Falling in Love with Edna St. Vincent Millay

It’s National Poetry month and St. Vincent’s hospital in Greenwich Village is closing, a suitably gloomy metaphor for the decline of its namesake’s reputation. Edna St. Vincent Millay (her middle name – which she preferred – came from the hospital where she was born) has been sliding in stature for decades. She can’t seem to get any respect these days. Even two biographies, released months apart in 2002, didn’t do much to rehabilitate her status among the cultural elite. The general feeling seems to be, she was kind of a proto-rock star, pretty and flamboyant, with a knack for dramatic reading: a performance artist whose stage presence concealed the trite, outdated sentimentality of her verse. Snobs love to refer to poetry they don’t like as “verse”, or most damningly “light verse”, which is how they dismiss her most prominent apprentice, Dorothy Parker.

Millay’s poems seem old fashioned because they fly in the face of a trend in poetry that has been gaining legitimacy since well before her death in 1950. Like the twelve tone, non-melodic music that was gaining popularity at mid-century, and expressionist painting, poetry has long been moving toward the abstract. The poetry in vogue then, by writers otherwise as diverse as W.S. Merwin, John Ashberry and Wallace Stevens, concerned itself with ideas not feelings. And this fashionable obscurity persists – check any poem published in the New Yorker magazine in the last twenty years. The new flamboyance is that of superior intellect and erudition. Maybe it began with Ezra Pound, bragging in some poem that only three people in the world could understand it, and you weren’t one of them.

Edna wrote about feelings. She had other archaic vices: she often wrote in rhyme, she wrote sonnets and other traditional verse forms. She addressed the subjects of her poems by quaint locutions like “thou” and “thy”. Technically, her work could have been composed in the nineteenth century. She would have been perfectly at home drinking tea in some salon with Thomas Hardy and Matthew Arnold. She was no innovator, but innovation, at least when performed for its own sake, like an elaborate magic trick (See: the syntax disappears; watch as I pull the Latin quotation from my hat), is often overrated, particularly by academics who can’t do anything else.

Edna St Vincent Millay did something very special: she wrote about her own feelings with a pellucid clarity that helped you understand your own. This puts her in rare and extraordinary company, among the likes of Cummings and Yeats and Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost and T.S Eliot … as well as singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell, Edna’s true modern avatar.

Her complete poems can be found in a single volume; I found that volume in my junior year at college, on a friend’s dorm-room desk. I picked it up glanced at the table of contents and wound up reading it straight through it, as if it were a novel – or an auto-biography – in verse. I was struck and am still sustained by the unsentimental rigor of her poems. A great friend of mine died this week, and nothing could have expressed my feelings better than Millay’s unbowed, sorrowful “Dirge without Music”:

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the
love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the
world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

And just today, walking out into the early spring sunshine, I thought of Millay’s hard won bitter dismissal of the fine weather:

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

And who could fail to be moved by the clear-eyed honesty of this quatrain, this fine distinction, from one of her late sonnets:

If I had loved you less or played you slyly,

I could have held you for a summer more,

But at the cost of words I value highly;

And no such summer as the one before.

There is an unadorned, plain-spoken truth to these words – it’s almost prosaic at times, despite the careful rhyme-schemes and impeccable scansion. Yet both poetry and beauty reside in the reality she faces up to so bravely, and presents with such humble, merciless precision.

I guess this is a type of greatness we don’t cherish so much any more: the tribute of a big heart and a generous spirit, speaking for us when our own words fail. But it means a lot to me. I suspect I would have fallen in love with Edna St. Vincent Millay if I had been lucky enough to meet her. I’m half in love with her, anyway, sixty years too late. And at this moment in time, at this turn in our American story, when the text message and the e-card, the twitter tweet and the sound bite divide and conquer our ever-decreasing capacity for attention; when ironic distance is the currency of cool, there couldn’t be a better time or a better month, to make Vincent’s acquaintance.

Trust me: it’s going to be love at first sight.

The New Drug Ads: Don't Ask Your Doctor About Dethamil

Within five minutes this morning I saw an ad for what I’ll call Pharmalax (“Ask your doctor if Pharmalax is right for you.”) and a legal notification that people who had the misfortune to use last years’s Pharamalax, Dethamil, could join a class action suit against the manufacturer if they were experiencing involuntary motion, facial twitches, running sores, hysterical blindness or ‘suicidal thoughts or actions’ Personally I doubt whether the people who experience ‘suicidal actions’ (previously known as “suicide”) will be signing up for the law suit, but everyone else should.

It certainly puts the Pharmalax ad in perspective. A smiling woman cavorts with her children because some symptom she wasn’t even aware of has been ‘managed’ and masked. She hugs her husband while the dog licks her hand the speedy voice dude in the background tells us “possible side effects may include migraine headache, loss of memory, muscle cramps, dyskinesia, crippling nausea, uncontrollable rage, narcolepsy and multiple personality disorder." The good news is your new personalities will be able to sue separately under the terms of the Pharmalax class action suit.

My question is – what the hell is going on? All I see on television are these drug ads for diseases I never knew existed. Apparently my doctor doesn’t know about them either since it’s now my job to inform him about them and consult on my medications. I prefer my doctor to tell me what medications I need. I assume he has better sources of information than whatever random ad he saw on television the night before. Are we really that sick? Do we really have that many new ailments? Or do the pharmaceutical companies just want us to feel that way? I take no drugs myself, except caffeine (my doctor says it’s right for me). It’s possible side effect include writing jittery screeds about the crazy stuff I see on television. I can live with that.

My Dad used to say that he went to his lawyer for medical advice (all those stress related illnesses they shared); and to his doctor for legal advice (all those malpractice suits had taught the old medic well).

Maybe the pharmaceutical companies should take a note from Dad. I’m waiting for the next ad, for Toxifil, the next miracle drug:

“Ask your lawyer if Toxifil is right for you.”

I mean, seriously – there’s no point in destroying your health with some new wonder drug if there’s not going to be a decent pay-out at the end.

American Idol: Bowersox Wins

Cancel the season, the contest is over.

Give the prize to Crystal Bowersox and let us go back to our Netflix queues. Her performances on American Idol are so much better than everyone else’s, it’s like Shawn White at the Olympics – amazing and bizarre and finally exhilarating. You sit up the first time you hear her and think “Oh yeah – this is a talent contest!” Someone with actual talent is so rare you almost don’t recognize it. She has a gorgeous voice, she can really play guitar and her innate musicality makes the karaoke singers around her look puny and forlorn. She sings Fogerty better than Fogerty; she sings Tracy Chapman and it sounds like she wrote the song herself. Apparently she writes her own songs. I hope she gets to sing one.

Early in the season, Simon disparagingly called her a ‘busker’ – he should pay attention to those buskers, strumming outside the tube stations. A lot of them are good, some of them are great and apparently one of them was Crystal Bowersox.

During season 7, Carrie Underwood was so far ahead of everyone else in the voting that the producers were terrified that the numbers would leak and the suspense would fizzle. I suspect the same thing may happen this year, but I’m not sure. Bowersox is too odd – a little over weight, messy, with a missing tooth. And yet she’s beautiful in a strange way and mysterious, she doesn’t preen for the camera or play to it. She accepts the judge’s praise quietly. She keeps her thoughts to herself. Her attitude of calm self-certainty might alienate the fourteen-year-old girls in Boise and Dubuque, but I like it. She doesn’t really seem a part of the show: she’s from a different, tougher world. David Cook had something like this distance two years ago, but he was a humble fellow, in his talent and his personality – he tried out by accident, after tagging along with his brother, and never seemed convinced by his own success. He was charmingly small. Bowersox is big – a commanding presence, Janis Joplin with a guitar and by now her career is assured no matter what happens in the next month or two.

I’ve already downloaded two songs, which I’ve never done before. I may even cross over to the dark side this season and vote.

I just have to learn how to text first.

"Juliet, Naked": Three Writing Lessons From Nick Hornby

I received Juliet, Naked as a Valentine’s Day present, and it turned out to be a perfect one. This is the old Nick Hornby, writing about the things he loves as much as I do: music and relationships and life in small sea-side towns. Writing a book myself, I devised a brief curriculum in creative writing from the sheer delight that reading this novel gave me.

First: Do the work necessary to make your writing seem effortless.

This means avoiding clichés and finding fresh ways to tell your story. Take this random paragraph for instance:

Duncan had fallen asleep quickly, but she had lain awake, listening to him snoring and not liking him. Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she’d spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she’d ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? A partner was supposed to be some mark of success: anyone who shared a bed with someone on a nightly basis had proved herself capable in some way, no? Of something? But her relationship now seemed to her to betoken failure, not success. She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.

Duncan is obsessed with reclusive rocker Tucker Crowe, whose 20-year silence has just been broken with an album of demo versions of the songs on his classic heartbreak record Juliet. Duncan loves the unadorned ‘naked’ songs, and writes a paean to them on his Tucker Crowe website. Annie disagrees and writes a sharp little essay laying out the reasons, which boil down to -- finished songs are better than half-baked early versions, and these early stumbling efforts are really none of anyone’s business. Duncan is furious. But Tucker Crowe (who keeps up with his scattered internet fan base) loves it, and e-mails her to tell her so. Thus begins a courtship by mail and eventually a full-blown romance.

Here’s another grace note, with Annie thinking about Tucker, invoking jigsaw puzzles without ever mentioning them:

She told herself not to ask too many questions, even though there was so much she wanted to know about him. She liked to think she was curious about people, but her hunger for information went beyond curiosity: she wanted to piece the entirety of his adult life together, and she seemed to be lacking even the straight edges that would get her started.

