Friday, September 6, 2013

In the burrows of the nightmare: or why I liked English class





I have a horrible confession to make. I liked English class. I liked it so much I had to hide it. I never said anything, never contributed a single comment to any discussion, though my mind was teeming with ideas about everything we studied.


It was decades later, when I was an adult and went back to school, that I found the courage to say the things I felt and saw. By this time my perceptions had shifted, of course. Even the most familiar poem wasn't the same; someone had gone in there and changed it, in every textbook in all the world.






I guess Auden's As I Walked Out One Evening is my favorite poem because it makes me want to scream that I ever dared to write poetry and try to get it published. I DID get a dozen or so of my poems published in small literary mags, but maybe seven people bothered to read them, mostly the contributors. Sometimes I wondered if the editor had bothered to read them at all.


Example. I wrote a poem called Lightning - God must've been punishing me for writing a poem called Lightning, because in the final printed version it came out Lightening.

"Well, it's only one letter different," squawked the 19-year-old assistant editor who had neatly inserted an error where there was none before. She must have thought I had made a spelling mistake.




So now my poem, which HAD been about childhood sexual abuse and doing hard time in a mental institution, was suddenly about a much more powerful subject: Coffee Mate "lightener", guaranteed to replace cream with a metallic-tasting petroleum-based powder which would never go sour.

So much for MY adventures. In my last post I decided to illustrate that favorite poem from high school (written by that dry, craggy desert of a man, W. H. Auden), and in doing so, some of that English class stuff came back to me.

My teacher in high school, Mr. Griffin  (probably dead by now, I realize with a shock) read this one out loud one day, and I was riveted. Maybe it was the way he read it.
The class called this teacher Griffy Baby (though not to his face), and he was given to telling tales out of school, recommending we watch a literary-based movie called Carry On Up the Jungle. Sometimes when he was tired of teaching he told funny stories about his kids, one of whom resembled a baby Dylan Thomas. Then there was the day he showed us a home movie of a tawdry drama he had filmed with his drunken friends.







Griffy Baby was partial to giving me As, but was curious as to why I never said anything in class. My soul was so crushed with social isolation and constant, relentless bullying that I didn't dare open my mouth. But I was grateful for that magnificent poem, and I never forgot it.


So to make up for my silence in class, I want to do a blow-by-blow analysis here and now, which is maybe appropriate given Auden's legendary sexual orientation. (He also wrote an infamous poem called The Platonic Blow which I don't think I will post here, but I do encourage you, even urge you to look it up. It'll make your literary hair stand on end, or something else if you're gay. Short of out-and-out porn, it's the most sexually-explicit writing I have ever seen.)




As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.


When the poem opens, the scene is just so. . . normal. The poet is out for a nice little stroll. Just walking down the street. Then he sees crowds upon the pavement. . . not other people strolling along, but crowds. Assembled for what? And these crowds, which sound about as friendly as the spectators at a Roman coliseum, are fields of harvest wheat. I mean, they don't look like wheat or sound like wheat or smell like wheat or taste like wheat. This is no synonym, folks, it is that deadliest of things: a metaphor! And speaking of deadly, isn't it just a little obvious that these wheaten folk seem all ready for the scythe of the Grim Reaper? "Harvest" wheat, indeed.




And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.


Arch of the railway. This is why I included in my last post's illustrations quite a few images from a superb movie called Notes on a Scandal, with Cate Blanchett playing a 40-year-old teacher having an affair with a 15-year-old student. Having to meet in such a drippy place smells of the illicit, or at least of the damned uncomfortable. And that brimming river: hey, that's assonance, folks! He does it three times, too, which makes it magical. The river could be Lethe, the river of oblivion, which would surely match the dire tone of the rest of this thing. And brimming, like tears, like a cup about to run over. But that nasty cup appears later on.




'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,


'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.






Here he seems to be introducing silly mythical images which would be highly inappropriate if it weren't for the sing-songy, nursery-rhyme-esque form of the poem, with its strict rhyme and meter. Personally I wonder why he spends so much time on these innocent-sounding pronouncements, when I always thought the dank, furtive image of the arch of the railway implied meeting up with a prostitute, male or female.

