS, but come on now.

Square Pegs, along with all these others, had been a bee in my bonnet for years, since old TV shows started becoming available on DVD. "Yay! I can watch I Love Lucy - hooray! But what about Square Pegs?"

I am sure its release had something to do with the unstoppable juggernaut that was the Sex and the City movie, but I didn't care about any of that. I was just happy to have that show again in my sweaty little hands, so I could relive the horror of high school, but also laugh my ass off at all of those characters I remembered so well. It was strange how much came back to me. Lines of dialogue, scenes ... "Oh wait ... isn't there some scene in the bathroom with a plunger right around here?" I was always right. So strange and actually kind of freaky. I wish I could remember OTHER things, like all the Latin I took in high school ... but no, I have entire episodes of Square Pegs memorized, not to mention every camera angle in the legendary Skyward. I want my Latin back!

The funniest thing about all of this, at the moment, is that I watched the entire series last June, after I bought the DVD. Had a great time, yuk yuk. Then Suzy Gilstrap came along in November and hijacked my life. Ben Marley took on more importance, as I watched Skyward, and I remembered the impact he had on me as that awkward girl on the cusp of just accepting I was not only a girl but a weird girl ... and so I looked him up and, naturally, realized that I had seen him many many many many times before. Facts of Life. Check. Jaws 2. Check. Pride of Jesse Hallam. Check. Square Pegs. Check. That TV movie starring Mare Winningham as a girl who goes back to high school after being a teenage streetwalker? Check. And then of course Apollo 13. Check. (Thank you, Lisa, for the checklist.) Seen them all, all throughout my life. I just hadn't put it all together (the Ben Marley thread of connection, I mean). I hadn't followed him, in the way I followed Ralph Macchio or Harrison Ford. He remained an isolated cute guy, but gotta say: in Square Pegs he was devastating - and I remember him very well from back when I first saw it - just the kind of guy who would crack your heart in a million pieces in high school ... and just attainable enough that it makes the whole situation even worse. Once I figured out his continuum (as of two weeks ago, after seeing Skyward, when Keith and Dan and I IMDB'd him to DEATH), I remembered him vividly and put it all together. Of COURSE he was Larry Simpson in Square Pegs. I remember his face, I remember their moments - I would expect nothing less!

"Larry Simpson is like ... deep ... you know? Vinnie can fake ID any time ... but you can't ... fake ........... depth."

I have such affection for those characters, it's insane.

I love Tracy Nelson as Jennifer DeNuccio, the popular dead-eyed fashion-plate Valley Girl beeyotch. I love Vinnie, Jennifer's swaggering Welcome Back Kotter boyfriend, who is always chewing on a toothpick, played by Jon Caliri. I also loved Claudette Wells as LaDonna, the black girl (the only black girl in Weemawee? Seemed like it), who palled around with Jennifer, and basically started off the entire series by singing the alma mater at a school pep rally "in her own style", which was reminiscent of Madonna. So unfortunately the one black girl is also a song-and-dance queen. But she was very funny and intimidating as a character, and I loved that her best friend was the Valley Girl. It's a nice and un-obvious choice, but that's the way life is, so often.

I adore Jami Gertz as Muffy Tepperman, the bossy preppy pep-squad queen, who hadn't a shred of humor about herself or anything. She is so annoying and very very funny.

I love John Femia as Marshall Blechtman, another annoying character, who wants to be a stand-up comedian and he is terrible. I loved Johnny Slash, played with great weirdness by Merritt Butrick - and the music he loved was the music that I loved by that point, so I felt a kinship to him. Every time Marshall would take Johnny's ubiquitous headphones off, you could hear some other cool song playing - B-52s, for example - "Private Idaho", I think was one of them. He was me. I get it, Johnny Slash, I love that music too!

So there's our main cast (I'll be focusing on Ben Marley as Larry Simpson soon enough!). These people have, like so many other characters, stayed in my brain for all this time. You know, you say "Johnny Slash" to someone of a certain age, and they will nod, and reply, "Totally different head."

The show was on for one damn season.

Remarkable.

Meaningless goals update.

One degree!

Meanwhile, I did a little digging on IMDB and came up with release dates for three movies/events which helped me grow up, had a huge impact. It was a pretty intense year, I'll tell you that.

May 21, 1980: Empire Strikes Back opened (I wrote what a shift it was for me - just emotionally - seeing that movie here)

November 20, 1980: Skyward aired (more than you probably ever wanted to know about that here and here)

February 18, 1981: The Eight is Enough episode "Vows" aired (more on the impact that had here)

Good morning, good afternoon, good NIGHT.

This year-long assault on my senses was far too much for me in my already hormonal state - and I emerged from it basically a teenager. I had been a little girl before. Now I had a taste of the pheromones, and put a fork in me, I'm done.

Looking at that timeline, I don't know how I stood it.

On Mickey Rourke in Diner:

Mick as Boogie was electric - girls wanted to do him and guys wanted to be him. Cooler than the Fonz and more fragile than an egg.

"more fragile than an egg".

How lovely.

I got that quote from this terrific retrospect of Rourke's career that came out around the time of Sin City, complete with a list of Rourke must-sees (some interesting choices). I love how much people remember Johnny Handsome (well ... except for me at first ... uhm ... sorry, Michael ... my post about the film here) - and how the "moment when he takes off the bandages" is referenced time and time again. NOT to be missed.

In the article I link to, he writes:

An older, wiser Rourke gingerly accepts the attention this time around, but the boxer's instincts remain. Play the game, but don't get played. Deep inside, you know it stings...why can't it just be about the acting? Ask the really intriguing actors about Mickey - the Penns, Walkens, Depps - and to a person they'll tell you how Rourke remains an untapped well of talent. How his swaggering but vulnerable machismo was an inspiration to them. How he could stand toe-to-toe with the best and still can. How he will generously share a small scene instead of trying to steal it, yet still make his turn one of the film's pivotal moments. That he's an actor's actor despite everything else, and that life's hard knocks have given him even greater resonance and depth.

Definitely go read the whole thing.

The Energizer Bunny

The Mickey Rourke piece I wrote for House Next Door is now on the main page of IMDB, the first link under their "Hit List".

Thanks for the heads up, Emily!

(To anyone who makes it over here from that link, here is my full Mickey Rourke archive of content. I do write about other things, too - like Ben Marley as well as Alexander Hamilton, the "miracle on ice", and various other random topics of interest.)

Screenshot of the link on IMDB courtesy of my good friend Emily:

Dear Ben Marley:

In the Square Pegs pilot, you play Larry Simpson, the hottest guy in school, and a SENIOR no less. You are the object of desire of pretty much everyone. You cross racial boundaries (even LaDonna with her swirly braids thinks you are fine - more on LaDonna later), and you become the symbol of being popular to our two hapless freshmen. If they can somehow get in with YOU, then they will be "in"!

My question for you is: when you go to the freshman dance, as hot as you are, why do you dress like an unmarried washed-up 18th-century-French-literature professor at a small women's college in Vermont?

"Square Pegs": Jami Gertz as Muffy Tepperman

I had forgotten how funny she is in this. She's funny in every line, every gesture. It is over-the-top old-movie-star Gloria Swanson behavior, all gesture and eyeball action, and it's hilarious.

For instance, in the pilot (you know, starring Ben Marley), The Waitresses show up to play for the freshman dance. Because, you know, that's how things happen at Weemawee High. Muffy Tepperman, as head of the social club, introduces The Waitresses with much ridiculous self-important fanfare. She says that The Waitresses will be "bigger than the Eagles".

They start to play "I Know What Boys Like" ... and please ... first of all, just look at Jami Gertz in the background. It's hilarious. And then watch how she dances. Muffy, please!

The "Square Pegs" opening: a refresher course before we get to Ben Marley

I am sure to those of you of a certain age group, this will all sound very familiar. Maybe you even have it memorized, by osmosis. I can't remember algebra, but I remember this opening voiceover.

"Listen, I've got this whole high school thing psyched out. It all breaks down into cliques."
"Cliques?"
"Yeah, you know - cliques. Little in groups of different kids. All we have to do is click with the right clique and we can finally have a social life that's worthy of us."
"No way. Not even with cleavage!"
"I told you. This year we're gonna be popular."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. Even if it kills us."

Hope's quirks

She will never jump up on the bed directly from the floor below. She has to jump up onto my windowsill, tippy-toe along the sill, step delicately out onto my scanner, and then leap onto the bed. A more roundabout way you could not imagine. I don't know why this is the case. It is delightfully eccentric.

She sometimes likes to lie on the kitchen floor beneath one of my cool retro chairs. It is always the same chair. I imagine there must be a warm spot there but it's so cute. If I can't find her I know where to look.

She only likes Fancy Feast that is in MORSELS. She doesn't like the hard CYLINDERS of seafood delight, or whatever. I'll put down a CYLINDER in front of her, and I don't care if it's filet mignon, she stares at it, and then looks up at me like, "But ... where are the chunks? You know I don't like these ... these cylinders." It's a heart-cracking expression.

Sometimes I think she gets confused when she's eating and thinks she's in the litter box because she reaches out to do scratching motions after her meal, to "cover up" her food.

She loves my red fleece blanket. If I am washing it, leaving my down comforter exposed, she stares at the bed in confusion. Like: "where is that blanket I love so much?"

She lets me pet her belly when the moon is half-full and only when Scorpio is on the cusp of Uranus. But when she does let me pet her belly, she has a moment of hesitation and then basically hurls her body backwards and open, displaying her entire underside including Uranus to me. It is so vulnerable. I feel honored.

She is completely fascinated by the window sill in the kitchen which I don't want her to leap up onto because I have a plant there and a little china teapot and other things I don't want her to knock over. Hence: all she wants to do is be on the kitchen window sill. If she could just be up on that window sill, according to her, all would be right with the world. SHE MUST BE THERE.

She now blatantly sleeps wraps around my head.

When she sleeps on my bed, she prefers to be curled up directly ON one of my pillows. She doesn't so much enjoy being on the center of the bed, red fleece blanket notwithstanding.

She uses the red fleece blanket mainly for the whole kneading-of-paws thing that she does when she is feeling particularly relaxed and decadent.

She has really gotten into a groove with her cardboard box scratching post. She'll be racing around the apartment, having a spontaneous nervous breakdown, and suddenly she knows what she needs - and races over to the post to attack it like a maniac.

If I pet her while she's sleeping, something she makes a little dove-like chirrup in her throat as she wakes up.

She's only sat on my lap once. I held my breath the whole time, wondering when she would decide to get sick of it. She chose it, too. I was on the bed and she sat next to me, staring at me. It was completely clear what she wanted. I couldn't believe it. I petted my lap once or twice, like "come on, you can do it" and suddenly there she was, curled up and letting me pet her belly. I keep hoping that we will share such a moment again.

The love affair with the banana continues and shows no signs of abating.

"I decided to wear a jacket and a tie because I thought that's what directors from the '40s would wear and Bette Davis would like that ..."

Also:

"Skyward was really the piece of film that convinced studios I could direct features."

-- Ron Howard

I can certainly see why. In the same way that I can see why that one episode of Eight is Enough would convince the powers-that-be in Hollywood that Ralph Macchio could carry a film as a romantic lead. Which, seriously, is not obvious on the face of it. He's a scrawny little guy, and handsome, of course, but lots of people are handsome. He also wasn't the lead inEight is Enough. Unless it was "his" episode, he was a minor character, face in the crowd. So who would have thought: Huh. That kid's got something? Well, after that one episode I bet a couple of smart people in power did. Being given a LEAD in a film is no small feat, and perhaps looking at Macchio you would see your typical Teen Beat heartthrob, a dime a dozen. But he wasn't. He was more than that, and he showed it in that episode.

And so you have to know what you're looking for, to "see" a star. I was 12 years old when I saw that Eight is Enough episode, probably one or two weeks after damn Skyward came out (it was a busy year) and I felt it. I felt that thing, that magic.

So something like Skyward was Howard's test, his "debut" - although he had done a couple things before. It showed a deftness with story, a knack for creating watchable characters, an obvious ability to deal with huge powerhouses like Bette Davis (very important for directors), a technical know-how to make those flying scenes come off, and - most important - a sense of how to move a large audience.

The germ of Ralph Macchio's Karate Kid smash success is in that one episode of Eight is Enough. Not every little cutie-pie on a regular television series can carry a movie like he did ... but you can see it already there. Now why isn't Eight is Enough on DVD? I actually didn't like the show at all - but I just want to own the Ralph Macchio season so I can check out that one episode again, which I haven't seen since it first aired, but obviously (if you read my review of it) remember vividly.

Same thing with Ron Howard and Skyward.

I got these quotes from a television interview with Howard below (or part of it) - where he talks about his early years directing TV movies and how one thing led to another. Big conversation about Skyward. Fascinating details, especially about Bette Davis.

All Skyward posts here.

Ben Marley reminder

I'm not done with Ben Marley. Not by a long shot.

Next up? His performance as the hot senior Larry Simpson in two episodes of Square Pegs! I remember him vividly - but again, I didn't put it together at the time that he was the hottie who rocked my world in Skyward. I am wiser now.

All Ben Marley stuff here!

(I still am unable to read - I was doing okay with the Nureyev book but I had to put it down, and my own book is now flying out into the world, trying to find a home - so I am disoriented at the lack of anything to do. Worst possible timing. But in a way it's a blessing. I couldn't work more on the book now if I had to. This - Ben Marley - is akin to a security blanket. It's something I can focus on, and it pleases me to do so. Not that I need to make excuses, dernit, I'm just saying.)

Ledger

I didn't like Dark Knight. I thought it was a mess. I didn't like individual elements and I didn't like the whole either. It's not that I didn't "get it", or that I was "afraid" of its implications. The fanboys have been rabid dogs about criticism of their baby, so I know all their arguments. No, it's not that I quivered in my seat afraid of what I was actually seeing, and its power, and therefore have to "attack" it. And I'm not attacking it, anyway. I just didn't like the movie, boys, chillax. More than anything, I felt it was incompetent. That was the weirdest thing about it, for me. A day after I saw it I could barely remember it. I've loved all the Batman films, so this was strange to me. But whatever, it's a movie, you can't win 'em all.

However, Heath Ledger's performance as The Joker is one of those rare rare things ... what I would call a "performance for the ages". I knew the second I saw the first scene with him in it that he was as good as everyone had been saying, and even better. The second you saw him, you couldn't imagine anyone else in the part (even though we have seen many many actors play that part). He took it to another level. A vision of apocalyptic chaos, with something truly great underneath it: a philosophy. This was a man devoted to chaos, yes, but what made him truly frightening was the thought behind it. He knew what he was doing. He wasn't a giggling lunatic rubbing his hands in glee (although he did that, too). He was a calculating thinker. That was where the fear came from, for me. It is difficult to suggest such a thing when you have that crazy makeup on your face, and you are required to say these "ba-dum-ching" pun-filled lines, which could add up to the impression that you think everything is a big "joke". What was extraordinary about the performance, and it has stayed with me, was that yes, he thought it all was a big joke, and no, he found none of it funny. There wasn't a shred of compassion in him, he was of a Ted Bundy-like nature - a cold-blooded killer, who not only enjoyed death and destruction, but enjoyed making people squirm beforehand.

I have been watching Heath Ledger for a long time. He had an interesting trajectory. With Knight's Tale, the marketing component for that movie took over the entire experience. It was one of the most promoted movies I can remember. I was sick of it before it hit the screens. And who was that blonde hottie and why am I supposed to care? It was overkill. But then I saw the movie, and it was a lot of fun, and he was adorable in it. A real hunk, you know?

The bossy insistence of the marketing campaign did not seem to affect his career. He seemed to choose carefully what he would do next. The next film he appeared in was the low-key three-person Monster's Ball. I couldn't believe it was the same guy, first of all. He was wonderful in that movie. Heartbreaking and taciturn - a throwback to male movie actors of old. There was something stoic about him, but he managed to suggest the deep wells of loneliness in this guy. It was a very touching performance. That was when I got excited about Heath Ledger. I felt I was looking at a true talent, as opposed to what the Knight's Tale marketing team wanted me to see: the Next Best Hot Thing. He was more than that.

Now he was somebody to really watch.

Lords of Dogtown was the next film I clicked into with Ledger - I hadn't seen Four Feathers, or Brothers Grimm, and in Lords of Dogtown, he is nearly unrecognizable to what I had seen before. There's almost a Dude-esque quality to his look here, all California beard and sunglasses, and the comparison to Jeff Bridges is deliberate. Jeff Bridges is my favorite living actor, and one of the things that Bridges, handsome, masculine, and without a doubt a movie star, can do is disappear. Like nobody else. This is not the current fetish of accents, weird walks, and "chameleon" tricks, which I find facile and ultimately shallow. Today I play a German-Latvian witch doctor, tomorrow I play a steel magnolia from Alabama with a cleft palate, and the next day I play the imperious Queen of Siberia in 300 A.D. Look at my skill!! It is what is being congratulated now, in acting, and acting - as a craft - goes through phases and developments just like any other craft. The days of big star PERSONAE are gone, where people like Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, John Wayne, et al, brought their star power to whatever role they did, always recognizably themselves, but marvelous to watch. No tricks. Nowadays, it is something else that is recognized as "good acting", and I have feelings and opinions about that, but whatever, it's the trend.

But Jeff Bridges disappears. These are not tricks, these are not skills. Whatever work he does (unlike most of the people being celebrated for this kind of stuff today) is completely invisible. His transformation is total. He submerges his personality entirely and something else emerges. Who knows how he does it. How is irrelevant. I mention Bridges because it is rare that a man that handsome has a career like the one he has. His sex appeal is undeniable, and obviously in his prime he played roles that capitalized on that - Against All Odds, Jagged Edge, Fabulous Baker Boys. But what he was actually doing in those parts was always way more subtle than your basic beefcake hottie fucking the gorgeous movie actress. I go into that in the piece I linked to above (especially in my comments on Fabulous Baker Boys).

When I saw Heath Ledger in Lords of Dogtown I was completely delighted by him. An old-fashioned word, but a propos. I just enjoyed him so much. Who was that guy? Not just the character, but HIM. He seemed to really get a kick out of acting, and not only that, but he had great skill. Skill that was (as I mentioned above) relatively invisible. He submerged himself, in all his young golden-boy handsomeness, into whatever part he was playing. There seemed to be very little ego in him. The JOB was the thing for him, not the celebrity or the sex symbol thing. That's rare. The pressure had been on him from the beginning to fit into a certain pigeonhole - hot new young actor - and the choices he made continuously bucked against that. Good for him. Knight's Tale, as cute as it was, could have ruined him. But he (and I am imagining he got a lot of advice telling him what to do, what to choose, what to play) did what he wanted. He took it down a notch. He got everyone's attention, with the billboards on every bus for Knight's Tale, and then immediately following, he took his career in a quieter more independent path. I thought that was really cool. Brave.

Then came the juggernaut that was Brokeback Mountain. I had a lot of feelings about that one going in, due to my love of the short story (I wrote about that here). I don't think its an exaggeration to say that that was one of the greatest short stories I have read in the last twenty years. It knocked my socks off. I read it when it first came out, in The New Yorker, and it almost made me nervous, as things usually do when I realize I am in the presence of not just greatness, but something mythic, something truly important. I felt that way when I read Mary Gaitskill for the first time. It's a rare sensation. That story came out in 1997, but my admiration for it was still vibrating through me when the movie came out. And although Ang Lee was at the helm (I thought that was a good, if not obvious choice), and I liked both Jake Gyllenhall and Heath Ledger - I got nervous. What would they do to it? I feel a sense of ownership towards that story, in the same way I do towards all works of literature that pierce me to my core. It took me years to see John Huston's "The Dead", because I felt I just couldn't bear to see it outside of my own head. (I loved the movie, by the way). I refused to see The Shipping News, because the second I heard they cast Kevin Spacey as Quoyle I realized which way the wind was blowing, what interpretation they were going to put on it, and I thought: Not on my fucking watch. I won't see that movie on principle. If they had cast John C. Reilly, I would have gone to see it, even though I would still have been nervous about what they had done to that precious book I love so much.

So I had all of that going in. Parts of Brokeback Mountain, the story, were with me word for word. I reread it before seeing the movie, trying to strengthen myself. Even if the movie was bad, it still wouldn't touch the story!

Watching that film was an odd and incredibly emotional experience for me. First of all, the story is 30 pages long. How do you make a two-hour movie of that? Well. They took entire parts of it word for word, first of all. They didn't change a damn thing, in terms of what those two men said to each other. And what they did add (details of Jack's marriage to the Texas rodeo queen, fleshing out what is suggested in the story) was just right. I felt they honored the original work, especially in how those two actors played the scenes. What the story manages to convey in 30 pages is nothing less than breathtaking. You feel like you have been sucker-punched by the last line. What Ledger and Gyllenhall played here was twofold: the stoic unreflective nature of both of these men. They are like the animals they watch over. They bear it (in Ledger's best line - "we just got to stand it.") But they also play that this, out of nowhere, is love. It's awful. It's truly awful. There is nowhere to put such love, it fits in with no kind of life, and there are no options out of it. "We just got to stand it." Both of them NAIL that very difficult balance throughout the film. It is that that gives the story its power (well, and Proulx's off-the-charts writing), and without it, you'd just have a prurient fuck-fest. The context surrounding these men is as important as their love. Ang Lee directed that with delicacy, I thought, and sensitivity, not being too on the nose. There is the scene at Thanksgiving where Gyllenhall has to keep getting up to turn off the television, and his wife's father keeps getting up to turn it back on. It's a wonderful scene, truly tense and awful, evocative of the entire life of humiliation and emasculation this guy has experienced. It's enraging. (This is one of the scenes that is NOT in the book, but it just goes to show you the adaptation was spectacular).

For me, it was Ledger's movie, through and through.

As I wrote in my piece about him when he passed away:

It is one of the more visceral performances of recent memory. You could smell the nicotine on the edges of his fingers, you could smell his sweat. This was not a man who spoke much, felt comfortable speaking ... and any time he did open his mouth to speak, it was as though the vocal cords took a while to realize: "Oh ... we're doing this now? We're talking?"

Jim Emerson wrote about Ledger's portrayal of Ennis:

Rare is the performance that can honestly be called a "revelation," but that's what it felt like to watch Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain." Not only did he bring iconic life and nuance to the existential loneliness of Ennis Del Mar, a taciturn but complex (and conflicted) character, but for such mature work to spring from the teen-idol star of "10 Things I Hate About You" and "A Knight's Tale" was... well, revelatory itself -- the astonishing revelation of a suddenly, fully developed actor who, in the superficial juvenile parts he'd played previously, had given little indication he was capable of such moving depth and clarity. Ledger emerged as if from a cocoon, gleaming with promise and flexing his wings.

The performance was revelatory in a lot of ways. It was revelatory in what he was able to suggest, with very few lines, it was revelatory in its raw passion and silent suffering, and it was revelatory about manhood, in general. I mentioned it being a "throwback", and these are some of the things I have said before when I've written about Rourke, or Jeff Bridges, or Russell Crowe.

Brokeback Mountain relies on the cinematography of the gorgeous haunting landscape, as well as the sound of the wind whistling through almost every scene. You can feel the coldness of the mugs of coffee in their hands, and the scratch of the cold logs they sit on. The script is spare, and that is right. But none of it would have worked without Ledger's quiet suffering stoic presence. It was not a put-on, it was not contrived. I did not feel that he lived now, for example. Heath Ledger was obviously an early 21st century man, that's his time and place ... but in Brokeback Mountain, no way on EARTH was that guy "now". He does this with no tricks, no disguise.

