Snapshots

— It’s official. I am almost too busy, although I hesitate to even say that, because being busy is good.

— I miss Memphis. More than that, I miss spending every minute of every day with Jen. We were excellent travel companions and did really great in a peripatetic yet rigorously planned environment. I think we should be on the road all year.

— Finally saw Warrior, because of some comments made by Jason in one of his essays at the Tree House. For some reason, I just “missed it” during its first run, even though I had wanted to see it. Loved Gavin O’Connor’s Miracle. Love Nick Nolte and Tom Hardy. Never saw it. Now, with the Oscar noms out, with Nolte nominated, I had to go back and play some catchup. While I could go on and on about how much I loved the movie, I’ll just point you to Jason’s original review, which says it all. Perfectly put. I may have more to say, but please see the first bullet-point in this snapshot post.

— Going to the movies at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday morning looks like this.

I saw The Artist in a giant empty movie theatre. It was glorious, although I would have liked to see it with a packed house too. I loved it.

— Have a big Sunday planned with Allison. I have not seen her since before Christmas. We are excited. We are going to a movie and the Weegee exhibit at the I.C.P. Email from Allison: “I suggest we go to the museum first, get our fill of murdered gangsters, get a bite afterwards and then go to the movie..what do you think?” It sounds like heaven to me. Our shared love of murder is well-documented.

— I miss my siblings. I miss my niece and nephews.

— Plans, plans, plans. Not enough hours in the day.

— Have been drowning in the documentary Elvis On Tour, which is magnificent, avant-garde, and ahead of its time. The archival footage section was edited by a young Martin Scorsese and it’s so well done, perfectly placed, and perfectly articulates the continuum of the journey that we see unfolding in real time during the documentary. Young blonde boy jiggling on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1956 leads directly to the helmet-of-black-hair superhero-caped entertainment juggernaut that we see in the early 1970s. I have more observations, most of which have to do with how Elvis listens. This moving clip is from that documentary. But I’m talking about the backstage moments we see. Moments where the Stamps start singing and even amidst the bustle of backstage, Elvis goes totally still – as in: totally still – in order to listen. Not just with his ears but his whole body. (His friends called him “Super Ears” because he not only could listen to the conversation he was having with you in that moment, but he also knew what other people were talking about in their conversation across the room. Multiple levels of awareness, and yet not manifesting itself in a scattered impression. FOCUS.) But there’s more listening: The moments greeting awkward enthusiastic officials in the various towns he lands in, his sweetness with them (calling everyone “Sir”, and putting his head down, shyly), which makes him seem vulnerable. You want him to play it cooler, protect himself. And yet there he is in a giant blue suit with a yellow silk scarf and sunglasses as big as hands, and a ring on every finger, and it seems that he must be the Ultimate in Protected Rock Star, right? He’s so eccentric his ego MUST be impenetrable, he certainly can’t be shy. But he is. It’s a strange dichotomy and is completely evident in every personal interaction he has in that documentary. I popped it in again because I wanted to see The Stamps, the guys I just saw in person at Graceland, the day before Elvis’ birthday. It was wonderful to see them all in action again. While the documentary has so much to recommend it (lots of tour footage, lots of songs performed in full, and the innovative use of the split screen), one of my favorite numbers performed by Elvis during it is “Lawdy Miss Clawdy”, a song which, of course, goes way way back to his earliest days. It still is a song, as performed by him, that resists classification. I listen to his 1956 version and still think to myself, “Jesus, what IS that?” It’s always fun to hear him go back and re-visit those songs that first really made his name (although sometimes, in the live recordings from the 70s, he bullshits his way through the classics, making a joke out of them, sketching in the outlines and then goofing off). Here, in the documentary, “Lawdy Miss Clawdy” erupts as a burlesque-hall song (which it always kind of was, part of the reason it is strange to hear a 20-year-old boy commit to it so fully and in such unembarrassed abandon), with The Stamps and The Sweet Inspirations singing backup and a giant horn section giving the song a gyrating floozy pulse, which of course Elvis understands intuitively, being a gyrating floozy himself. There’s no sketching-in or goofing off here. Well, there’s some goofing off. The whole damn song is a goof-off. But it’s a re-imagining of something that had such a distinctive sound to begin with (the banging climbing piano), and shows that Elvis was not a nostalgia act. He brought up feelings of nostalgia in his audiences, but his eyes weren’t looking backwards. He wasn’t stuck.

— I know I just got back from Memphis but am feeling that wanderlust again already. I love to do weekends away in windy isolated beach motels, off-season and am feeling the urge to disappear yet again.