That brings me to the next lesson:

Give your readers what they want. But still surprise them,

The premise of any book implies certain events and complications, certain moments we can’t help anticipating. In this book, we want Annie and Tucker to meet, we want them to fall in love, we want Tucker to sort out his complicated family (Five children by three wives). We want his son Jackson to like Annie and her dinky little sea-side village. We want Duncan to realize that his ex-girlfriend is entertaining the object of his decades-long monomania … in her small-town kitchen. We want Tucker and his greatest fan to meet. We want Tucker to take Annie away from the damp boredom of her provincial life and we want her to inspire new music from her aging paramour.

Spoilers ahead: it all happens.

But not quite as you expect, which brings me to the third lesson:

Be kind to your characters. Let them shine.

Even Duncan. Duncan could have been the book’s comic relief, the obsessive stalking admirer, who’d break into the house of the woman who inspired his idol’s greatest music, just to snoop in the closets; the fanboy who takes any disagreement about cultural trivia as a romantic deal-breaker. When he finally meets Tucker Crowe you fully expect him to make a fool out of himself. And he does – up to a point. He knows too much trivia, most of it false. He insists on Tucker showing him a passport to prove his identity, and he's as officious as a customs agent as he inspects the picture ID. But there’s more to Duncan than abstract, gossip-grinding adoration. There’s a kind of tough-minded purity to his admiration. Listen:

“All I can say in my defense is that … well, you asked us to listen. And some of us listened a little too hard. This will probably sound silly and not what you want to hear. But I’m not the only person who thinks you’re a genius. And while you might think we’re … we’re inadequate as people, we’re not necessarily the worst judges in the world. We read and watch movies and think, and … I probably blew it as far as you’re concerned with my silly Naked review, which was written at the wrong time and for the wrong reasons. But the original album … Do you even know how dense that was? I still haven’t peeled it all away, I don’t think, after all this time. I don’t pretend to understand what those songs meant to you, but it’s the forms of expression you chose, the allusions, the musical references. That’s what makes it art. To my mind. And … sorry, sorry, one last thing. I don’t think people with talent necessarily value it, because it all comes so easy to them., and we never value things that come easy to us. But I value what you did on that album more highly, I think, than anything else I’ve heard. So thank you. And now I think I should leave. But I couldn’t meet you without telling you all that

And you can’t help thinking – "All right! Go, Duncan." We all have someone, some artist, we want to make this speech to. I actually said something like it to John Fowles, after searching him out in Lyme Regis during the summer of 1972. Duncan rose to the occasion much better than I did, and Hornby uses the moment to engage us with Duncan, and make us respect him and even love him a little, just as Annie does. The speech affects Tucker also:

It had never occurred to him that his work was redeemable, or that he was redeemable through his work. But as he listened that afternoon to an articulate, nerdy man tell him over and over again why he was a genius, he could feel himself hoping that it might actually be true.

So Hornby teaches by example: he lets his characters shine, gives us what we want but still surprises us, in a meticulously crafted but apparently effortless novel that keeps us giddy with the pleasures of literature from the first page to the last. Now all I have to do is apply those lessons to my own book. A daunting task. Maybe I’ll re-read Juliet, Naked again, first.

And take better notes this time.

Play it Forward: Keeping the Music Alive

Cotton - The Mountain Goats

I ran into a man, while walking my pug yesterday, and he told me a peculiarly sad story. He had just taken his twenty-year old son to a Buddy Holly tribute band concert. The kid had to be dragged to the event, but wound up loving the music (it’s Buddy Holly – who wouldn’t?). The sad part? It occurred to me even as he was speaking, and in my usual manner, I just blurted it out. “You blew it, man,” I said. “How did your kid get to be twenty without ever hearing Buddy Holly? You’re a parent -- passing that music along is your job.”

I guess I sounded a little harsh, but it was true and the other side of the story – he spent a few minutes describing his futile efforts to enjoy a Kings of Leon album his son wanted him to hear – was just as demoralizing. He owed it to himself and his son to try a little harder. Apart from anything else, Kings of Leon rock. The point is, music stays alive through the proselytizing and cajoling, the commerce and community of families. Things vanish if they’re not appreciated. I think of the ruins in that Borges story which only existed because of one bird visiting on its yearly migrations, because one consciousness valued it. When that bird died, the crumbling old structure simply disappeared. But it’s not just fanciful Argentine metaphors I’m talking about – pieces of history can vanish as well. A Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles had been run by generations of women, with the recipes handed down from mother to daughter, but never transcribed. The system worked perfectly well until the first all-male generation. No one thought to teach the little boys the recipes and when the last old lady who knew them died, a whole subspecies of Mexican cuisine died with her. That’s a cautionary tale about unexamined sexism of course, but it’s also a warning about the fragility of the culture that sustains us.

My mother’s father was a prominent theatrical press agent, a Damon Runyan-esque character who did publicity for the likes of Hoagy Carmichael and Fats Waller, and he exposed her to the great Broadway talent of the twenties and thirties; she married a playwright and continued her intimacy with the stage (Guys and Dolls was playing across the street from my Dad’s first produced play all through the fall of 1952). I grew up saturated with the show tunes she loved, and learned to love the composers who wrote those tunes – George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, among others. They took their place with Beethoven and Tchaikovsky in our household (“Tchaikovsky wrote hit tunes,” she used to exult) Mom could be making breakfast singing “Adelaide’s Lament” from Frank Loesser’s masterpiece (“We get on the train to Niagra, you can hear church bells chime; the compartment is air-conditioned and the mood’s sublime – then we get off at Saratoga, for the fourteenth time), or some ditty from a Mozart opera -- anything was possible. We always had Milton Cross hosting the quiz during the intermission of the Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon broadcasts; and I went to sleep every night with the second movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik introducing the late night show on WQXR.

I passed all this on to my kids – along with the music I grew up with … the Beatles, The Stones, Joni Mitchell, Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Cat Stevens, The Who, Neil Young, Elton John. My kids were the first ones in their elementary school to discover the Beatles, and I was happy so see a small island version of Beatle-mania spread through the ten-year-old Nantucket community faster than a flu bug, They moved on -- to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, The Clash, Nirvana and beyond. Now I’m reaping the benefits, as I discover groups as diverse as The Postal Service The Shins, The Killers, Belle and Sebastian, Vampire Weekend, The Mountain Goats … and yes, Kings of Leon.

How would I have ever discovered this music, without my children? And how would they have discovered it themselves, if they hadn’t grown up in the music-rich environment my wife and I provided? They have taste, and we’re at least partly responsible. It all comes around in giant elegant circles. When my Mom was in the hospital this summer she wanted to hear some ‘new music’- she wanted to know what my kids were listening to. I played her John Darnielle’s Cotton and her face lit up, just as mine had the first time Nick played it for me, three generations connected by the harsh, elegiac spell of a beautiful song.

I can’t wait to hear the music my grandchildren will bring to me, in exchange for “You’re the Top”, “The Pretender” and “Cotton.” It’s how we keep the music alive. But it’s more than that. It’s how we keep each other alive, too.

That’s what I wanted to tell the old man I met on my dog walk. Maybe I’ll make him a mix-tape. He’s going to love Kings of Leon, if he just gives them a chance.

A New Low for American Idol

I know that's an ambiguous headline. I could be talking about the hightened tapioca inanity of the judges' comments last night (Simon excepted), which kind of boil down to "You were bad but you could be good and you're cute but you chose the wrong song and you deserve to be here but you don't, because if we admitted how bad you really were we'd have to admit we blew it. I mean -- we picked you out of hundreds of thousand of singers. And an epic fail like that doesn't exactly boost ratings."

I could also be talking about last night's guys, who with one exception were flat, boring, soulless and out of tune. It would make sense, since I can't remember a more dismal group.

But that's not what I'm talking about and neither are the grating re-cycled "this is my dream" sound-bites that precede every clunking performance. Pick a better dream dude.

Or better yet -- wake up.

No, I'm talking about one performance in particular, and the judges' response to it. The culprit is John Park, a nice looking but talentless young man who chose to perform one of the greatest works of art of the 20th century (and I mean all the arts -- stack it in there with Christo's wrapped cathedral and Guernica and Death of a Salesman; with Falling Water and Top Hat and The Great Gatsby) I'm talking about Billy Holiday's searing anthem to self-reliance, "God Bless the Child".

There was so much wrong with that segment, it's hard to know where to start. The kid had no business even trying to scale that mountain. He sang it with no heart, no feeling, no sense tht he'd ever had to take the left-overs from a rich relative's table -- and, like so many of the other boys -- with no rhythm and no tune. The song was barely recognizable ... that may have been the best thing about John Park's performance.

But it got worse. None of the judge's mentioned Billie Holiday. I found this particularly offensive since one of the standard critical tropes since the beginning of American Idol has been for the panel to say stuff like "That's a Mariah Carey song. You got to bring it when you try a song that big. That's a lot to live up to, dog" and "All I could hear was Celine Dion, honey. She owns that song" or "That sounded like a karoake version of Whitney Houston. You brought nothing of your own to it."(For extra points, guess the judges)

But when it's a Billie Holiday song, the greatest singer in Jazz history, who makes Whitney Houston (Or Diana Ross who attempted to play her in the execrable biopic) sound like big-throated school girls taking a solo at the chorus concert, no one says a word. Maybe Billie Holiday doesn't register with those people, maybe they don't care.

But I do, and this was the moment where American Idol jumped the shark for me. I don't think I'll be watching it any more. Instead, I think I'll take out my 1937 Count Basie recordings and check out Lester Young making some real music with Lady Day.

That's a lot to live up to, dog.