The strangest thing about this is that when you saw him in interviews, and in person, he's really just a gangly skinny little guy. I was always amazed by how slight he seemed in person. That picture of him skateboarding at the top of this post makes him look like a teenager, not fully grown up yet.

But he seemed much bigger in Brokeback Mountain. Not because of weight gain or anything artificial (he might have had a bit of padding there at the end, to suggest middle age). His size came from his presence, and that is really what I mean when I talk about him being a "throwback". The old-time movie stars, creating personae that they would play in every movie, were huge because of their presence. Humphrey Bogart was a pipsqueak who had to stand on a damn BOX in his love scenes with Ingrid Bergman so that he seemed taller. But who had a bigger presence than that guy? And he didn't have to manufacture it, or pump it up. All he had to do was show up. He plays chess in the first time we see him in Casablanca, the camera moves up from the board, and there he is.

Pow. Gets you right in the gut.

Heath Ledger, with every squinting suffering quiet moment in Brokeback Mountain, has the power of the old movie stars. Jake Gyllenhall, although wonderful as well, does not. He has a bit more of a stretch to seem middle-aged (although he does a nice job - you can see the work, but it's okay, it's an okay job) - and he also has to play a character who is more chatty, restless, and emotional. He does all of that.

But it's Ledger's movie. The misery he endures, without a complaint, quiet, gritting his teeth, turning his wife over when he fucks her so he can't see her face, leaning against the trailer wall, head down ... not saying much, not revealing much ... but God, revealing everything. Marvelous. If our hearts don't break for him, then none of it will work. Jack is more of a wild-card. We don't worry as much about him, for some reason, even though he is the one more willing to flirt with danger. Ledger shows the heart of his character, a heart cracked open by love, something he almost resents and wishes would go the hell back where it came from.

It is an iconic performance, referencing us back to the giants of movie stars back then ... when the power of your presence was what made you a star. It is also an amazingly generous performance. He did not protect himself. He turned it all inside out, so we could see.

I had been watching him for a while. I was strangely proud of him for that performance. I felt to myself, watching it, "Wow. Holy fuck. Good for you, dude. Good for you."

Taken in context with the rest of his roles, it was obvious that we were looking at a giant talent.

The kind of talent I find lacking in today's current trend - of more showy actor-y parts (and nothing against many of those performances - I do love a lot of them ... it's just that I have a fondness for the other kind of acting). Ledger has presence. Which again, was so funny, because he almost had NO presence in person. But that's just the mark of his talent. His weirdness and passion and suffering went into his work. He didn't wear it on his sleeve as a regular man.

Before The Dark Knight came out, some stills had been released, and some photographs taken while filming.

The images were startling, terrifying. What the hell was going on with Heath Ledger? It was amazing to see, and I know for me it got my hopes up to see the movie. Jack Nicholson as The Joker made an indelible impression, what a wacky performance, but suddenly, with one backstage view of Ledger filming the movie, all that was swept away. He looked demonic. Not just because of the makeup, but because of the dead cobra-light in his eyes. It was powerful. This character had obviously infiltrated him. You could see it in those stills.

I know he had problems during filming. He was insomniac, and he made a couple of mentions about how playing The Joker had disturbed him, made him manic (small wonder). His exhaustion shows in the role. Not that he seems tired, on the contrary, but that he seems on edge, at the end of his rope, with the manic clarity that sometimes comes when you can't go to sleep, and it's suddenly 3 in the morning, and you have to get up at 6:30 a.m., and all kinds of horrible thoughts start catapulting through your mind, about the world, your life, your disappointments, your lost dreams. I've had those moments. He doesn't just nail such an energy, he plays it from the inside out.

It is a deeply unsettling performance. For me, it tipped the balance of the whole movie. Again, the fanboys have an answer for everything, and shriek, "BUT THAT'S THE WHOLE POINT." I don't think so.

Regardless, he is not just riveting - but inevitable, awful, relentless, with not a shred of conscience. We are so used to seeing "villains" onscreen, who are supposed to embody these anti-social things, but really just come off as cliched. The closest comparison to what Ledger did in Dark Knight is Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, although, thinking about it more, I would say that Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter is also close to what Ledger was getting at here. You do not reason with these men. You do not reason with a cobra. You kill the cobra. That's your only option. There are forces of anarchy on the planet, and it is best to recognize them for what they are, not rationalize them away, or try to "understand". The thing is: if you truly understand, then you know what you must do: obliterate that force as quickly as possible. Understanding does not always mean empathy. Sometimes it means resolve.

Heath Ledger is out of this world in that movie. He, as an actor, obviously tapped into something so primal and real that it made it down into his cellular structure. You cannot see an actor there - and with a part like The Joker, that is so difficult! It's all artifice and jokey lines. But he is truly frightening, especially when he gets quiet and "thoughtful".

The thing that is so great about his performance, so above-and-beyond anything else that is in that movie, is that it has a chilly inner logic to it, and that's the worst part of all. If The Joker just thrived on chaos, then we could perhaps condescend to him, like he's a silly (albeit dangerous) child, who needs a Time Out, and desperately. But Ledger is playing a man with a philosophy of life, far far stronger than those on the "right" side, who spout vague platitudes about justice and order, but who can't even come close to the level of belief that The Joker has in chaos.

He trumps everything.

Ledger, in a slamdunk, is not just acting here, he is embodying an idea - and boy, the pitfalls to be didactic and obvious are everywhere. He avoids all of them. His moments of grief, when tears stream down his face, are grotesque, commedia dell arte gone deeply satanic. The mask is so complete that he has internalized it. There is no differentiation between the face and the man.

How he accomplished all of this I will never know, but I chalk it up to his giant talent, which was already on display, and his power of imagination. What an imagination. He could dream his way into that? What else could this man do?

And so I sit here today, and I just find it odd and sad that he is gone.

A young man.

But he's left an impressive (albeit too short) body of work. I mourn now what I won't get to see. I mourn what won't be.

He was the real deal.

A young slim man in a hoodie skateboarding through Brooklyn.

This is how we do it

This is how we are.

If you've been following along on my site, then you'll know.

Mickey Rourke and Michael - and the strange and exciting melding of those two - helped me get through this terrible fall.

Like I said over at Flickhead's:

Amen!

All Rourke posts here.

Side effects of South Beach

Jen: So ... cutting out carbs is supposed to skyrocket your sex drive. Have you noticed that?

Me: Oh God. I don't know if I can handle it if it goes any higher.

Jen: I totally understand.

Soundtrack to right now

Now - Everclear

Waste my time running in circles
Waste my time going bad on the vine
I spent the last year walking through the fire
Now I do believe it's my turn to shine
(Now it's my turn to shine)

Waste my time walking in rythym
Waste my time talking in rhyme
I spent the last year in a Mexican freefall
I do believe it's my turn to climb

I used to think I was born to know trouble
I used to think I was a born-again clown
I used to think I had everybody guessing
I looked like I was flying high when I was falling down

Now I am taller than I used to be
Now I am living again
Now I like where I have found myself
This is where I want to be now

Now this is where I want to be
Now this is where I want to be
Now this is where I want to be

I was falling free in Mexico
Living on those taco bars and sweet sunshine
Learning how to walk again in my own skin
Learning the art of losing my mind

I used to think I was born in a hurricane
I used to think I was jumping jack flash
I used to think I was a victim of circumstance
Beating up on everyone all the time
I should have been kicking myself
in my own ass

Now I don't worry about the future much
Now I don't think about the past
Now I'm learning how to laugh again
This is where I want to be now

Now I'm tired of the drama club
Now I'm sick with all the hate
Yeah, it's been one hell of a hard year
This is where I want to be now
This is where I want to be now
I want to be now

A mother's relief

This is what happens when you don't talk to your mother for five days (unheard of, when recently I have been talking to her daily), and the only way she stays in contact with you is by reading your blog. Big things went down this week - and, as always, I wrote about none of them here on the blog. My blog is not a diary. I sent my mother a long email, detailing all of the new developments in this or that area. She called me about half an hour later, after getting the email.

We chatted. I filled her in. She filled me in. I talked more, telling her this and that and what's going down.

Then I said, "God, Mum, sorry, I'm talking your ear off."

She said, "It's actually nice to hear something from you other than your thoughts on Skyward Christmas."

hahahahahaha

Ahem.

Skyward Christmas: Some changes and observations

Skyward Christmas: My opening salvo

Skyward Christmas: Part deux

Today in history: February 22, 1732

George Washington, first President of the United States, was born.

(All quotes from George Washington's letters below I got from my copy of the Library of America's compilation of his writings)

Thomas Jefferson on George Washington:

The moderation and virtue of a single character probably prevented this Revolution from being closed, as most others have been, by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.

In May, 1754, Washington wrote a letter home to his brother, after his first experience of battle in the French and Indian War:

I heard Bullets whistle and believe me there was something charming in the Sound.

In November, 1754, George Washington wrote:

My inclinations are strongly bent to arms.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, in a letter written to a friend in 1774

Does it not appear as clear as the sun in its meridian brightness that there is a regular, systematic plan to fix the right and practice of taxation upon us? Ought we not, then, to put our virtue and fortitude to the severest tests?

One of the things I love about Washington is that his progression to Revolutionary was gradual, and began with practical matters, like being taxed, and having his autonomy as a farmer taken away from him (the British regulated where he could buy parts, taxing him to death, etc.) His was not a high-flung "all men are created equal" mindset, like Thomas Jefferson's ... He began with the unfairness and humiliation of his status as someone who is being occupied and bossed around. It took all kinds to make that revolution. If we had just had Thomas Jefferson, we would have been in trouble. But we needed Thomas Jefferson to put the ideals into words, for the ages. But it was the mixture of personalities and mindsets that made it a success. Very important. John Adams countered Jefferson. Hamilton countered Washington and Jefferson. Ben Franklin gave it a glitter and notoriety. Madison was the brainiac lawyer. John Jay, Samuel Adams ... all with their area of expertise, their interests and passions. Thank God we had a good mix.

In 1755, Washington wrote a complaining letter to his friend Robert Dinwiddie:

We cannot conceive that because we are Americans, we shou'd therefore be deprived of the Benefits Common to British Subjects.

In 1758, Washington wrote a couple of letters to Sally Fairfax, a woman he was in love with - his first love - someone he never really recovered from (letters to her at the end of his life suggest that):

'Tis true, I profess myself a Votary to Love - I acknowledge that a Lady is in the Case - and further I confess that this Lady is known to you. - Yes Madam, as well as she is to one, who is too sensible of her Charms to deny the Power, whose Influence he feels and must ever Submit to. I feel the force of her amiable beauties in the recollection of a thousand tender passages that I coud wish to obliterate, till I am bid to revive them. - but experience alas! Sadly reminds me how Impossible this is. - and evinces an opinion which I have long entertained, that there is a Destiny, which has the Sovereign Controul of our Actions - not to be resisted by the Strongest efforts of Human Nature.

The World has no business to know the object of my Love, declard in this manner to you - you when I want to conceal it - One thing, above all things in this World I wish to know, and only one person of your Acquaintance can solve me that, or guess my meaning. - but adieu to this, till happier times, if I shall ever see them ...

Excerpt from Joseph Ellis's His Excellency: George Washington:

All of which is to suggest that Washington did not need to read books by radical Whig writers or receive an education in political theory from George Mason in order to regard the British military occupation of Massachusetts in 1774 as the latest installment in a long-standing pattern. His own ideological origins did not derive primarily from books but from his own experience with what he had come to regard as the imperiousness of the British Empire. Mason probably helped him to develop a more expansive vocabulary to express his thoughts and feelings, but the thoughts, and even more so the feelings, had been brewing inside him for more than twenty years. At the psychological nub of it all lay an utter loathing for any form of dependency, a sense of his own significance, and a deep distrust of any authority beyond his direct control.

Martha Washington wrote a letter to a relative on the eve of her husband's departure to the Convention in 1774:

I foresee consequences; dark days and darker nights; domestic happiness suspended; social enjoyments abandoned; property of every kind put in jeopardy by war, perhaps; neighbors and friends at variance, and eternal separations on earth possible. But what are all these evils when compared with the fate of which the Port Bill may be only a threat? My mind is made up; my heart is in the cause. George is right; he is always right. God has promised to protect the righteous, and I will trust him.

PATRICK HENRY, on his return home from the first Continental Congress in 1774 was asked whom he thought was the foremost man in the group:

"Colonel Washington is unquestionably the greatest man on that floor."

Abigail Adams first met Washington in 1774, and wrote to her husband:

You had prepared me to entertain a favorable opinion of him, but I thought the half was not told me. Dignity with ease and complacency, the gentleman and the soldier look agreeably blended in him. Modesty marks every line and feature of his face.

When George Washington was elected (unanimously) by the First Continental Congress to be Commander in Chief (this was in June, 1775) - here was the brief acceptance he made:

"Lest some unlucky event should happen unfavorable to my reputation, I beg it may be remembered by every gentleman in the room, that I this day declare, with the utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command."

In a 1775 letter to his brother-in-law, Burwell Bassett:

I am now Imbarked on a tempestuous Ocean from whence, perhaps, no friendly harbour is to be found ... It is an honour I wished to avoid ... I can answer but for three things, a firm belief of the justice of our Cause - close attention to the prosecution of it - and the strictest Integrity - If these cannot supply the places of Ability & Experience, the cause will suffer & more than probably my character along with it, as reputation derives its principal support from success.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, writing to Martha on June 18, 1775, following his nomination as commander in chief

My Dearest: I now sit down to write to you on a subject which fills me with inexpressible concern, and this concern is greatly aggravated and increased when I reflect upon the uneasiness I know it will give you. It has been determined in Congress that the whole army raised for the defence of the American cause shall be put under my care, and that it is necessary for me to proceed immediately to Boston to take upon me the command of it.

You may believe me, my dear Patsy, when I assure you, in the most solemn manner, that, so far from seeking this appointment, I have used every endeavour in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity, and that I should enjoy more real happiness in one month with you at home than I have the most distant prospect of finding abroad, if my stay were to be seven times seven years.

But as it has been a kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service, I shall hope that my undertaking is designed to answer some good purpose.

George Washington describes here what a general expects in his aides:

The variegated and important duties of the aids of a commander in chief or the commander of a separate army require experienced officers, men of judgment and men of business, ready pens to execute them properly and with dispatch. A great deal more is required of them than attending him at a parade or delivering verbal orders here and there, or copying a written one. They ought, if I may be allowed to use the expression, to possess the Soul of the General, and from a single idea given to them, to convey his meaning in the clearest and fullest manner.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter to Joseph Reed, early December, 1775, after a disappointing recruiting drive

I have oftentimes thought how much happier I should have been if, instead of accepting the command under such circumstances, I had taken my musket on my shoulder and entered the ranks; or, if I could have justified the measure to posterity and my own conscience, had retired to the back country and lived in a wigwam. If I shall be able to rise superior to these and many other difficulties which might be enumerated, I shall most religiously believe that the finger of Providence is in it to blind the eyes of our enemies, for surely if we get well through this month it must be for want of their knowing the disadvantages which we labor under.

On August 1, 1777, Washington invited the newly arrived Marquis de Lafayette to witness a review of the troops. The American troops marched by, ragged, disheveled, shabby. Here is what the two men were reported to say to one another:

Washington: We are rather embarrassed to show ourselves to an officer who has just left the army of France.

Lafayette: I am here, sir, to learn and not to teach.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, on the self-sacrifice of his soldiers during the hard winter of 1777:

To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lay on, without shoes, by which their marches might be traced by the blood from their feet, and almost as often without provisions as with; marching through frost and snow, and at Christmas taking up their winter quarters within a day's march of the enemy, without a house or hut to cover them till they could be built, and submitting to it without a murmur, is a mark of patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarce be paralleled.

In 1779, George Washington wrote:

Men are very apt to run into extremes; hatred to England may carry some into excessive Confidence in France ...; I am heartily disposed to entertain the most favourable sentiments of our new ally and to cherish them in others to a reasonable degree; but it is a maxim founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter of May 31, 1780, describing one of the things he was learning through the war - his frustration with Congress was constant, sometimes titanic rage (when he gets mad, boy, look out), other times just a nagging persistent annoyance.

Certain I am unless Congress speak in a more decisive tone, unless they are invested with powers by the several States competent to the great purposes of the war, or assume them as a matter of right, and they and the States respectively act with more energy than they hitherto have done, that our cause is lost. One State will comply with a requisition of Congress, another neglects to do it; a third executes it by halves; and all differ either in the manner, the matter, or so much in point of time, that we are always working up hill; and, while such a system as the present one or rather want of one prevails, we shall ever be unable to apply our strength or resources to any advantage.

Excerpt from Joseph Ellis's His Excellency: George Washington:

One incident near the end of the war provides a clue to the transformation in his character wrought by the intense experience of serving so long as the singular embodiment of commitment to the cause. In 1781, Lund Washington reported that a British warship had anchored in the Potomac near Mount Vernon, presumably with orders to ravage Washington's estate. When the British captain offered assurances that he harbored no hostile intentions, Lund sent out a boatload of provisions to express his gratitude for the captain's admirable restraint. When Washington learned of this incident he berated Lund: "It would have been a less painful circumstance to me, to have heard, that in consequence of your non-compliance with their request, they had burnt my House, and laid the Plantation to ruins."

And here is a story - (perhaps it's a rumor - but I love it nonetheless) of Benjamin Franklin's response to the news of the surrender at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. He was, of course, in Paris at the time, setting the world on fire with his homespun wisdom, bacchanalian propensities, chess-playing abilities - and the vision he presented to the world of what liberty, American-style, looked like. An international celebrity.

Word came to France of the decisive American victory, and the complete surrender to George Washington in Yorktown. Franklin attended a diplomatic dinner shortly thereafter - and, of course, everyone was discussing the British defeat.

The French foreign minister stood, and toasted Louis XVI: "To his Majesty, Louis the Sixteenth, who, like the moon, fills the earth with a soft, benevolent glow."

The British ambassador rose and said, "To George the Third, who, like the sun at noonday, spreads his light and illumines the world."

Franklin rose and countered, "I cannot give you the sun or the moon, but I give you George Washington, General of the armies of the United States, who, like Joshua of old, commanded both the sun and the moon to stand still, and both obeyed."

Excerpt from Joseph Ellis's His Excellency: George Washington:

After Yorktown, moreover, new life was breathed into these old fears, since Washington's insistence on maintaining the Continental army at full strength during a time when the majority of the citizenry believed, correctly it turned out, that the war was over only intensified fears that he intended to become the American Cromwell ... Such loose talk triggered the fear that the infant American republic was about to be murdered in its infancy by the same kind of military dictatorship that had destroyed the Roman and English republics in their formative phases. And since these were the only two significant efforts to establish republican governments in recorded history, the pattern did not bode well.

Washington was fully aware of this pattern, and therefore recognized the need to make explicit statements of his intention to defy it. In May 1782 a young officer at the Newburgh encampment, Lewis Nicola, put in writing what many officers were whispering behind the scenes: that the Continental Congress's erratic conduct of the war had exposed the weakness of all republics and the certain disaster that would befall postwar America unless Washington declared himself king ... Washington responded with a stern lecture to "banish these thoughts from your Mind," and denounced the scheme as "big with the greatest mischiefs that can befall my Country." When word of Washington's response leaked out to the world, no less an expert on the subject than George III was heard to say that, if Washington resisted the monarchical mantle and retired, as he always said he would, he would be "the greatest man in the world".

While George III's judgment as a student of history has never met the highest standards, his opinion on this matter merits our attention, for it underlines the truly exceptional character of Washington's refusal to regard himself as the indispensable steward of the American Revolution. Oliver Cromwell had not surrendered power after the English Revolution. Napoleon, Lenin, Mao, and Castro did not step aside to leave their respective revolutionary settlements to others in subsequent centuries. We need to linger over this moment to ask what was different about Washington, or what was different about the political conditions created by the American Revolution, that allowed him to resist temptations that other revolutionary leaders before and since found irresistible.

GEORGE WASHINGTON, letter of (unwelcome) advice sent to governors of the 13 states, 1783, as the army began to disband.

Americans are now sole lords and proprietors of a vast tract of continent comprehending all the various soils and climates of the world and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life - Heaven has crowned all other blessings, by giving a fairer opportunity for political happiness, than any other nation has been favored with - This is the time of their political probation; this is the moment when the eyes of the whole world are turned upon them; this is the moment to establish or ruin their national character forever; this is the favorable moment to give such a tone to our federal government as will enable it to answer the ends of its institution; or this may be the ill-fated moment for relaxing the powers of the Union, annihilating the cement of the Confederation and exposing us to become the sport of European politics, which may play one state against another, to prevent their growing importance and to serve their own interested purposes. For, according to the system of policy the states shall adopt at this moment, they will stand or fall; and by their confirmation or lapse it is yet to be decided whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered a blessing or a curse - a blessing or a curse, not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of unborn millions be involved.

[He states that there are 4 requirements for the new America]

First. An indissoluble union of the states under one federal head. Secondly. A sacred regard to public justice (that is, the payment of debts). Thirdly. The adoption of a proper peace establishment (that is, an army and a navy). Fourthly. The prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the Union, which will influence them to forget their local prejudices and policies; to make those mutual concessions, which are requisite to the general prosperity; and, in some instances, to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community. These are the pillars on which the glorious future of our independency and national character must be supported.

Then there was the Newburgh Conspiracy, in March 1783, when a group of congressmen aligned with officers in the army threatened a military coup for various reasons. The new federal government was barely formed, there was no constitution yet - and the states were vying for powerful positions. It's important to remember just how tenuous all of this was at the time. It wasn't a smooth clear path full of Revolutionary-Era virtue and certainty, although there are bozos who claim that it was like that. They need to read their history books. Washington heard of the plot, and decided to address it headon. Now. One of the things I love about this story is that Washington - while he obviously said time and time again that he was uncomfortable with being a "symbol" (and I believe him) - he also realized that it was pointless to fight against it, and when he needed to USE that symbolic stature to get something done that he wanted, he had no problem with playing that card. This is a highly theatrical moment, described vividly by every person who was there, who left an account, and they all say the same thing. There wasn't a dry eye in the house. Perhaps it's my theatrical background, but I cannot believe that Washington was unaware of the effect he wanted to have, and that he did not USE that gesture described so vividly in a conscious manner. There is a way, you know, to be FALSE and TRUE at the same time. Any actor can tell you that. You are playing make-believe, you are pretending to be someone else - so that's the FALSE part - but your reactions and gestures all come from a very TRUE place, and many an actor will tell you that they feel MORE true when they are acting than when they are just out and about as a regular civilian. So that's my interpretation of Washington's big gesture here. It was certainly planned, and so that is FALSE ... but it was also organic and came from a true place. It was chosen for the EFFECT it would have. Washington was a celebrity. He knew that. He hated it. But he used it when convenient. Anyway, I'm going on and on but this is just one of my favorite moments of his life - I love its theatricality - and I also just wish I had been there. But so many people described the moment that I do feel like I can live it vicariously. Like Patrick Henry's "give me liberty or give me death" speech, where people record his gestures, his pantomime, the tenor of his voice. I have imagined myself there.

So Washington gets wind of this dangerous conspiracy, to basically take over, and undermine Washington's authority - not to mention the authority of the baby federal government.

Excerpt from Joseph Ellis's His Excellency: George Washington:

For obvious reasons, the secret conversations within the officers' corps never found their way into the historical record, making all efforts to recover the shifting factions in the plot educated guesses at best. We can be sure that the crisis came to a head on March 11, when the dissident officers scheduled a meeting to coordinate their strategy. Washington countermanded the order for a meeting, saying only he could issue such an order, then scheduled a session for all officers on March 16.