Idealism, maybe? Or is this guy or girl, or guys or girls, just incredibly stupid, given to ludicrous hyperbole? In any case, all these blatherings seem sum-up-able in one word: "Forever." I will love you, dear, I'll love you. . . for all eternity.


'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'








The years run like rabbits, as if to say, my, how time flies when you're having fun! Or is it something else? They may be running away, but it has nothing to do with us chasing after them. Some day, such as NOW, we may fervently wish those rabbits would slow down.  Rabbits also imply a sort of dumb, embarrassing fertility, not to mention the rabbit being pulled out of a hat ("Nothing up my sleeve!") and Alice's white rabbit, who is somehow always running "late". (And note the double meaning of late!)

And just what does "rabbiting on" mean? That you talk too much?

And that "first love of the world" cannot be anyone but Eve, the first woman. Hmmm, I wonder what she charges?

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.


I like this. I love this. I love the "device" of Time speaking to us, of all the clocks in the city starting to protest the bullshit of the lovers writhing under the arch. The audacity, too, of allowing Time to address us, as if God Himself decided to step up to the plate (which He does, all the time, in the Old Testament).







And already we have our warning: my teacher read this in a slightly smug tone. "You cannot conquer time."

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.


This is one of those ravishing verses of poetry that you don't want to touch because it's just so fucking magnificent. I wanted to write that on my term paper - "fucking magnificent" - but I didn't, and still got an A.

But he's doing the same thing here, capitolizing and I suppose personifying the Nightmare, Justice, etc. Justice being not blind, but naked. Pull down the blinds, please. And how about that little cough, ahem. Excuse me. Do you know who's in charge here?




'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.


Nobody wants to read this because it makes them groan inwardly, especially those first two lines. It's so bloody true, even in the most goal-directed, achievement-stuffed life. And Time, that wonderful personified Wizard of eternity, will have his "fancy", much as a rich man might pick out a particularly tasty prostitute from the lineup. Fancy is a silly, ephemeral, frou-frou sort of thing, the opposite of plain: fancy this, fancy that. And it also means fantasy. The "tomorrow or today" is sort of like setting up a delivery time for a parcel: "oh, I'll be here tomorrow, I think, you can bring it round then. Or, wait a minute, I'll be home today."




'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.


I had a little trouble with this until I stole an interpretation from someone else. Green valleys are very British, of course - how green is my valley, and all that -  but why is the snow (grey hair, old age) so "appalling"? It casts a pall over the valley, even obscures it completely so that the green life beneath it does not show. It might as well not be there at all. The next two lines are all shivery and liquidescent. I don't know what a threaded dance is, but I think the diver is Cupid. Once more, eroticism is shattered by that dirty old man, Mortality.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.





This is among Auden's most famous lines, for some reason almost always misquoted (like Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle) as "stare, stare in the mirror". The mirror does come, but a few verses later, and in a much more disturbing manner. This one is effective, I think, because of understatement. Or: is the subject just washing his hands of the whole thing? (Didn't Pilate do the same thing? And Lady Macbeth? Oh, I'm going overboard here.)

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.


Probably my favorite verse, because it makes me want to scream and never write again. Glacier, desert, crack in the tea-cup, land of the dead, where we all end up, unless you believe in Heaven, which Auden obviously does not. The safe comfort of the everyday and the brutal fact of mortality are so closely juxtaposed that we no longer take any notice. It's as close as the skin on your face.




'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.


This is a weird one, and I suppose it echoes the nursery-rhyme quality of some of these verses. The Giant must be a reference to Jack and the Beanstalk, but what does it mean that he's "enchanting to"? I hope not what I think. Most Americans won't know this, but the Lily-white Boy (also a strange image) is a character in an English folk song called Green Grow the Rushes-o. Jill goes down on her back, well. . . innocence begins to prostitute itself. This is the Land of the Dead, which is beginning to resemble Hieronymus Bosch's vision of hell.

'O look, look in the mirror
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.





Yes. THIS is the verse with the mirror in it, and it has that "o look, look -", that sense of shock, almost of horror at the inevitable, strenuously-denied passage of time. I don't want to look, but I must look! And those ironic lines - life remains a blessing, but we're about to die so why is a blessing even relevant? And the stinging self-contempt of "YOU cannot bless", as if you have somehow, and mysteriously, lost all your power.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'


There was a crooked man, who walked a crooked mile. . . and the whole human condition is drawn in slanted lines.