Killer Whale: "I've Had It."

an 'animal expert' on one of the network morning shows expressing bafflement at the tragic Killer Whale incident at Sea World yesterday. They really can't figure it out? Is that possible? Can they really be so dense and solipsistic?

I remember a story about the great dolphin researcher John Lilly -- he set his study animals free because they were mocking the tests he gave them and it became clear to him that they were just as smart as he was. Ultimately he couldn't justify holding intelligent animals captive.

Sea World has no such scruples.

The spokespeople talk about the 'love' between the whales and the trainers, the 'joy' and 'play'. But if the tanks were connected with the open water and the whales could come and go as they pleased, I know and you know and the corporate shills at Sea World know just as well as we do, that those whales would be gone in one flick of a tail, never to be seen again.

They're prisoners. They live in cages, forced to perform grotesque antics for our amusement. There were about a dozen Twilight Zone episodes where humans wound up in alien zoos -- a chilling thought. If puny venal arrogant creatures abducted you from your world and stuck you in a 'familiar environment' (Complete with cable TV and frozen dinners, while making you dance and juggle, feeding you chunks of meat when you cooperated, you might get a little pissed off, yourself. The thought of some opportune pay-back might cross your mind. After all, what would you have to lose?

This isn't the first time a whale has attacked. It won't be the last. Sea World's whale show is closed down for the moment, and they should keep it that way. They claim to love the whales. If so they should follow the advice of everyone from Richard Bach to Sting:

If you love them, set them free.

Democratic Conspiracies Revealed

Yes, now it can be told!

Those bumbling contentious disorganized democrats are in fact Machiavellian geniuses, hatching plot after plot designed to bring down the Republican party, assure Democratic victory in 2010 and guarantee President Obama a second term in 2012.

Who are the masterminds behind these intricate, devious schemes? Rahm Emmanuel? Eric Holder? Joe Biden? Barack Obama himself? Michelle? Perhaps they’re all part of the secret cabal currently scheming the downfall of the GOP. We know this much – no one could have conjured these strategies alone. This magnitude of cunning requires a virtual Manhattan Project of political hatchet men and tacticians.

Starting with the simplest of the three plans we know about, the Obama administration may have planted a mole in the inner circles of Dick Cheney’s private life. Somehow, they have convinced him to go on the air, to speak at CPAC conventions, to write articles, to make himself as conspicuous as possible speaking the idiotic partisan rhetoric which -- this is the master stroke – he actually believes himself, gradually corroding any credibility his administration might have possessed and turning thousands if not millions of undecided voters to the Progressive cause in what can only be called a fugue state of contempt and disgust.

Electing Scott Brown was a far trickier proposition – yet crucial, in order to shake up the party and push health Care legislation toward Reconciliation vote in the Senate. Only a ‘catastrophe’ of this magnitude could goad the Democratic majority into such a bold response. But that meant choosing the democratic candidate most likely to lose the election and once the cabal did the due diligence on Martha Coakley, they saw the opportunity. Here was a woman who scorned shaking hands with the electorate, who took her election as a foregone conclusion and who added the special gift of zero charisma to the mix of snobbery, entitlement and standard “democratic” muddle-headed foolishness. It seemed like a long shot – this was Kennedy’s seat after all – but they knew they had picked a horse who could lose big-time and there’s a rumor going around the West Wing that Kennedy himself had endorsed this last ditch end run around the Republican filibuster.

I save the most brilliant design for the last.

The problem was a basic one: how to split the Republican Party, as Perot did in 1992 – and as Nader had split the Democrats in 2000. There’s no more certain route to victory, and the best part is you can mask your power-grab in a swath of approved rhetoric about the value of third party candidates, inclusive democracy and the voice of the people. Someone in the White house must have been watching Glenn Beck, and that’s where the inspiration came from: foment a whole super-conservative ‘anti-tax’ ‘grass roots’ movement. The fuse was there – it just needed the right undercover Democratic operatives to light it. Which Democratic Karl Rove came up with term “tea bagger’ we may never know, but it was a flash of genius. Now Republican candidates have the Hobson’s choice of appeasing the Tea bag movement and alienating their base, or spurning them and looking like liberals in disguise. When a tea-bag candidate in the 2012 election finally appears (Palin is on the short list, we know that), the Republican vote will be fragmented, torn apart by its own partisan fault lines, arguing about tax relief and abortion while a true Democratic majority with a victorious Democratic president in the White House steers the country back onto a course of compassion, fairness and sanity.

Brilliant!

Well, of course this whole idea is absurd. The Democrats coluldn't organize a pie fight in a bakery. They’re the Bay of Pigs People, the Iran rescue mission people the "Oops-I-left-a-stain-on-the-dress"people. They couldn’t plan a surprise party for an Alzheimer’s victim.

But a boy can always dream.

Needled: Why Men Should Watch "Project Runway"

Coming across on the boat from Hyannis last week, I saw quite a few married couples, but none of them were talking to each other. The wives were in one group discussing who had gotten face work done, and whose kid was getting suspended and whose husband was sleeping with the Swedish au pair. They talked about books and movies and how to deal with their mothers-in-law and how short a skirt you could wear at age forty.

The men were talking about work.

Most of them were building contractors, so they were talking about the price of copper flashing, and the difficulty of procuring clear trim white pine. I felt bad for them. Their conversations were boring and they could have had the same boring conversations at Marine Lumber or any job site on Nantucket. Was there really nothing else to talk about? My Dad told me that the best advice he ever got as a kid came from the football coach at the Hill School. “You’ll never be any good at this game,” the old man told him. “You’re better off playing with the girls.” He had been doing precisely that ever since and highly recommended it. I hung out with the wives on that boat trip. The story of how one woman was breaking into her husband’s email and deleting messages from his girlfriend, struck me as more interesting than the off-island price for a new table saw.

Then I came home and watched two straight hours of Project Runway.

I tell people that and it’s like I just told them I was a cross dresser. “Hey!” I feel like saying, “I’m watching them make the clothes – not wearing them!”

It’s annoying because there’s nothing gender specific about Project Runway .On one level it’s no different from American Idol or MTV’s Real Life or any of the many shows Project Runway has spawned (cooking competitions, hair-dressing competitions, even an upscale architecture competition on the Sundance channel). There are strong personalities – the Diva, the snob, the hard-working loser, the modest visionary the insanely self assured disaster. (The most talented ones always have the least to say for themselves, whether they’re cutting fabric or singing Celine Dion tunes) You have the judges, including the chillingly Teutonic Heidi Klum (“You’re OUT. Auf Wiedersehen”); you have the mentor (Tim Gunn) … you have the nasty remarks and last minute panic attacks and desperate overhauls at the last minute.

But on Project Runway you get something more.

Every week on the show the ever decreasing number of designers accept that episode’s challenge, and actually design clothes (whether its making evening dresses out of burlap, creating a garment made from material found in the grocery store, or making a garden party ensemble from whatever they could find in the flower district). We watch them create something new every week, whether it’s brilliant or awful or somewhere in between. This is a level of ingenuity and ionvention we can fully absorb and judge for ourselves. The singers on American Idol don’t write their own songs; we can’t taste the food prepared on all those kitchen combat programs. But we can see the dresses, and watch them being stitched together, in an hour long fugue state of vicarious creativity. There’s no reason in the world why men shouldn’t enjoy this just as much as women. It’s like the vilified ‘chick flicks’ which are basically just stories about people, rather than explosions. Men are people. Cutting them off from so much of the fun of life seems unfair and absurd.

But then, I drink hazelnut coffee and wear pink Crocs. So maybe I’m not the best person to ask.

The Problem with Independent Movies

I just finished watching Fish Tank, a much lauded independent film, written and directed by Andrea Arnold, starring newcomer Katie Jarvis and Inglourious Basterd Michael Fassbender. I disliked it intensely, and it made me think of another independent movie about a disaffected young woman, The Good Girl. Jennifer Aniston starred in Miguel Arteta’s film sight years ago, but not much has changed in Indie world since then. Life is still bleak, apartments are still grimy, people are still aimless and rude and self-absorbed. The camera is still-hand held, even if it’s digital now. Fish Tank looks like it might be the first film ever actually shot on someone’s smart phone. Though I suppose it would be an insult to the filmmakers to accuse them of buying such high-tech toys. I remember some indie film-maker joking at the Oscars a few years ago “This is surreal -- the dress I’m wearing tonight cost more than my movie.”

But there’s more to the intemperate personalities and squalid settings of most independent films than cranky moods and low budgets. There’s a philosophy at work here, and it’s the philosophy that annoys me the most. The inverse snobbery of these films makes a brazen statement to the audience: “This is the truth. This is real life. Of course it’s ugly and unpleasant. If that’s too tough for you, there’s a Sandra Bullock movie playing next door. We are not here to entertain you. Get your infantile jollies elsewhere. We owe you nothing. We don’t make cheesy deals with jaded thrill junkies. Pay attention. Embrace your boredom and discomfort. Medicine is supposed to taste bad. Iodine is supposed to sting.”

The clear implication is that they’re better than we are. It reminds me of an old girlfriend of mine who made an imperious virtue out of her self-inflicted misery. Sadness was more than unfortunate phase (or a clinical condition): it was a badge of honor. Attempts to cheer her up always ended in defeat – the fact that you were happy destroyed your credibility. Happy people were shallow, superficial children who didn’t grasp the appalling horror of the world, or the tragic ironies of human existence.

There’s only one thing to do with a person like that: flee.

In much the same spirit, I rarely watch an entire independent film. Give me Sandra Bullock any time.