He spent the preceding day drafting, in his own hand, the most impressive speech he ever wrote. Beyond the verbal felicities and classic cadences, the speech established a direct link between his own honor and reputation and the abiding goals of the American Revolution. His central message was that any attempted coup by the army was simultaneously a repudiation of the principles for which they had all been fighting and an assault on his own integrity. Whereas Cromwell and later Napoleon made themselves synonymous with the revolution in order to justify the assumption of dictatorial power, Washington made himself synonymous with the American Revolution in order to declare that it was incompatible with dictatorial power.

On March 16, 1783, George Washington made the following speech to his group of officers:

Gentlemen: By an anonymous summons, an attempt has been made to convene you together; how inconsistent with the rules of propriety, how unmilitary, and how subversive of all order and discipline, let the good sense of the army decide...

Thus much, gentlemen, I have thought it incumbent on me to observe to you, to show upon what principles I opposed the irregular and hasty meeting which was proposed to have been held on Tuesday last - and not because I wanted a disposition to give you every opportunity consistent with your own honor, and the dignity of the army, to make known your grievances. If my conduct heretofore has not evinced to you that I have been a faithful friend to the army, my declaration of it at this time would be equally unavailing and improper. But as I was among the first who embarked in the cause of our common country. As I have never left your side one moment, but when called from you on public duty. As I have been the constant companion and witness of your distresses, and not among the last to feel and acknowledge your merits. As I have ever considered my own military reputation as inseparably connected with that of the army. As my heart has ever expanded with joy, when I have heard its praises, and my indignation has arisen, when the mouth of detraction has been opened against it, it can scarcely be supposed, at this late stage of the war, that I am indifferent to its interests.

But how are they to be promoted? The way is plain, says the anonymous addresser. If war continues, remove into the unsettled country, there establish yourselves, and leave an ungrateful country to defend itself. But who are they to defend? Our wives, our children, our farms, and other property which we leave behind us. Or, in this state of hostile separation, are we to take the two first (the latter cannot be removed) to perish in a wilderness, with hunger, cold, and nakedness? If peace takes place, never sheathe your swords, says he, until you have obtained full and ample justice; this dreadful alternative, of either deserting our country in the extremest hour of her distress or turning our arms against it (which is the apparent object, unless Congress can be compelled into instant compliance), has something so shocking in it that humanity revolts at the idea. My God! What can this writer have in view, by recommending such measures? Can he be a friend to the army? Can he be a friend to this country? Rather, is he not an insidious foe? Some emissary, perhaps, from New York, plotting the ruin of both, by sowing the seeds of discord and separation between the civil and military powers of the continent? And what a compliment does he pay to our understandings when he recommends measures in either alternative, impracticable in their nature?

I cannot, in justice to my own belief, and what I have great reason to conceive is the intention of Congress, conclude this address, without giving it as my decided opinion, that that honorable body entertain exalted sentiments of the services of the army; and, from a full conviction of its merits and sufferings, will do it complete justice. That their endeavors to discover and establish funds for this purpose have been unwearied, and will not cease till they have succeeded, I have not a doubt. But, like all other large bodies, where there is a variety of different interests to reconcile, their deliberations are slow. Why, then, should we distrust them? And, in consequence of that distrust, adopt measures which may cast a shade over that glory which has been so justly acquired; and tarnish the reputation of an army which is celebrated through all Europe, for its fortitude and patriotism? And for what is this done? To bring the object we seek nearer? No! most certainly, in my opinion, it will cast it at a greater distance.

For myself (and I take no merit in giving the assurance, being induced to it from principles of gratitude, veracity, and justice), a grateful sense of the confidence you have ever placed in me, a recollection of the cheerful assistance and prompt obedience I have experienced from you, under every vicissitude of fortune, and the sincere affection I feel for an army I have so long had the honor to command will oblige me to declare, in this public and solemn manner, that, in the attainment of complete justice for all your toils and dangers, and in the gratification of every wish, so far as may be done consistently with the great duty I owe my country and those powers we are bound to respect, you may freely command my services to the utmost of my abilities.

While I give you these assurances, and pledge myself in the most unequivocal manner to exert whatever ability I am possessed of in your favor, let me entreat you, gentlemen, on your part, not to take any measures which, viewed in the calm light of reason, will lessen the dignity and sully the glory you have hitherto maintained; let me request you to rely on the plighted faith of your country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress; that, previous to your dissolution as an army, they will cause all your accounts to be fairly liquidated, as directed in their resolutions, which were published to you two days ago, and that they will adopt the most effectual measures in their power to render ample justice to you, for your faithful and meritorious services. And let me conjure you, in the name of our common country, as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man who wishes, under any specious pretenses, to overturn the liberties of our country, and who wickedly attempts to open the floodgates of civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.

By thus determining and thus acting, you will pursue the plain and direct road to the attainment of your wishes. You will defeat the insidious designs of our enemies, who are compelled to resort from open force to secret artifice. You will give one more distinguished proof of unexampled patriotism and patient virtue, rising superior to the pressure of the most complicated sufferings. And you will, by the dignity of your conduct, afford occasion for posterity to say, when speaking of the glorious example you have exhibited to mankind, "Had this day been wanting, the world had never seen the last stage of perfection to which human nature is capable of attaining."

I hope you made it through that whole thing. It is rather extraordinary. BUT the most extraordinary thing is the "improvised" moment that came directly BEFORE he made that speech. It was the GESTURE that ended the coup, not his words. Or perhaps a mixture of both. But never ever underestimate the power of gesture.

Here is Joseph Ellis again on the moment in question:

Washington has just entered the New Building at Newburgh, a large auditorium recently built by the troops and also called The Temple. About 500 officers are present in the audience. Horatio Gates is chairing the meeting, a rich irony since Gates is most probably complicitous in the plot to stage a military coup that Washington has come to quash. Everything has been scripted and orchestrated beforehand. Washington's aides fan out into the audience to prompt applause for the general's most crucial lines. Washington walks slowly to the podium and reaches inside his jacket to pull out his prepared remarks. Then he pauses - the gesture is almost certainly planned - and pulls from his waistcoat a pair of spectacles recently sent to him by David Rittenhouse, the Philadelphia scientist. No one has ever seen Washington wear spectacles before on public occasions. He looks out to his assembled officers while adjusting the new glasses and says: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray, but almost blind in the service of my country." Several officers began to sob. The speech itself is anti-climactic. All thoughts of a military coup die at that moment.

On November 25, 1783: George Washington "took back" New York.

The peace treaty had been signed a year before, France had pledged support and recognition of the new United States, but the redcoats remained in New York, waiting for their written orders from London. George Washington vowed that he would not go home, he would not break up his army, until every last redcoat had left.

Nov. 25 was that momentous day - the day the American troops marched back into town, after the departure of the British.

The exhausted army marched the long way downtown, through what was now a war-ravaged New York City. People lined the streets, throwing laurels in front of Washington's horse, screaming, crying ... a huge display of emotion and reverence that made the typically humble Washington feel uncomfortable.

A woman in the crowd that day wrote the following in her diary:

We had been accustomed for a long time to military display in all the finish and finery of [British] garrison life. The troops just leaving us were as if equipped for a show and with their scarlet uniforms and burnished arms made a brilliant display. The troops that marched in, on the contrary, were ill-clad and weather-beaten and made a forlorn appearance. But then, they were our troops and as I looked at them and thought upon all they had done and suffered for us, my heart and my eyes were full.

GEORGE WASHINGTON'S MOTHER to Lafayette, 1784:

"I am not surprised at what George has done, for he was always a good boy."

George Washington wrote the following on the eve of his inauguration in 1789:

It is said that every man has his portion of ambition. I may have mine, I suppose, as well as the rest, but if I know my own heart, my ambition would not lead me into public life; my only ambition is to do my duty in this world as well as I am capable of performing it, and to merit the good opinion of all good men.

David McCullough describes, in his book on John Adams, the first inauguration day:

On the day of his inauguration, Thursday, April 30 1789, Washington rode to Federal Hall in a canary-yellow carriage pulled by six white horses and followed by a long column of New York militia in full dress. The air was sharp, the sun shone brightly, and with all work stopped in the city, the crowds along his route were the largest ever seen. It was as if all New York had turned out and more besides. "Many persons in the crowd," reported the Gazette of the United States "were heard to say they should now die contented - nothing being wanted to complete their happiness - but the sight of the savior of his country."

In the Senate Chamber were gathered the members of both houses of Congress, the Vice President, and sundry officials and diplomatic agents, all of whom rose when Washington made his entrance, looking solemn and stately. His hair powdered, he wore a dress sword, white silk stockings, shoes with silver buckles, and a suit of the same brown Hartford broadcloth that Adams, too, was wearing for the occasion. They might have been dressed as twins, except that Washington's metal buttons had eagles on them.

It was Adams who formally welcomed the General and escorted him to the dais. For an awkward moment Adams appeared to be in some difficulty, as though he had forgotten what he was supposed to say. then, addressing Washington, he declared that the Senate and House of Representatives were ready to attend him for the oath of office as required by the Constitution. Washington said he was ready. Adams bowed and led the way to the outer balcony, in full view of the throng in the streets. People were cheering and waving from below, and from windows and rooftops as far as the eye could see. Washington bowed once, then a second time.

Fourteen years earlier, it had been Adams who called on the Continental Congress to make the tall Virginian commander-in-chief of the army. Now he stood at Washington's side as Washington, his right hand on the Bible, repeated the oath of office as read by Chancellor Robert R. Livingston of New York, who had also been a member of the Continental Congress.

In a low voice Washington solemnly swore to execute the office of the President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, to "preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States." Then, as not specified in the Constitution, he added, "So help me God", and kissed the Bible, thereby establishing his own first presidential tradition.

"It is done," Livingston said, and, turning to the crowd, cried out, "Long live George Washington, President of the United States."

George Washington said:

Men may speculate as they will, they may talk of patriotism; they may draw a few examples from current story - but whoever builds upon it as a sufficient basis for conducting a long and bloody war will find themselves deceived in the end - For a long time it may of itself push men to action, to bear much, to encounter difficulties, but it will not endure unassisted by Interest.

On August 17, 1790, George Washington visited Newport Rhode Island - and visited the Jewish congregation of the Touro Synagogue (which still stands - gorgeous building. We went on a field trip there in grade school). The congregation presented an address to George Washington, welcoming him to Newport, and to their synagogue. A couple of days later George Washington wrote an eloquent response. Both the address as well as Washington's response were printed in all of the "national" newspapers at the time.

August 21st, 1790
To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island.

Gentleman.

While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in my visit to Newport, from all classes of Citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation.

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

He expresses there my own issues with the concept of "tolerance", with his "It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights." Mitchell and I have bitched about that very thing before, only in not so beautiful language. Don't condescend to TOLERATE me. Don't "indulge" me, from your height of belonging, because that means that it is only by YOUR grace that I am tolerated. Fuck you. I don't care if you TOLERATE me or not, it makes no difference to me. I am protected by the laws of the land, and as long as I abide by those laws, then it doesn't matter in the slightest what you think of me. Good for you, George, for putting that into words. The Jewish people, as long as they were good citizens, had nothing to fear. It was not up to one group of people to decide to 'tolerate' them or not. They were citizens of the land, and therefore protected.

This is why John Adams said he wanted the new nation to be a nation "of laws, not men." Because men are fickle and subject to emotion and temptation. They may "tolerate" you one day and hate you the next. As long as we are a nation "of laws, not men" ... then that will not matter. Yes, there will be growth pains, as we saw in the suffragette movement, the civil rights movement, and as we continue to see in the gay / lesbian / transgender movement. Nothing is perfect. Thank God. Perfection means stasis, a perfect way to describe a totalitarian top-down state. We are not that. We are ruled by "laws, not men", so the Jewish synagogue in Newport was protected by the law, regardless of the anti-Semitism they may have faced around them.

Now I will wait for someone to pipe up "but Washington had slaves!"

Yes. He had slaves. You know why? Because he was a man of HIS time, not our own. It was a grave sin on the society at the time, and many - including Washington - were tormented by the contradiction. It was so interwoven with their own prosperity that many could not see a way out of it. But to discount everything he said because he happened to live THEN not NOW, and was therefore subject to the prejudices of his time, is ridiculous. It's also a shame. Because if you take that view - then you cut yourself off from the wisdom of the ages.

From Joseph Ellis' book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation:

First, it is crucial to recognize that Washington's extraordinary reputation rested less on his prudent exercise of power than on his dramatic flair at surrendering it. He was, in fact, a veritable virtuoso of exits. Almost everyone regarded his retirement of 1796 as a repeat performance of his resignation as commander of the Continental Army in 1783. Back then, faced with a restive and unpaid remnant of the victorious army quartered in Newburgh, New York, he had suddenly appeared at a meeting of officers who were contemplating insurrection; the murky plot involved marching on the Congress and then seizing a tract of land for themselves in the West, all presumably with Washington as their leader.

He summarily rejected their offer to become the American Caesar and denounced the entire scheme as treason to the cause for which they had fought. Then, in a melodramatic gesture that immediately became famous, he pulled a pair of glasses out of his pocket: "Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles," he declared rhetorically, "for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." Upon learning that Washington intended to reject the mantle of emperor, no less an authority than George III allegedly observed, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." True to his word, on December 22, 1783, Washington surrendered his commission to the Congress, then meeting in Annapolis: "Having now finished the work assigned me," he announced, "I now retire from the great theatre of action." In so doing, he became the supreme example of the leader who could be trusted with power because he was so ready to give it up.

Excerpt from Joseph Ellis's His Excellency: George Washington, on the final days of Washington's presidency:

The last days were spent hosting dinners and dances in his honor. The ceremonials culminated with the [John] Adams inauguration, where, somewhat to Adams's irritation, more attention was paid to the outgoing than incoming president. Adams reported to Abigail that he thought he heard Washington murmuring under his breath at the end of the ceremony: "Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest." But the story is probably apocryphal. Washington's diary entry for the day was typically flat and unrevealing: "Much such a day as yesterday in all respects. Mercury at 41." The public man was already receding into the proverbial mists. The private man could not wait to get those new dentrues and place himself beneath those vines and fig trees.

Washington said, at one point, to the doctor, during his final illness in 1799:

"Doctor, I die hard, but I am not afraid to go."

George Washington's last words:

"I feel myself going. I thank you for your attentions; but I pray you to take no more trouble about me. Let me go off quietly. I cannot last long."

Henry Lee said, in eulogy:

First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen.

Mark Twain wrote in 1871:

I have a higher and greater standard of principle [than George Washington]. Washington could not lie. I can lie but I won't.

Gouverneur Morris said, upon the death of George Washington:

It is a question, previous to the first meeting, what course shall be pursued. Men of decided temper, who, devoted to the public, overlooked prudential considerations, thought a form of government should be framed entirely new. But cautious men, with whom popularity was an object, deemed it fit to consult and comply with the wishes of the people. AMERICANS! -- let the opinion then delivered by the greatest and best of men, be ever present to your remembrance. He was collected within himself. His countenance had more than usual solemnity -- His eye was fixed, and seemed to look into futurity. 'It is (said he)too probable that no plan we propose will be adopted. Perhaps another dreadful conflict is to be sustained. If to please the people, we offer what we ourselves disapprove, how can we afterwards defend our work? Let us raise a standard to which the wise and the honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.'--this was the patriot voice of WASHINGTON; and this the constant tenor of his conduct.

My father said, in regards to Washington being our first President:

"We were so lucky."

And below, a video in praise of "George Washington's awesome-ness": Did you know he weighed "a fucking ton"? Well, he did.

On that note, happy birthday, Mr. Washington!

"Skyward Christmas": part deux

We left off with me comparing Ben Marley to James Dean. I stand by my statement.

Onward.

Julie and Billie sit eating the damn chili (I bet THIS Billie's chili isn't as tough on the stomach as Bette Davis's chili!) and Julie is suddenly introspective and worried. She asks Billie why Coop has never learned to fly. Oh for God's sake, who cares. Billie is taciturn and tight-lipped about it (the only time she is those two things in the entire movie) and says, basically, None of your business. She ends the scene with, "It's not my story to tell."

Oh, so there's a story there! I thought Howard Hesseman revealed his reasons quite well in Skyward, but Skyward Christmas is like a dog with a bone.

We now see there is a bee in Julie's dumb bonnet. She must make Coop fly!

Next comes Gilstrap's first mistake, in a movie where she makes MANY. She does something so stupid, so - well - MEAN - that I actually actively disliked her for the rest of the movie, and wished that Ben Marley would dump the broad and go have hot teenage sex in the back of his pickup truck with one of the cheerleaders in the school. Seriously, Marley, you don't need to deal with a girl who makes THIS kind of bad choice!

Gilstrap is getting ready to go up for a flight. Coop is puttering around, checking the flight before it takes off. Gilstrap says, "The rudder's stuck ... could you check the blah blah blah ..." Coop climbs into the plane to give a look, and in that moment, Gilstrap guns the engine and starts speeding down the runway. Yeah, Gilstrap. That is a great way to get someone overcome their fears. What a dangerous stupid thing to do. If he has a panic attack while you're up in the air, then what will you do? No excuse, Gilstrap. No excuse. Coop does begin to freak out, clawing at the glass roof - but Gilstrap keeps speeding down the runway. Coop is openly panicking - Gilstrap finally sees the error of her ways and is screaming at Coop that she will stop the plane - but it's too late. Coop is in a frenzy and leaps out of the plane, falling to the runway, in a crumpled heap.

Gilstrap, who - obviously - cannot leap out of the plane and rush to his side, freaks out, screaming his name at the top of her lungs.

Good. You should be horrified. That was a terrible thing to do to someone.

Idiot.

I never really recovered from that moment. I was annoyed from then on.

The next scene we see Billie and Gilstrap racing behind the ambulance, taking Coop to the hospital. Gilstrap is beside herself, apologizing repeatedly, and Billie is unmoved. Just imagine this scene in the hands of Bette Davis, and you can really see what we're missing here. It becomes maudlin and cliche (which it already is, due to the silly script) - as opposed to a glimpse of something real and raw going on (which you got in Skyward). This scene feels like it goes on FOREVER because they both are just (with the help of the director) milking every moment until there is no more life in the thing whatsoever. Billie finally says to her, "I'm not the one who has to do the forgiving. That's Coop's choice."

Damn Coop and his choices.

The next scene is a quiet scene at the Gilstrap family home. Julie is obviously in trouble for the shit she just pulled. Good. Coop, obviously, is alive, but he's still in the hospital. Oh, and there were some other scenes in there involving the grandpa, but they were so awful that I blocked them out. Suffice it to say, grandpa is stranded in St. Louis and being a big baby about it - and Julie has hatched a plan to fly back there and pick him up for Christmas, as a surprise to her parents. Her sister is in on the plan. Grandpa is all proud and stuff, in the lobby of his rooming-house, telling everyone how his granddaughter is going to fly to pick him up. Yay for you, Grandpa.

Anyway, Julie's slick TV-actor dad (no longer the mumbly tormented Clu Gulagher) says that he's going to ground her. No more flying. Julie is heartbroken. What about Grandpa? But her parents stay firm. Good. Anyone who is that irresponsible as a pilot doesn't deserve a license.

Then comes the long drawn out scene in the hospital where Julie asks Coop for forgiveness. This is when this new Coop's true Forrest Gump stunted man-boy personality comes to the fore. He is holding a grudge. He sulks, basically. I think RAGE would be more appropriate Coop. After all, you were the one in Skyward who called Julie on her shit, wheelchair or no ... she deserves to be bitch-slapped from here to Kingdom Come! But instead Coop sits in bed, working on some airplane part ("the nurse'll be mad cause I get grease on her clean sheets" ...) and refuses to look at Julie, in her high-necked Big Love blouse, even though she is pleading and apologizing.

The whole thing is tiresome. I was already sick of both of them.

But then, halleluia, next scene involves Ben Marley. He drives her home from the hospital. Julie sits there with tears rolling down her face. He's got his hat on, which I found completely distracting, and could barely listen to what he was saying. But it was a simple scene, him trying to find out if Coop is all right, him trying to comfort her - not with words, really - just putting his arm around her, stuff like that ... all of which was, again, delightfully iconic and Hud-ish, due to his hat and his general demeanor. He's a good boyfriend, basically. I still think he needs to kick her to the curb and hook up with some irresponsible hottie because he's YOUNG, does he need this crap? Who needs Coop and his damn sulks?

But he's trying to do the right thing here. He doesn't try to cheer her up, not yet, he just tries to listen. Like I tried to listen, while watching the damn thing, distracted by the hat and the face.

"Wait - what did he just say?"
"I have no idea. LOOK AT HIM."

Next scene is indicative of the problem in the script, as well as Gilstrap's performance. I'm not really faulting her. She was not an experienced actress, and she was basically thrown to the wolves here, having to carry a series - and she wasn't up for it. In the other film, as I mentioned, her co-stars had weight and reality, Bette Davis, Marion Ross - and that helped Gilstrap. But here she starts to sink, going towards blatant sentimentality, with no subtlety. And in this context, "sentimentality" starts to look like "self-pity" - and all of the characters (except Ben Marley's) fall for it. Everyone is feeling sorry for themselves, holding grudges, and being difficult and passive-aggressive. That's the energy we're presented with here. Makes me want to leap into a waiting aircraft and fly away to ride a stupid bull, I'll tell you that!

So the next scene, Scott is taking Julie out for ice cream and trying to cheer her up. He swoops over to the table with two sundaes (again, with the symphony of movement he puts into his character's body language), saying something like, "Two Billings specials!" Julie is morose. What a shock. He sits across from her, and he's all about his ice cream, and trying to feed her a scoop of it. She shakes her head no. You don't deserve such a boyfriend, Gilstrap. Anyway, she is given lines like, "I just wish Grandpa could be with us for Christmas" and "The only time I am really me is when I fly" and "I'm just so sad about Coop" ... and she plays them right on the nose, not underplaying, or undercutting, or anything a more experienced actress would do with such obviously maudlin material. She goes right along with the line. But Ben Marley doesn't. That's why he's good. He listens, but he also manages to suggest that he is a bit distracted by his ice cream, he's not just eyeballing her, and listening with dead seriousness - he's still jiggly, and nervy, and also (perhaps?) a bit tired of the self-pity. He's all about solutions.

At one point he says, in regards to stupid Grandpa who won't get on a bus, and who now WON'T be picked up by Gilstrap since she's grounded: "Look." Putting his spoon down definitively. You know he's serious when he stops paying attention to his ice cream. He says, "I'll go pick him up. I'll give him the ride of his life - he won't never forget it." Kind of laughing to lighten the mood, and showing that kind of macho arrogant flyboy attitude that he would use to great success in Apollo 13. But Julie, still morose, shakes her head and says, "He won't go with anyone else but me!" Grandpa is a serious pain in the ass. Good lord. What a baby. So there's Ben Marley, basically acting by himself here ... making a scene happen ... meaning: using humor, charm, and then seriously listening when that is called for ... it's a mixed bag, not just one note. She ends the scene with saying, "What am I gonna do, Scott?" Pleading with him.

He looks up at her and says, "I don't know, Julie."

It's a nice moment, played simply and truthfully, with a big ol' closeup of his cute face. He, at least, knows how to play a closeup.

You know, closeups are all about character, thought, and what's going on in the eyes. Not plot. Let it go. The plot will take care of itself. Don't act, for God's sake, in your closeup! It's got to be honest and connected to the moment. That's what he does there.