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.


And thus, the soft, gentle benediction, as we lie howling and writhing in the face of eternal Hell.



Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!


Thursday, September 5, 2013

I just want to make a point




I don't know, maybe I don't even need to post any text here. The pictures say it all. The fabled Mary Tyler Moore Show reunion on Hot in Cleveland has shocked a few people, not so much by the age of the performers (some in their 80s now) but by their appearance.

I'm afraid Mary has gone the Joan Rivers/mausoleum route beloved of too many glamorous stars of yore. The cheek implants are ready to explode out of her face, the eyes have disappeared into her head, and her neck has that celery-stalk look of ruthlessly pulled-back skin. Compare and contrast to Betty White - who doesn't love Betty White? She was on TV before I was born! - who at well over 90 has decided to keep her own face. Granted, she has good skin and great cheekbones, and the ability to light up in front of a camera as few people can. She has a great smile and a great voice and even good hair, without all the obvious styled wispiness Mary uses to cover whatever her forehead looks like. Like William Shatner, she just doesn't seem to age like all the rest of us. 

But she is proof of one thing. Old age isn't hideous. It's old age. And if you can still smile like that, it must be a pretty good thing.



The Wrong Note Rag performed by Pot-Pourri




Not written in the '20s, not even for a show set in the '20s, but rather the Swing era of the 1940s. Yet it's full of all that '20s jazz, when jazz was still exciting and new. I think this was Leonard Bernstein's first musical, Wonderful Town. And you'll never get this one out of your brain, out of your brain, out of your brain. . . 



Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Amazing grace: Kevin Rudd's act of faith




Kevin Rudd launches passionate defence of gay marriage

Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, a devout Christian, has stared down a pastor on live television and cited scripture while delivering a stirring defence of gay marriage.

In footage that has since gone viral on the internet, Mr Rudd declared that "people don't choose their sexuality" and said if The Bible were taken literally, slavery would still be legal.

His impassioned defence of his decision to throw his support behind same sex marriage came in response to a Christian pastor who asked on a chat show featuring audience questions: "Kevin, if you call yourself a Christian, why don't you believe the words of Jesus in The Bible?"

Mr Rudd, facing defeat in Australia's election on Saturday, responded: "Well mate if I was going to have that view, The Bible also says that slavery is a natural condition. Because St Paul said in the New Testament: slaves be obedient to your masters. And therefore we should have all fought for the confederacy in the US Civil War. I mean for goodness sake. The human condition and social conditions change."

Mr Rudd said be believed his decision to support gay marriage was in line with The Bible's emphasis on "universal love".

"I concluded in my conscience, through an informed conscience and a Christian conscience, it was the right thing to do," he told ABC TV's Q&A show.




This amazing four minutes is making the rounds. It proves that it's possible to have a lightbulb come on regarding your former beliefs, not just flip-flopping to garner votes but realizing in the clear light of day that human beings in all their diversity deserve compassion, understanding and a fair shake.

The glazed eyes and bolted doors apparent in the faces of the audience speak volumes about their own limited beliefs, and this misguided pastor with the ominous "Republic" shirt (?) seems ill at ease and even afraid. Rudd speaks with poise, confidence, and heartfelt conviction, and with a refreshing absence of shouting, fist-pounding and empty rhetoric. 

After studying it formally for 15 years and even teaching classes, I know my Bible pretty well, and I challenge conservative Christians to find any kind of statement from Jesus on homosexuality. It simply isn't there. And yes, Saint Paul, who could pound fists with the best of them, not only stated that slaves should obey their masters, but that wives should "submit themselves" to their husbands! Rudd didn't need to pull this one out, and to his credit he didn't, but he certainly could have. 

Does this mean we should just toss the Bible away as irrelevant to 2013 and all its multiplicity of views?  In the words of theologian Marcus Borg, it's possible to take scripture "seriously, but not literally." I think that Jesus so embodied near-unthinkable changes in human consciousness that he was put to death for it.  But who has that sort of guts, these days?