Here’s why: regular movies like me. They want to win me over. They think (craven panderers!) that I need a reason to be interested in their characters and situations. They attempt to provide such reasons and in the process often wind up telling engaging stories populated with memorable people. You can trace this effort back to 1938, when Ernst Lubistch – along with screenwriters Billy Wilder and Charles Brakett-- invented the ‘meet cute’ Gary Cooper and Claudette Colbert are both shopping for pajamas, fighting with separate clerks because he only buys the bottoms and she only buys the tops. They make the obvious arrangement and they’re off to the races. Most importantly, we like both of them and actually care what happens to them.

The great James M. Cain explains the point brilliantly in 1 1944 preface to a collection of novellas called Three of a Kind. He attributes the story-telling wisom he dispenses to theatrical producer William Harris Jr., who clarified things, thusly:



In this story you think you want to write, they meet, they have lunch, they talk, they like each other, they fall in love. That’s how it does happen. But I don’t pay $5.50 for that. It may be love but it’s not a play. I don’t feel anything, and making me feel is what you’re after. Look, I’m sitting at a window, looking down at the park. There’s two benches there, one with a couple on it holding hands. Well, there’s no news in that, is there? I guess they’re in love but they can go right down and get married and send me a card from Niagara Falls and I don’t care a bit. On the other bench is a girl reading a book. She’s got a little dog there, and every now and then she exercises him by throwing a ball out on the grass and making him bring it back. A guy comes along, takes a look at her, and passes by. When he takes another look at her, I know he likes her looks, and right away I wonder what’s going to happen. Now if she looks up from the book and jumps up and runs over to him and kisses him, it’s still love, but I’m bored. But if she looks up, and he walks away quick, I know they’re strangers. I see him stop at a peanut vendors, and I wonder what he’s up to. He buys peanuts, comes back, sits on the bench, pays no attention to her. But the dog he pats on the head He starts on the peanuts, but right away he peels one and pitches it up in the air for the dog. The dog catches it, pricks up its ears for another. Turns out the dog likes peanuts. Next thing, the girl is watching it and laughs. The guy raises his hat, moves over. They both play with the dog. He’s done it, Cain, he’s pulled something, he’s got me interested. I stay right there watching them. I ought to be writing a scene, but I want to see how this comes out. After a while, when he flags a cab and they all three drive off together, he, she. And the dog, they’re my favorite lovers that day. It’s the same way with anything you write. Before you can interest me in a story, you have to interest me in them.



This is the essential narrative truth that independent films no only fail to grasp but actually repudiate. They have their dogma (they even have a school of filmmaking called dogma), but I think something much less fancy and high-falutin’ is going on underneath the academic double talk.

It makes me think of the first lecture I ever attended at Vermont College, Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders. These insects were purely graphic: if a student used the verb ‘to be’ enough times on a page, Doug could draw a dot in the middle and draw lines out to all the examples until the page looked like a multi-legged spider: not a good thing. The verb to be is a mere connector; it doesn’t tell a story; you should never promote it to the fall-back verb in a tough sentence, I loved Doug’s example. The student writes, “The barn was red.” A perfectly acceptable sentence, grammatically correct an inoffensive. Try substituting a real verb – suddenly you’re telling a story, something like this, perhaps “Red paint peeled from the barn, revealing a scabrous undercoat that exactly matched the old man’s complexion as he hammered on the FOR SALE sign and walked away for the last time.”

Years of work with graduate writing students have helped Glover understand the subtle reason why so many students choose not to seek out the fresh sprightly interesting verb and settle instead for that lifeless stalwart of the passive voice,”to be”.

It’s too much work.

Finding the exciting, vivid verbs to drive your story means that you (and not the reader) have to do the work of imagining what’s really going on, how it looks and smells and feels. Student: “The rabbit was on the lawn”

Or you could write it as Keats did, as quoted by F. Scott Fitzgerald in a letter to his daughter (“lucky girl,” Doug added), explaining in great prose verbs drive the sentences:

“The hare limped, trembling, through the frozen grass.”

So am I saying that Independent filmmakers are lazy? No – just the talented ones.

I don’t care about the others. But ones who do have a spark need to get to work. They have to realize that watching an angry teen-ager yell at everyone in her path for the first fifteen minutes of a film gives me no reason to care whether or not she finds love with her mother’s boyfriend at the end. They have to realize that a juiceless, washed out character like Jennifer Aniston’s Justine Last in The Good Girl presents no feature of interest. People like her exist? So what? When I was reading scripts for a Hollywood agent, every bad writer played the same card: “It’s a true story.” Nothing matters less. True stories have no third acts. True stories happened to you – I need something to happen to me. Forget the true story. Tell me the interesting story.

That’s how you get from the Independent Spirit Awards to the Oscars.

Fitness After Fifty: The Book Nerd's Workout

Full disclosure: I’m 57 years old, and twenty pounds over weight – and that was fine with me, at least until I caught a glimpse of myself, ambushed by a an unexpected mirror. I can’t tell you exactly what I saw (I’m sure you can guess) but it did not match up with my svelte 20-year old self-image. It was a stiff does of reality I couldn’t shake. All those pairs of pants kept getting tighter, and it wasn’t just the shrinking effects of the dryer, though I remain a staunch supporter of the shrinking effects of the dryer.

I had to fix the problem, but I knew my options were limited. Getting up at six A.M. and running five miles sounded good but I had tried it before and I knew it wasn’t going to happen. A personal trainer would have been great, but it was a little out of my price range. My son had gotten fit just by running on a treadmill, so I talked Annie into the idea and looked them up on line: too big, too expensive. You needed a separate room for a piece of equipment like that. All of this was at the stage where just thinking about exercising seems almost like the real thing. It takes up time, distracts you, tires you out. Plus you get that all-important sense of self-satisfaction: You get to say stuff like “Exercise” (at least thinking about exercise) “just happens to be a major priority for me!” Notice the “happens-to” formulation, a favorite among self-righteous jerks who invoke coincidence just to deny it; and thus imbue their random opinions with the gravity of fate.

Well it all sounded good but I was still getting fat.

My solution was to join the local health club.

They had treadmills – and a shower, which my current antique apartment did not. There were other people there – who could be depended on to snicker at me if I slacked off (Peer pressure is good, once you’re out of high school). I would get to drive there, and buy coffee afterward. It seemed like a manageable proposition. Of course, there was always the locker room issue, you know … getting undressed around other men (I think of Woody Allen in Annie Hall, explaining why he doesn’t shower at the tennis club: “I’m not comfortable being seen naked by a man of my own gender.”). But I figured going a little later than other people – as a painting contractor, my time is pretty much my own -- might cut down on the crowds.

It was worth a try.

Plus if you give some one three hundred dollars in advance for three months of Health Club membership, you feel especially profligate and irresponsible (not to mention lazy and puny and lame) if you don’t go. It’s a good system – it puts every kind of pressure on you, and the combination usually works.

So now we have to talk about the machine itself. It takes you through a work-out, increasing the incline and decreasing it, measuring the twenty minutes in two and three minute segments, praising you (“Great job!”) and encouraging you (“Only six more minutes!”) as you go along. It’s a little abstract, being praised by a machine, but the worst part is, I’m so craven I like it. “That machine says I’m doing a great job!” I told myself. Later on, I asked the instructor about the calorie-burning meter display, and he just laughed. “It’s an average,” he said. “The machine has no idea how many calories you’re burning.” So maybe it was just as unreliable about how good a job I was doing. Liar. But I didn’t care. Flattery will get you everywhere, treadmill machine.

The real problem was those minute and two-minute increments. I got caught up in them and the workout seemed to take forever. I needed a distraction. I don’t have an iPod, and I don’t really like listening to music when I’m exerting myself, anyway They have magazines at the club but the print is way too small to read comfortably while jogging. TVs line the walls, with the sound off, but they’re placed diabolically remote from the treadmills, rendering the close-captioning illegible. This is bad because I realized quickly that distraction is the key to getting through a workout. What do I do when I’m bored any other time? I read. But books were too cumbersome to set on the treadmill’s shelf and once again, the print was too small, anyway.

Driving home on the third day, I realized the solution, with that familiar twinge of retroactive impatience and annoyance. It was so obvious! Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

That day I ordered a big print edition of Virgina Woolf’s To The Lighthouse from Amazon. I wanted a book I had been meaning to read for a long time, something challenging. I wanted to improve my mind along with my body.

When the novel arrived in the mail, I razored out the first twenty pages and took them to the club with me. They fit perfectly on the Treadmill shelf and to my mild surprise they were utterly engrossing. And distracting: I ran six minutes before I even noticed I(three had been my outside limit before I partnered with Virginia). What the lady herself might think of me vandalizing her novel to place the pages on an exercise machine, I have no idea. I hope she’d be pleased. The thing that might please her most I discovered entirely by accident. The big print renders her book shockingly accessible. Classic literature has always meant small type: brown pages packed tight with tiny indecipherable text. It’s like the way we see World War Two in black and white, from all those grainy newsreels. But people shot color footage then also (John Huston made some stirring documentaries), and seeing those times in all the hues and shades of the real world creates a haunting new intimacy with those people. It restores the dignity, the imperative human truth of their long-extinguished lives. Big print does the same thing for the classics, removing the mystique of eyestrain and rendering the sentences, however antique and complex, fresh, approachable and seductive:



Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogueof the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss.



Good writers control your breathing: you literally hold your breath though a compound sentence and pant along with a series of short staccato ones. With Virginia Woolf in charge of my respiration and my mind taken up with Mrs. Ramsay’s walk into town with the egregious Charles Tansley, the exercise becomes almost incidental.

My next goal: twenty minutes at 4.5 miles an hour through all the inclines …and Mrs. Dalloway Then 5mph and The Moonstone! Six mph and Middlemarch. But why stop there? Seven mph and anything goes -- Mao II, Midnight’s Children, Mason and Dixon --

I’m unstoppable.