Next we see Coop, who is back at work. He's got a bandage on his face, I believe, and he putters about in the hangar with a grim sulky look on his face. I don't blame him for being mad, it's the SULKING I can't abide. A good old-fashioned self-righteous anger would be way more appropriate.

But yay, more Ben Marley! Marley walks out to the hangar, in his white apron, carrying a tray of food for Coop. He's trying to be jokey and friendly - actually, no, he IS jokey and friendly, it's his easygoing personality - but there's all this other stuff beneath it, the ongoing fight between Coop and Julie, etc. His friendliness is covering that up.

He says, not looking at Coop, "How you feeling?"

Coop rattles off all of his injuries and then says, "What do you think?"

Marley doesn't take it personally. He's working up to something. Something on his mind.

Uhm, swoon? Let's see a couple more.

Dude is effing gorgeous, and that's my final answer.

Anyway, he tries to patch things up between Julie and Coop. Julie is grounded, not allowed out at the airport - and Ben wants to make sure that Coop knows "she said Merry Christmas". He is the messenger. Coop is still sulky, and holding onto a grudge, and ... in a moment that ends up being a clunky ba-dum-ching in the script - says, "She's not gonna pull any more surprises on me, is she?"

And then suddenly, as if on cue (as if??) we hear the engine of an airplane gunning ... and Coop jumps to attention. "Is someone stealing my airplane?" They look out at the runway, and there is Julie, with her goggles on, taking off in the plane. Unannounced, unplanned, she is basically stealing the damn thing to go pick up her Grandpa. Not to mention the fact that she is also grounded. She is breaking 10 rules at one time. But there's not time to worry about all of that. Coop and Scott run out of the tarmac, after the plane, calling at her to stop. It's actually a nice shot of our adorable short-order cook charging off after the plane.

But Julie is beyond the pale now. She ignores the shrieks and takes off into the air. Turns out that her best friend Kendra helped her into the plane ... "But I didn't know she was grounded! She said she was going to get her grandpa!"

Billie has come running out of the restaurant, and she is hysterical. Billie? Hysterical?

Coop, with that same sulk on his face, says something about how he had put a bad generator into the plane, to test it. Billie freaks out. "YOU PUT A BAD GENERATOR INTO THAT PLANE?" He says, aw shucks, "Well how else am I gonna work on it?" Julie knows none of this, so she has now taken off into the air with a bad generator.

The worried group on the ground stares up into the sky. The music is ominous. Billie says, with an air of disgust, "Let's hope she has the sense to put the radio on" (I doubt it, Billie) and goes back into the restaurant, leaving Scott worried and alone. And gorgeous.

We see Julie flying through the air. She's got her map out, planning her route.

Back down on the ground, hysteria is building in the restaurant. Billie and Coop huddle by the radio, and Billie screams into it, trying to contact Julie. Scott and Kendra look on. I liked Marley's vibe here, which again seemed natural and truthful, as opposed to actor-y. He's nervous, restless, he squints at the sound of the crackle on the radio, like he's trying to see her through the static, he keeps looking around, like - let's get the hell out of here and go get her. But it's not overdone, it's subtle and just right. You know, it's enjoyable to watch him. You stop worrying. With everyone else, you're afraid that the sentiment and melodrama will sink them, and so you wince, watching them act. But with him, you can just relax. Yes, you can also enjoy his beauty, which I do - but I maintained enough of a clear head to see what he was actually doing in these scenes, and it's good. Not too much.

Julie flies along happy as a clam. Billie screams into the radio like a shrieking Greek goddess. Julie is flying over swamps and lowlands, peeking down to make sure she's on the right course. Dum-dee-dum, just flyin' along in my stolen airplane ...

I think along in here we also get scenes with Grandpa, packing his bags, and heading to the meeting place in the middle of a field. His friend comes to wait with him and his friend is scornful like, "I highly doubt she'll make it ..." and Grandpa is all puffed up with pride and says, "She'll be here. My granddaughter is a pilot! She's coming to pick me up!" You know, upping the emotional stakes for everyone involved. Will Julie arrive? Will Christmas happen? Will Ben ride his stupid bull? These are the cliffhangers involved.

Then we are also in the restaurant, with the worried group huddled over the radio, and Coop is all twisted up like a pretzel, because of the generator that might go bad any minute, and Kendra is sad-faced because it's all her fault in the first place (no, it's not, Kendra. It's Gilstrap's fault and hers alone), and Scott is a tightly-coiled jiggling-legged ball of energy. What he wants to do is run, leap into his truck, and go after her.

The chronology gets a little cloudy here but at some point, of course, the generator fails and smoke begins to pour out of the engine of the plane. This is when Julie finally responds to the urgent radio calls, but by this point she is too far away to come through clearly. Of course the words that DO make it through are alarming: "smoke", etc. She sounds panicked. The panic on the ground grows. Billie is screaming at her to give the coordinates ... but the static is too loud. Julie is struggling with the airplane now, coughing because of the smoke, and she screams, "I'm going to crash!" or some such comforting remark.

They then lose contact with Julie altogether. We see Julie aim for a big field and she lands, but by then the airplane is out of control and she can't stop in time before she crashes into a tree. The plane is not on fire but there is a lot of smoke and Julie, using her upper body strength that she has been building, by using her manual wheelchair, hauls herself out of the plane and there's a terrible shot of her falling to the ground. It looks like it's really her, although it's probably not. It's a dead-weight kind of fall because of her legs and it's awful to watch. She tries to crawl away from the airplane and then collapses onto the ground.

Terrible, yes, but I'm sorry, that's what happens when you take off in someone else's plane without checking first. I'm glad you're okay, Julie, but honestly, you need to develop some common sense!

Once they lose contact with Julie, a still silence takes over the restaurant and everyone stands there, quiet and horrified. Billie then says, in a quiet voice (finally! she's quiet!): "Scott, you'd better go call her parents."

Scott bolts to the door. Finally he has something concrete to do!

Somewhere along in here, we get a shot of Grandpa, finally giving up waiting, and he's all wallowing in self-pity, that he has been forgotten ... AGAIN. I know we're meant to feel urgent, and like we want to leap through the screen and tell Grandpa that no, Julie TRIED to get there ... but instead I was just annoyed. Can't he just assume that everyone in the world is doing the best they can? Does he have to put the most cynical spin onto everything? But no, he is determined to feel bad and lonely. He scowls at the ground. He is inconsolable.

Meanwhile, back at the airport, Julie's glamorous new parents come rushing in, with sister in tow. Where is the adopted son? At home with a babysitter? It's so odd that they would add that kid and give him nothing to do.

The parents are hysterical (more of the same), demanding that they "get Julie down" - uhm, how do you propose they go about that? Scott and Kendra stand nearby, almost like guilty accomplices, even though this is all Julie's fault. The parents are out of their minds. "WHERE IS SHE? GET HER DOWN."

I know I grabbed screenshots of minute changes of expression on his face, but whatever, it's occupying my spare time, and I find it amusing and fun. I need all the help I can get. Again, he has a nice energy through all of this, underplaying the hysterical energy of everyone else.

We were talking about it later and Dan said something about, "So this was the pilot for a new series - but what would the series be? Every week she gets grounded and every week she goes on some dangerous mission?"

My contribution to the discussion was, "I wish the entire television series had been focused on the erotic possibilities in the relationship with Scott."

Dan agreed. "That's a television show I would have watched."

Billie explains to Julie's parents what has happened, and also that they don't know where exactly she is, but they believe she is somewhere near the Oklahoma border. The plan then becomes: the Ward parents will stay at the restaurant and man the radio, and Coop (on his motorcycle) and Billie and Scott (in his truck) will go out and look for Julie.

The parents, lonely and afraid, watch everyone run out the door ... and the Christmas wreath hangs on the door, as if in mockery of their family holiday.

Julie is injured and lying by the plane.

Then we see Coop flying down some country road on a motorcycle.

Then we see Billie and Scott, careening down some country road in his truck. They don't speak. Billie is all worried and emotional, and Marley is now in the position of having to underplay things, and keep things simple and clean. He's taken up with driving, he's focused on the task at hand, but at one point, he says, with no flourish or embellishment, eyes still on the road, "You ever get scared, Billie?"

Billie says, "Not if I can help it."

He says, still watching the road, "What about now?"

She thinks a minute and then says in a campy TV kind of way, "She's a good pilot. I am sure she touched down okay."

Scott doesn't look at her. He's driving, watching the road, deep in thought. Says, "Wish I was as sure as you."

Sometimes you need to know when not to do too much, and he plays that little scene just right.

Then I think Coop somehow locates her. How on earth he would find her I will never know. But he sees the plane off the road in a field, and, like an idiot, tries to charge across the field on his motorcycle - and of course he crashes. There are lingering shots of his dismayed face as he inspects his bike and its broken chain, telegraphing to us that it will provide no escape from the field. Meanwhile Julie lies in a crumpled heap just over there. Forget your damn bike and go help her, Coop!

Also, I was just so confused. The way it is filmed makes it seem like Coop turned off the road and started across the field. The road is right there. She's not in the middle of the Sahara. Even without a bike, couldn't Coop stand out on the road and either flag someone down, or start the hell walking to the closest town so he could send for help? I didn't understand the logistics or the geography of why they felt so TRAPPED. They're not at the summit of Everest with no possibility of rescue! But whatever, I realize I am over-thinking it. I don't mean to be a bitch. But I was confused, and kept saying to Dan and Keith, "But the road is right over there!"

I don't mind schmaltz. I even adore a little bit of cheese. But persistent illogicality in service of a bossy plot drives me crazy.

At some point too we see Grandpa's landlady come hand him a message "from your granddaughter". He lights up and says, "Julie?" She says, "Your other granddaughter." The message says that Julie had to crash the plane and is nowhere to be found, but people are looking for her. Grandpa is horrified. His response is full of self-hatred (of course - because ALL of his responses have to do with himSELF) - he says, bitterly, "And I couldn't take the bus." And then trudges up the stairs, furious at himself.

Billie and Scott have been pulling over at every gas station to call back to the restaurant to see if Julie or Coop has been heard from. Still no word.

Coop has raced across the field to pick up Julie, who is moaning and holding her stomach. He puts her on the wing of the plane, where she rests her head, and they are tearful and happy to be together and alive. They are friends again. She is apologetic, he is immediately looking to fix the plane ... and that will take some doing. Somehow he hooks up his bike's generator to the plane, or something like that ... and through various mechanical works of wizardry gets the radio to work. By now it is nightfall. Coop makes a fire. And then calls back on the radio to the restaurant. Julie's parents race to the microphone.

They have many questions, none of which Coop can answer. He tells them to call the Oklahoma state police, and the closest town, and blah blah ... and then puts Julie on the microphone to talk to her parents. It is as though it is a last goodbye. As though Julie is trapped in the wilderness in a blizzard 300 miles from civilization. It is vaguely ridiculous. She's not going to DIE, she'll be out of there by morning. But anyway, Julie and her parents have a tearful conversation, saying "I love you" and "I'm sorry" and all that. Relief. Yet they are not out of the woods yet.

And what about Grandpa???

Next scene is Billie and Scott stopped at another payphone. Billie is at the phone, and Scott sits in the truck, swathed in shadow, cowboy hat brim down. Kinda hot. What a shock. Billie slowly and tremulously comes to the door of the truck, and she stands in the doorway, trembling with emotion. It's way too much. Take it down just one notch, then maybe you would have had me. He glances up at her. She says, barely able to hold back the sobs, "Coop found her ... she's alive ... SHE'S ALIVE." Ben Marley is just one of those actors who knows how to keep things simple. It's nice to see. He takes in what she's saying, he doesn't burst into tears, he doesn't overact ... he just looks suddenly, relieved and relaxed, and reaches over and grabs Billie to hug her. An organic moment of emotion, not pushed. Well done. Not easy when your scene partner is literally trembling with too much of basically everything.

Now we come to Coop's big scene. Geoffrey Lewis plays it fine, it's just way too imposed on the action - a manufactured Freudian reason for his fear of flying. It's a big confession. He plays it to the hilt. He even wells up with tears at one point. But swallows it down, crushes down the emotion in the flickering firelight, as Julie stares on with compassion and love. The music is insistent. It's a big fat monologue. "Here's why I'm afraid to fly." And out pours this horror story from his past.

I liked it better when I didn't know that story.

Billie and Scott, now that they know she has been found, go back to the restaurant - and the entire group stands vigil around the microphone. It's dawn now.

I enjoy his thighs, which I believe I mentioned in my original Skyward post.

I can't remember why the Oklahoma police cannot get to the crash site ("but the road is right there!!" I kept saying) - but it becomes clear that Julie will have to fly them out of the field. Coop has fixed the propeller using his McGyver methodology. It works. Yes, she has internal bleeding, and yes, she is a minor, and yes, she can't walk ... but she must fly that plane! And even MORE important: Coop must be passenger. He must get over his fear. Now. But maybe because he finally told the story the ghost will be laid to rest. Do you think??

Let's go back to the restaurant and take a look at Scott waiting.

Isn't it to die for?

Oh, and just want to mention one thing that I already mentioned. Mrs. Ward and Billie are too similar, in terms of type. We kept getting confused, even though we know Mrs. Roeper was Billie. Separately, they are fine, but put them side by side, and confusion begins to grow. Especially since they basically were both playing the same worried scream-y mother-type.

See what I mean?

Who the heck is who?

Let's get back to more pleasant matters.

There. That's better.

Julie and Coop go through the pre-flight check, and finally ... tense with nervousness and the memories that haunt him from the past ... he climbs into the cockpit. Julie then starts up the propeller, and now it is time for takeoff. There isn't much room. Will they make it? Julie and Coop are flying across the field, and Coop looks scared to death, as well as vaguely stiff-upper-lip sulky ... like ... I'm scared, yup, but I will be strong. Then, at last, the plane is airborne.

And now comes a moment that I cannot believe wasn't cut. Who's in charge here? I want to speak to them! As the plane lifts from the ground, there is a shot of Coop, and suddenly, he not only looks relieved, but enlightened and full of grace and ease, and he is staring at something in the distance ... and he says, with a soft smile, "Hi, Dad."

I'm not even kidding.

Honest to God, you don't need it. All you would need is his look of relief and we would "get it", I swear to God - we'll get it - Just please don't have him stare off at a fixed spot and say, "Hi, Dad" just as the plane lifts off the ground. Please don't do that!!!

Poor Geoffrey Lewis. But he goes through it, says his lines, what're you gonna do? There are worse ways to make a living.

BUT STILL.

"Hi, Dad"???

Then we see the plane swooping and soaring, and Coop and Julie are laughing, and you know he's put to rest that old fear, and now he can be a pilot, and life will be beautiful and Billie will be proud.

But I ask you: what about Grandpa??

Our next (and final) scene is Christmas dinner at the Ward household. Scott is there. (Does he have a family? What is his deal?)

I think the set designer needs to CHILL with the Christmas decorations. I'm getting a headache just looking at that background.

The family is happy and thankful to be together. Julie is grounded for real, but you can tell the air is more cleared up between them, she knows she deserves it, blah blah blah, she learned her lesson. They say grace. A knock comes at the door.

Who could it be??

Billie enters, they all call out a greeting and then she says, "And I have a surprise guest!" She turns to look at the open door, and naturally Grandpa comes through.

The family flips out, crying, laughing, hugging ...

and can you guess what Grandpa is holding in his grizzled old hand?

The homemade Christmas tree angel, of course, constructed of broken light bulbs. Julie's mother clutches it (be careful! don't cut yourself!), and breaks down into grateful tears of happiness.

Julie smiles happily, looking on.

And here is the final shot of Skyward Christmas, which perhaps could have had more emotional "oomph" for me if I hadn't been so distracted by Scott's fly.

My apologies.

A girl can't look skyward ALL the time.

"Skyward Christmas": my opening salvo

Dan said, right before the movie started, "What do you want to bet it starts with the Gilstrap family trimming the tree?"

The story began at the airport, and we all had a moment, like, "Oh, well, Dan, you can't win 'em all ..." But then came the second scene, and there was the Gilstrap family trimming the tree, and Dan shouted, "I TOLD YOU. Didn't I TELL you?" Yes, yes, you told us.

"Skyward Christmas" was like that. It fulfilled your expectations, but unlike other movies that fulfill your expectations and are therefore satisfying, "Skyward Christmas" was embarrassing. You kept hoping they would just, you know, stop embarrassing you, but they could not leave well enough alone. She has one line, where she is crying in the truck over damn Coop's Oedipal issues, and her boyfriend (you know, Ben Marley) is trying to talk her through it, and the scene ends with her remembering the horror she just experienced, and saying bitterly, "Some Christmas present."

It's strange to be in the presence of something so wrong. It's not that any of the individual elements were bad. They weren't. Mrs. Roeper is a good actress. No shame there. Geoffrey Lewis is a reliable journeyman-actor. He's fine. Bibi Besch is a highly-experienced television actress, used to showing up and doing her part. She's okay. But the filming of it was abominably sentimental, and the script was clunky, bossy, and dripping with sentiment. At least Skyward had the tart presence of Bette Davis, to really bring a sense of reality to the situation - a wheelchair-bound girl who wants to fly ... and without that grounding presence Skyward Christmas is, frankly, lost. Also, the gravitas (if you want to call it that) of experienced actors like Marion Ross and Lisa Whelchel is now gone, and the entire thing rests on Suzy Gilstrap's shoulders, and she can't handle it. (I cannot believe I just associated "gravitas" with Lisa Whelchel. But I'm dead serious.)

Anson Williams and Ron Howard still co-produced the thing, but direction and script were in other hands entirely. I'm not saying that Anson Williams is on par with Ernest Lehmann, or something, but his elements, in Skyward, although obvious and rather clunky, worked. He had an understanding of balance, of how one scene needed to balance another, how it would be more interesting to have her sister be supportive rather than bitchy, and her potential boyfriend be a loser-in-hiding, rather than a true high school hero. In Skyward Christmas, that subtlety (and I am using the term loosely in this case) is lost, and we are just left with the swooning soundtrack and the terrible script.

There was one scene, a very simple one, actually, with the family trimming the tree, and maybe it was because we were all exclaiming about Dan's prophetic comments, but we missed a tiny bit of the scene, and it was written in such a strange way that we literally could not figure out what was going on. It was a group befuddlement. The mother was staring at a photo album and saying, longingly, "This will be our first Christmas without him." We all shouted, "WHO?" The whole family kept talking about "him", but it was filmed in such a drippy no-life kind of way that we weren't even sure what to focus on ... we also were baffled by the fact that an 8-year-old younger brother had been inserted into the story ... "who the hell is that?" we asked each other ... And seriously, this isn't like a David Lynch script, where you really need to pay attention or you will miss the subtleties ... This was a stupid script and we were totally lost. "What the hell are they talking about?" we asked each other. The father would enter the scene and say, "He is free to join us any time ..." We all shouted, "WHO?" It was hysterical. We're smart people but we could not understand Skyward Christmas.

Of course, it turns out, that they were all babbling about Grandpa, who had been left behind in St. Louis, and had not forgiven the family for moving. Grandpa, seriously, let your daughter live her own life.

Bibi Besch sits holding the "Christmas album" (the movie made me into a real Scrooge, I rolled my eyes at every Christmas reference) and she has a long monologue about Grandpa (her father), and how he made an angel to go on the top of the tree, and she thought longingly about that angel. Then comes an inadvertently funny line: "He made it out of smashed up light bulbs ..." She says this in a sweet and nostalgic voice, but the image of an angel made up of jagged broken glass would not leave my mind. We were all guffawing. Jesus, Grandpa, you make Christmas ornaments out of jagged smashed-up light bulbs? No wonder the family fled to Texas. You're frightening.

Suzy Gilstrap tries to comfort her mother. But this family insists on staying in the mood they are in. They will not BE comforted. They enjoy feeling sorry for themselves, and they enjoy being victimized by their own emotions.

I'll walk you through the progression of the movie.

This will be a very Ben Marley-heavy post ... because honestly, he is the only thing that saves this mess. He's sweet, real, and believable. Thank God.

Our story opens with Suzy Gilstrap flying through the air. She is engaged in a radio conversation with the airport on the ground (you know, Billie's airport). You can see that she is now confident and at home in the air (which means trouble, eventually. Girl is WAY over-confident), because she's saying stuff like, "10-4 good buddy, Foxhole-Niner-Gilstrap is due east-northwest, come in, good buddy" - or whatever ... babbling on in the code of the air.

I was more interested in the fact that Ben Marley is behind the counter in Billie's restaurant, wearing a white apron, and listening to the radio conversation going on, looking concerned and interested. I had no idea who anyone else was, since ... well ... they all look alike ... Mrs. Roeper looks like Bibi Besch and Coop looks vaguely like the man playing Gilstrap's father ... and it was all a mish-mash of TV-ready faces sitting there. But no matter. I was just looking at Marley anyway.

It becomes clear that this flight is a big deal. I don't know why. I mean, I eventually learned why, but in the opening sequence of the film I was more confused by the new cast, and couldn't focus on anything else. Anyway, this is a big flight for Julie, so her parents sit in Billie's restaurant, all tensed up and worried and proud (yuk), and we see Billie (Mrs. Roeper) also up in the air (with Julie? It's not clear), beaming with glimmery-eyed pride at what her pupil is doing. We see Coop, all crinkly-eyed and emotional, listening to the radio conversation ... and it's supposed to be a tense suspenseful moment. Everyone being gobsmacked by Julie's fearless control of her aircraft.

Whatever.

Then she comes in to land, speaking in her gibberish confident code. There is a flurry of activity on the ground, as the entire restaurant runs outside to watch her landing. Ben Marley even gets to shout, "YEEEEEEEEE HAW", but he can be forgiven. I mean, look at the boy.

Everyone is cheering like maniacs as the plane comes in to land.

They just won't stop cheering.

I wish they'd shut up.

Finally, the plane pulls up - and yes, Mrs. Roeper is in the back seat - and they open the cockpit, and she calls out, "Julie, I now pronounce you a private pilot". Or something along those lines. The cheering lunatics just keep cheering. Julie is happy, validated. Coop (go away, Coop) goes and tenderly lifts her out of the plane (her family is still screaming) and Ben Marley runs to get her wheelchair, wheeling it up in the middle of the jabbering crowd.

Champagne is popped and glasses poured all around. These people need to get a life. Also, Julie is a minor and as far as I can tell, so is Scott. Why are they drinking champagne? Her parents stand nearby, glamorous and unreal-looking, all worried and proud at the same time. The entire damn restaurant appears to be standing on the tarmac, celebrating Julie's graduation. Don't these people have work to do?

Ben Marley tenderly gives his girlfriend a cup of champagne.

He has a line that goes something like, "To Julie ... the kindest ... most beautiful ... sweetest pilot in Texas ... I love you."

That gives you an idea of the kind of script we're dealing with here. BUT. BUT. I will say that Ben Marley seems to have an instinct for this kind of thing, and he breezes through the line, without too much fanfare (he doesn't dwell on it, which would be the worst possible choice), and even makes "sweetest pilot in Texas" into a sort of funny line. He drawls it, like he knows he's being cheesy, so he's self-deprecating about it, and he's kind of embarrassed as well. So. Thank you, Ben Marley, for saving us from schmaltz. Not entirely, of course, because there's only so much you can do in such a moment - but you did your best, and it comes off as a sweet kind of funny line, instead of a tarpit of saccharine from which we will never emerge.