Tuesday, September 3, 2013

Khachaturian, Masquerade Suite





A favorite. When I latch onto one of these, I listen to it over and over again. This is like dark, quirky circus music. The percussion, including nasty little snares and great smashing cymbals, is outstanding. Try to imagine the piece without it.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

Chef Boy-ar-dee: the lost gifs!





Mama Mia and Santa Lucia! Did y'all know there was an actual, real-live, puffy-hat-wearing, spaghetti-cooking, Italian-talking Chef Boy-ar-dee?






(Though it's true he couldn't always stay too long in the kitchen. Just popped in and out.  He had Gina Lollobrigida in the back room.)






Yes, this is the real Chef Hector Boiardi, creator of the first mass-produced Italian food, whose name was so hard for Americans to pronounce it had to be dumbed way down. Read his lips:  he's saying "Have my soup. Whassup?", which must be some sort of funny Italian palindrome.






See, this guy was so dog-gone famous and well-loved that they erected a real bronze-plated statue of him right outside of Boy-Ar-Dee Headquarters in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Either that, or they had him bronzed.





Spare a thought for the old boy. He was the immigrant success story writ large. Amen.







Saturday, August 31, 2013

Popeye and the exploding phallic symbol: don't read this post! Whatever you do!




Yes, in a strange sort of way. I remember this one freaking me out as a kid. I wondered why that car looked so odd, more like some sort of bulbous tank with a nose thrusting out in front.

I know now that this is one of those elegant cars of the mid-'40s. For some reason Popeye has to put air in the tires, and of course goes too far with it. Ohhhh, that swelling and swelling, the red bulges growing bigger and bigger and popping out with more red bulges that become transparent before the whole thing explodes!

I notice Popeye sounds different in this one, though Olive Oyl is likely voiced by Mae Questel as usual. The real Popeye may have been in the service or suffering from war wounds or shell shock.  Things were different in wartime. This is dated 1946, but who knows when it was made. At least it doesn't have a cartoon Hitler in it (though that tire explosion is pretty scary in itself - not for the faint of heart).




Thursday, August 29, 2013

Hottest scene in literary history! Don't read this post!




You wouldn't normally associate E. L. Doctorow's classic novel Ragtime (profusely adapted for both stage and screen) with eroticism. Would you? I don't know. Maybe. When I first read it, whenever that was (and you can tell something by the way the pages of my paperback copy have turned not yellow, but brown), a certain passage stuck in my head. So did a few others, and all of them had to do with sex.

Not that Doctorow is a pornographer or even an especially sensual writer, though he does have his moments. His strength is describing what's right in front of him, and I seldom feel his characters' hearts beating. But once in a while. . . 




Doctorow is a notorious name-dropper in this thing and keeps on referring to the movers and shakers of the day, people like Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Admiral Peary, and - most notably - two women, famous or even infamous for very different reasons. I don't know much about Emma Goldman except that she was an anarchist and a rabble-rouser, and had a face like a rail fence. Evelyn Nesbit was considered a scarlet woman and spent her evenings sitting around on a velvet swing while men looked her up, or is it the other way around? 


I won't even try to navigate the ambitions of this book, because they are just so extreme. A novel is always a reduction of reality, but reducing this gigantic sprawl of history to any sort of pages is pretty remarkable, that is, without freeze-drying and removing all the juices in the process.

This passage has juices. It's just the kind of scene that my mind wanders to when.  . . oh hell, who has sexual fantasies at my age anyway? Life is full of surprises. I thought things would sort of dry up at menopause, but instead, wow, wowsa, wowsy, wow-wow-wow-wow!






So I still enjoy imagining scenes, toying with characters, even writing the stuff myself (see: The Glass Character, which has its share of erotic moments while Muriel Ashford hopelessly throbs for her dear, distant, impossible amour). The "explosive" conclusion of this scene is such a surprise that it initially kind of shocked me. I know men of that era were supposed to be almost as chaste as women, but I don't imagine too many of them could manage it.