I just wish there was a private shower at the club.

Falling in Love With Football: A Super Bowl Valentine

In 1977, The Oakland Raiders finally returned to the Super Bowl. I was living at the beach that year, temporary roommates with my best friend, Stephen Salinger, a life-long Raiders fan. He made food, invited friends in, cheered through the game and celebrated for days after the Raiders’ decisive 32-14 win against the Minnesota Vikings.

I went surfing.

He couldn’t believe it. I had to be the only man in America not watching the game. It was perverse, it was pathological. It was unpatriotic. But there was a swell running and, in a favorite phrase of mine at the time, football was just “guys jumping into piles” anyway. I thought I was ‘above’ football, but the truth is I was a petty little snob from an upper East Side, socialist-leaning family (My mother voted for Adlai Stevenson. Twice). We went to anti-war demonstrations and Pete Seeger concerts (Yes, we sang along), not football games. Running photographs at half-time from Shea Stadium to the pressroom at The Daily News, years before, I had gotten a closer brush with the sport. I came away impressed by the sheer size of the players and the gladiatorial brutality of the game itself. But I wasn’t inspired to watch.

I later became friendly with one of the players on the field that day, Jets cornerback Steve Tannen. We sat in my step-brother’s living room watching another Superbowl, and he explained what was going on. I still didn’t get it. My smug superior pose was like a suit of armor. I clanked when I walked. An actual NFL player was sitting on a couch with me, explaining the intricacies of the game, and all I could think was, “This is way too complicated for such a dumb sport.”

I might never have discovered the game at all, but around ten years ago, something completely unexpected happened.

I fell in love with a fan.

. Annie and I worked together in my contracting business and we were painting a kitchen one Sunday afternoon, when she put on the radio. Not NPR as usual, but an AM station out of new York city, WFAN. The Giants were playing and she didn’t want to miss the game. She liked listening almost as much as watching, which was convenient since the hated Patriots had knocked the Giants off the Boston television stations most Sundays.

Bob Papa and Dick Lynch called the games better than the boneheads FOX and ABC, and she liked constructing the plays in her mind from their rapid-fire descriptions: “It’s third and eighteen, Collins in the shotgun. Amani Toomer split wide left, Cross to the right, Tiki Barber in the slot. Long snap from Center. Collins back to pass. He has Amani Toomer up the left side line, he’s all alone … the pass is short, he comes back for the ball, makes the catch, in typical Toomer fashion, dragging both toes in-bounds. That’s a miraculous catch at the twelve yard line and – no, there’s a flag on the play. It’s coming back, folks.”

I didn’t understand most of this. It was like listening cricket or curling. But Annie sure did. I’ll never forget her howl and rage and frustration at that moment, when it turned out that Roman Oben had forced the holding call.

“What the hell are you doing?!” she shouted at the radio. “They’re killing us with these penalties! You don't hold there! Not there! Not now! We’re giving them the game! Why can’t they just let them play? Now watch! It’s fourth and inches and Fassel’s going for the field goal! Just give Tiki the ball! Let him run it!” But he didn’t, and the kick went wide. Another dismal day for the Giants.

But the fans were used to days like that, in the lean years before the great squad of the mid-eighties and the tough years since. And at the end of all those seasons, they’d just sigh and say “Maybe next year…” There was always plenty of time to lick your wounds and prepare for the next season: it was a long way to September.

Eventually I learned the terminology, and more and more every Sunday I got drawn into the games. It had happened the same way for Annie, as a little girl, sitting with her Dad, watching the games on television – or traveling to Yankee Stadium, and even the Yale Bowl, during those seasons when the Giants didn’t have a venue of their own. Football turned into the best way to spend time with him: it gave them an endlessly fascinating topic in common, and a perfect strategy for getting to know her otherwise difficult and remote father. A few years later I saw Remember the Titans and thought I glimpsed a little of Annie in the white coach’s ten-year old daughter, screaming at the TV. Not that much has changed. She still paces and chides and screams “GO DEFENCE” on those crucial goal-line stands. I don’t think Annie sat down once through the whole of Super Bowl 42, when the Giants triumphed in their rematch with the hated Patriots.

She’s had her glory moments as fan. She submitted a song about the team – lyrics to the tune of Ora Lee -- in a FAN contest, and won it. She wound up singing on the radio with Offensive Tackle Karl Nelson. Bob Papa had written “Good” on the sheet she submitted – as terse and emphatic as the call on an extra point. Some sample lyrics—



Twelve and Four

Twelve and Four

We are playoff bound

With Stephen Baker in the air

And Otis on the ground



A friend of Annie’s worked for the New Yorker, and the big day got written up as a Talk of the Town piece.

Cool.

The more I watched, the more I fell in love with the game. I gloried in the spectacular pounding the Giants gave the Vikings on the way to that other Super Bowl, in 2000 – and suffered through their humiliating loss to the Ravens, a few weeks later. We drove all the way down to Connecticut for that calamity. Annie’s whole family was morbidly in tune with the team, reading the mood on the field even before the kickoff. “They look flat,” her Dad announced as the Giants out onto the field. It seemed nuts to me, but they were right. “It’s all about emotion,” Annie told me, and I began to sense that myself, feeling the shifts in psychic energy on the field with that crucial touchdown before the half-time, or the break in concentration when the other team called a disruptive time-out.

With the increasing popularity of so-called ‘reality’ TV and the cultural ascendance of unscripted drama – from The Great Race to American Idol, from Survivor to The Biggest Loser – I started to realize a curious small truth: football is our true reality TV, and our most fascinating unscripted drama. I had seen football movies like Varsity Blues, where the final victory was a foregone conclusion. In the actual game, anything can happen. An interception or a turnover, a miscalculated on-side kick, can turn a game upside down.

I realized that football defines itself through series of paradoxes. It represents a kind of utopian view of America, where people work together toward a common goal, a world without rancor or racism, a peaceable kingdom … where men are broken and battered in ferocious combat every week. It’s a brutal sport that rewards elegance and grace, that elevates men to unparalleled stardom through intricate self effacing military teamwork; a bruising physical competition that relies on levels of knowledge and intuition and cerebral analysis that would give a MIT statistics professor pause. It takes place on a hundred yard playing field, and yet any individual game can be decided by a matter of inches; It plays itself out over almost four hours but so often resolves itself in the last few seconds – that over-time field goal in the air as the clock runs down.

It draws familes together, like Annie’s; and friends, like Stephen and me (we commisterate now, about the Raiders and the Giants); and cities, like New Orleans and Indianapolis, whose teams will be duking it out this Sunday in Miami. And it gives us an extraordinarily diverse cast of characters to enjoy: The old legends thinking about retirement, the kids scoring their first NFL touchdowns ever, in the autumn sunlight; the younger brother struggling in his brother’s shadow and the older brother moving closer to the title of greatest quarterback of all time, and closing in on it this weekend, beyond the glory of another ring. And the other players who’ll never get the ring – Tiki Barber, who retired too soon; or Barry Sanders, quitting because he was contractually bound to play out his career with a losing team. All the great careers ruined by traffic accidents and drug scandals, or by carrying a loaded gun in the waistband of your sweatpants and accidentally shooting yourself in the leg.

It’s a complex, fascinating world and I know I’m a part of it at last as I wait for Peyton to throw that first pass on Sunday, and wonder what happened to his little brother’s team, lying down to be trampled by the Vikings in a humiliating final game, and blow out a long breath and say, “Oh well. Maybe next year.”

I’ll be watching the Combine and the draft on the NFL channel, discussing the prospects with my family (The Giants need help on their offensive line). It’s not much, but I’ll take what I can get.

It’s a long way to September.

Avatar; Footnote to an Asterisk

In comparing the Avatar box office grosses with Titanic, various showbiz pundits have pointed out that the figures are somewhat deceptive -- tickets cost more now, so you have to sell fewer of them to get the same dollar amount. Will Avatar ever sell as many tickets as Titanic? There's no way to tell (though it's starting to seem possible), but the usual adjustments for inflation don't really apply here the way they usually do. There is another factor at work, one we've never seen before. It throws off ythe pundits' calculations.

These higher ticket prices are not a function of vast economic forces, the inevitable rise of ticket prices over the whole marketplace for a decade or two. Much of this increase is voluntary, and specific to one film. People willingly paid a considerable premium to see Avatar in 3D. They accepted, even embraced, this one-time spike in movie pricing, happily forking over as much as twice the usual admission for this particular experience.

Avatar made more money faster than any other film in history because people were willing to pay so much more to see it. That's not just a footnote to a box office asterisk. In an era when most people prefer to pay less for movies and see them on cable, or rent them through netflix --or else just wait until they're on normal television, that's an un paralleled endorsement by an unequalled number of people for a unique film experience.

No asterisk required.

Farewell, Robert B. Parker

Robert B. Parker taught my son to read.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. He didn’t sit with Nick and sound out the vowels and work on the phonics textbooks. But he made Nick want to read and that’s more important than all the vocabulary tests and grammar lessons put together. I gave Nick Mortal Stakes, Looking for Rachel Wallace and Early Autumn when he was in eighth grade. Up until that moment he had never read a book for fun. Schools aren’t too big on fun, and don’t seem to understand the carnal pleasures and quiet consolations of a good book, whether you’re waiting on line for a movie (I read Schindler’s List waiting to see Jurassic Park – thanks, Steve), or waiting for your father’s funeral, which is when I burned through the Harry Potter books available at the time.

It was my Dad who gave me my first Robert B. Parker Spenser novel, Taming a Seahorse. I had just landed at LAX after a long plane flight from New York. He handed me the novel and said “This will take care of your jet lag.”