Julie, holding a glass of champagne, makes an interminable speech where she, to quote Maureen Stapleton's Oscar speech, thanks "everyone I have ever met in my whole life". She thanks her parents ... she thanks her sister ... she thanks Coop, who takes the praise with an "Aw shucks" manner that is rather nauseating to witness ... She thanks her best friend Kendra (I don't care about Kendra) ... Billie (aka Mrs. Roeper) is near tears watching all of this. Another bad choice. Everyone is near tears throughout the entire picture. STOP CRYING.

Julie thanks Scott and makes some promise about flying him to such-and-such ... "so you can ride that stupid bull ..." and everyone laughs, and Ben Marley is embarrassed, but grinning, too. And now I can't get the picture of Ben Marley riding that stupid bull out of my mind, and I wish that THAT had been the plot of Skyward Christmas, as opposed to trying to make a passive-aggressive old grandpa feel welcome in his own family. I want to see Julie fly Ben to some rodeo where he can ride a stupid bull. Why can't I see that??

Then we have the really confusing "Grandpappy made me an ornament out of smashed-up light bulbs and it sparkled like the star of Bethlehem" scene ... which was gratifying only because they were, indeed, trimming the tree. But we were too confused by the presence of the little brother (did the family adopt? Where the hell did HE come from?) to really pay attention to the important plot-points. Much to our chagrin later in the film.

I'm not clear on what happens next, but I do know that there is a long shot of the street outside the school, and we can see Julie wheeling along with Scott (in his cowboy hat) sauntering along next to her. We can hear them talking. About Christmas. (rolling of the eyes from this here Scrooge). Scott is launching himself alongside Gilstrap in a way that manages to be humorous and iconic at the same time. I'm not even kidding. It reminds me of James Dean, the sort of weird nervous-ball-of-energy body language, not to mention the skinniness of him in the cowboy hat and jeans. He's an ADD-type of guy, easily bored, and rather amused at his own personality. He's bantering with her, "Whatdja get me for Christmas, huh?" as he leaps off a curb. Stuff like that. She banters back, "What makes you think I got you anything?" He takes off his hat, flips it around, puts it on her head for a second, flips it back into his own hand, and plops it down on his head, all as he says, "Cause I'm irresistible. You know that."

Truer words were never spoken.

It's a nice scene. I like how he throws himself around, swaggering, and grinning, and tipping his hat to a truck going by, and teasing her, and launching himself from curb to curb. He probably was not directed to do all of this behavioral stuff ... that's usually the actor's talent that brings that out. It would have been just as easy to walk along beside her, chatting. But what is the interest in that? Also, it fits from what we know about his character from Skyward. He has excess energy, he talks a lot, running on his own motor, there's an unselfconsciousness about him somehow, and he is charming and gangly.

So spaketh Sheila.

More to come ...

Sneak preview of one of his darker more concerned moments:

Oh, Gilstrap, what have you gone and done ....

Hope smells like teen spirit

She definitely looks "over-bored" and "self-assured".

Whatever. Nevermind.

"Dunwich Horror" remake: Breaking news in the land of Dean Stockwell

A small break in the Ben Marley obsession to just mention some exciting news:

Dunwich Horror has been remade and will be released this week (at least according to IMDB). Dean Stockwell, who played Wilbur so campily and committedly in the cheesy (totally enjoyable) version in the 1970s will be back - this time playing Dr. Henry Armitage. I'm so excited! The only thing that would make me happier would be if Ben Marley had a role as well.

In preparation for the new Dunwich Horror, here is the post I wrote about it, at the height of my Stockwell obsession. Wonderful film, with not one lackluster moment. Brill.

THE DUNWICH HORROR

Dunwich Horror from 1970 has pretty much nothing to do with the HP Lovecraft story from whence/which it came - and that's a bone of contention for many people, Stockwell included. He was disappointed in how the movie came out - being a huge Lovecraft fan. But the point must be made that it is, essentially, a B-movie, with all the glory and mortification that that implies. It must not be taken too seriously, and it must be seen as an homage to Lovecraft - rather than a faithful adaptation.

The thing is a HOOT. I love B-movies: To me, they are the best examples of the sheer JOY of film-making. And Dunwich Horror, while it definitely has much better production values than Ed Wood's stuff, is in the same vein. It doesn't take itself too seriously - it's not ponderous or pretentious in the slightest - it doesn't worry too much about itself - it is unapologetically manipulative - and frankly, it's a blast.

Every time I find myself in the middle of such an obsession as the one I am in now - and I "go to work" - meaning: seeing everything the object of desire has done - there are always surprises. And there are always movies I discover that I NEVER would have seen otherwise.

Discovering movies like The Dunwich Horror has been so much fun.

Dunwich Horror wastes no time in getting started.

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

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

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

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

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

Dude. Step back. Learn boundaries.

Thanks.

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

Oh, some interesting trivia:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's one of his funnest performances.

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

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

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

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

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

Some screenshots below.

The freakin' rings.

Dude, I thought I told you to learn boundaries.

run for the hills, Sandra!!

The 'stache. In all its nasty glory.

That's such a Stockwell expression.

Run!!!

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

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

Here's a quote from Dean Stockwell:

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

I love that that was his idea.

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

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

Those damn rings again.

Uh oh.

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

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

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

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

All Stockwell stuff here

"Here we are now. Entertain us."

Yesterday was Kurt Cobain's birthday.

Excerpt from Cobain's journal:

In the summer of 1983 ... I remember hanging out at a Montesano, Washington Thriftway when this short-haired employee box-boy, who kind [of] looked like the guy in Air Supply, handed me a flyer that read: "The Them Festival. Tomorrow night in the parking lot behind Thriftway. Free live rock music." Monte was a place not accustomed to having live rock acts in their little village, a population of a few thousand loggers and their subservient wives. I showed up with stoner friends in a van. And there stood the Air Supply box-boy holding a Les Paul with a picture from a magazine of Kool Cigarettes on it. They played faster than I ever imagined music could be played and with more energy than my Iron Maiden records could provide. This was what I was looking for. Ah, punk rock. The other stoners were bored and kept shouting, "Play some Def Leppard." God, I hated those fucks more than ever. I came to the promised land of a grocery store parking lot and I found my special purpose.

1989 review of Nirvana's show, written by Gillian Gaar in The Rocket:

Nirvana careens from one end of the thrash spectrum to the other, giving a nod towards garage grunge, alternative noise, and hell-raising metal without swearing allegiance to any of them.

1989 journal entry, Kurt Cobain:

My lyrics are a big pile of contradictions. They're split down the middle between very sincere opinions and feelings that I have, and sarcastic, hopeful, humorous rebuttals towards cliche, bohemian ideals that have been exhausted for years. I mean to be passionate and sincere, but I also like to have fun and act like a dork.

Bob Dylan, after hearing the song "Polly" for the first time:

The kid has heart.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

During one rambunctious night of partying at Kurt's house, Hanna spray-painted "Kurt smells like teen spirit" on the bedroom wall. She was referring to a deodorant for teenage girls, so her graffiti was not without implication: Tobi used Teen Spirit, and by writing this on the wall, Kathleen was taunting Kurt about sleeping with her, implying that he was marked by her scent.

Line from the first draft of "Smells Like Teen Spirit":

Who will be the king and queen of the outcast teens?

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

On November 25 [1990], Nirvana played a show at Seattle's Off Ramp that attracted more A&R representatives than any concert in Northwest history. Representatives from Columbia, Capitol, Slash, RCA, and several other labels were bumping into each other. "The A & R guys were in full-court press," observed Sony's Damon Stewart. The sheer number of A & R reps altered the way the band was perceived in Seattle. "By that time," explained Susan Silver, "there was a competitive feeding frenzy going on around them."

The show itself was remarkable - Kurt later told a friend it was his favorite Nirvana performance. During an eighteen-song set, the band played twelve unreleased tunes. They opened with the powerful "Aneurysm," the first time it was played in public, and the crowd slam-danced and body-surfed until they broke the light bulbs on the ceiling. "I thought the show was amazing," recalled Kim Thayil of Soundgarden. "They did a cover of the Velvet Underground's 'Here She Comes Now' that I thought was brilliant. And then, when I heard 'Lithium', it stuck in my mind. Ben, our bass player, came up to me and said, 'That's the hit. That's a Top 40 hit right there.'"

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

... but the surprise came [at the show played in Seattle in April, 1991] when the band played a new composition. Kurt slurred the vocals, perhaps not even knowing all the words, but the guitar part was already in place, as was the tremendous driving drum beat. "I didn't know what they were playing," recalled Susie Tennant, DGC promotion rep, "but I knew it was amazing. I remember jumping up and down and asking everyone next to me, 'What is this song?' "

Tennant's words mimicked what Novoselic and Grohl had said just three weeks earlier, when Kurt brought a new riff into rehearsal. "It's called 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,'" Kurt announced to his bandmates, stealing the Kathleen Hanna graffiti. At the time, no one in the band knew of the deodorant, and it wasn't until the song was recorded and mastered that anyone pointed out it had the name of a product in it. When Kurt first brought the song into the studio, it ha a faster beat and less focus on the bridge. "Kurt was playing just the chorus," Krist remembered. It was Krist's idea to slow the tune down, and Grohl instinctively added a powerful beat.

At the O.K. Hotel, Kurt just hummed a couple of the verses. He was changing the lyrics to all his songs during this period, and "Teen Spirit" had about a dozen drafts. One of the final drafts featured the chorus: "A denial and from strangers / A revival and from favors / Here we are now, we're so famous / We're so stupid and from Vegas." Another began with: "Come out and play, make up the rules / Have lots of fun, we know we'll lose." Later in the same version was a line that had no rhyming couplet: "The finest day I ever had was when tomorrow never came."

September, 1991 - letter written by Cobain to a friend, the same week that "Smells Like Teen Spirit", the single, would go on sale:

I got evicted from my apartment. I'm living in my car so I have no address, but here's Krist's phone number for messages.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

Two days later [September 15, 1991], Nirvana held an "in-store" at Beehive Records. DGC expected about 50 patrons, but when over 200 kids were lined up by two in the afternoon - for an event scheduled to start at seven - it began to dawn on them that perhaps the band's popularity was greater than first thought. Kurt had decided that rather than simply sign albums and shake people's hands - the usual business of an in-store - Nirvana would play. When he saw the line at the store that afternoon, it marked the first time he was heard to utter the words "holy shit" in response to his popularity. The band retreated to the Blue Moon Tavern and began drinking, but when they looked out the window and saw dozens of fans looking in, they felt like they were in the movie A Hard Day's Night. When the show began, Beehive was so crowded that kids were standing on racks of albums and sawhorses had to be lined up in front of the store's glass windows to protect them. Nirvana played a 45-minute set - performing on the store floor - until the crowd began smashing into the band like the pep rally in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video.

Kurt was bewildered by just how big a deal it had all become. Looking into the crowd, he saw half of the Seattle music scene and dozens of his friends. It was particularly unnerving for him to see two of his ex-girlfriends - Tobi and Tracy - there, bopping away to the songs. Even these intimates were now part of an audience he felt pressure to serve. The store was selling the first copies of Nevermind the public had a chance at, and they quickly sold out. "People were ripping posters off the wall," remembered store manager Jamie Brown, "just so they'd have a piece of paper for Kurt to autograph." Kurt kept shaking his head in amazement ...

Though he had always wanted to be famous - and back when he was in school in Monte, he had promised his classmates one day he would be - the actual culmination of his dreams deeply unnerved him.

On September 24, 1991, Nevermind went on sale nationwide.

Lines began forming at record stores across the country.

Mark Kates, representative from DGC, was with Novoselic and Grohl in Boston, on that day, and they went to Newbury Comics, and passed by a record store with a line around the block. Kates said:

It was amazing. There were like a thousand kids trying to buy this record.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

It took two weeks for Nevermind to register in the Billboard Top 200, but when it did chart, the album entered at No. 144. By the second week it rose to No. 109; by the third week it was at No. 65; and after four weeks, on the second of November [1991], it was at No. 35, with a bullet. Few bands have had such a quick ascendancy to the Top 40 with their debuts. Nevermind would have registered even higher if DGC had been more prepared - due to their modest expectations, the label had initially pressed only 46,251 copies. For several weeks, the record was sold out.

Usually a quick rise on the charts is attributable to a well-orchestrated promotional effort, backed by marketing muscle, yet Nevermind achieved its early success without such grease. During its first few weeks, the record had little help from radio except in a few selected cities. When DGC's promotion staff tried to convince programmers to play "Teen Spirit", they initially met with resistance. "People at rock radio, even in Seattle, told me, 'We cant play this. I can't understand what the guy is saying,'" recalled DGC's Susie Tennant. Most stations that added the single slated it late at night, thinking it "too aggressive" to put on during the day.

Nirvana gives me goosebumps to this day, and this is years into my listening their music on a regular basis. "Rape Me", "Lithium", "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" still, after all this time, make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

A couple years ago, I asked my brother to write an experience of his down - one that he had told me many times - but which I never got sick of hearing.

Here it is.

This is what it means to have music be important to you, to have impact, and I would hope that even non-Nirvana fans could recognize that. It is a universal experience. But there was something else going on in 1991, a kind of from-the-ground-up revolution, that definitely was being managed and watched by record execs (sharks circling that they are), but there was an organic element to it, too, which made it unbelievably exciting (to anyone who had been unhappy with the way radio sounded in the late 80s). This is what my brother speaks of here.

Quelle Chanson, Non?

My fifth year of college (!) was spent abroad in Orleans, France at L’Universite d’Orleans. Up until that point, I’d lived in Rhode Island all my life. From the time I was 15 until that year my main contact with the world outside of Little Rhody was through various punk rock bands.

This is what ’83 to ’91 looked like for me…

7Seconds were from out West and toured relentlessly, singing melodic breakneck hardcore punk that thematically took on ‘important’ issues like racism, sexism, and ‘the-world-doesn’t-understand-our-mohawks-ism’.

Minor Threat were from D.C. and not as upbeat as 7Seconds. They were more attuned to the forces that lay behind the ills of society and therefore less inclined to sing passionately about being able to change it. They later morphed into Fugazi, another of my all-time favs.

The Midwest was represented by a two-headed hydra of searing punk rock, The Replacements and Husker Du. The Replacements were the ill-advised Thursday night booze-off before a big test and Husker Du was the all-night study session for a political science exam that devolves into a meth-fueled rage against some machine.

All these bands were connected to other lesser lights. Before the internet, there was DIY (Do It Yourself) punk rock. They started their own record labels, they printed their own LP’s, they drew their own posters. They toured the country in vans sleeping on the couches of their biggest fans.

Rolling Stone didn’t write about them, radio wouldn’t touch them with an any length foot pole, MTV was already in the business of creating megastars, and the majority of the public winced at anything that was LOUD. I vividly remember playing a Replacements song for a friend of mine in high school. This guy was a musician, a guitar player who liked heavy metal for Pete’s sake, but he simply COULD NOT HEAR THE SONG. All he heard was noise.

This scene would be replayed throughout the late ‘80’s for me, both in high school and in my first few years in college. I had my circle of like-minded friends. There were four of us. Tom, Justin, Joe, moi. We were occasionally a band, but more often than not we were intense spectators. To be a fan of this music meant a certain level of danger. Concerts were rag-tag affairs in which the crowd threw itself against itself as ferociously as possible. There were violent elements who were attracted to this kind of freedom and we often found ourselves rescuing punk maidens from slam-dance circles and avenging uncalled for elbows with punches. Skinheads, completely missing the point, weren’t dancing so much as they were trolling for conflict. Depending on our mood, we either gave it to them or didn’t.

Outside the shows this underground element would collide with ‘normal’ American life. The leeriness of capitalism was astounding. The feeling of ‘us vs. them’ was overwhelming. Restaurants would refuse to serve you. Store owners would deny you their products. Business owners would REFUSE YOUR MONEY. I could romanticize that whole aspect as having added some level of enjoyment, but to be honest, it just sucked. I had thousands of ‘what is the deal with THAT’ conversations with my co-conspirators. The justifications we concocted on behalf of our oppressors could never quite be pinned down into any certain set of criteria. Suffice it to say, we were, by definition, outsiders.

Did this status affect my view of said mainstream? In other words, was I as much of a douchebag to the world as the world was a douchebag to me? Of course not. I bought ‘Thriller’ like everyone else. I rocked out to Van Halen’s ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’. I lusted over Sade. I never cared for Madonna, but I didn’t SPIT at people who did. I even had some classic rock in the collection. My tastes ran towards punk rock but I could appreciate Duran Duran, perhaps the weirdest boy band ever. And Prince was from Minneapolis like my other two favorite bands. What wasn’t there to like about Prince?

But my open-mindedness was definitely not reciprocated. For some reason the music that meant the most to me was not just disliked, it was seen as a threat.

So, college happened in there somewhere. In between punk rock concerts, I did a ton of plays at the wonderful University of Rhode Island theater department. I had a series of disastrous relationships and abused alcohol. I HAD A BLAST.

I kept three majors. Theater, English, and French. My youthful enjoyment of Inspector Clouseau had improbably turned into a major. Thus everything about my French studies seemed vaguely comedic to me. The opportunity to live in France for a year was going to be a laugh riot. I’d completed 4 full years of college and only needed 9 credits to graduate. 5 classes per semester equals 15 credits, so you do the math. Over the course of my two semesters in France, I only needed to do less than one semester of work. France was in trouble, people.

That summer wasn’t exactly a victory lap of an exit. I got Lyme’s Disease and went through a horrific breakup. I left the country an emotional wreck and very unhealthy. In fact, I took the last of my antibiotics right before I got on the plane, hoping they’d done their work. I invested in an expensive CD Walkman and a small set of speakers. I brought two notebooks of CD’s with me, perhaps 20 of my favorites.

My first couple of months in France were primarily recuperative. I went to classes with my other Foreign Exchange students, I ate pleasant dinners with my host family, I went to every movie in town to get used to listening to French when I didn’t have to respond. I read in my little dorm room. I ate the same meal twice a day at the cafeteria. Slowly the language unfurled itself to me and social situations became bearable.

Two of my American friends had joined a local American football team and made some French friends. This was what I was after. Instead of hanging out with my classmates, other non-French speaking foreigners, I began hanging out primarily with French people. But America was about to reach out to me.

The campus of L’Universite d’Orleans is a 20 minute bus ride outside of the city of Orleans. We all began to spend far more time in the city and very little on campus. On one of these excursions, we stopped in at FNAC. FNAC (said as one word by the French, hilarious) was the French version of Tower Records. In a ‘holy shit I feel old’ side note, Tower recently disappeared off of the face of the planet.

I’d been in France a couple of months and I’d yet to buy any music, preferring instead to start smoking. So I wasn’t all that into going to FNAC, to be honest. I loitered, looking at French chicks.

And then a song came on over the in-store stereo system.

I AM NOT EXAGGERATING ANYTHING THAT FOLLOWS.

My memory of this moment is like one of those long unbroken movie shots…the camera starts up in the very highest corner of the store. The song begins and slowly the camera begins to swoop, capturing the silly French fashions, the funny haircuts, the multi colored crazily buttoned jackets, the pointy shoes, late ‘80’s American culture reappropriated back to Europe and funneled inappropriately into Mass Appeal. The focus of the shot narrows in on the face of an obviously American post-teen. As the music builds, the camera nears his face as his mouth opens, his toes tap, his head bounces. He is obviously AMAZED at this sound. The sound obliterates everything else.

The camera stays in close up. The song ends. The next voice you hear you have to try to imagine a little bit. Do you remember the morning rock DJ in your town? Do you remember the inherent utter hyperbole in their speech? Now cross that with Inspector Clouseau…

‘Eh, mes amis, quelle chanson, non? C’etait le Number One des Etats Unis, la nouvelle son de…”

Interjection: Did I just hear him say that was the Number One song in the United States? When I flew out of Logan Airport, the number one song was ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ by Bryan Adams. It had just replaced ‘Rush Rush’ by Paula Abdul. Those were the big hits of the summer. Think about that for a second.

Cut back to gape-mouthed post-teen…

“…la nouvelle son de Nirvana! Smells Like Teen Spirit de l’album Nevermind.”

Dropping the camera metaphor, I could barely believe what I’d been hearing. I tore over to the Rock section and found Nirvana. Sold out. I had heard of them after they put out their ‘Bleach’ album in 1989 but I hadn’t bought the album and knew very little about them. I was almost angry. That song was Number One??? What the hell was going on back there???? I turn my back for one second and all of a sudden everyone can handle loud music??? Not only can they handle it, but it is THE MOST POPULAR SONG IN THE COUNTRY????

I seriously thought about getting on a plane and flying back to the States.

Imagine you work for a political candidate, Mr. So-and-so. You’ve been tirelessly campaigning for years. You’ve poured your heart and soul into a race that people seem ambivalent about at best. By some fluke, you are on a deserted island when the actual voting takes place. Your isolation makes you wonder what ever compelled you to get involved in politics in the first place. A plane flies overhead. Instead of rescuing you, it drops a newspaper on your head. The headline says, “So-and-So Elected in a Landslide!”

I’d spent the better part of ten years catching flak for how loud and out of control my tastes were, how what I liked was actually an affront to decent American consumerism, and that such a horrific assault on art and sound was everything that was wrong with the youth of today.

Bryan Adams was considered a ROCK STAR. Huey Lewis (god love ‘im) was a ROCK STAR. Now, I have nothing against either of these guys, but…come on. ROCK STARS? I don’t think so. Rock stars scare people. David Bowie is a ROCK STAR. Mick Jagger is a ROCK STAR. They scared people! They might even have slept together just to show the world they could do whatever they wanted! ROCK STARS change how people view the world.

I have never felt such a sensation of vertigo as I did that day in that French record store. One listen of that song and I knew that NOTHING would be the same when I got back to America. Name another song that could truthfully make such a claim.

One final note. I only got 8 credits and had to take another class when I got back Stateside. C’est la vie!

Tori Amos describes a similar moment to what my brother describes when she first heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (a song which she immediately covered). She was in Iceland, touring with just her piano and herself. She had not "hit" yet. That would come the following year. There was no place for her, either, in the world of radio at that time. She was unclassifiable. Perhaps she was okay with that, who knows - but she says she was in Iceland in a little bar, and suddenly she felt goosebumps go all over her body, as she heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" start playing. What the hell was that song? What the hell was going on back in the United States that that was number one? It was a prescient moment for her. She had this strange prickly sixth sense that "it" could happen for her now. If there was a place for that in the Top 40, then there would be a place for her. (Here's an interview with Amos about that song.) She says, "'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was really like an injection. It propelled people to choose what they wanted to do with themselves and their questioning, and it gave a generation some juice."

Some Nirvana videos below the jump.

Although 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' gets most of the attention, and rightly so, my favorite Nirvana song (well, I flip flop) is "Lithium". That, and "Rape Me" (when he starts screaming "Rape Me" over and over at the end - and it's this catchy almost old-fashioned tune, but he's repeatedly screaming "Rape Me" - just unbelievable) ... but I think "Lithium" ultimately gets the gold from yours truly.