I love costume dramas, the ones that go on in my head I mean, and I love Victorian and Edwardian scenes because the women's gowns are just ravishing, making practically anyone look graceful and beautiful, and are at the same time mortal prisons. It appeals to my innate sense of masochism. But wouldn't all those layers be perversely exciting? A man might have to take a course of study to undress his wife on his wedding night (and by the way, have you ever thought of this? In the past, a good many people, both men and women, knew nothing at all about the sex act when they married. And yet, they had these huge families. They must've figured it out, but how good was it? I mean, for her? Oh Jesus, just read the excerpt!)




Though it's not likely they ever met, Doctorow has fun with an erotically-charged encounter between Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit. Writers can move the chess-pieces around any way they want, and manipulate their women figures like so many helpless dolls. One wonders if the author reacted anything like Mother's Younger Brother.



















Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Four-figure Facebook: the ultimate load of crap



  • Four more friends and I hit 1,000-- will there be falling balloons, kazoos, confetti and champagne?

    This is an actual Facebook post from today. I've removed the name, but it's a writer with a book out. 

    OK, my issue is this: TWICE Facebook sent me a stern notice that nobody was accepting my FB friend requests. Then they told me I was friending too many people, and insisted (demanded) I know all the people I friended personally, intimately, face-to-face. They then cut me off from sending any more friend requests for two weeks, ominously warning me that if I didn't toe the line, I might be "out" (no doubt for good). 

    Everyone I sent a request to was, at very least, a friend of a friend, with in many cases over 100 friends in common. But somehow I had still stepped on the big guy's toes.

    I'm on a Facebook tightrope, folks. Once more, I've inadvertently blundered. Unlike others, I can't seem to capture that misty unicorn of social networking, the number 1000 (which I don't really want anyway and will never attain). What am I doing wrong? Are my school records out there or something?





    I have asked many, many people what the hell is going on here, and I get turned backs and a sense that they are embarrassed, if not downright offended. You mean you don't KNOW how this works? Why, as soon as you set up a new FB account, fifty people a day swarm to your page and beg you to friend them. All because they are close, personal friends, face-to-face buddies you meet and have coffee with all the time.

    I guess if THEY come to YOU, it's OK because it's a sort of checkmark on your popularity scale. If you have to go begging and actually ask people, that's another matter entirely.





    It's parroted time and time again that FB is NOT for personal advertising or bragging about your new book. We all understand that, yes, then violate this rule constantly, often coyly, as in "well, I just hate to bring this up, but. . . " or "I hope this doesn't look like shameless self-promotion, but. . . " This is followed by a flood of likes and congratulations, sycophantic gushing over so-and-so's good fortune, masking a bitter, teeth-clenching jealously, a sense of "yes, I'll praise him now because I want to cultivate his contacts, but sooner or later I'm gonna get that bastard."

    The puffery, narcissism and blatant verbal sandwich-board/billboard advertising on FB makes me queasy, but if you even suggest it is actually going on, the result is indignation, even disbelief. I've even been told "I'm speechless" (which, believe me, I wish most of them actually were). We know the real dynamics, sure, but we're not going to admit it. 





    Because, for God's sake, don't you know already? And if not, why not? And if you don't know, isn't THAT why no one wants to be your friend? Isn't THAT why you don't have a golden key to that exclusive club, Four-Figure Facebook, complete with pole dancers and your very own highly-prized, high-maintenance Park Avenue escort/mistress, the same one who got Edward Snowden's rocks off before he retreated to Russia or wherever-the-fuck-he-is?






    I know people in the Four Figure Club who have a thousand, two thousand, even three or four thousand, and a few have even maxed out at the ultimate five thousand upper limit that FB imposes on your very best, exclusive, heart-to-heart, have-coffee-with-every-day "friends". Since FB always prominently displays lists of "people you may know" who are in fact friends of your friends, I thought it was allowed to contact some of them, to invite them to be your friends. Apparently not, or at least not for me. One must attract friends with an invisible force, something you are born with, a giant magnet implanted in your solar plexus.




    Then there are those of us who have nothing but a big hole in our solar plexus, but don't we deserve it? Why aren't we one of the quadruple-digit crowd? Aren't we blue chip, aren't we Facebook Fortune 5000? If not, don't we deserve obscurity in the grubby, sad realms of the terminally unpopular?

    I'm just askin'.