Dad loved Spenser’s tough unsentimental style and his dry wit.

I remember Spenser correcting an un-amused thug who had just remarked that “Everybody’s a comedian” noting, “You haven’t said anything funny.” Threats like “I’m going to kill you,” were always met with a precise and ironic “You’re going to try.” When Spencer goes back to the crippled billionaire whose family’s murder he avenged in The Judas Goat to ask for money so he can rescue Hawk in A Catskill Eagle, the old crank is amused by Spenser’s casual admission that his only interest is money and Spenser’s complete failure to suck up to him during the intervening years. Spenser never schmoozed and he never faked it. Some friend of Hawk’s once asked him “What do you see in that big white guy?” And Hawk replied, “He does what he says he’s going to do.” For Spenser that constitutes a whole philosophy of life, but I remember thinking at the time – “That’s it? What’s the big deal?” That was before a thousand missed appointments and a dozen fizzled partnerships, before a hundred let downs, big and small – many of them with me at fault. Gradually, I learned the depressing, repetitive fact of life: almost no one actually does what they say they’re going to do. I try to do it, as I try to live up to Spenser in so many ways. You could have a worse role model, though not a more exigent one. Spenser does things his own way. In Early Autumn, he’s hired to find a runaway boy. He tracks down the kid easily, but soon realizes that the parents are ,monsters and the boy one Paul Giacomin, was right to run away. Instead of returning the spoiled petulant little creep, Spenser takes him out to some land he owns in Maine and builds a house with him. He teaches Paul construction and fighting, the two things he knows best and the kid turns out all right. In later books he becomes a ballet dancer and remains a true friend over the decades. Paul is just one member of the extended Spenser family. When Spenser takes the job of protecting radical lesbian Rachel Wallace, he strong-arms some security people. They were trying to forcibly remove her from a political demonstration, and she wanted to be manhandled out of the place, to make a political point. She fires Spenser … and then gets kidnapped. Spenser finds her on his own, for no pay, out of simple remorse and obligation. Rachel Wallace continues to appear in later books, as does Patricia Utley, the high class madam we first meet in Ceremony. Lawyer Rita Fiore, gangster Gino Fish, local cops Belson and Quirk are among the many other regulars in the books.

And then there’s Hawk, cool, impeccably dressed Cristal-drinking leg-breaker and equal member in Spenser’s freemasonry of American manhood. He doesn’t talk much, but he and Spenser understand each other. They are two Quixotes, cleaning the street gangs out of a Boston housing project for no money, making jokes about doubling their fees next time. Spenser is cool but hawk is the coolest. Who forget that scene in A Catskill Eagle where Hawk arm-wrestles some hulking mercenary in a bar, letting the guy press his arm to within an inch of the table top, stopping him there and then -- when Spenser indicates that they have to go -- effortlessly snapping the soldier’s arm in a 180 degree arc and slamming it onto the table.

Of course the primary member of the Spenser family is Susan Silverman, his gorgeous shrink girlfriend. I have to say I’ve never been overly fond of Susan. She thinks too much and she’s a little self-conscious. Also she eats like a bird. Driving down Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood years ago I saw a bumper sticker that said “I’ll be your Susan if you’ll be my Spenser.” I pulled up next to the woman at the red light on Fairfax and rolled down my window. ‘You have a problem,” I said. “Susans are everywhere. But Spensers are hard to find.” She shrugged. She knew it, much better than I did. Oh well, there was always the next Spenser book.

Until today.

All we can do now is go back and re-read them, along with the other great books, All Our Yesterdays, his Boston police epic, Wilderness, his thriller-writer-witnesses-a-mob-hit-and-finds-himself-living-one-of-his-own books adventure … and of course his glorious, late career western trilogy (Appaloosa, Resolution, Brimstone) with Spenser and Hawk re-imagined as itinerant gunmen Everett Hitch and Virgil Cole

Parker taught me to appreciate scotch and soda, stand up to bullies and finish the extra set of sit ups. He taught me how to make a fast meal and break into a window by chipping out the glazing. He taught me that solving a case has more to do with poking at a situation waiting for things to happen than finding clues. He made Boston appealing (even without a GPS). More than that, he made adulthood appealing, for three generations of my family – my brilliant, alcoholic father, my hesitant pre-adolescent son, and me. Someone once remarked that I was always in search of father figures. Maybe it’s true. I know I lost another one on Monday morning.

He died at his desk, writing, That’s the way any writer would want to go. The police said there was no sign of foul play. That was oddly disappointing, a brackish dousing of reality. A writer found dead at his desk in a Parker novel would spark another fascinating case for Spenser and Hawk. Susan would chime in with the psychiatric angle: an angry editor? A pathological fan? A jealous mystery writer? They would track it down, between runs along the Charles and work-out at Henry Cimoli’s regrettably gentrified gym (It has potted plants now).

This is real life, though -- and Parker is just gone. But his people remain, caught in time,unfaded, reliving their adventures, forever.

Parker taught my son to read; I suspect he’ll be teaching my grandson, too.

Avatar: The Best Picture

We just got back from seeing Avatar 3D for the second time in three days.

Each time we had to drive thirty miles of frozen Vermont highway, there and back, to watch the film. We’re staying in Montpelier this week, and the 3D version was only playing in a little theater just outside of Burlington. But the trip was more than worthwhile. It was essential. Twenty four hours after the first viewing Annie and I both realized that all we really wanted to do was see it again. It draws you back. It’s like a drug, and it leaves you feeling stoned – shaky and dazzled and goofy and disoriented. For hours after the first time, I felt like a gong someone had hit with a huge fuzzy mallet, vibrating happily, rocking back and forth on my ropes, barely connected to the world around me. Navigating route 89 south with my hands unsteady and my knees trembling, I was probably as dangerous as a drunk. The thought occurred to both of us – could this be dangerous? Had this movie re-wired our brains? Would we ever be able to watch ordinary movies again? Would we ever be able to enjoy the actual world around us (historically admired for its three dimensions) again? It certainly seemed flat and lifeless as we tottered out of the theater. The distortion wasn’t quite as complete and overwhelming the second time – but it was close.

You watch this movie ecstatically immersed in its world; but as you go deeper and deeper into its field of images, they penetrate you, also. They irradiate you. All you want to do at the end is watch it more. You want to go back to Pandora, maybe buy a small plot of land on one of those floating mountains.

Annie said, “This is what it must have been like at the Paris Exhibition in 1900, when people saw the first talking picture.” Maybe. But I think this was even more revolutionary, even more spectacular. After the first vertiginous moments when you actually fight it, when you finally adjust to, or perhaps submit to or just embrace the pictures opening up in front of you, you experience this story so viscerally that it stays with you like dream, like an acid trip, like some long forgotten, hypnotically resurrected part of your own life or your ancestral past.

So, long story short, it’s worth the extra two bucks.

And I have to add here, it’s not just the technology.

James Cameron has a brute ferocious story telling genius that more subtle minds, telling more nuanced stories, can only envy. You can critique him for the familiar ‘tropes’ of his narrative – the Dances with Wolves moments, the Last Samurai echoes, the Ferngully clichés – but all of that misses the point. The story may be familiar – all stories are familiar, Broken down far enough, there are only, like, seventeen of them, or something. In the end it’s all about the execution, and Cameron tells this familiar story with a rip-roaring high style, an image-drunk cinematic gusto and a heartfelt passion that you can’t deny or debunk. Is it liberal guilt propaganda? Yes! Do we guilty liberals need some great propaganda? Damn right we do. The corporate creeps who want to strip mine paradise for money represent everything I hate and the Nav’i who fight them to a standstill are my heroes. In this Dances with Wolves, the Indians win. The inhabitants of Pandora and the planet itself rally together to kick some serious robber baron capitalist ass, and it feels great.

But don’t get me wrong – Cameron loves his villains, and you can’t help loving them, too, Colonel Mike Qauritch, played by the incomparable Stephen Lang, is so single-minded, so absolutely sure of his mission, so willing to sacrifice everything for what he believes, that you wind up as drunk as he is with that crazy monomania. “It’s not over while I’m alive,” he croaks, launching into his final assault over the scattered corpses of his army and the flaming ruins of his high tech armada … and you sense that Cameron was writing himself in those lines. Only someone with that steely, relentless, demented self-certainty could have pulled this epic masterwork together, creating the technology on the fly, and ram-rodding platoons of dubious studio executives and skeptical technicians and baffled actors through the years of financial, industrial, scientific and aesthetic warfare required to realize this preposterous and unprecedented vision.

The Colonel is Cameron, and Cameron is the Terminator, cruel and unstoppable and if he had been unstoppable, he would have been stopped,

We can only be grateful that he wasn’t.

This movie should win Best Picture at the Academy Awards this year. It was made for that title “Best Picture”, it is quite simply the best picture, the absolutely best pictures … so much the best, so self-evidently the best, that it seems unfair to set this film in competition against its paltry two-dimensional adversaries.

And there’s another dimension I have celebrate here. Unlike most high-tech science fiction fan-boy geek movies – and this may be the ultimate example of that genre – Avatar has heart. It’s a passionate love story, acted with compelling fervor by Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington – both of whom acted in mediocre, now bizzarely dated, science fiction films by lesser directors recently. The directors of Terminator Salvation and Star Trek must be stunned, leveled, reeling right now at this majestic tale of discovery and rebirth. And they should be. They’ve just been rendered obsolete.

Avatar is an emotional tsunami that sweeps away anyone not absolutely barricaded against it, anyone who can sit back, adjust those 3D glasses and let the storm surge take them. This movie stuns hardened cynics to tears and leaves jaded film buffs babbling. This is film history happening right in front of us and all you can do is bow down, get your sea-legs and watch it again.