September, 1991 - letter written by Cobain to a friend, the same week that "Smells Like Teen Spirit", the single, would go on sale:

I got evicted from my apartment. I'm living in my car so I have no address, but here's Krist's phone number for messages.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

Two days later [September 15, 1991], Nirvana held an "in-store" at Beehive Records. DGC expected about 50 patrons, but when over 200 kids were lined up by two in the afternoon - for an event scheduled to start at seven - it began to dawn on them that perhaps the band's popularity was greater than first thought. Kurt had decided that rather than simply sign albums and shake people's hands - the usual business of an in-store - Nirvana would play. When he saw the line at the store that afternoon, it marked the first time he was heard to utter the words "holy shit" in response to his popularity. The band retreated to the Blue Moon Tavern and began drinking, but when they looked out the window and saw dozens of fans looking in, they felt like they were in the movie A Hard Day's Night. When the show began, Beehive was so crowded that kids were standing on racks of albums and sawhorses had to be lined up in front of the store's glass windows to protect them. Nirvana played a 45-minute set - performing on the store floor - until the crowd began smashing into the band like the pep rally in the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video.

Kurt was bewildered by just how big a deal it had all become. Looking into the crowd, he saw half of the Seattle music scene and dozens of his friends. It was particularly unnerving for him to see two of his ex-girlfriends - Tobi and Tracy - there, bopping away to the songs. Even these intimates were now part of an audience he felt pressure to serve. The store was selling the first copies of Nevermind the public had a chance at, and they quickly sold out. "People were ripping posters off the wall," remembered store manager Jamie Brown, "just so they'd have a piece of paper for Kurt to autograph." Kurt kept shaking his head in amazement ...

Though he had always wanted to be famous - and back when he was in school in Monte, he had promised his classmates one day he would be - the actual culmination of his dreams deeply unnerved him.

On September 24, 1991, Nevermind went on sale nationwide.

Lines began forming at record stores across the country.

Mark Kates, representative from DGC, was with Novoselic and Grohl in Boston, on that day, and they went to Newbury Comics, and passed by a record store with a line around the block. Kates said:

It was amazing. There were like a thousand kids trying to buy this record.

Excerpt from Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Kurt Cobain, by Charles Cross:

It took two weeks for Nevermind to register in the Billboard Top 200, but when it did chart, the album entered at No. 144. By the second week it rose to No. 109; by the third week it was at No. 65; and after four weeks, on the second of November [1991], it was at No. 35, with a bullet. Few bands have had such a quick ascendancy to the Top 40 with their debuts. Nevermind would have registered even higher if DGC had been more prepared - due to their modest expectations, the label had initially pressed only 46,251 copies. For several weeks, the record was sold out.

Usually a quick rise on the charts is attributable to a well-orchestrated promotional effort, backed by marketing muscle, yet Nevermind achieved its early success without such grease. During its first few weeks, the record had little help from radio except in a few selected cities. When DGC's promotion staff tried to convince programmers to play "Teen Spirit", they initially met with resistance. "People at rock radio, even in Seattle, told me, 'We cant play this. I can't understand what the guy is saying,'" recalled DGC's Susie Tennant. Most stations that added the single slated it late at night, thinking it "too aggressive" to put on during the day.

Nirvana gives me goosebumps to this day, and this is years into my listening their music on a regular basis. "Rape Me", "Lithium", "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and "Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge on Seattle" still, after all this time, make the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

A couple years ago, I asked my brother to write an experience of his down - one that he had told me many times - but which I never got sick of hearing.

Here it is.

This is what it means to have music be important to you, to have impact, and I would hope that even non-Nirvana fans could recognize that. It is a universal experience. But there was something else going on in 1991, a kind of from-the-ground-up revolution, that definitely was being managed and watched by record execs (sharks circling that they are), but there was an organic element to it, too, which made it unbelievably exciting (to anyone who had been unhappy with the way radio sounded in the late 80s). This is what my brother speaks of here.

Quelle Chanson, Non?

My fifth year of college (!) was spent abroad in Orleans, France at L’Universite d’Orleans. Up until that point, I’d lived in Rhode Island all my life. From the time I was 15 until that year my main contact with the world outside of Little Rhody was through various punk rock bands.

This is what ’83 to ’91 looked like for me…

7Seconds were from out West and toured relentlessly, singing melodic breakneck hardcore punk that thematically took on ‘important’ issues like racism, sexism, and ‘the-world-doesn’t-understand-our-mohawks-ism’.

Minor Threat were from D.C. and not as upbeat as 7Seconds. They were more attuned to the forces that lay behind the ills of society and therefore less inclined to sing passionately about being able to change it. They later morphed into Fugazi, another of my all-time favs.

The Midwest was represented by a two-headed hydra of searing punk rock, The Replacements and Husker Du. The Replacements were the ill-advised Thursday night booze-off before a big test and Husker Du was the all-night study session for a political science exam that devolves into a meth-fueled rage against some machine.

All these bands were connected to other lesser lights. Before the internet, there was DIY (Do It Yourself) punk rock. They started their own record labels, they printed their own LP’s, they drew their own posters. They toured the country in vans sleeping on the couches of their biggest fans.

Rolling Stone didn’t write about them, radio wouldn’t touch them with an any length foot pole, MTV was already in the business of creating megastars, and the majority of the public winced at anything that was LOUD. I vividly remember playing a Replacements song for a friend of mine in high school. This guy was a musician, a guitar player who liked heavy metal for Pete’s sake, but he simply COULD NOT HEAR THE SONG. All he heard was noise.

This scene would be replayed throughout the late ‘80’s for me, both in high school and in my first few years in college. I had my circle of like-minded friends. There were four of us. Tom, Justin, Joe, moi. We were occasionally a band, but more often than not we were intense spectators. To be a fan of this music meant a certain level of danger. Concerts were rag-tag affairs in which the crowd threw itself against itself as ferociously as possible. There were violent elements who were attracted to this kind of freedom and we often found ourselves rescuing punk maidens from slam-dance circles and avenging uncalled for elbows with punches. Skinheads, completely missing the point, weren’t dancing so much as they were trolling for conflict. Depending on our mood, we either gave it to them or didn’t.

Outside the shows this underground element would collide with ‘normal’ American life. The leeriness of capitalism was astounding. The feeling of ‘us vs. them’ was overwhelming. Restaurants would refuse to serve you. Store owners would deny you their products. Business owners would REFUSE YOUR MONEY. I could romanticize that whole aspect as having added some level of enjoyment, but to be honest, it just sucked. I had thousands of ‘what is the deal with THAT’ conversations with my co-conspirators. The justifications we concocted on behalf of our oppressors could never quite be pinned down into any certain set of criteria. Suffice it to say, we were, by definition, outsiders.

Did this status affect my view of said mainstream? In other words, was I as much of a douchebag to the world as the world was a douchebag to me? Of course not. I bought ‘Thriller’ like everyone else. I rocked out to Van Halen’s ‘Runnin’ With The Devil’. I lusted over Sade. I never cared for Madonna, but I didn’t SPIT at people who did. I even had some classic rock in the collection. My tastes ran towards punk rock but I could appreciate Duran Duran, perhaps the weirdest boy band ever. And Prince was from Minneapolis like my other two favorite bands. What wasn’t there to like about Prince?

But my open-mindedness was definitely not reciprocated. For some reason the music that meant the most to me was not just disliked, it was seen as a threat.

So, college happened in there somewhere. In between punk rock concerts, I did a ton of plays at the wonderful University of Rhode Island theater department. I had a series of disastrous relationships and abused alcohol. I HAD A BLAST.

I kept three majors. Theater, English, and French. My youthful enjoyment of Inspector Clouseau had improbably turned into a major. Thus everything about my French studies seemed vaguely comedic to me. The opportunity to live in France for a year was going to be a laugh riot. I’d completed 4 full years of college and only needed 9 credits to graduate. 5 classes per semester equals 15 credits, so you do the math. Over the course of my two semesters in France, I only needed to do less than one semester of work. France was in trouble, people.

That summer wasn’t exactly a victory lap of an exit. I got Lyme’s Disease and went through a horrific breakup. I left the country an emotional wreck and very unhealthy. In fact, I took the last of my antibiotics right before I got on the plane, hoping they’d done their work. I invested in an expensive CD Walkman and a small set of speakers. I brought two notebooks of CD’s with me, perhaps 20 of my favorites.

My first couple of months in France were primarily recuperative. I went to classes with my other Foreign Exchange students, I ate pleasant dinners with my host family, I went to every movie in town to get used to listening to French when I didn’t have to respond. I read in my little dorm room. I ate the same meal twice a day at the cafeteria. Slowly the language unfurled itself to me and social situations became bearable.

Two of my American friends had joined a local American football team and made some French friends. This was what I was after. Instead of hanging out with my classmates, other non-French speaking foreigners, I began hanging out primarily with French people. But America was about to reach out to me.

The campus of L’Universite d’Orleans is a 20 minute bus ride outside of the city of Orleans. We all began to spend far more time in the city and very little on campus. On one of these excursions, we stopped in at FNAC. FNAC (said as one word by the French, hilarious) was the French version of Tower Records. In a ‘holy shit I feel old’ side note, Tower recently disappeared off of the face of the planet.

I’d been in France a couple of months and I’d yet to buy any music, preferring instead to start smoking. So I wasn’t all that into going to FNAC, to be honest. I loitered, looking at French chicks.

And then a song came on over the in-store stereo system.

I AM NOT EXAGGERATING ANYTHING THAT FOLLOWS.

My memory of this moment is like one of those long unbroken movie shots…the camera starts up in the very highest corner of the store. The song begins and slowly the camera begins to swoop, capturing the silly French fashions, the funny haircuts, the multi colored crazily buttoned jackets, the pointy shoes, late ‘80’s American culture reappropriated back to Europe and funneled inappropriately into Mass Appeal. The focus of the shot narrows in on the face of an obviously American post-teen. As the music builds, the camera nears his face as his mouth opens, his toes tap, his head bounces. He is obviously AMAZED at this sound. The sound obliterates everything else.

The camera stays in close up. The song ends. The next voice you hear you have to try to imagine a little bit. Do you remember the morning rock DJ in your town? Do you remember the inherent utter hyperbole in their speech? Now cross that with Inspector Clouseau…

‘Eh, mes amis, quelle chanson, non? C’etait le Number One des Etats Unis, la nouvelle son de…”

Interjection: Did I just hear him say that was the Number One song in the United States? When I flew out of Logan Airport, the number one song was ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It for You’ by Bryan Adams. It had just replaced ‘Rush Rush’ by Paula Abdul. Those were the big hits of the summer. Think about that for a second.

Cut back to gape-mouthed post-teen…

“…la nouvelle son de Nirvana! Smells Like Teen Spirit de l’album Nevermind.”

Dropping the camera metaphor, I could barely believe what I’d been hearing. I tore over to the Rock section and found Nirvana. Sold out. I had heard of them after they put out their ‘Bleach’ album in 1989 but I hadn’t bought the album and knew very little about them. I was almost angry. That song was Number One??? What the hell was going on back there???? I turn my back for one second and all of a sudden everyone can handle loud music??? Not only can they handle it, but it is THE MOST POPULAR SONG IN THE COUNTRY????

I seriously thought about getting on a plane and flying back to the States.

Imagine you work for a political candidate, Mr. So-and-so. You’ve been tirelessly campaigning for years. You’ve poured your heart and soul into a race that people seem ambivalent about at best. By some fluke, you are on a deserted island when the actual voting takes place. Your isolation makes you wonder what ever compelled you to get involved in politics in the first place. A plane flies overhead. Instead of rescuing you, it drops a newspaper on your head. The headline says, “So-and-So Elected in a Landslide!”

I’d spent the better part of ten years catching flak for how loud and out of control my tastes were, how what I liked was actually an affront to decent American consumerism, and that such a horrific assault on art and sound was everything that was wrong with the youth of today.

Bryan Adams was considered a ROCK STAR. Huey Lewis (god love ‘im) was a ROCK STAR. Now, I have nothing against either of these guys, but…come on. ROCK STARS? I don’t think so. Rock stars scare people. David Bowie is a ROCK STAR. Mick Jagger is a ROCK STAR. They scared people! They might even have slept together just to show the world they could do whatever they wanted! ROCK STARS change how people view the world.

I have never felt such a sensation of vertigo as I did that day in that French record store. One listen of that song and I knew that NOTHING would be the same when I got back to America. Name another song that could truthfully make such a claim.

One final note. I only got 8 credits and had to take another class when I got back Stateside. C’est la vie!

Tori Amos describes a similar moment to what my brother describes when she first heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" (a song which she immediately covered). She was in Iceland, touring with just her piano and herself. She had not "hit" yet. That would come the following year. There was no place for her, either, in the world of radio at that time. She was unclassifiable. Perhaps she was okay with that, who knows - but she says she was in Iceland in a little bar, and suddenly she felt goosebumps go all over her body, as she heard "Smells Like Teen Spirit" start playing. What the hell was that song? What the hell was going on back in the United States that that was number one? It was a prescient moment for her. She had this strange prickly sixth sense that "it" could happen for her now. If there was a place for that in the Top 40, then there would be a place for her. (Here's an interview with Amos about that song.) She says, "'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was really like an injection. It propelled people to choose what they wanted to do with themselves and their questioning, and it gave a generation some juice."

Some Nirvana videos below the jump.

Although 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' gets most of the attention, and rightly so, my favorite Nirvana song (well, I flip flop) is "Lithium". That, and "Rape Me" (when he starts screaming "Rape Me" over and over at the end - and it's this catchy almost old-fashioned tune, but he's repeatedly screaming "Rape Me" - just unbelievable) ... but I think "Lithium" ultimately gets the gold from yours truly.

In the dentist's chair

I had a two-hour dental procedure done today. I have teeth anxiety, in general, and although I have excellent teeth (genetically, as well as actually - due to my flossing obsession) going to the dentist makes me freak. And two hours is a long time to handle such anxiety. They make you wear goggles now, psychedlic orange welder-goggles, to deal with the splashing of the jet and any other debris that might come flying out of your damn mouth during the procedure. My problem is that it is the SOUND that is awful, and often I cannot tell if I feel pain or if it is just the sound that is so horrifying. I have the best dentist who has ever lived, so she works with me, and tells me what she will do before she does it, but boy, it takes all of my Latinate-inspired Irish Catholic trance state (introibo ad altare Dei, introibo ad altare Dei, introibo ad altare Dei ... ) plus Zen Buddhism to get through it. "Is this hurting you?" she asks, as she drills away. I respond (gargled, due to the cotton and crap in my mouth), "I can't tell." Can a SOUND hurt a person? I am here to tell you yes.

But there were times when I found myself welling up with tears, thinking about pain, and what I have witnessed recently, in terms of pain endurance, and sheer fucking guts ... and then tears come. Not of pain but of loss and my own brand of guts. I can certainly put up with this, after what I have seen. But nothing comes by itself anymore. Joy comes with loss. Triumph comes with regret. This will be how it always is, from now on. That's life.

Regardless, I am very emotional right now, anyway, and maybe 45 minutes into the appointment, I got into a groove with it. Everything went slack. My limbs flopped, my eyes stayed closed, and the only thing that was tense was my left fist curled up into a ball. Everything else was in another zone entirely. The novocaine wasn't just numbing my face. It numbed everything. I went into my fantasy-land, where I can be free, (you know, leaping on a trampoline in the middle of a desert), and while the entire time I was enduring what was going on in my mouth, I was also 100% relaxed and felt like i could go to sleep at any minute. This is what training yourself in relaxation will do for you. Breathing must be low and deep, and there are "go to" places in your head that are relaxing ... use them, utilize them.

So I did. Tears rolling down my face. Limbs slack and dead. Caught, stuck, trapped, breathing.

Rolling images through my mind. An act of will. All I wanted to do is pull the cotton out of my mouth, and scream, "STOP. JUST STOP" and flee down Lexington Avenue. But I didn't. I endured. Breathing low, enduring my feeling of loss, and grief, and holding up before me images that helped.

I know I reveal myself with posts like this, and I open myself up to attack. The attacks come like clockwork. Some guy is writing a mean and contemptuous email as we speak. But I cannot worry about such things, or let it hold me back.

I am speaking my truth.

I have to believe there are those out there who understand.

Dana Stevens on Mickey Rourke

Dana Stevens has just written an article on how Mickey Rourke became "irresistible" again, and she quotes the piece I wrote about Rourke for House Next Door.

I'm very very flattered and excited. She called my piece "definitive". Well, well. That is just damn nice.

Thanks, Dana Stevens. I've been reading you for years. This is a real treat for me (and Michael, by proxy).

Go read her whole piece. Great stuff.

I am determined

I am also crazy.

Meaningless goals. Keeping me afloat.

More television commercials from "Skyward Christmas"

Keith, Dan and I enjoyed the commercials more than the movie itself.

"Skyward Christmas": some changes and observations

-- Suddenly Julie and Lisa have a younger brother who is 8 years old. It is never explained. He is not important to the script at all. We found it baffling. Why add him? He doesn't even have lines. Weird.

-- Billie Dupree is no longer played by Bette Davis. She is now played by the vaguely glamorous (in a TV kind of way) and maternal Audra Lindlay (you know - Mrs. Roeper). Keith said, "Mrs. Roeper is playing Billie?" She's fine, but it's hard to get the memory of Bette Davis out of your head. It is a completely different character now. Billie Dupree is now very emotional, and maternal towards Julie, and all warm and cuddly. You just can't imagine Bette Davis getting hysterical in the way that Audra Lindlay does. Bette is much more of a cool character. After all, you'd have to be if you were a stunt pilot in the 30s and nearly got yourself killed in the flying sequences in 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.

-- Coop (I still don't care about Coop) is no longer played by Howard Hesseman. He is now played by the craggy-faced Geoffrey Lewis (father of Juliet Lewis - they look almost exactly alike). He does a fine job, I guess - I'm just rather annoyed by the character. He's passive-aggressive, and here in Skyward Christmas, he's almost like a stunted man-boy. Howard Hesseman at least played him as a capable grownup, even with his issues (that I don't care about). But Geoffrey Lewis almost plays him like Forrest Gump. A blunt childish man-boy. The character is already annoying, so I found this interpretation even more so. And this script takes him into Freudian territory, with a long sob story involving a father and an exploded airplane ... to explain why Coop "won't fly". Rather dumb. I just don't care. Sorry, Coop! But at least THIS Coop doesn't wear vests open, displaying his greasy chest.

-- Mrs; Ward is no longer played by the blowsy harried (and effective) Marion Ross. She is now played by the glamorous platinum-blonde Bibi Besch (long long career that woman had - she was on every television show known to man). But it's a problem here because she's too actress-y-looking. Only actresses have hair like that. And - she kind of looks like Audra Lindlay. We would get confused at points. "Wait - is that her mother? Or Billie?" It didn't help that Mrs. Roeper was playing Billie in a much more maternal way than Bette Davis did ... so the two women seemed to have identical characters and energies ... not a good choice. It turned Skyward Christmas into a concerned maternal shriek-fest, the action dominated by two overly emotional mother figures, screaming into the radio microphone, "JULIE! JULIE!". Nobody was there (well, Ben Marley was) to play under the scene, to keep cool, to play against the overwhelming sentimentality of the thing.

-- Lisa Whelchel is gone, sadly, and in her place is Kelly Ann Conn, who looks like a young Uma Thurman. She does an okay job, and at least she was trying to create the same character we had gotten to know in Skyward - unlike Mrs. Roeper, who made Billie Dupree a whole other kind of person. Kelly Ann Conn is supportive, kind, and always on the phone with her boyfriend. She's also the one who sticks up for Julie when Julie either gets in trouble or her parents want to hold her back.

-- Julie now has a best friend named Kendra. I don't care about Kendra.

-- Julie herself has blossomed. She and Scott are still a couple, but there's an aspect to her character in Skyward Christmas that is really unattractive. Give Gilstrap an inch and she'll take a mile. She behaves badly. She is WILLFUL, and so many of the bad things that happen you're like, "Well, Gilstrap, what did you expect? Sorry you crashed your plane, but I don't feel sorry for you - you had no business stealing that plane anyway."

-- Scott (aka Ben Marley) now works as a short-order cook out at Billie Dupree's restaurant at the airport. He spends most of the movie in a white apron, and is just as adorable as ever - but he doesn't have that much to do here. Naturally, for me, the whole thing comes alive when he's onscreen. I mean, not REALLY, because the script is so terrible, with lines like, "He told me the angel sparkled like the star of Bethlehem" ... and Christmas references thrown in, willy-nilly. But I still find him appealing, and one of the best things is that he wears the cowboy hat through the majority of the picture, so it starts to feel like I'm watching Hud or something.

-- The good thing, though, is that Ben Marley is playing the same character as he did in Skyward. Yes, he's now an established boyfriend - as opposed to a potential boyfriend ... so that's a change, but his energy is the same: chatty, kind of practical, a little bit egotistical, but in a jokey way - all the same guy. Same character. Thank GOD. Billie Dupree was so changed, with her glossy lipstick and heavy mascara, screaming hysterically into the phone for the police to go find Julie ... that I was relieved to see that at least SOME things on this planet remain the same, and a hot teenage boy in a cowboy hat still behaves in the same manner, launching himself in and out of his truck, grinning with a sweet openness, and basically being a dreamboat.

-- There is now a side plot about a grandfather, which is the linchpin of the entire thing - and it was so bad. The grandfather was mad that the family moved to Texas, he felt like they had moved just to get away from him. (Oh, get over yourself, grandpa.) The whole Ward family sits around missing grandpa and feeling bad that he won't be there for Christmas ... and the script is very bossy: Grandpa won't get on a bus because he has a bad back. He also won't buy a train ticket for some bullheaded reason. Julie is now a private pilot, and wants to go fly to pick him up and bring him home for Christmas ... and through various tragedies, she doesn't arrive at the meeting place. Grandpa wallows in self-pity, like: "Here I am ... being blown off by my family ... AGAIN." Grandpa, seriously, stop being so passive-aggressive. Everyone is trying to make the situation work. You're a grown man. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. At one point, he trudges back up the stairs of his rooming-house, all full of self-pity - and I said to Keith and Dan, "This is a VERY passive-aggressive family. They're driving me crazy."

MRS. ROEPER as BILLIE DUPREE

SUZY GILSTRAP as JULIE ... basically stealing an airplane to go pick up her passive-aggressive Grandpa

JULIE'S NEW PARENTS

JACK ELAM as JULIE'S PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE GRANDFATHER

KELLY ANN CONN as the new LISA WHELCHEL

GEOFFREY LEWIS as COOP, THE MAN-BOY WITH OEDIPAL ISSUES

BEN MARLEY as the hottest short-order cook in Texas

Notice the random Christmas wreath, a subliminal reminder of how high the stakes are for this passive-aggressive bunch of whiners! At least Ben Marley keeps his cool! Everyone else is just freaking out at all times, screaming into CB radios, with tears glimmering in their heavily-mascara-ed eyes. And Coop is now a whimpering man-boy. Marley is our testosterone representative, and believe me, Skyward Christmas needs it!

I can't believe I just wrote this post. I am shaking with laughter.

More 1980s commercials from "Skyward Christmas"

I feel shame. Yet also longing. Because this is my heritage.

Beheaded before Skyward

I went over to Jen's last night (we lived together for nine years, there's a special bond there), and I had my South Beach snack and she made a veggie burger and we talked our heads off for many many hours. We talked about my life, her life, men, books, my book - oh, and this was funny - she had this random book on her coffee table and we could not stop laughing about it. It was called DIVORCED, BEHEADED, SURVIVED and it was a "feminist reinterpretation" of the wives of Henry VIII. But we could not take it seriously, and kept shouting, randomly, "What do you want from me? I was DIVORCED, I was BEHEADED, and I SURVIVED." I was like, "How on earth does one SURVIVE after one has been beheaded?" Jen would burst in from another room and declaim, "DIVORCED! BEHEADED! SURVIVED!"

I filled her in on the whole Skyward drama, and we both started laughing so hard that it was like I had been punched in the stomach. It was one of THOSE laughs. Tears were streaming down my face, Jen was cackling - we were looking through my screen shots, and HOWLING.

In the middle of all of this, my blackberry buzzed with an email. Throughout the night, our respective blackberries kept buzzing, so we would keep chatting, but check emails as well. Obnoxious to some, normal to us. I glanced down at the email I just received - it was from my cousin Mike - who has now, in a matter of 48 hours - gotten me one-degree away from Ben Marley. I was three degrees of separation on Monday, now I am one degree on Thursday. This is what happens when you "know" people. You ask one question: "Do you know Ben Marley?" and suddenly emails are flying back and forth, the posts I've written are being passed on to the man in question, and things begin to happen. I adore it. Stranger things have happened. Dean Stockwell hugged me last year (story at 11). I WILLED that to happen. And Stevie helped make it possible. I am now "friends" with Hedye Tehrani, one of my favorite actresses, on Facebook. She just "friended" me! What strange country, friends, is this? But since Jen and I had just been HOWLING about Skyward, crying off our mascara, it was even funnier. "Holy shit, Jen, listen to this ..." I read the email out. We were dying!

Jen's new man came over, and found us in this rather hilarious mascara-streaked state. He was nice and relaxed about it, nice guy. Jen said at one point, casually, to him, "Have you, by any chance, seen Skyward?"

We started guffawing. He had NOT seen Skyward, but he had seen all of the ABC Afterschool Specials, and we had a good reminiscing chat about all of them. They're all on DVD now, and I really need to reacquaint myself with them. Especially Lance Kerwin.

I realize that Lance Kerwin is now doing a U-turn for Jesus full time (look him up, you'll see what I mean - it seems like he is doing well, and that makes me strangely happy) -but I will always love him for his quivering sensitivity and victimized status in those ABC Afterschool Specials. The bowl cut and the sweet demeanor was not quite the over-the-moon effect of Ben Marley in his cowboy hat - but I saw the ABC Afterschool Specials when I was 10 and 11 and just a CHILD. By the time I was 12, I was ready for the glimpse of MAN-hood provided by Ben Marley in Skyward. It was like my response to Han Solo in Empire Strikes Back, seen at around the same time as Skyward. They came out the same year. A mere year before, I had been all pre-teen aching for the bowlcut sensitive underdog, and suddenly, a year later - through Ben Marley and Harrison Ford - I knew what the future was. Swaggering MEN. Not BOYS.

I didn't get to bed until three in the morning last night, which is so unlike me, but the whole night had been spent curled up on Jen's awesome vintage couch, having deep and emotional conversations, interspersed with guffaws of laughter about Skyward and my cousin Mike's emails.

It felt like at any moment there would be a knock at the door, and it would be Ben Marley standing there, saying, "Hi ... I hear you've been writing about me?"

I got an email from Mike at one point saying:

a) do you know who his father is?
b) GO TO BED

hahahahahaha

Of course I know who his father is. Look who I have had on my wall for almost 20 years.

But yes. I obeyed Mike. Time for bed. Do not resist the command of an O'Malley man. They have your best interests at heart.

An awesome thing about my DVD of "Skyward Christmas":

It's better than most of the acting (except for Ben Marley) and certainly better than the script.

It is that there are 1980s-era commercials included. Keith, Dan and I were GOBSMACKED watching this. It is amazing to see how our entire culture, it feels like, has changed. It was like ruminating over ancient hieroglyphics or something - and this is from my lifetime! Pretty scary.

Here is an advertisement for an upcoming night of television on the same network.

Glorious. I so want to go back in time and see all of these shows.

Barbara Mandrell ...

then:

Doug Henning's world of magic ...

then:

an expose about Rock Hudson's "close call" with heart surgery

Sneak peek of "Skyward Christmas"

It's really the most important aspect of the film, criminally under-used.

The boat cemetery

Ryszard Kapucinski in his book Imperium writes:

Central Asia is deserts and more deserts, fields of brown weathered stones, the heat from the sun above, sandstorms.

But the world of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is different. Arable fields stretch along both rivers, abundant orchards; everywhere profusions of nut trees, apple trees, fig trees, palms, pomegranates...

The waters of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, as well as of their tributaries, allowed famous cities to arise and to flourish --Bukhara and Khiva, Kokand and Samarqand. This way, too, passed the loaded-down caravans of the Silk Road, thanks to which the markets of Venice and Florence, Nice and Seville, acquired their importance and color.

Brezhnev decided to turn all of Uzbekistan into one large cotton plantation. He wanted Uzbekistan to be a showpiece of Bolshevik ingenuity. Environmentalists are rightly angry about what has happened to the Aral Sea, and have spearheaded literally every plan to save it, but to blame it on global warming is not just incorrect, it's a-historical. It's like blaming the famine in the Ukraine in 1933 or the famine in Ireland in 1847 on a couple of years of bad crops. Yes, the powers that be may want you to think that, but those were man-made disasters, conscious and conniving. While perhaps (perhaps! I am not prepared to go that far!) the destruction of the Aral Sea was an unintended consequence of moronic agricultural planning, I do not let the powers-that-be off the hook.

Communism treated nature and the natural world as just another element of production, to be controlled, dominated, manipulated. So that is what Brezhnev set out to do in Uzbekistan: no longer would the people along the two rivers grow fruit, and figs and apples (things they could actually survive on). All of their orchards and green fields were appropriated by the Soviet state, and planted with cotton. The repercussions of this ill-thought-out move were (and are) apocalyptically disastrous.

Uzbekistan is not a natural for cotton plantations. It's a desert. The people along the two great rivers lived in careful equilibrium with nature, growing things to support their communities, carefully handling the water supply, carefully monitoring how many people lived in each oasis ... because oases are not meant to overflow with people. One too many camels, and suddenly your water supply dries up. Brezhnev bulldozed through Uzbekistan, upending all of the orchards, all of the fields, and forced everybody to plant cotton.

Kapuscinski describes this process:

First, bulldozers were brought in from all over the Imperium. The hot metal cockroaches crawled over the sandy plains. Starting from the banks of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, the steel rams began to carve deep ditches and fissures in the sand, into which the water from the rivers was then channeled. They had to dig an endless number of these ditches (and they are still digging them now), considering that the combined length of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya is 3,662 kilometers! Then along those canals, the kolkhoz workers had to plant cotton. At first they planted upon desert barrens, but because there was still not enough of the white fibers, the authorities ordered that arable fields, gardens, and orchards be given over to cotton. It is easy to imagine the despair and terror of peasants from whom one takes the only thing they have -- the currant bush, the apricot tree, the scrap of shade. In villages, cotton was now planted right up against the cottage windows, in former flower beds, in courtyards, near fences. It was planted instead of tomatoes and onions, instead of olives and watermelons. Over these villages drowning in cotton, planes and helicopters flew, dumping on them avalanches of artificial fertilizers, clouds of poisonous pesticides. People choked, they had nothing to breathe, went blind.

The rivers Amu and Syr Darya had been doing their thing for millennia. By diverting the waters of the rivers, by imposing an artificial restriction on them, the delicate balance of the desert land changed ... and it changed rapidly.

Kapuscinski:

The fields of rice and wheat, the green meadows, the stands of kale and paprika, the plantations of peaches and lemons, all vanished. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, cotton grew. Its fields, its white drowsy sea, stretched for tens, hundreds of kilometers.

Grigory Reznichenko wrote a book in 1989 called The Aral Catastrophe, and he elaborates:

Around 20 million people live in the countryside in Central Asia. Two-thirds work with cotton and really with nothing else besides. Farmers, gardeners, orchard keepers have all had to change profession -- they are now employed as laborers on cotton plantations. Coercion and fear compel them to work with cotton. Coercion and fear, for it surely isn't money. One earns pennies harvesting cotton. And the work is tiring and monotonous. To fulfill his daily quota, a man mustbend down ten to twelve thousand times. An atrocious, forty-degree heat [Celsius], air that stinks of virulent chemicals, aridity, and constant thirst destroy the human being, especially women and children ... people pay with their health and their life for the personal well-being and power of a handful of demoralized careerists.

The "careerists" in Moscow would agree upon, beforehand, the amount of the coming cotton harvest. It was always a number which was completely unattainable. Then when the smaller harvest came in, Brezhnev and his nitwits would inflate the numbers and spread positive propaganda about the miracle they had worked in Uzbekistan. The "cotton mafia" got rich off of the completely imaginary massive cotton harvests. And the people working the cotton starved, because no longer could they feed themselves with their own orchards.

But all of this is pretty much just the normal tragedy (with different details) of all of the republics in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The Communists raped the land, enslaved the citizens, and closed the borders. This is all par for the course.

What makes the tragedy in Uzbekistan stand out is the Aral Sea, the once-beautiful and vital Aral Sea, a sea which, in a matter of 25 years, has dried up off the face of the earth, creating global ecological issues.

The Soviets over-taxed the Amu and Syr Darya rivers, they cut tributaries into the desert, to divert the water where they wanted it to go. And almost immediately (the balance of nature is so delicate in any desert), both of the ancient and great rivers began to dry up, and shrink to nothing. Amu and Syr are what feed the Aral Sea. So the drying up of the two rivers had massive consequences for the Aral Sea, which began to shrink. It shrank so rapidly that if you look at satellite photographs of the sea, from 1967 to 1997, you see it almost completely disappear.

Kapuscinski again:

The waters of the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, instead of flowing into the Aral Sea, were, according to man's will, sqandered along the way, spilled over fields, over unending deserts, along an immense distance of more than 3000 kilometers. For this reason, the calm and broad currents of both powerful rivers -- the only source of life in this part of the world -- instead of swelling and intensifying in the course of their journey (as is customary in nature), began to decline, to shrink, to get narrower and shallower, until, short of reaching the sea, they were transformed into salty, poisoned, and muddy pools, into spongy and foul-smelling ditches, into treacherous puddles of duckweed, finally sinking below ground and disappearing from view.

So the rivers shrink. Because the river shrinks, the sea disappears. And then there's the issue with salt. Here's some info about what the Aral Sea once was (I got this from the Aral Sea homepage):

The salt deposits rising to the surface because of the shrinking of the rivers destroyed the land, and because of all the windstorms and duststorms common to deserts, these salt deposits also ruined the atmosphere. This was exacerbated by all of the pesticides which had soaked into the land over the decades, so the pesticides are stirred up by the windstorms, and spread, ruining the air for miles and miles around.

Kapuscinski on the salt problem:

It is a known fact that a dozen or so meters below the surface of every desert lie large deposits of concentrated salt. If water is conducted to it, the salt, together with the moisture, will rise to the surface. And that is exactly what happened now in Uzbekistan. The concealed, crushed, deeply secreted salt started to move upward, to regain its liberty. The golden land of Uzbekistan, which was first cloaked in the white of cotton, was now glazed over with a lustrous crust of white salt.

But one doesn't have to study the ground. When the wind blows, one can taste the salt on one's lips, on one's tongue. It stings the eyes.

More:

The Aral Sea and its tributaries provided sustenance for 3 million people. But the fate of this sea and its two rivers also impinges on the situation of all the inhabitants of this region, of whom there are 32 million.

The Soviet authorities have long worried about how to reverse the disaster -- the destruction of the Aral Sea, the ruination of half of Central Asia. It is after all well known that the unprecedented increase in cotton cultivation has led to a tragic shortage of water, a shortage that is destroying a large part of the world (a fact which to this day continues to be concealed).

Then, of course, the USSR collapsed. Although the USSR was an ungainly bohemoth, an "evil empire", and although this whole mess was their fault in the first place, they still were the only ones aware enough of the problem to try to find solutions. Granted their "solutions" were insane: bombing glaciers in the Tienshan and Pamir mountains, for example, so that the run-off would flood the land again was one of their bright ideas, or redirecting the rivers of Siberia (thousands and thousands and thousands of miles away) to come down into Uzbekistan, so that Brezhnev's crazy dream of a Land of Cotton could be realized. This, if they had followed through with it, of course would have meant the ruination of Siberia.

Once the USSR collapsed, Uzbekistan was completely abandoned. All of the Russians who knew how to do anything fled the country, leaving it in the hands of a down-trodden uneducated populace, a populace who still remembers the sea, but who now live in a stinking polluted desert, with nowhere to go. And so the Aral Sea has died.

Environmental groups all over the world have stepped in, to try to save the situation. The Soviets had enslaved the Uzbeks and had given them no sense of agency in their destinies, they just were forced to harvest the cotton imposed on them, and tried to live their lives, while the environmental disaster in their own country intensified almost on a minute to minute basis. People die much earlier there. People get weird unclassifiable diseases. People are poisoned.

It's a lost cause.

So the Aral Sea is shrinking, and a process of "desertification" is taking place. The sands growing more and more insistent, taking over more and more acreage ... there are photos of once flourishing fishing villages overrun by giant dunes.

Kapuscinski, on his travels, visits Muynak, which was, literally only a couple of years ago, a fishing port on the Aral Sea.

[Muynak] now stands in the middle of the desert; the sea is 60 to 80 kilometers from here. Near the settlement, where the port once was, rusting carcasses of trawlers, cutters, barges, and other boats lie in the sand. Despite the fact that the paint is peeling and falling off, one can still make out some of the names: Estonia, Dagestan, Nahodka. The place is deserted; there is no one around ...

It is a sad settlement -- Muynak. It once lay in the spot where the beautiful life-giving Amu Darya flowed into the Aral Sea, an extraordinary sea in the heart of a great desert. Today, there is neither river nor sea. In the town the vegetation has withered; the dogs have died. Half the residents have left, and those who stayed have nowhere else to go. They do not work, for they are fishermen, and there are no fish. Of the Aral Sea's 178 species of fish and frutti di mare, only 38 remain. Besides, the sea is far away; how is one to get there across the desert? If there is no strong wind, people sit on little benches, leaning against the shabby and crumbling walls of their decrepit houses. It is impossible to ascertain how they make a living; it is difficult to communicate with them about anything. They are Karakalpaks -- they barely speak any Russian, and the children no longer speak Russian at all. If one smiles at the people sitting against the walls, they become even more gloomy, and the women veil their faces. Indeed, a smile does look false here, and laughter would sound like the screech of a rusty nail against glass.

Children play in the sand with a plastic bucket that's missing a handle. Ragged, skinny, sad. I did not visit the nearest hospital, which is on the other side of the sea, but in Tashkent I was shown a film made in that hospital. For every 1000 children born, 100 die immediately. And those that survive? The doctor picks up in his hands little white skeletons, still alive, although it is difficult to tell.

One of my goals in life is to someday see the "boat cemetery" in the now-dried-up Aral Sea. It would be a terrible trip, haunting and sad (I am haunted by the big sign with a fish on it, from where a fish market used to be - now surrounded by a huge desert) ... but it is something I have been longing to see for about ten years now, maybe more.

Sometimes, in quieter moments, I suddenly think about those boats sitting in the desert all the way across the world. They're there right now, rusting and being eaten up by the rapidly-spreading dunes.

It's something I think it is important to acknowledge, first of all ... but it's also something I just really want to see.

Flat and stretchy

My favorite kind of Hope moment. It is so full of pleasure and self-regard.

Categories

Doing a little restructuring here, to make it easier for people to find content. At some point I need to invest in a reorganization again, it's been years since my last one, but I just can't do it right now. I need someone ELSE to do it, and it's going to be a big job - I know what I want and I am sure it is possible, but I need to sit down with some nerd and have them figure it out.

In the meantime, I've created some new categories - again, to make it easier to find stuff.

Here they are:

Friends - all content having to do with my awesome most awesome friends ... I wanted to pull that content out, and be able to highlight it easier - than having it looped under another category

Family - I had been looping the "family" content (as well as the "friends" content) all under the "My Life" category - but it was just getting out of hand. Too much stuff in there, a big content dump, impossible to locate really anything. I decided to break it up. I am happy with the result. It was even difficult for me to find content - not so much now.

Oh, and naturally, because it just seems to be going that way on my site:

Ben Marley now has his own category. I began to laugh AS I created it.

To quote his character in Apollo 13, "Yeah, baby."

Yes, I have categories for the Founding Fathers and Stalin. You know, I'm a serious person with serious interests. And so Ben Marley joins the ranks ... with Alexander Hamilton and James Joyce, and I honestly see no problem.

O'Malley women

Jean and Pat are now sitting poolside on a Caribbean island, Jean glorious and ridiculous in a "pregnancy tankini" (I am waiting for the pics to come in), reading her fantasy baseball book, and planning for "her" upcoming season. "I can't wait for baseball!" said Jean.

It makes me happy to think of Jean and Pat, relaxed and baking in the sun, on their delayed honeymoon. We all deserve a break.

Just two days ago, I took a walk with my mother and sister, along the sea wall in Narragansett.

Meaningless goals update.

Google results. As of this morning, for the first time, page one.

February 18, 1967

On December 28, he offered her a ride home from the record hop even though he had no car.

When she got home that night, she told her older sister Anne that she had met a boy at the record hop. The boy had been telling her jokes all night, making her laugh. The girl told her older sister, "He's so funny, he reminds me of Jerry Lewis." The girl loved Jerry Lewis. It was a huge compliment. She also mentioned how when the boy talked to you, sometimes he looked at your forehead as opposed to right in your eyes.

Eight years later, on a cold February 18, 1967, they were wed.

Ben Marley in "Apollo 13"

In Apollo 13, Ben Marley plays John Young, an astronaut on the alternate team for the Apollo 13 mission, with Kevin Bacon (before Bacon gets bumped up to the main team when it is feared that Sinise will get the measles).

Now the funniest thing is: and I probably won't be believed, but whatever: I had no idea that this guy was Ben Marley, who was such a dreamboat to me as a 12 year old girl when he appeared in Skyward - but he (and his part) made an impression on me in Apollo 13. He is memorable. The movie isn't a star vehicle, although there are stars in it, obviously. It's an ensemble, one of the most special things about it. Ed Harris is important, but so is the little guy played by Ron Howard's brother. Tom Hanks is important, but so are all the Mission Control guys with their slide rules. It's a group effort to get those guys home, and it takes all hands on deck - the heroes and the geeks. The geeks ARE the heroes. What other movie has people doing arithmetic sums as a nail-biting sequence? So there's that aspect to the movie, where even the big stars kind of blend into the ensemble (my favorite kind of movie, by the way).

I'm not a big Ron Howard fan, and Beautiful Mind made me angry. It would take a hell of a lot for me to get over it and say I was a Ron Howard fan (Skyward notwithstanding) ... but Apollo 13 is a true high-point, I think, and one of my favorite all-time movies.

I remember seeing it in the theatre in Chicago with Jim, and there's the first scene - with everyone gathered at the Lovell house to watch the moon-landing. And there was that one long panning shot of everyone gathered in the living room (and yes, Ben Marley is there!), watching Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. It's not the footage on the television that is the moving part about that scene - it is the faces of everyone watching. Goosebumps. I heard Jim start to cry next to me. The scene then ended and Jim glanced at me and whispered, "This is going to be a long movie." We howled. 30 seconds in and we're weeping.

But BACK TO BEN MARLEY.

I've seen the movie so many times now that I admit I have it memorized and all of the bit parts are just as engrained in my memory as Ed Harris' best lines. Everyone NAILS their roles. There are no unimportant parts.

And Ben Marley has two moments that are among my favorite in the movie - again, having no idea even who he WAS when I first saw it.

The first moment I love is after the scene where Sinise, Hanks and Paxton are all in the simulator. This is before they've gone into space, obviously. Their team has been bumped up and they are racing to finish preparing before launch. It's a tense scene with Sinise as the pilot, trying to line up the whosiwhatsit with the thingamajig. He makes it without burning them all up - but as they come out, and as the alternate team (with Marley and Bacon) come up the steps for their training session, Sinise stops everything and says, "My rate of entry was still a little too steep ... I really think we need to try it again." The alternate team stops in their tracks, and kind of glance back at the head honcho, like ... okay, what do we do now? Someone says, "We really don't have time ... launch is tomorrow ..." Sinise is unmoved and says, "I don't feel good about it. I think we need to try it again." There's a pause and then Hanks, the commander, says, "Well, let's get it RIGHT" - and the top team goes to go back into the simulator, and the alternates (you know, Ben Marley, Kevin Bacon, et al), all suited up with nowhere to go, head back down the steps. There is a breezy macho Right Stuff exchange between the two teams - the alternates are all kind of laughing, like, "Fine, fine, we'll go back to second place" - and in the middle of that exchange, one of the astronauts says, laughing and nodding in a macho blase way, "Yeah, baby."

That man is Ben Marley. The scene fades out on his line.

It stuck with me.

Now I am not sure if astronauts in 1970 said "Yeah, baby", I am not sure if that was in the vernacular at that time, so the moment always struck me as a little anachronistic, but also charming and evocative of the entire relationship here between the two teams. It adds reality to what is not expressed in the script. That NEEDS to be in place, we need to "get" how the two teams operate, and how the system works ... and to me, that good-natured yet still kind of competitive, "Yeah baby" does it. I imagine that's why Howard kept it in. It is clearly improvised. Anachronistic or no, it acts as a shorthand, letting us, the audience know, how the whole thing works.

So that moment is one I love in this movie full of great moments.

Oh, and let me backtrack a bit.

When I watched Skyward with Keith and Dan, we all were swooning over Ben Marley's hot ass and other very important aspects of that film. Keith went to the computer afterwards and IMDB'd Ben Marley. Keith said, "Oh! He was in Apollo 13!"

Having seen that movie so many times, I stopped in my tracks, racking my brains to figure out which one he was - one of the mission control guys? There's that hot redhead who has one of my favorite lines in the film, which got one of the biggest laughs in the entire picture, "Okay, Jim. Copy that." He was hot enough that it made me wonder if THAT was Ben Marley - but then - suddenly - I knew exactly who Ben Marley was - and that HE was the one who has the "Yeah, baby" moment that I love so much. I could see his face. Mentally, I compared it with the hottie in Skyward. Of course. Same guy. And then his whole part came rushing back to me: dude is all through Apollo 13, he's in almost every scene.

Well, naturally, I raced home from seeing Skyward and Skyward Christmas (which I'll get to) and watched Apollo 13, ONLY looking for Ben Marley. It is quite a bizarre experience and I highly recommend it. There are huge crowd scenes in Mission Control, where normally I would be looking at Ed Harris or Gary Sinise, and this time I was scanning frantically for Ben Marley. What is he doing?? And whatever he was doing was always organic and right for the scene. This is true of the entire ensemble of that picture. Very few of them have closeups ... but without them? The movie flat out would not work.

The other moment of Ben Marley's that I love - that I loved before I knew it was Ben Marley, I really feel the need to make that clear - is after the explosion. Everyone at Mission Control is freaking out - and groups start to splinter off, to 'work the problem'. There's a scene in a classroom, where everyone is talking and freaking out and Ed Harris walks in and everyone kind of settles down. They begin to discuss what to do, with Ed Harris leading the conversation. Everyone has their say. I liked that aspect of the Mission Control scenes, and Gene Kranz himself has said that the movie really captured that aspect of what it was like. Yes, these guys are all (mainly) military men, used to a chain of command - but what Apollo 13 shows is that everyone has their say, authority was not just blindly followed - some ideas were taken on, others rejected - but you really get the sense that although Ed Harris is clearly in charge, this is not a top-down "do what I say" organization. He makes some comment about what they need to do, and a harassed guy explodes, "That is NOT the argument - we do a direct abort and bring them home NOW." He is not punished for insubordination or anything like that. The entire thing is a discussion, an urgent brainstorming session.

Actually, there are two moments looped into one here - and I just love how Ben Marley plays it. Ed Harris takes charge of the room, after the big discussion, and then says, in general - to everyone - "Get everyone in here who knows anything about that ship" -and suddenly, Marley, who has been leaning over and murmuring something to someone else, straightens up - and walks out of the room. It's like he's doing 3 things at once. He's involved in the problem, he's concerned, and what he is playing in the moment of leaning over to a colleague is probably saying, "We gotta get Ken Mattingly in that simulator" and in the same moment, Harris says, "Get everyone in here you know ..." A moment of synchronicity, of shared action, unspoken - that's one of the best things about this movie. A more emotional movie you would be hard-pressed to find, but it doesn't dwell on emotion, it is all about the DOING. Marley is leaning over, talking to his colleague, and is ALSO listening to Ed Harris. You know how you can hear two things at the same time in really stressful high-stakes moments - and so, at some unseen cue, he straightens up and walks out of the room. Having seen the movie a million times, it is so clear - he's off to get Ken Mattingly.

I just love that moment.

As I mentioned in my post on Skyward with the dance scene, Howard adds in a couple of shots in that scene that up the ante (people looking on, Lisa Whelchel looking on, Ben Marley's boot acting as a propeller) ... these things make the scene, which is already good, even better. Howard is at his best in those moments, I think. He does not let his sentimentality get the better of him (which is not the case in other moments in his films, when he cannot leave well enough alone).

The men in Apollo 13 are not introspective men. These are men of action. These are men of initiative. They are paid and rewarded for being able to figure shit out on their own, and the brief shot of the guy getting up and leaving the room - without asking permission, without running it by Ed Harris - just leaving - tells us all we need to know. It's why he's an astronaut good enough to be an alternate. You don't get to that level without showing you can do shit on your own and make on-the-spot choices.

I don't know how many times I've seen the movie, but I always look forward to that moment - him bolting from the room.

This loops in to the next moment of his that I love.

Gary Sinise, as Ken Mattingly, has been wallowing in a tarpit of self-pity, drinking beer and watching television with the phone off the hook, because he's so bummed he was bumped from the mission. So obviously Ben Marley has been trying to contact him via phone for 45 minutes, an hour - before finally Marley can't wait, drives to the motel (it looks like) where Mattingly is staying and has the landlord let him into the room. Sinise is passed out in the bed when Marley comes busting in, turning on the lights.

Sinise is groggy, looks up blurrily at Ben Marley and Marley says (my next favorite part of his in the movie), "Good. You're not dead."

It's a very funny moment, because it's not played sentimentally, or with any emotion. Marley is more pissed than anything. He has needed to find Mattingly, he has been ringing the room nonstop, but the phone is off the hook. Mattingly has made all of this WAY more difficult than it needs to be, and Marley has had to waste the time to DRIVE to the motel in this high-pressure situation and get someone to let him in.

"Good. You're not dead," he says flatly to Sinise, and then barges through the room, turning on all the lights, going into the bathroom to get Sinise's stuff ready for him, clothes, razor, whatever he needs.

Sinise is coming out of sleep, and groggy, he has no idea what has happened ... and so it is up to Ben Marley to fill Sinise in, but also to re-cap for us, the audience, what is going on. He's got a big monologue. Some of it is said as we see him rustling through the bathroom - but most of it is heard in voiceover, with a big ol' closeup on Sinise's face, as he begins to realize what has happened.

Ben Marley as John Young, the astronaut:

"We gotta get you into the simulator. We've got a ship to land. There's been an explosion. Oxygen tanks are gone, two fuel cells gone, command module's shut down. The crew's fine so far. Trying to keep them alive in the lem. We're going to have to shut that down too. We got a lot of people working the numbers on this one, Ken. Nobody's too sure how much power we're gonna have when we hit re-entry. The command module's gonna be frozen up pretty good by then."

Again, this is not a flashy part. There are no flashy parts in a movie such as this one. You just show up, embody your character, and do your best to fit in to the whole. You can't outshine the others, because that would tip the balance of the film, but when it is your moment to, you know, shine - that's what you do. Nail it. That's why you're cast. Like the pudgy little guy who has one big scene, building the filter for the CO2 cartridges, making a square peg fit into a round hole. That guy maybe has three lines, but my God, who doesn't remember him? His look of dismay when Paxton tears the bag, and then he says, harassed, "They should have one more up there ..." He's MARVELOUS - but does anyone know his name? It doesn't matter. Whoever he is, he shows up, does his part, and is an integral part of the whole.

Ben Marley, with his scene here in the motel room with Sinise, is an integral part of the whole. He re-caps the crisis for us, but he does it in a way that does not feel like boring exposition. He has made it seem organic.

Then comes the whole Loren Dean section of the film. He doesn't make his entrance until more than halfway through. He is the one who suggests to Ed Harris that the issue is really POWER, not time or the engine or oxygen, only power. Everything hinges on the power in that lem, and it needs to be maximized for re-entry. This is why Gary Sinise needs to get into the simulator and work the sequencing, to try to save as much power as they can.

It's almost like there are two movies here: Pre-Loren Dean, During-Loren Dean. Once he takes over, his plot-line becomes the secondary path of the film, NOT the ones with the dudes in Mission Control. In the second half of the film, we have the three guys up in the lem, and Loren Dean, Gary Sinise and Ben Marley trying to figure out the power issue in the simulator.

Ben Marley fans (all of you new fans out there) won't want to miss it!

Gary Sinise and Ben Marley enter the simulator area, and Loren Dean breathes a sigh of relief that Sinise is finally there. "We gotta get you in there," he says to Sinise. Marley is the third person in the scene. He is not peripheral. He is essential. Part of the team. As Sinise goes to get into the simulator, it's like Roy Scheider saying, "Show time!" in All That Jazz. Loren Dean has already rushed off to the office, and Ben Marley calls out to the crowd of technicians:

"Let's get this show on the road. Put 'im in space, fellas."

Yes, SIR.

Frankly, you can put ME in space any time you like.

I remember Skyward. I was THERE, my friend.

Then comes the tense ongoing sequence of trying to get the order right of powering down so that they don't over-amp-age, watt-age, whatever. Gary Sinise is in the simulator, Loren Dean and Ben Marley are in the office, with little headsets on, and with each mistake, things get tenser. Time is running out. There isn't time to dick around - they MUST figure it out. Now Loren Dean is obviously running these scenes, but Ben Marley's quiet presence, beside him, full of thought and urgency and support, is essential to the sequence working, for an audience. If it had just been Loren Dean and Sinise in the simulator- it wouldn't have worked as well. Ron Howard has an uncanny sense of things like that. It has to be THREE in those scenes, not just TWO. Because THREE brings in the waiting outer world, THREE adds to the sense of urgency. If it was just two, then the audience might be lulled into the sense that working out the power sequence is just an intellectual exercise. But no, having the third there - Marley - another astronaut - reminds us of the stakes. Loren Dean is the brainiac. He lives in isolation, going over his numbers by himself. Sinise is the rejected astronaut, not at all involved (except peripherally) in the mission. But having Marley in those scenes, hovering, concerned, quiet - brings all of those waiting guys in Mission Control, brings Ed Harris into those scenes.

Essential.

A couple moments I noticed in my last viewing that I adore beyond measure:

They finally get the sequencing right. It's incredibly tense. Loren Dean and Marley glance at each other, almost afraid to move, then Dean says, "I think we got it ..." and CUT.

Next we see a car screaming up to the Mission Control building door, and out of the car jump Loren Dean, Gary Sinise and Ben Marley. Gary Sinise is busy putting on his jacket, he's got on Ray Banz, he's basically hot as shit ... he's clutching papers in his hand, with the sequence on it ... Ben Marley jumps out of the car and the three men dash to the door. A security guard kind of steps forward, about to ask them, "Who are you guys?" and Marley - firmly, yet somehow gently - moves the man out of the way - so they can blow by. GREAT MOMENT. I had never noticed it before, but this last time of course I had to watch it five times. Loren Dean and Sinise are charging forward - the security guard makes a move - and suddenly Marley is there, moving the dude physically out of the way. HAWT! The camera follows the three men as they barrel into the building, with people hustling to get out of the way, knowing that these three are IT ... get out of the damn way, these are the men we have been waiting for ...

The three men burst into the Mission Control main room, and you can hear someone say, "Ken's here ..." and Sinise is there, in all his star power as an actor, moving into the room, grabbing a headset - but Loren Dean and Ben Marley are right at his side. The team who have, after all this time, "figured it out".

The rest of the film has Gary Sinise gently talking the exhausted and sick crew up in space through the sequence. Throughout, you can see Ben Marley in the background, deep in thought - almost willing himself up into the wounded ship, to try to MAKE these guys get home safe. Isn't that just what you would do if you were him? Wouldn't you just want to be up there with them? That's what he's playing, all by himself, in the background. The other guys in the scene are the engineers and technicians ... but he is actually an astronaut, and he has the quiet crazy energy of a guy who knows what it's like, and is trying to keep CALM, like he would do if he were in the pilot seat.

Seriously, Ben Marley fans - you want to have some fun? Watch the final 25 minutes of Apollo 13 and just focus on Ben Marley, and what he is doing during those huge crowd scenes. You want to see why I love actors so much? Watch HIM during Apollo 13, not the stars. Movies like Apollo 13 would not be possible without actors like him in the smaller parts. Everything he does adds to the general vibe Howard needs in every moment, everything he does is part of the STORY. It has no SELF in it. Of course there are stars, and they deserve their big fat closeups, they're stars after all - but none of it would be possible without everyone AROUND them, doing their jobs, with no glory, and setting up the star to be, well, a star. It's why I count Thomas Mitchell as one of my favorite actors of all time. Or Claude Rains. These people were not leading men, they did not carry pictures - but imagine Notorious without the Claude Rains character. Imagine It's a Wonderful Life or Only Angels Have Wings without Thomas Mitchell. NOT. POSSIBLE. It is those actors, the second-tier actors, who REALLY make the movies we love possible. Stars are awesome, I love me some stars, but they do not act in a vacuum. They need their support players to be as committed, as IN the world they are trying to create, as they are.

That's what's going on with Ben Marley in those last scenes. And not just him - but all the Mission Control guys. Yes, when Ed Harris breaks down at the very end, it's an amazing moment - one of my favorites in a career of great moments. But without all those little guys - Ron Howard's brother, the pudgy dude who made the filter, and Ben Marley - he would be acting in a vacuum.

So kudos, Mr. Marley. I know actors like you are never congratulated for the work you do in movies like Apollo 13. You are not nominated for Oscars. You are not remembered by name. But believe me, you are noticed. You are valued. None of it would be possible if people like you were not AS committed to your job as the stars of the film.

Great job.

CREDITS

"What network do we want?" calls out Ben Marley to the group in the first scene

Ben Marley is leaning over the television, his body in the foreground.

Hmmm. That shot reminds me a little bit of something ... I can't quite place it ... where have I seen it before .... let me think ...

A reference thrown to the Skyward fans? A closeup blurry shot of Ben Marley's body? A message from Ron Howard to us, his fans from 1980? Why not?

What I call the "Yeah Baby" moment

"Yeah, baby ..."

Mission Control Pow-wow

Ben Marley here is sprung tight as a coil, ready to leap into action .. he needs to do SOMEthing ...

Leaning over to chat ... when Ed Harris says his line about "Get everyone you know in here ..."

Ben Marley is OUTTA there, like a bullet from a gun. Great moment.

Bursting into Ken Mattingley's motel room

"Good. You're not dead."

Re-cap delivered by Ben Marley. Hot, on every level.

A flurry of motion. Gary Sinise and Ben Marley burst into the simulator area, to be met by Loren Dean ... conversation, quick and macho

Gary Sinise has been in the simulator for hours. Time is running out. Ben Marley opens the curtain and peeks in. "You need a break, Ken?" (I love the wrinkles in his forehead. Hot.)

Tension growing. A fight between Loren Dean and Gary Sinise, with Ben Marley looking on ... quiet, coiled, attentive.

At one point, Loren Dean covers his mike and says to Ben Marley, "I don't know where we're gonna find it" ... A private moment of tension between them on their side of things

Closer ... closer ... to a solution ... things get very still in the office ... the men afraid to move, afraid their success in the moment will unravel at closer examination ...

They've got it. The three men run towards the Mission Control building, and Ben Marley gently but firmly bodily moves a security guard out of the way. It's so alpha. I love it.

Connecting with the astronauts, in the Mission Control main room

Let me just say this: Look at Ben Marley here. The focus of the scene here is, rightly, on Gary Sinise. It is HIS scene. So look at where Ben Marley is looking. That is smart, selfless acting, in touch with STORY as opposed to SELF

If you look at everyone in this shot, everyone is IN IT ... not one false note. This is acting 101, I realize ... this is what you EXPECT of your cast, but it so often doesn't happen that I want to point it out. Look at the involvement of everyone, and Ben Marley quietly just ENDURING the tension of the moment.

The wide shot

Waiting ... waiting ...

The astronauts have re-entered the earth's atmosphere. A sigh of relief. Ben Marley can't quite "let go" yet ... he's still "in it" ... which makes sense ...

This is Gary Sinise's big closeup, but look at Ben Marley in the background. It's stuff like that that makes this a good movie.

Celebration

Excuse me, but you also get to see Ben Marley blow a smoke ring after taking a big puff on a huge macho cigar. I have died and gone to heaven.

ONE LAST THING I NOTICED:

This is the kind of thing you would only notice if you were tracking one minor character through a major movie. In the final scene of celebration, as everyone is freaking out, and Ed Harris slowly sits down, choked up ... there are a couple of shots of Gary Sinise, closeups, saying into the mike, "Welcome home", etc. - and behind him, you can see all the Mission Control guys shaking hands, breaking out cigars. Now there is one big closeup of Sinise - the focus is only on Sinise, although there are all of these other guys (including Ben Marley) in the shot. I noticed Ben Marley in the background hold out his hand to one of the other guys to shake it -but the actor didn't notice it, was already shaking hands with someone else. An awkward moment, right? But Marley rightly understood that nobody on earth (except for Sheila O'Malley years later) would be looking at HIM in that moment, so he almost acts AS IF his hand had been shaken, and goes back to puffing on his cigar, proud and puffed up, undeterred by the slightly awkward moment that just went down. He acts AS IF it had never happened ... Now, if he had been the star of the film, that moment would have had to be done over. If it had been Gary Sinise having an awkward moment in the crucial moment of celebration, Howard would have called for another take. But Ben Marley understands that in that moment the focus is not on him - NOBODY is looking at him ... it is enough that the impression is given that hands are being shaken ... so he doesn't stop, he moves on ... realizing that the focus is not on him, and it is more important that the STAR is set up properly, rather than him having a gratifying moment with another actor. It's not easy to ignore an awkward moment like that. A lesser actor would have called attention, subtly or not so subtly, to the weird moment he had just had - and Howard would have been required to call for another take, because the action in the background had pulled focus from the main scene. Marley, in the graceful way he handles another actor basically blowing him off, never pulls focus, allowing the moment, Gary Sinise's moment, to happen.

And that, my friends, is why I love actors, and why I think (at its best) it is a noble profession. My deepest admiration, Ben Marley, for how you fit yourself into the story, and did what the story required you to do: create your own character and motivation ("Yeah, baby") - but more important than that: your JOB is to set up Gary Sinise for his big moments at the end. That is your job.

I remember Tommy Lee Jones came and spoke at my school, and someone asked a question about The Fugitive, and his acting job in that, what he "worked on". Jones said, and I love this, "I felt like my main job in that picture was just to pay attention to Harrison Ford."

That's what Ben Marley does in that moment in Apollo 13.

Just pay attention to the star, and model yourself on a basketball player ... where the assist is sometimes more important than the play itself.

Swimming through the bees

I remember hearing "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby", the 8-minute-long song by the Counting Crows long before 1999 when the album was released (just looked it up). I associate "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" with the spring and summer of 1995, a time of personal loss and grief, but also possibility and hope, when I was so lost and yet also so alive. Loneliness, weird stasis - almost like a plane hovering over the runway, smothering heat wave, lots of sex, burning nostalgia... yearning for the past, excited for the future, sad it all will end ... I was SURE that "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" was a big part of that whole time. But no. It came afterwards. Long afterwards.

I may be confusing it with the earlier album, which came out in 1993 - the one with "Anna Begins" on it, but it's "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" that I remember.

I guess that's just how memory works. It melds together two intense times, or superimposes a soundtrack from a different era onto another time, because the mood is right. Or the music fits with the era because it either so reflects your own experience that you had had at that time, and you want to relive it, or shocks you out of certain moods, propelling you down a different path. For example, I do have some "get happy" songs. It is not always possible for me to get happy - nor do I always want to "get happy" (especially not now) - there is sadness too big to touch, but if I can sense a sadness approaching (of the vague self-pitying kind - not the acute immediate kind, which will not be stopped) ... there are songs that can help me snap out of it. I've written posts before about how certain songs seem to actually contain memories - and so I need to be careful, sometimes, of what I listen to. Because I'm not always in the mood to be transported. It'll be the strangest things, and sometimes the song, and my relationship to it, does change - but here's an example. It's not like I am transported to that specific time when I hear that song. I am transported. Here's another example, a song that, to this day, has the potential to (literally) take my breath away. More here.

It is one of my favorite topics. Perhaps it's because of acting and theatre - you get used to dealing in emotion, figuring out what works, what doesn't ... it's like you have to build up your arsenal of weapons. "Watershed" by the Indigo Girls makes me cry, no matter how happy or contented I am when it comes on. It is a trigger. Not just because of the lyrics, but the sound, the chord progression, and also the memories the song itself contains. But I also am interested in memory itself, and how the brain latches onto things, and how even if it is not literally true, there is sometimes a deeper truth, not connected to facts or accurate timelines.

I know that "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" came into my life because of my friends David and Maria, who love The Counting Crows (I do, too - but I had somehow missed owning this album). And now I don't own ANY Counting Crows albums, because I just don't really care about them anymore - but I sure as hell own "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby". My music collection would never be complete without it. It's a "go to" song, meaning: I'm a fantasist. I manage to pay my bills and clean my house and maintain relationships, but at heart, I prefer the dream to the reality. My fantasies are places I wallow in, languishing, I could spend hours there, and I do. These aren't just sexual fantasies, although I have those too, of course. Sometimes they are "revenge fantasies", where I "get" someone back, sometimes they are casual fantasies - chatting, my head in someone's lap, comfort, peace (have to be careful about those) ... sometimes they are wild and out there, involving home movies and me jumping on a trampoline in the middle of the desert (I love that one ). Music is attached to all of this. And nothing general: specific songs help me go to the specific fantasy. The "home movie-trampoline" song is "Holding my Breath" by Hello goodbye, for example.

Something I go through phases of listening to a song on eternal repeat (and when I say "eternal repeat" I mean that I drove for four hours yesterday listening only to "Now" by Everclear). Right now, a time when I need comfort and reminders of certain TYPES of emotions - other than loss and self-hatred and fear and disappointment - I have a couple of "go to" songs, and it's one of the reasons why I can't just randomly listen to music right now. I cannot be ambushed. Music also doesn't hold my attention.

A lot of times I stay away from "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby" due to the associations I have (however incorrect), of a summer of baffled loss. It's not something I choose to call upon. Like the song itself says:

And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings

But there is something transcendent in the song at times too, it feels like something in me rises up to meet it. "We drove out to the desert just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars ..."

It's eight minutes long. It appears to be repetitive (it is repetitive). But it transports.

I have never looked up the lyrics. I didn't feel I needed to.

There was one of those lines that made me burn with a joy almost too sweet to bear: "So I throw my hand into the air and it swims in the bees..."

When I was heartsick and aching, that image - of running, and throwing my hand into the air, and having it "swim in the bees" - was strangely comforting - terrible actually - because wouldn't it sting? But it reminded me of things, things I loved, things I was trying to stop myself from loving, things that could save me if I let them - joy, acceptance, gratitude ... and it hurt. That line HURT. But I got something from it. It spoke to me. I remembered running through the fields with Michael, before he caught up to me and tackled me, I remembered running towards the surf on the last day of high school and Betsy jumping in, I remembered bopping around in my parents' car with Mitchell on a summer night, going to Dairy Queen and listening to Barbra Streisand ... freedom, and laughter and friendship ... that is poignant now only because it is over.

For some reason today I Googled the lyrics.

I was shocked and saddened (at first) - after all these years - that the hand does not "swim through the bees". It's not bees at all. The hand swims "through the beams". But this is a post about memory, which is notoriously faulty, first of all, but also notoriously more reliable than anything else.

Those lyrics (my lyrics, I mean) have connotations for me, connotations of joy and hope that felt so far away for me in that summer of 1995, and feel very far away from me right now.

It is hard to point at something in my life at this time and say, "There. There is the 'substance of things hoped for.' I can see it. I can feel it." My hands grasp empty air.

It feels like a moral imperative for me to focus on being grateful right now ... but it is also not so easy, and something I struggle with on a second-to-second basis, at times. I feel lost, grief-struck, frightened, and sometimes overwhelmingly sad. Entire days are lost.

But when I hear that bit of the song, once again, the images come ... from years ago ... as if on cue ... running across some golden field, throwing my hand up in the air, and letting it swim through the bees. I can even feel the light touch of those bees on my hand ... the slight sting ... it doesn't really hurt, it's really just a pinprick... hot and sharp.

I'm rather surprised I can listen to this song right now, but I think I need those bees.

I've always known what I needed.

Well I woke up in mid-afternoon cause that's when it all hurts the most
I dream I never know anyone at the party and I'm always the host
If dreams are like movies, then memories are films about ghosts
You can never escape, you can only move south down the coast

well, I am an idiot walking a tightrope of fortune and fame
I am an acrobat swinging trapezes through circles of flame
If you've never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame
and though I'll never forget your face,
sometimes i can't remember my name

Hey Mrs. Potter don't cry
Hey Mrs. Potter I know why but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

Well, there's a piece of Maria in every song that I sing
And the price of a memory is the memory of the sorrow it brings
And there is always one last light to turn out and one last bell to ring
And the last one out of the circus has to lock up everything

Or the elephants will get out and forget to remember what you said
And the ghosts of the tilt-a-whirl will linger inside your head
And the ferris wheel junkies will spin there forever instead
When I see you a blanket of stars covers me in my bed

Hey Mrs. Potter don't go
Hey Mrs. Potter I don't know but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

All the blue light reflections that color my mind when I sleep
And the lovesick rejections that accompany the company I keep
All the razor perceptions that cut just a little too deep
Hey I can bleed as well as anyone, but I need someone to help me sleep

So I throw my hand into the air and it swims in the beams
It's just a brief interruption of the swirling dust sparkle jet stream
Well, I know I don't know you and you're probably not what you seem
But I'd sure like to find out
So why don't you climb down off that movie screen

Hey Mrs. Potter don't turn
Hey Mrs. Potter I burn for you
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

When the last king of Hollywood shatters his glass on the floor
and orders another
Well, I wonder what he did that for
That's when I know that I have to get out cause I have been there before
So I gave up my seat at the bar and I head for the door

We drove out to the desert just to lie down beneath this bowl of stars
We stand up in the palace like it's the last of the great pioneer town bars
We shout out these songs against the clang of electric guitars
You can see a million miles tonight
But you can't get very far
Oh, you can see a million miles tonight
But you can't get very far

Hey Mrs. Potter I won't touch
Hey Mrs. Potter it's not much but
Hey Mrs. Potter won't you talk to me

Ben Marley in Apollo 13

A little glimpse ... before we begin:

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