Tuesday, August 27, 2013

The world is not respectable: favorite quotes





An artist, a man, a failure, MUST PROCEED. Proceed: not succeed. With success, as any world or unworld comprehends it, he has essentially nothing to do. If it should come, well and good: but what makes him climb to the top of the tent emphatically isn’t ‘a billion empty faces’. Even success in his own terms cannot concern him otherwise than as a stimulus to further, and a challenge to more unimagineable, self-discovering – ‘The chairs will all fall by themselves down from the wire’; and who catches or who doesn’t catch them is none of his immortal business. One thing, however, does always concern this individual: fidelity to himself.

- e. e. cummings









The world is not respectable; it is mortal, tormented, confused, deluded forever; but it is shot through with beauty, with love, with glints of courage and laughter; and in these, the spirit blooms timidly, and struggles to the light amid the thorns.

- George Santayana




The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.

- Henry Miller



This is the greatest mystery of the human mind - the inductive leap. Everything falls into place, irrelevancies relate, dissonance becomes harmony, and nonsense wears a crown of meaning. But the clarifying leap springs from the rich soil of confusion, and the leaper is not unfamiliar with pain.


- John Steinbeck






So long as men praise you, you can only be sure that you are not yet on your own true path but on someone else’s.

–Friedrich Nietzsche


You wouldn’t be so concerned about what people think of you if you knew how seldom they did.

- Anon.










Monday, August 26, 2013

Found, lost, found, lost, and found again: a proverb






Egyptian Proverb:  The worst things: 

To be in bed and sleep not, 

To want for one who comes not, 

To try to please and please not.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896 - 1940)



Why Hollywood has its head up its ass




I’ve believed  this for quite a while now. Let me explain. Until smartphones took over, every time someone in a movie was on the phone and the other person hung up, the person would rattle the phone-cradle in a way that would do absolutely nothing except assure that the phone was dead.

This bizarre behaviour mysteriously migrated to the general population who routinely did the same thing when they lost a connection. Why? It was in the movies! Everyone did that! If the phone went dead, then, rattle-rattle-rattle, and it would come back! Never mind that it never happened that way in human history. People even did it with that brontosaurus of communication, the pay phone. (As a sideline, have you thought of this? With the phasing out of phone booths, we lose one more venue for steamed-up, hasty vertical sex.)





This technique might have worked during the era of Alexander Graham Bell and the crank-operated phone. The rattling was meant to connect you to the switchboard operator who sat at a giant panel with 100 other “girls” pulling out and pushing in little plugs and saying in a twangy nasal voice, “Num-ber, pleee-aaase.”  I don’t know exactly when this was phased out, but it was likely sometime after World War II.

There’s more. Until very recently, writers were always portrayed a certain way. They hid out in the attic with a manual typewriter and banged away, ripping the finished pages out, crumpling them up violently, and tossing them into the wastebasket in the far corner of the room. Hitting the basket meant it was a good writing day.




I remember this in Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas, in which he wrote a thousand-page novel without carbons (remember carbons? If you’re under 60, you won’t), so that by the end of the movie the one existing copy blew out to sea.

Update, Hollywood, update. Don’t show people slapping a hysterical person. Would YOU like to be slapped if you were hysterical? I’d be tempted to rip the person’s throat out. But hey, if it’s done in the movies, that’s what we need to do. It must work.

Woody Allen, now. (My fingers invariably stumble over his name and call him Woody Alien.) We all know he IS that writer who sits in a little nook in his palatial home banging away at a manual typewriter (and who must have his ribbons handmade for him in Thailand or somewhere). In his latest venture, Blue Jasmine, a tour de force vehicle for Cate Blanchett who plays a sort of latter-day Blanche DuBois, there are some clangers that are not only puzzling but downright offputting. One wonders if Allen has been living in a cave all these years.




Phones are the worst of it, though that’s not all: Jasmine’s low-rent sister Ginger has a wall phone with a cord which her badass boy friend predictably rips out of the wall and hurls, presumably in order to cut her off from all human contact. It’s the equivalent of taking an axe and cutting the phone line. Grrrrrrrr.

Though Jasmine spends a lot of time jittering around on her iPhone, she claims to have no technical experience whatsoever and decides to take a “computer course” so she can study fashion design online.  This is one of the most awkward, embarrassing things I’ve seen in a movie in quite a few years. The computer course is generic, its purpose unnamed, but it reminds me of the things senior citizens used to take in the early ‘90s to reduce their terror of technology.





The people taking this course aren’t seniors, but appear to be college-age students of a generation that grew up surrounded by technology, swimming in it like fish in the sea. My own kids, who are practically middle-aged by now, experienced computers as a fact of life and naturally became more proficient as the technology blossomed, then boomed. My son moved into a career as a techie without any sort of awkward transition and has thrived in it as naturally as a superbly-trained athlete in competition.

So why all these 25-year-old people taking this baffling “computer course”? Because no one dares tell Woody Allen that it’s a clanger of monstrous proportions. It really does get in the way. I’m not a particularly  tech-savvy person and for the most part stick to basics, but I doubt if navigating an online course would tax my abilities because it’s all pretty simple and straightforward.




Allen missed a chance for a splendid visual joke: he could have shown a roomful of seniors desperately trying to get the hang of this, while Jasmine looks around in chagrin. But his pride probably would not have allowed it.



When I saw these painful anachronistic jolts in a movie that is otherwise brilliant and extremely well-written, it pulled me so violently out of time that I sometimes wondered if the movie was supposed to take place in the early ‘90s. I am actually surprised that Blanchett didn’t try to rattle the nonexistent cradle on her iPhone or take a Pitman shorthand course at the local recreation centre.



Saturday, August 24, 2013

More Lloyd synchronicity: brought to you by your Uncle Marty!




(Facebook-surfing can either be very boring, or. . . very boring. But I found something tonight. Then lost it, then found it again. It's an interview from this past spring for Humanities magazine, featuring everyone's favorite Italian uncle, Martin Scorsese. Then I get to the end of it and find a Lloyd double-whammy. OK, so when do I get the third one?)




LEACH: How big was the transition from silent to talkies? How did it affect comedies?
SCORSESE: It all became verbal. The comedy stars in the thirties were Laurel and Hardy, thankfully, and W. C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. Then after the war or during the war, Abbott and Costello, which was really language, old vaudeville routines. And then postwar it’s Martin and Lewis, which was a kind of manic craziness and kind of reflection of the freedom after the war.
LEACH: Two foils.
SCORSESE: Yeah, exactly. But in the silent era, it’s all physical and visual comedy: Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and Charley Chase, all these people we’re restoring. There’s a lot of them that are being restored. It’s quite remarkable seeing these on a big screen.





Young people, when I show it to them, they ’ll ask, Do they talk in this movie? I say, they don’t talk in this one, but you might find it interesting. And they do.
LEACH: I’ll bet.
SCORSESE: The great silent dramatic films really worked extraordinarily well. I mean, they still do if you’ve seen them restored, meaning at the right speed, the right tint and color, because everything was in color, but toned and tinted. In any event, they did have their own international language. Murnau wanted to use title cards in Esperanto. He said, this is the universal language, cinema. And then when sound came in, it changed again completely.
LEACH: The movie industry is America’s greatest presentation to the world in terms of public diplomacy. For instance, Charlie Chaplin was truly universal. You didn’t have to translate it into any language.





SCORSESE: Norman Lloyd, who was a great actor and producer, he worked with everybody: Hitchcock and Welles and Chaplin. He’s in his nineties now. He was just talking on television the other night on TCM, and he was saying that Chaplin is universal, probably the greatest, because he kind of told the story of the immigrant. And anywhere around the world people could identify with it.
LEACH: Well, we thank you.
SCORSESE: Thank you.


(Post-blog revelation. Don't ask me how I find these things. The above shot of the demented old man in the Shriners fez really is Harold Lloyd hanging off the Space Needle in Seattle when he was something like 76 years old. I would've doubted my eyes except, when I looked closely at his right hand, I could see that it was missing thumb and forefinger. How and why he'd do this is anyone's guess, but maybe he was thinking in terms of going out with a big splash.)





The gospel according to Woody Allen









(A big p. s. The above quote has also been attributed to George Carlin and Andy Rooney. Pick one. To be honest, my bet's on Carlin.)