That’s what we did. And it was even better the second time.

Dueling Banjos and Air Guitars: Confessions of a Non-Musician

I always wanted to make music.
Fiction and poetry are fine, but the fact remains: you can’t describe falling in love so that someone who’s never had the feeling will feel it. Metaphors are for the initiated. Words can give you the thrill of recognition. But the actual experience, the first kiss, the last fight? Until you’ve lived them, the greatest words in the language are just chatter.
Melody is different, as remote from the approximations of language of any emotion it might evoke. But music isn’t trying to describe anything, it’s not second hand. It’s the thing itself, whole and complete, effortlessly repudiating the tinkertoy tools of language: you can’t describe a song.
You can only sing it.
This all comes to mind because I wanted to write a song today.
There was something in the grey Atlantic light, the ebb of Christmas into the chilly rain-spattered start of a new year, the damp wind off the Atlantic, taunting hope and tricking it out of you at the same time. I knew the right tune, some minor melody modulating into a major key, could express my feeling perfectly. More than that, it would reflect the emotion, like the ridge of trees pointing downward in a still lake, become its avatar, embody it as a living creature without language conveyed without words to anyone who heard it.
But I can’t write music.
I’ve never had a tune in my head, never woken up with one playing there, as Yesterday was playing in Paul McCartney’s head, all those years ago; as All Those Years Ago was playing in George Harrison’s a few years later.
So instead I write words, and they seem especially puny right now.
I was listening to a New Year’s Eve rock concert tonight, some local band. The sound mix was bad, the singers weren’t miked right and you couldn’t hear the lyrics at all. But it didn’t matter. The drum beat caught my heart rate and picked it up, the music worked its way past my bruised ears and into the captive synapses and the rim shot capillaries, waves of pleasure riding the lifting tides of memory and desire, until I was unable to keep still, my head bobbing, my feet stamping the high hat pedal under the table.
Rock and roll!
This was pure art, the way ragas are pure art, the way John Coltrane and Entrain and Coleman Hawkins and Nat King Cole are pure art, and Emmy Lou Harris and the Harrisburg Philarmonic playing Schubert lieder and the Shangi-las singing Leader of the Pack. You don’t need the lyrics, you just need the beat and the track and the tune.
Words are pale and flimsy next to that. Authors from Aristotle to John Fowles have claimed prose and poetry as the greatest arts because of their specificity – the incomparable ability of the written word to capture the essence of a thought. But words are a little less accurate with feelings. Every writer has felt this wall separating his scribbles from the ongoing rush of the living world. It’s a fact -- words fail.
Mallarme: “A poem is never finished, but abandoned.”
Eliot: “It is impossible to say just what I mean.”
Billy Joel:“There’s a new band in town but you can’t get the sound from a story on a magazine.”
That’s why Chrissie Hynde stopped writing rock criticism and formed a band.
That’s why you can’t really compliment a musician after a performance. Everyone likes praise (and money!) but the only communication that matters with a musician is through music itself. You see it on stage – jazz musicians ‘trading eights’; you see it walking down the street when one musician starts singing and his friend lays the harmony on top of it. The relatively tone deaf third wheel (that would be me) can only fall back a few steps and listen. You see it in films, when Jon Voight and the little banjo player connect in Deliverance, when the aliens greet us with music in Close Encolunters, when the teen-age lovers skip over their awkwardness to play a duet in Juno.
Maybe that’s why musicians only seem to make lasting unions with each other. They share something the rest of us don’t.
Leonard Cohen to Janis Joplin: “We are ugly but we have the music.”
So I admit it. I have art envy.
And musicians are as self-contained as they music itself. I think of those old bluesmen before the big city white guys in suits with tape recorders discovered them, happy to play sitting on rocking chairs on their porches, heard by no one. I think of Woody Guthrie quitting his radio gig, saying “I don’t need this job. I can play while I’m walking.”
The lead guitar dude tonight works in some local government job, he’s never cut a record. I leaned over to my friend at one point and I said “What is a guy who can play like that doing here?”
My friend just smiled, “Playing,” he said.
Nothing else really matters.
I think of the street musician in Joni Mitchell’s For Free, playing for the pure pleasure of it while she ruefully admits, “I’ll play if you have the money, or if you’re a friend to me.”
But intention is irrelevant, and at least for me her music has a an alchemical power far removed from the grumpy old woman who seems to spend most of her time these days disowning it.The music exists, independent of everything else, including its creator.
The other arts are relative; music is absolute.
If a string quartet plays in the forest and there’s no one to hear them, it doesn’t matter. Beethoven composed his greatest works after he went deaf; Def Leppard sold six million copes if Pyromania, and not because of the words

Ridin' into danger, laughin' all the way
Fast, free and easy, livin' for today
- – Yeah, whatever. Just play the music.

Best of all, and most difficult to understand or deconstruct, music is uniquely porous to experience: chords and harmonies can be irradiated by the events of your life, joy or trauma can penetrate the music permanently, and transform it with an emotional half life roughly the length of your own. Your heartbreak, the feeling the rain-dark streets where you paced it out, the shabby overheated apartment where you were happy for the first time in your life, translate themselves into chords of a certain song and stay there. The song becomes the evening light, and the snow ticking against the window panes, the leap of expectation when the phone rang. You had an actual phone then, a landline where you could actually hear each other talking. These memories warp and recast the music. It’s not accidental that people refer to ‘our song’. It is theirs; and anyone else’s whose life merged with the chord changes, a hundred thousand different songs, a million songs, and all of them the same.
Proust claimed this power for the sense of taste – his famous Madeleine cakes dipped in tea, that “contain in the almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.” No taste has ever done that for me, though I feel something comparable for the sense of smell. Entering an old house, the odor of resinous wood and dust and damp plaster can bring me back to chilly summer houses opened up in the late spring, still storing the winter cold. The sudden sense of being ten years old again with a long vacation in front of me is almost immobilizing.
It’s exactly like that, walking into the closed room of a much-loved song, breathing in the full dense complex atmosphere, the haunted perfume of a past moment, eyes closed, afraid to move or make a sound of my own.
No book, no painting, no sculpture, no dance performance or stage play or film has ever done this for me.
But Joni Mitchell does it every time.
Her music is the storehouse of my past, and the only pure preservative for fragile species of feeling that would have vanished long ago, gone extinct and fossilized into old slides and letters and journal entries, without it.
Whatever she may think about her body of work now, this is the gift she had, and just as importantly, the one she gave with such profligate indifference, simply by writing songs and singing them.
It’s not just her, of course. We each have a select group of musicians who wrote the soundtrack for our lives, whose tunes hold our whole wounded personal history in suspension.
That may be why, when I find out someone I dislike has musical talent, my opinion of them rises like balloons at a kids’ party. I saw Joe Scarborough playing the guitar on TV the other day and Annie said ”Oh yeah, he was in a band” and I found myself actually liking old shovel face for the first time ever, completely against my will. But I mean – he plays guitar!
I walked into a house I was working on last year, and the arrogant, shrewish unbearable owner was upstairs, getting the place ready for real estate agents. I thought she had the radio on, but it was her singing and her voice was gorgeous. I stood there for a few minutes listening, appalled by the chemical changes going on in my brain, suddenly fond of this woman, against all reason and common sense.
I can carry a tune, but barely; I immediately start singing the harmony when someone else does.
I feel for those hapless the American Idol wannabes.
I know why people enter karaoke contests.
I play air guitar on the steering wheel when I drive with the radio on. Sometimes I drum on the dashboard.
I listen, I download, I sign along. That ought to be enough for me but it isn’t. The longing to participate remains. Music is sublime, music is perfect, music is everything I want and cannot have.
I can’t explain it.
I’d write a song about it but I don’t know how.

Watching "When Harry Met Sally" on New Year's Eve

This is one of the four or five best romantic comedies ever written, and after watching it today, I was able to analyse the decisively brilliant moment I had never thoughtmuch about before.

Here's a transcript of the New Year's Eve party scene, just before the end of the film:
Harry: I've been doing a lot of thinking. And the
thing is, I love you.
Sally: What?
Harry: I love you.
Sally: How do you expect me to respond to this?
Harry: How about you love me too?
Sally: How about I'm leaving.
Harry: Doesn't what I said mean anything to you?
Sally: I'm sorry Harry, I know it's New Years Eve, I know
you're feeling lonely, but you just can't show up here, tell me
you love me and expect that to make everything alright.
It doesn't work this way.
Harry: Well how does it work?
Sally: I don't know but not this way.
Harry: Well how about this way. I love that you get
cold when it's seventy one degrees out, I love that it takes you an hour
and a half to order a sandwich, I love that you get a little crinkle
above your nose when you're looking at me like I'm nuts, I love that
after I spend a day with you I can still smell your perfume on my clothes
and I love that you are the last person I want to talk to before I go
to sleep at night. And it's not because I'm lonely, and it's not because
it's New Years Eve. I came here tonight because when you realise you want
to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of the
life to start as soon as possible.
Sally: You see, that is just like you Harry. You say
things like that and you make it impossible for me to hate you.
And I hate you Harry... I really hate you. I hate you.
(They kiss.)
Harry: What does this song mean? For my whole life
I don't know what this song means. I mean, 'Should old acquaintance be forgot".
Does that mean we should forget old acquaintances or does it mean if we happen to
forget them we should remember them, which is not possible because we already
forgot them!?
Sally: Well may be it just means that we should remember
that we forgot them or something. Anyway it's about old friends.

Why does this work so well?

I only figured out today, after God knows how many viewings (I own the DVD)

Here's the emotional choreography:
Harry makes first move. In a classic feint to the negative, Sally rejects it. So Harry digs deeper, gets specific and hits the emotional bull's eye. She caps the moment with the "it's impossible to hate you" speech.
The scene could have ended there. Many a lesser writer would have been ecstatic to get that far. But Ephron has one more card to play. I call it the 'off-topic feint' -- a line that seems to draw us away from the immediate moment, or pull the characters away from each other and into the broader context of the scene -- in this case, a New Year's Ever party with Auld Lang Syne playing as the ball drops. On its own, without reference to the ultimate strategy, this is a brilliant tactic: Harry makes an 'off hand' comment that's typically clever and charming -- what the hell does this song mean, anyway? It sets up their reunion as a fait accompli. They can now return to 'business as usual' -- just talking about stuff and enjoying each other's company.

The great narrative coup come just after Sally's halting, heartfelt attempt to answer: "Maybe it means we're just supposed to remember we forgot them or something."

Ephron takes this seemingly random bit of chit-chat and uses it to pull us all the way back into the absolute thematic center and the emotional heart of her story:

Sally says, "Anyway, it's about old friends."

Aint it the truth.

This is close to genius, and there's a lot to learn from it: using the apparently trivial external aspects of the scene to define and fulfill your story.

Whatever her later failures, you can't take this one away from Nora Ephron.

Happy New Year!

Californication Redeemed: Hank Moody Faces the Music

“That’s the thing about lies. They always come out eventually.”



So says the devious Mia, Hank Moody’s ex-girlfriend and plagiarist, in the final episode of Californication’s third season. The lie in this case is that Hank had an affair with her when she was sixteen – he didn’t know it, but made no effort to verify her age. He wrote a novella about the experience and she stole it, securing his compliance with the threat of full disclosure. I waited through all of the second season for this time bomb to explode, wondering when Karen would read the book (she would know Hank’s style instantly, just as his agent Runkle did), when the lie would be exposed, when the truth would hit, when the birds would fly into the jet engine and bring Hank’s life crashing down. It didn’t happen and I wrote a post about it here, chastising Tom Kapinos for narrative cowardice, accusing him of being too soft on his characters, comparing him to the great Jenji Kohan of Weeds, who flenses her hapless creations with the glee of a drunken sushi chef every week. I had one comment on that post that struck me as odd – it was so strident in defense of the writers, and so detailed in its knowledge of the show, that I wondered for a deluded moment if perhaps Kapinos himself had posted that response. Well, whether it was him or not, someone must have gotten through to him, or perhaps he had this plan in mind all along. In any case, the last episode of this season was a heart-wrenching triumph and a total vindication of the show: a powerful return to everything I loved about it from the beginning. It may have even been the best episode ever. And the questions teem to mind: can Karen ever forgive him? Can his daughter ever forgive him? Can he somehow reassemble the meaningful life he’s been taking for granted for so long? Will the truth help his career? Will he be able to write in the glare of publicity? Will he beat the assault rap for punching Mi9a’s manager? Will she press statutory rape charges after all? Will Hank go back to New York? Suddenly all these questions have taken on a new urgency. Standing in the light of an unforgiving truth, all these people seem lovely and fragile and precious again, even Hank himself. Even Mia becomes more human, with her bewilderment and regret, living a lie, famous for nothing, unable to write a second book wounding everyone around her as her falsehoods metastasize.

I had heard that the final scene between Hank and Karen was played without audible dialogue, under the soundtrack of Elton John’s Rocket Man. Not presenting the actual scene felt like a cop-out, at least in theory. In fact it worked beautifully. We know these characters so well, and understand their crisis so intimately, that we can write the dialogue ourselves. If I taught a creative writing class, I would assign that scene to my students, and hope they would address the one remaining mystery: why Karen didn’t read Mia’s book long before (or even glance through it); and why she didn’t recognize Hank’s style at the bookstore reading featured in the final episode. At first it seemed like a plot hole. Then I thought about it a little more, and wound up writing my own version of that last argument.





Hank: It’s about Mia

Karen: Is she all right?

Hank: No, no, she’s fine. It’s –

Karen:What? What is it?

Hank: I never wanted to tell you this –

Karen: No.

Hank: I knew there was no way you could –

Karen: You slept with her.

Hank: Karen –

Karen, Oh my God., You fucking slept with her. When did this happen. Two nights ago, you said you were Runkle, but –

Hank: No, no, it was long before that, Long before we were back together

Karen When I was with Bill.

Hank: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying, it was –

Karen: She was a teenager, Hank.

Hank: Wait a second, I –

Karen: She was sixteen years old!

Hank I didn’t know that., I swear. I met her in a book store, I thought she was just another lit groupie, I had no idea –

Karen: So it was you. In the book. Punching and fucking.

Hank: That was fiction, that had nothing to do with –

Karen: Oh Jesus. Now I get it.

Hank: Karen –

Karen: I knew it! When we were sitting at that fucking reading and she was reading your words and I was telling myself no it isn’t possible it can’t be, she’s a disciple, she’s a mimic, it can’t be Hank’s book .I can’t be. What an idiot I am. I should have just read it when you practically begged me to, at Bill’s house. Then it disappeared and you never mentioned again and Mia was suddenly a writer, and … I almost looked at it so many times. But I just couldn’t. I must have known. Some part of me must have known. I just couldn’t deal with it. I looked away and I was going to keep looking away, go to New York start again and pretend I had no idea, make myself believe I was crazy because I couldn’t stand the thought that –

Hank: I wanted to tell you –

Karen: The hell you did! She blackmailed you, Hank! That’s the only explanation, that’s why she backtracked at the wedding after she scared the shit out of everyone. But it doesn’t matter if you talk now because she can’t write another book. Isn’t that it? She’s going public so you had to tell me.

Hank: I didn’t want to hurt you –

Karen Well too bad. Too fucking bad, it’s too late you piece of shit, you fucking worthless prick, you --



And this is where she starts punching him; they run outside with their daughter Becca chasing them; and then the police arrive to arrest Hank for assaulting Mia’s manager. He's in the biggest trouble of his life, all of it well-earned.

What happens next? I don’t know.

I’m just glad it finally matters again.

Mustapha Mond & The Turkey Button:My Brave new World

There’s a new meme going around the foodie circles: turkey is bad.

People only eat it once a year – they choke it down at Thanksgiving along with the fruitcake and the minced yams in a perverse attempt to actually climb inside a Norman Rockwell painting and live there. They’d be better off dressing their kids in boy and girl scout uniforms and having them say the pledge of allegiance in front of the liberty bell, or letting some avuncular doctor put a stethoscope to their doll’s chest. In real life, turkey is stringy(white meat) and greasy (dark meat) and you’d be much better off with a veal chop.

I resent this new dogma because I’ve always loved turkey. It’s the perfect poultry: more savory than chicken, less fatty than duck, less gamey than goose. And it extends itself beyond the holiday, into sandwiches and hash and dinners reheated in the left-over gravy and then finally, after thirty hours of slow simmering reduction – soup! That veal chop is gone the next day. And I eat turkey more than once a year. I have it on Christmas, also – and any other day, as often as my family permits. Someone else must be doing that also – there are always Butterballs in the grocery. Not that I buy factory turkey – we get ours from a little farm in Vermont. There are no weird hormones and anti-biotics in the feed, and no creepy little button on the breast to tell me when the bird is done. I was talking to my mother about this yesterday, over another sublime turkey dinner “(The best one ever!,” she enthused, as she has every year since I was old enough to eat solid food), and she has a theory to explain the turkey haters.

It’s the button.

The button pops when the turkey is over-done. So people have gotten used to over-cooked turkey, with its tendency to fall apart when you lift it from the pan and its dry breast meat. Why does the button work this way? For safety, for security, for uniformity: to avoid law-suits and to standardize the cooking experience to extract faulty human judgment from the process. I prefer Erma Rombauer’s guideline of fifteen minutes a pound, an experienced eye and (in the last resort) a meat thermometer.

But the button bothers me. It’s like the single serving coffee machine in my insurance agent’s office. It makes ‘perfect’ coffee every time: perfectly consistent, that is. The machine looks cool with its blue back-lighting, it’s easy to use and it’s kind of fun. There’s just one problem with it: the coffee is weak. It produces a baseline average of what most people probably like and the result is bland and watery. It makes you want to dump a heap of fresh-ground coffee into a pan of boiling water, the way the cowboys did … or, failing that, get a French press.

The machine is a metaphor, just like the button, a synecdoche for the larger society with it’s meticulously unadventurous school curriculums and toxic fertilized lawns, its cookie cutter housing subdivisions, its machine-processed pop songs, action movies and romance novels.

Maybe it’s all about comfort. I think of the great argument between John Savage and Mustapha Mond, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Mond explains this theory in detail – a happy population requires drugs (theirs is called soma) and immersive films (feelies) and comprehensive brainwashing from an early age. John Savage prefers to remain sober; he chooses Shakespeare over the feelies and wants the right to be ecstatic – or miserable. The narcotized middle ground doesn’t interest him.

Mond’s response – you want that stuff? You’re welcome to it. And he exiles Savage to an island.

From my own island, where narrow cobble-stone streets unravel into sterile subdivisions and each new building,( like the renovated and expanded airport, or the police and fire department fortress going up on Fairgrounds Road), diminishes the beauty and charm of an historic village thirty miles from shore, I side with John Savage, even when I’m lost in the moors at dusk, running low on gas and praying for some sign of that over-development everyone’s complaining about. As we inch ever closer toward Huxley’s prescient dystopia, I’ll take my stand for mess and rough edges.

John Savage says, “I don’t want comfort. I want god, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

Sounds good to me, but my list is a little longer. It includes strong coffee, weedy lawns and Christmas turkey, cooked right.


Your tags: