Random Thoughts from Some Kind of Hairpin

Omar the Dancing Hypocrite

2006-06-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

This American Life’s program this weekend was entitled “Them.” The centerpiece of the broadcast was (to quote the TAL website) as follows: “Several years ago […] Jon Ronson spent a year following around a Muslim activist named Omar Bakri, who called himself bin Laden's ‘man in London.’” [Emphasis mine.]

Bakri, who escaped from Saudi Arabia before settling in London, made it repeatedly and unblinkingly clear that he intended to overthrow the British government and set up an Islamic dictatorship (with ancillary branches in other heretical states such as America and the rest of Europe.)

At one point in Ronson’s piece, Bakri hands out flyers in the tubes warning of the disease of homosexuality: “There are homosexuals everywhere!” Now, who would have thought the message gay activists have been trying to disseminate to the heterosexual population for decades would be recognized and proclaimed by an Islamic fundamentalist extremist? Not what he intended, I’m sure.

But I digress. The risible climax of this reportorial adventure comes when, after 11 September 2001 and Bakri’s public exclamations of delight, he is finally rounded up and deported. (If there were any real justice he’d have been returned to Saudi to stand trial for the activities over which he originally feared legal reprisal, but we can’t have everything.) The punchline to this sick joke? Bakri’s pathetic whining to Ronson that he was an innocent, that he didn’t know Bin Laden, and why was he being persecuted in this manner?

A couple of personal disclaimers are in order. First, I am profoundly agnostic and, as such, am more than tired of the endless bigotry of fundamentalist Christers, Jews, Muslims and, for all I know, the Flat Earth Society. Second, and despite the foregoing, I don’t believe in persecuting or indeed prosecuting anyone for his or her religious beliefs—which is a damn site more open-minded than many of them deserve or would grant to me as a secular faggot humanist. Third, while I think that when one decides to emigrate to another nation one has to accept the mores of the culture and nation in which one lives, I do not believe one automatically gives up the right to criticize the way in which one’s new host nation governs itself. Often the finest patriot is he who objects most to the inequities of his country, adopted or native.

That having been said …

I am bloody well sick and tired of Islamists and others who don’t think twice about moving to a Western nation, then decide that nation’s society is an offense to his sensibilities but expects the people of his adoptive country to accommodate him in every particular. Not to put too fine a point on the matter:

Take your religious dogma, bigotry, intolerance and love of secular dictatorship, and go fuck yourself with it.

Thank you.

A Hell of a Life

2006-03-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

This has been a lousy couple of weeks for lovers of the dramatic form. First Don Knotts and Darren McGavin. Now Maureen Stapleton. With each of these losses another precious, ineluctable link in the chain of craft is broken.

Knotts' death filled me with sadness, McGavin's with fury. In attempting to anatomize my anger over McGavin I came to the conclusion that it was based on a long-held belief that this splendid actor never received his due. Yes, The Night Stalker, The Night Strangler and their deliciously hokey yet often wittily effective progeny Kolchak: The Night Stalker are cult favorites and will likely live on forever as have such limited engagements as The Prisoner, which stars another fine actor who never became the star he should have been.

What ties McGavin, McGoohan and, until recently my primary example of the problem, Brian Keith together is that each of them had precisely the gifts an actor needs to succeed: looks, idiosyncratic talent, and superbly individualistic speaking voices. Was it, perhaps, type-casting that kept them from the big brass ring? Idiot producers who wouldn't know genius if they were standing next to Marlon Brando? The simple, bad luck of the draw? Whatever it was that dogged them, each of these men was infintely deserving of a greater market share, as they say in the TeeVee Biz.

Knotts was, simply, beloved. No one who was a child in the 1960s, as I was, could fail to recall, with a frisson akin to sexual ecstasy, those immortal words "Nip it! Nip it in. The. Bud!" What forever cemented my admiration for Don Knotts was my first view (in, I'd estimate, 1969) of his pop-eyed, Barney Fife-squared performance in The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, which I adored to such a degree I remember extolling it during Show and Tell the following Monday, complete with bug-eyed "takes." Seeing it again (and again, and again) as I've gotten older has only endeared it, and Knotts' performance, to me all the more. Here is timing, inflection, a rare understanding of the wire-thin distinction between dignity, buffoonery and the ego-driven need for recognition Knotts honed in the Fife years. Along with something else: a gift for pathos that never tumbles into the abyss of special pleading. What a man.

Stapleton is another special case. With her face she could have been one of two things: a cafeteria cashier or a character actor. K&W's loss was our gain.

She won, incredibly, a Tony as "Best Supporting Actress" for her performance in the lead of The Rose Tattoo, a comic drama written expressly for her by Tennessee Williams. There's something in that ironic discrepancy perhaps only Stapleton herself could have enjoyed. She lived big, drank bigger. Her death at 81 is a bit of a shock; how the hell did her liver hold up so long?

Another irony she probably laughed over in that low, infectious chuckle of hers: no Irish actor I can think of played so many Jewish women, on stage and screen. (With time out for Hispanics like Inez Guerrero in Airport.) She also had the queasy distinction of being considered old long before she reached middle age: at 38, she's Dick Van Dyke's intractable nudze of a mother in Bye Bye Birdie. She got accidentally knifed in the face while filming The Fan, which must have felt like surviving Mt. Saint Helen's only to go down in flames falling asleep with a lit cigarette. She survived Woody Allen and playing his conception of The Vulgar Life Force in Interiors. Walter Matthau insisted she play, as she did on stage, all three women's roles opposite him in the movie of Plaza Suite; she ended up getting only one, and Matthau looked like a vain popinjay. But this was always the way of things. She had the lead in Orpheus Descending in New York and got a small supporting role in the strange movie version The Fugitive Kind. And here's one to whet your appetite: a listing on the Internet Movie Database for a Kraft Theatre television adaptation of All the King's Men with Stapleton as Sadie Burke. Oh my dear loving god, what I'd give to see that!

My favorite Stapleton performance came in Reds, Warren Beatty's glorious, histrionic, liberating, inane, insane, exhilarating ode to leftist idealism. (How the bloody hell did he get it made?) As Emma Goldman, Stapleton is the still, sane, reasonable figure of uncompromised integrity around which everyone else swirls, eddy-like and egocentric. It's a performance to treasure, especially when Stapleton throws away a line like her response to Beatty's suggestion that he walk her home after a late-night confab: "Why? I won't hurt anybody." To E.G., as she's called in the movie, is also given what is probably the epic's single finest critique of American politics: "I think voting is the opium of the masses in this country. Every four years you deaden the pain." It's a line Gore Vidal would be pleased to claim, and Stapleton tosses it off, not as a deadly bon-mot she's been dying to deliver, but as a simple statement of fact, not to be disputed.

Reds meant the world to me in 1981. It holds up less well now, but two essential elements remain undimmed: Jack Nicholson's impossibly sexy Eugene O'Neill, and Maureen Stapleton.

So, shall we have a glass in her honor? She would have.

Oh, those wacky Islamists

2006-02-07T08:30:00.001-08:00

A courageous blogger has put those accursed dozen Danish images—which apparently represent the greatest evil done to humanity in the last hundred years—on her site. Indulge your freedom of expression (that which we have left, until Bush and/or the Mullahs take it away for good) and view them:
http://face-of-muhammed.blogspot.com/

Last night on Auntie Beeb, some Muslim fundamentalist, almost perceptibly foaming at the mouth, insisted the Danish editors in question be turned over to a Sharia court where they would be (as he repeatedly said) condemned to death.

I have only one thing to say about this entire fracas, to wit:

The tender sensibilities of Islamic fundies—which I aver arise from a shaky faith in their own faith—must never be insulted or derided. They, however, may insult, deride, threaten and murder anyone they please. Especially Jews. (The Holocaust is a joke or a hoax, and Israel must be nuked off the map, but the depiction of the prophet really really hurts.) That, apparently, is the path to righteousness. We in the West must bow down in obescience to their every religious tenet, but never the reverse. I believe this is called hypocrisy—a far greater sin in my book than mocking Muhammad.
http://cartoonbox.slate.com/hottopic/?image=7&topicid=71

I'm not Muslim. I'm not Jewish. I'm not Christian. I don't give a good goddamn whose saints, prophets, popes or imams get caricatured in the press. Nor do I cede the right to not believe as any of them believe. You may not force me to bow to your god (or prophet or pope or imam).

I am insulted every day—by ugliness, ignorance, intolerance, class hatred, multinational capitalism, homophobia, anti-intellectualism, philistinism, sexism, deism and Wal-Mart. Who attends to my wounds? No one. I apply to no one, I petition no one. As Ennis del Mar says in Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain: If you can’t change it you gotta stand it. I stand it. I change what I can, and I stand the rest.

Go thou, o self-righteous ones, and do likewise.

Maggie: A Girl of the Screen

2006-01-05T10:56:00.001-08:00

The shade of Stephen Crane will perhaps forgive me for that, for I come in praise of Margaret Dumont. Arguably the greatest “straight-man” in the business. That paragon of public virtue who stood more abuse—verbal and physical—from Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo (not to mention the likes of W.C. Fields) than any one woman should ever have to shoulder alone.

Now, Groucho always maintained that she never understood any of the jokes or why their audiences laughed (an image even Dumont was happy to feed the press). But I challenge you to watch any scene in which she appears opposite the Bros. Marx and convince yourself that’s a true picture of her. It’s possible—just barely—for an actor to get by on that sort of thing maybe once, if the director is clever enough to elicit a performance out of confusion or wooden-headness. But try making a career of it.

No, she got the jokes and then some. No one who was that much of a thickie could have performed so knowingly and with such grace and comedic polish. Imagine building an entire performing life out of being the butt of the joke. (And a bigger butt there never was, so to speak; cf. the “stateroom scene” in A Night at the Opera.) Was anything meaner ever said of a dowager than Groucho’s “Remember, you're fighting for this woman’s honor, which is probably more than she ever did” in Duck Soup? Dumont’s reactions are models of comic timing. And if they’re a little broad, as though she was still playing to the back of house on Broadway, that doesn’t detract from her charm. After all, was Groucho subtle? Was Chico? How about Harpo?

I was trying to resist the urge to quote endlessly from the movies themselves, but I’ve had to succumb to temptation. After all, it's the only way to illustrate what that sainted woman had to bear from the lips of the Great Grouch.

In Duck Soup:
Groucho: Not that I care, but where is your husband?
Dumont: Why, he's dead.
Groucho: I bet he's just using that as an excuse.
Dumont: I was with him to the very end.
Groucho: No wonder he passed away.
Dumont: I held him in my arms and kissed him.
Groucho: Oh, I see, then it was murder.

Dumont: As chairwoman of the reception committee, I welcome you with open arms.
Groucho: Is that so? How late do you stay open?

Groucho: I suppose you would think me a sentimental old fluff, but, uh, would you mind giving me lock of your hair?
Dumont: A lock of my hair? Why, I had no idea—
Groucho: I'm letting you off easy: I was going to ask for the whole wig.

In A Night at the Opera:
Groucho: That woman? Do you know why I sat with her? Because she reminded me of you.
Dumont: Really?
Groucho: Of course, that's why I'm sitting here with you. Because you remind me of you. Your eyes, your throat, your lips! Everything about you reminds me of you. Except you. How do you account for that? (Aside to the audience) If she figures that one out, she's good.

And my personal favorite (a line I pull on my companions in restaurants to this day):
Groucho: Nine dollars and thirty cents? This is an outrage! If I were you, I wouldn’t pay it.

But she could take it—luckily for us. A Marx Bros. movie without her is a poor thing, indeed. (Well, Monkey Business and Horse Feathers had Thelma Todd, but that’s a wholly different animal, if you’ll pardon the expression. Todd, a spunky comedian in her own right, could more than hold her own, especially with Groucho; their demented tango on the balcony in Horse Feathers is a thing of beauty.) Maggie even has a fan club. And it may give you a measure of the affection and esteem with which Groucho regarded her that he hired her to do a dialogue sketch with him on a comedy show in the 1960s; she died a few days later. Happy, one hopes, in the knowledge that she still had it.

Even if she didn’t get the jokes, she was herself funny as hell. Groucho never had a better foil. That alone cements her place in movie history. If only for that, she will ever be immortal.

Say goodbye to Hollywood

2006-01-02T15:45:00.000-08:00

Tinseltown is apparently about to quite happily slit its own throat.

Good riddance, you say? Ah, but...

According to a report on this evening’s Marketplace, audiences are telling the studios that for any number of reasons—paid advertising on the screen, cell-phone usage, obnoxious spectator behavior in general—they now opt to go out only to so-called “event movies,” preferring to wait for the smaller films to be released on DVD.

I’m not sure I understand the reasoning here, given that Hollywood has long since all but stopped making “small” movies (read: movies about human beings) in favor of big special-effects driven blockbusters. But the news gives studio execs the perfect excuse to jettison everything that can’t be summed up in a single hyperbolic sentence (“It’s King Kong Meets Harry Potter”) and marketed via Burger King.

The old canard “The audience is never wrong” has always been risible. But then, the suits running (ruining?) the studios since the 1960s are businessmen only. Long gone the days when the moguls made movies not merely for profit, but because they loved making movies. They were vulgar, despotic, unlettered and often foolish—but they were not MBAs.

Of course, the gradual debasing of American movies—which in turn degrade the culture of the rest of the globe—is largely due to the audience itself. American literacy’s decline has affected not only the bestseller lists but also the content of popular art. If the slobs go only to see Mission: Impossible and the studios (rightly) aim their product at adolescent boys, what hope does Spike Lee have in the marketplace? I’ll set you a scenario:

Imagine if you will that the current, self-immolating mind-set gripping the studios had taken hold in 1971 rather than now.

There would have been no Godfather. No McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

No Taxi Driver, Harry & Tonto, Godfather Part II.

No French Connection, Cabaret, Klute, Nashville, The Hospital, Mean Streets, Apocalypse Now, American Graffiti, Badlands, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Network, Paper Moon, Days of Heaven, Shampoo, Chinatown, Fiddler on the Roof, The Driver, “Save the Tiger,” Sugarland Express, Young Frankenstein, The Last Detail, The China Syndrome, The Sting, An Unmarried Woman, All That Jazz, A Little Romance, Thieves Like Us. Not even a Frenzy or a Family Plot.

In short, none of the movies that define the early-to-mid 1970s as the last great period of individualized—or at the very least, gutsy—American filmmaking. At best, they might have received two-week engagements or gone straight to video.

I’m not against fantasy—far from it. I love the Star Wars movies. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is one of my five favorite movies. The best new flick I saw last year was Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit. But as a steady diet, even these superior movies would rot your teeth. They should be part of the feast—dessert, if you will. There should also be main courses, rich in character, dialogue, visual acuity, human conflict and emotional truth. Imagine a world in which the contenders for the Best Picture Oscar are the likes of Twister, Days of Thunder, Jurassic Park II and Independence Day.

I’ve all but given up going to the movies myself, which at one time was the most pleasurable activity in my life—not because there aren’t enough mind-numbing special effects spectaculars but because there are too many. Well, that and the paid advertising, the cell-phone usage, the obnoxious behavior of my fellow spectators...

The biggest unreported irony, to me, is that the aging Baby-Boom audience wants desperately to see itself reflected on the screen. If the kids turn the latest lame live comic book into a blockbuster, it will spawn two sequels and a half-dozen imitations. Yet every time a small, human-driven movie attains a wide audience, no one follows up on that success with anything like it. Instead, the studio execs call it “a non-recurring phenomenon,” shrug, and go back to the enthralling fun of cobbling up another Home Alone. The mature audience finally gets the message, and their movie-going habit dies.

In Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson has this to say to a screenwriter about the end of silent movies: “You’ve made a rope of words and strangled this business! But there’s a microphone right there to catch the last gurgles, and Technicolor to photograph the red, swollen tongue.” With a few modifications, that speech could serve as the epitaph of the so-called New Hollywood.

If the new thinking prevails, I may never go to the movies again.

Congratulations, assholes. You’ve just killed off an entire segment of your audience. Now do us all a favor and commit hara-kiri for good.

A Tripp is a dream your heart makes

2005-10-26T07:31:00.000-07:00

Or: A dream is a Tripp your heart makes. Or something like that.

I dreamed of an old friend last night, someone I've not seen in, I would guess, 15 years. It was a sexual dream, and wasn't at the same time.

It’s a commonplace, I suppose, but time moves more swiftly as one ages. At least, it seems so to me. I suspect it’s because you’re so busy collecting knowledge and experience when you’re young, and settle into more of a routine in later life. The years of my childhood and adolescence seemed endless to me at times (though I imagine they were much briefer to my parents) and those from, say, 18 to 25 stretched out in a languid arc. It often seems to me I packed more into those six or seven years than I have in the nearly twenty since.

Events from my late teens and early 20s have a cast-iron quality. I loved more intensely, I think, and more frequently. God knows I experienced more acute and chronic emotional pain. Depression, my constant friend these many years, was raging on in me then, happy and undiagnosed. But even that has a stiller quality now, not nearly so unrestrained. But then no one is happier than an adolescent in the throes of emotional upheaval. It’s a romantic dream that holds on as long as possible.

When I was 20 or 21, I made friends with a co-worker who went by the nickname Tripp. (I want to say I was 21 and he was 19, but I couldn't swear to that. In any case, we were close contemporaries.) To be honest, he caught my appreciate eye the day he walked in the door. It was one of those happy/unhappy coincidences that the object of my affectionate gaze was also bright, smart, funny, open, and knowledgeable in many of the areas I cared—and care—deeply about.

Tripp was medium height, slender but with the broad shoulders, muscled thighs and well-defined upper body of a swimmer, which he'd been in high school. He wore his hair moderately long for the time, as I did myself—back when I had a lot of it to wear longish. He had thick, dark eyebrows and blond hair, the latter bleached. His face was one of the most guileless and open I’ve ever known. He had largish, rubbery lips—not Mick Jagger grotesque, more sensuous and kissable—and a somewhat piggish, upturned nose I thought of as cute as hell.

He also had a backside to die for. Christ, how I wanted to lay my head between those pillows! The whole package—and I mean his personality and kindness as well as his physique—was attractive enough, but that ass was frosting on a very tasty cake. (I remember one summer afternoon when he pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and I commented on how damp it was. “I’ve got a sweaty butt,” he grinned, and all I could think was a bad paraphrase of Shakespeare: O, that I was a wallet upon that cheek …)

I couldn’t “read” people as well then as I have come to be able to subsequently: he was so open and sweet-natured, his smile so quick and genuine. The more I talked to him, the more frequently I saw him on the stock room floor, the more aware I was of how friendly feeling was quickly turning to infatuation. I sent him a note on afternoon, letting him know I was gay and hoping that wouldn’t interfere with our being friends. His answer was positive, although he noted that he’d “had a bad experience and, once bitten, twice shy …”

I asked Tripp about that later. He told me a slightly retarded neighbor kid had tried something with him when he was younger. Still, I kept wondering about him. One is never sure, when succumbing to feelings of love (which I was) whether the sensations one receives are real, or hoped-for. Tripp had been in a rock band (Another Roadside Attraction, named for the Tom Robbins book) with his best friend, and did once confess to me that he had some erotic feelings for him. Trying, in that well-meaning way a gay boy has of hoping to appear non-threatening, I invoked the “it could just be a phase” cliché. Idiot.

I spent a couple of Friday nights at his family’s house—he still lived with his parents—and tried to match Tripp blow-for-blow in beer drinking. To my great satisfaction, I never threw up during one of these binges, but I certainly tired out. One of my proudest moments was his awarding me a small gold medal he’d gotten for some swim meet in honor of my growing drink capacity. It bore the initials “FHST,” which he re-christened for me as “Fast as Hell Suds Taster.” I think I still have it, somewhere.

His bedroom had bunk-beds. He would lie on the top bunk and I would take the bottom. If I remember correctly, the assignments were by choice—I’m acrophobic, and none too steady after getting drunk. I’d fall asleep quickly, under the influence, but wake up early. While he slept I’d lie on my back, staring up at the top bunk, and imagine how it might feel to be up there with him. To wake with him beside me. To feel his warm, nearly hairless, silken flesh snuggled up against my own.

I’m aware that I’m going into more detail than is strictly necessary. But this is a part of my past I’ve never written about before, and Tripp has a small chamber of my heart even now. I’m collecting impressions, trying to get it all down before something slips way. Like the debt I owe his father, a conservative Republican, in making me defend my leftist positions through knowledge and intellectual acumen, not simply emotion and instinct. “Why do you feel like that?” or “What makes you think that?” were, as Tripp told me, his dad’s way of telling me I needed more information if I wanted to hold my own in a debate. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Now, if I have a gut feeling about something but no data to base it on, I try to keep my mouth shut until I know something about the subject. My own father never gave me that.

I’m also aware of how rambling, and possibly incoherent, these musings are. Which is the way with memory—it isn’t linear. One thought or memory causes one to recall another. Bear with me, please.

I’m reminded now of how he got his nickname. He had a younger cousin (if cousin it was—some relation, anyway) who, when he was a toddler, couldn’t say Tripp’s real name. Using one of the slang terms of the ‘70s—is it still in use? I’m not sure—someone had said in front of this child that my friend was “a trip.” The kid couldn’t pronounce _________ but he could say “Trip.” So, Tripp it was.

Since Tripp wanted to leave home, and my so-called “studio” apartment consisted of a dingy room with a kitchenette, bathroom, and cockroaches, we decided to put in together and located a two-bedroom in the suburbs. It was already a curious relationship, slightly masochistic on my part. I wanted him desperately, loved him deeply, and it would have made far more sense for me to keep a respectful distance. The last thing my pain required was working with Tripp and living in close quarters at the same time. But you can’t maintain a cool reserve, can you, when someone comes to mean something to you. My tendency throughout my adult life is to live in hope. I’m not sure why, since it’s never panned out, but it seems a part of my nature—a coping mechanism, maybe. I can live on a vague, unintentional hint the way a bear can survive hibernation on his own stored blubber.

I was largely passive in those days, and much too susceptible to the acts and opinions of others. My best friend (and on-again/off-again lover) had helped get me hooked on cigarettes, and Tripp influenced my future brand. I’d always smoked lights. He smoked light Menthols. While in the middle pf moving my stuff to our new apartment in a borrowed truck, I’d run out of Camels. He gave me his Merit Menthols to tide me over, and that was that. I used to switch brands in those days fairly regularly. Merits, then Benson & Hedges, then something else. I finally settled on Salem Ultra Lights. So the brand changed, but the Menthol stayed.

I should say that life with Tripp was hardly all Sturm und Drang, regardless of my thwarted desire. We continued to enjoy each other’s company, go to movies together, drive to other cities for late shows, discuss music and television and books. But there was an irresistible force and an immoveable object, and it made for an unspoken something, a tension, a frisson that lay between us like the elephant in the room no one will talk about. As long as I didn’t press it, we could pretend it wasn’t there.

Having this boy, for whom I burned so brightly, around made for some interesting contours. Instead of a bed, Tripp had a simple mattress on the floor of his bedroom, usually strewn with clothing. For the first—and so far, only—time in my life I became something of a furtive pantie-sniffer. Not, if memory serves, his actual undershorts, but the bikini-style briefs he wore when swimming. When they were lying around, discarded, on his mattress and Tripp was out, I would bring them to my face and inhale him, deeply—crotch and seat. Then I’d take off my trousers and slip on his briefs, get hard, and masturbate.

I jacked off in the oddest places in those days. Part of my job with the big office supply distributor for which I worked involved keeping inventories. Now and then I would take an inventory binder in hand and wander to the basement. (I had no stock there to count, but the basement personnel probably didn’t know that.) In my wanderings I had discovered the small, dark, dusty room where the boiler resided. You walked in, and next to the boiler was a concrete partition. If you crouched there, no one could see you, even if they were actually in the boiler room itself. So, several times a month (whenever my libido was too randy to ignore) I would grab a couple paper towels from the men’s room, stuff them in my pocket, and mosey down to the boiler room. Hidden behind the concrete wall I’d drop my pants and shorts and bring myself to orgasm. Usually while thinking about Tripp.

When I still lived alone, Tripp took me to a local movie-house for my first taste of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The theatre was small, the audience was sparse, but I loved the experience, and loved it even more for being shared with him. When the audience pulls off shirts and jackets to wave at the smoke on-screen, my heart skipped a beat to see Tripp remove his T-shirt. He kept himself, scrupulously I now think, or at least chastely, clothed around me. The brief glimpse of hairless, sculpted chest was intoxicating.

Tripp struck up a friendly acquaintance with a couple of girls that night, and we all stood chatting comfortably outside the theatre when the movie ended—until he took me aside and confided that they would come with us if we asked them. To my place. He all but begged me, and I refused. The thought of him in sexual congress that close to me was more unsettling to me than the notion of fucking the other girl. I didn’t want to end up participating in either event. It was one thing to “share” him with some young woman, but to be in the same room? Thanks a lot, but—no thanks.

He wasn’t angry, or even all that disappointed, though he pressed me fairly hard at the time. On the drive back to my place, he pumped me for my reaction to the movie, wanting me to share his enthusiasm. Didn’t I think Tim Curry was “sexy”? I did. But Tripp was sexier. And he was alive, beside me. Unattainable, but at least in the here and now, not several years, a few cameras and several thousand miles away.

I puzzled over that one. “Isn’t he sexy?” Was it the fish-net stockings? The half-feminine look and sound and expression? I didn’t think so. But I would never pin Tripp down on that one. But what was it that made him tell Michael, within minutes of meeting him, that he “might be bisexual”? That Michael wasn’t living with him, and pining for him, under the same roof? It was also the kind of thing that, in those days, served only to reinforce my own negativity about my physical self. Michael had made me feel unattractive, so I believed I was. (Typical of Michael, too, to repeat Tripp’s comments to me—sadist to my masochist. At least Tripp was never cruel.)

In hindsight, and with photographic evidence, I now understand that I looked as good then as I ever had, and better than I ever will again. When I see old photographs of myself at that age, my heart flutters slightly. Who is that cute kid? Aw, fuck—it’s me. Why didn’t someone tell me?

And now, in the meandering turns of memory, each remembered occurrence feeding off another, I recall how I posed Tripp for a photograph in my ratty old apartment. I had the sense of atmosphere in my head, although of course I had neither the photographic acumen nor the lighting equipment to realize it. But I saw him very specifically, and tried to make it real. First, I sat him at my small, cheap wooden table, my sporty cap on his head, a scarf around his neck. Then I gave him a hand of cards before carefully (and as slowly as I could manage without making him self-conscious or causing my own fingers to tremble) I unbuttoned his shirt and opened it, gently pulling the sides apart to reveal as much of his naked chest as possible. I can’t remember what I said to him about the look I wanted him to give the camera, but whatever it was, he got it. In the photograph he’s staring up, and his gaze is the living embodiment of the term “bedroom eyes.” They smolder, sensual and grave. It was all I could do not to sit myself on his lap.

I remember now, too, the night he asked to stretch out on my bed and nap. Was he sleeping, or only pretending to, when—after what I considered a decent interval to insure his slumber—I knelt by the side of the bed and, watching his back rise and fall with each breath and his incredibly shapely bottom curving up on my mattress, slid down my trousers and masturbated until I came? I have a feeling he knew very well what was going on, maybe even wanted it to happen, but he never said a word to acknowledge the event, and it’s sure as hell I didn’t either.

Looking back from this distance, I don’t entirely blame myself for what eventually happened, as I did at the time. I think he was complicit to some degree, even if it wasn’t wholly conscious on his part. Although never an overt or even covert sexual tease, I wonder now if some part of him didn’t enjoy being the object of my desire, and perhaps even illicitly (and wholly un-consciously) even encourage it.

I’m not going to recite my misdeeds with Tripp here. The catalogue is long, and some of it embarrasses me still. The long and the short of it is, I made him uncomfortable enough to leave. Reading over this account, it occurs to me that I may have given the impression that my feelings for Tripp were entirely, or perhaps largely, sexual. They weren't. Had it been merely a matter of physical attraction, I doubt I could have been so tormented by our friendship and our close proximity. It could have been treated as a kind of cosmic joke. But I wanted Tripp in every way it is possible to desire another human being; only love can make us behave so badly. But as that great Western philosopher Woody Allen once remarked, the heart wants what it wants.

A few years later, in a moment of rue and rather typical self-hatred, I wrote him a fairly long letter in care of his parents, apologizing for it all and wishing him well. That I never heard back didn’t altogether surprise me. Perhaps he never even received it.

I saw him again around 1990 or 1991. I was having dinner with a friend on her dinner break. She worked at a Waldenbooks in a local shopping mall, and she had just leant me enough money to put to rest a very expensive and extremely inconvenient bill from the IRS. I was giving her my undivided attention … when the doors to the mall opened and Tripp walked in.

He was dressed in business attire, which took me a bit aback; jeans, a T-shirt and an unbuttoned long-sleeved shirt over that were his everyday attire when I’d known him. He caught my eye, smiled that sweet smile of his, and moved off to get himself some food.

I ached to go and speak to him, but I couldn’t. I felt I owed her my solicitude. It would be rude, wouldn’t it, to get up and talk to someone else? This is the way money affects me. If someone—parent, a friend, whomever—loans or gifts me emergency funds, I feel beholden in a very immediate and all-pervasive way. I just couldn’t excuse myself and go talk to Tripp—could I?

I never saw him again. Until last night. In Dreamsville, Baby.

I don’t know what prompted the dream. Probably a combination of things. As autumn chases summer’s dreams, my seasonal depression is taking hold, aided this year by the numerous jolts of the last couple of months. I’ve been wool-gathering after going to bed of late, and my anxiety takes in both the future, of which I am uncertain and scared, and he past, which is filled with regret. I was also loading some old files into a new PC last night, among them a couple of erotic fantasy stories I’d written about Tripp, so that may have contributed to the mix as well.

In my dream, he had agreed to a sort of sex-date with me. It wasn’t just fucking—I never wanted anyone I loved in that period of my life in only those terms—but was to be the initiation of our making love. Odd that we were planning it rather than allowing it to happen spontaneously, but that’s the way with dreams, isn’t it? They hold their own logic, of which logic knows nothing.

In the dream he told me it would be that night, when he got home. In the meanwhile, I was to prepare the music—in particular, I was instructed to listen to a specific cassette which he gave me. It had a hidden track of some kind (which, in typical dream-logic, was actually a second strip of tape in the cassette itself) that pertained directly to us.

I never heard what was on that tape, though in the dream I listened to it. I also, maddeningly, didn’t get to witness our union. It wasn’t so much “discrete fade-out” as it was never fade-in. The dream segued from my perusal of the tape to the two of us, the following day. We were walking and Tripp was talking to a third person whose identity is unclear to me. He was speaking almost as though I wasn’t there, and when asked about his opinion of whatever it was they were discussing, said “My girlfriend agrees with me, but my boyfriend doesn’t.”

In the dream I was flush with equal parts pleasure and amazement. Shock that he would admit a same-sex relationship to a third party, wild excitement that his “boyfriend” in question was me.

That was it. All of it. So little, to provoke so much. But old yearnings may, unlike old soldiers, not fade away so much as receded for a time, until resurrected by a look, a phrase, a melody, or a dream.

Of all my regrets, and have more than my share, Tripp has always been high on the list. Regret for my actions, rue for our never having been together as I so fervently desired, and a strong prickle of anxious sorrow for that last glimpse of him.

What would I have said? Does it matter? Does any of it? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.

The Devil's Dictionary: Time for a revised edition?

2005-10-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

I'm reading John Le Carre's novel The Constant Gardener and note, with pleasure that—on my limited reading of him—he appears to becoming more Graham Greene-like. By which I mean more than his having paid hommage to the Master with The Tailor of Panama. With the demise of the Cold War and the decreased need, in Britain at least, for spies of the George Smiley type, his sweep is becoming more global, more overtly lefty—engaged with the world and more obvious in his empathy.

What prompts these reflections is a line spoken by Gloria Woodrow, the once-potentially brilliant, now-pitiably (and bubble-headedly) pliable wife of the Head of Chancery in Nairobi. (Le Carre writes of her, tellingly, "Yet Gloria Woodrow was not naturally stupid." Not naturally—what a wealth of bitter detail is crammed within that comic-tragic notation.) Consoling the grieving husband of a murdered woman, Gloria reminds him, wholly without awareness of any implicit irony, that "We can't go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute, or we'd never get anywhere."

We can't go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute, or we'd never get anywhere.

Was there ever a more succinct summation of the way of things? No, not the way of things—the way we've made of things. (Wasn't there once a young rabbi in Jerusalem who was quoted as saying "That which you do to the least of these, you also do to me"? A detail conveniently omitted by the roving bands of thugs who, amusingly, call themselves Fundamentalist Christians.) Perhaps if we did "go round treating people as if they were going to drop dead any minute," we might have less cause for regret ourselves. Certainly we might cause less pain in others.

I think it's time for a new edition of The Devil's Dictionary. I don't suppose Bierce would mind terribly if I appended his masterwork with an epigram of my own. And if so, he's dead, and beyond legal action.

Political Correctness. n.
The soul-chilling notion that all people are worthy of respect.

The World is Full of Beautiful Things

2005-09-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

Butterfly wings/
Emerald rings ...

So sang Doctor Dolittle, anyway. (The Leslie Bricusse one, not the Hugh Lofting.)

Sitting on the back porch of the office this afternoon, reading Son of a Witch and indulging in the twin perversions of caffeine and nicotine, I noticed a fluttering off to my right. Looking over I saw a butterfly. Late in the season, it seems to me, but it was a beautiful thing. The portion of wings closest to the body a purple so deep it seemed black, and on the tips a pattern in navy blue. There was no light to catch it today, but I thought that if there had been the blue pattern would have sparkled like the rarest of gems.

It flitted about aimlessly, in circles from parked car to asphalt and concrete, and over again. Now and then it paused on the ground to raise and lower its wings slowly, and I wondered if perhaps it was newly born. Or newly chrysaled? With its dark coloring and its flitting movements, it resembled a small bat—another creature I can watch on its rounds with great pleasure.

Several weeks ago I came out in the morning to find that someone, during the night, had deposited a small tub of colored goo bearing a Smoothie label on the porch. I found its lid and attached it. Eventually, tiring of the constant swarming of flies and ants, I moved it to the ground. At my touch the lid flew off—propelled, I assume, by the pent-up gas. There it has sat, turning rancid and vinegary, and a spider has set up her web nearby to catch the odd errant fly.

After a time, the butterfly began wending its way toward this monstrosity. Becoming fearful it would somehow either fall into the tub, or brush the web and, in either case, become hopelessly enmeshed, I knelt nearby to ... right it? save it? I'm only sure that, had it somehow slipped and fallen into that putrid vat, I'd have found some delicate means of extracating it.

Each time the butterfly wrested itself away from the lure of the tub and flit about, I held out my arm, palm down, as a resting place. Something in me wanted this creature to land on me, however briefly. To be, for a moment, a part of its beauty.

It never did, but I was relieved when, after falling into the tub and quickly righting itself again, it flew away, very rapidly now, to the east. I was reminded of how, a couple of weeks ago on a warm, sunny afternoon, I was gifted to witness the progression down our sidewalk of a pair of Buddhist monks. The deep yellow wraps, trimmed with sumptuous orange, the cheerful silence even as they conversed quietly, was a kind of benediction on the day. So it was with the butterfly.

A measure of grace, unexpected, as grace always is, to bless a surly, sunless afternoon.

The accepted wisdom, and how to avoid it

2005-08-03T08:34:00.000-07:00

It has become an article of faith among those who make a living at such things, that Jaws and Star Wars were the two-pronged assault that killed that brief, shining moment of the personal mass-market movie in the United States. Further, that the blame for the sorry mess that is the American movie industry today falls squarely on the shoulders of those two, seemingly mild-mannered demons, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.

Pap, twaddle, and—may I say?—bullshit.

First, let's understand something basic. The time of the mogul is dead, long dead—that much-maligned yet sorely-missed period (roughly 1920-1960) during which the likes of Sam Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Carl Laemmle, Adolph Zukor, Darryl Zanuck, the Brothers Warner—even the idiot savant of Poverty Row Harry Cohn—ruled the Dream Factory in this country. The rag merchants kept one eye on the grosses and the other on the entertainment quotient of their movies; whatever their feudal ways and despotic means, the old dinosaurs truly loved movies.

The replacement of the lover with the Suit and the MBA was something of a creeping cancer; no one quite realized what had happened until the damage was done. That the complete imbedding of corporate mentality in the movie industry happened to consolidate just as Spielberg and Lucas delivered those monster hits Jaws and Star Wars is basically just a joke of history. Further, as illustrative of William Goldman's ostentatiously quoted maxim "No one knows anything," no one expected anything of Lucas' space epic, and not much more of Stevie's little fish story. When both went on to top the previously elusive $100-million mark within two years of each other, the oil magnates and stereo components producers now running the studios took notice. It is in their laps that the mania for the instant mega-hit must be laid.

Have Lucas and Spileberg, separately and together, had a doleful effect on American movies? Absolutely. Until comparatively recently, it seemed that Spielberg was intent on claiming the mantle, often bestown upon him by the idiots who make up the entertainment press corps, of the Modern Disney. Not the Disney who made Pinocchio the greatest and most artlessly artistic of all animated movies but the Disney of Bon Voyage and The Sword in the Stone—trash for trash's sake, "popular" movie-making in the worst possible sense: thus, The Goonies. Spielberg's '80s output as a producer is wretched, Poltergeist, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and (maybe) Gremlins aside, and many began to despair that the man whose passion for fantastic visions produced art in the marketplace (Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T.— and Jaws) had been subsumed by the businessman-as-creative-force, accent on the word "business."

Lucas too sprayed the walls of the growing cineplexes with the detritus of a largely bankrupt imagination: Willow and—god help us—Howard the Duck (which, had it been made in the mode of Roger Rabbit, as a hip admixture of live-action and animation, might have honored its source, the bizarre, humane and altogether sui generis Steve Gerber comic of the late '70s/early '80s.) Even the Indiana Jones series, which started off so exhilaratingly with Raiders of the Lost Ark, quickly succumbed to gore, racist stereotypes ("Short Round," anyone?) and sado-masochistic sexism of jaw-dropping proportions. (Where the hell is Karen Allen when you need her?)

Garbage, goop, hucksterism and mendacity—the perfect embodiment of what has become known as Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is shit.

Who foresaw the staggering cultural impact of those early entries in the blockbuster game? No one. Oh, sure—Peter Benchley's novel was a roaring success, and the movie adaptation probably would have made money if it had been directed by Herschel Gordon Lewis. But not even the producers of Jaws, the estimable Richard Zanuck and David Brown, expected anything like what happened, especially after the prolonged and much-reported agonies of the movie's production, gleefully reported in the press. As for the space opera, its initial—and rather mysterious—emergence as the movie you had to see caught everyone off-guard: Lucas, 20th Century-Fox, Variety and those few, hardy, battered-but-valiant Fox stockholders who would soon be buried in dividends beyond their most fetid imaginings.

The lesson? These things are not planned. They can't be.

Altogether now, Class:

No. One. Knows. Anything.

What killed the popular personal movie—the wild, unfettered artistic meanderings of the Scorseses, Coppolas, Altmans and Malicks whose early-to-mid 1970s exercises stand as perhaps the last gasp of the Artist who Made Good (i.e., saw profit)—was the lust to replicate these ungovernable blips on the cultural graph. Hence the unrelenting push, each and every Memorial Day, to force down our throats some mass-produced piece of plastic crap destined to be forgotten at year's end by everyone but the money-men ... who are, more often than not, to be found floating in an ever-expanding sea of drek and red ink.

At the center of this appalling phenomenon is a truth so simple it eludes nearly everyone:

Movies are not automobiles.

Or stereo equipment. Or oil refineries. Or even cable television. Commodities, yes, but unreproducable in a way the high-tech gonifs at Sony simply cannot fathom. If we make a CD player the same way a million times, and every single unit of that million-run sells, their reasoning runs, why can't we do the same with movies?

Because, you idiots, a movie is not a CD player.

Added to which, each potential $100-million-buster must be sold overseas, to a growing market of functional and actual illiterates in far-flung Eastern counties: an audience that cannot, or will not, follow a moderately complex plot; that cares not one whit for characters whose human qualities rise above the occasional smart-ass, sour joke that passes for wit among arrested adolescents; that does not in some way represent a fairy tale vision of life on this planet; that does not involve at least a half-dozen strategically-placed explosions and a pair of ubiquitous fireballs; and that does not end with Villainy Vanquished and the Good Guy standing, however badly mauled and in need of transfusion.

(And lest you now assume your humble scribe a closet racist, be aware that the studios not are only aware of this, they count on it the way in the 1930s they counted so on European revenues they cravenly snipped out each and every reference in their movies to the growing Nazi menace. Further, let me say in my own defense that the above paragraph could just as easily be applied to a modern American movie audience as to one in India or Pakistan.)

The result: American movies are no longer made for Americans.

Do you understand this??

So don't blame Lucas, or Spielberg, or whatever convenient whipping boy you've had in mind as The Source of All That is Rotten in American Film. Blame Sony. Blame Michael Eisner. Blame Michael Bay.

Here endeth the lesson.

Coming Soon:
A few more stray thoughts on Jaws, its whereins and whereats, and why Steven Spielberg is, on the basis of this one movie, and regardless of anything else he's done since, one of this most gifted men who ever picked up a movie camera. Are you all-a-tingle?

In which Your Humble Correspondent resists the temptation to call this entry "You're gonna need a bigger boat"

2005-08-02T09:58:00.000-07:00

Purchased the new, two-disc Jaws (Widescreen Anniversary Collector's Edition) this weekend and watched the extras (which do not, for reasons that escape my ability to fathom such things, include the original theatrical trailer—which was on the previous, single-disc DVD.) Couldn't help wishing, despite the plethora of goodies, that Universal had gotten the rights to that National Geographic special of a few years back in which Peter Benchley tagged along on an expedition to the Great Barrier Reef, during which the N.G. photographer caught a jaw-dropping photo of a Great White shark breaching the water some twenty feet or more.

It's more than a little sobering to note the 30th anniversary of a movie you vividly recall seeing when it was first released. (Christ—as if I don't feel old enough already.) And just try explaining to a new generation how staggering the impact of this movie was at the time: how there had never been anything like it before; how it was the very first example of what we now take for granted as the "Summer Blockbuster"; how one movie could so influence an entire society that the previously rather thoughtless practice of seasonal swimming became a test of nerve ("Do I go in the water or not?") the same way that Psycho made millions of Americans reconsider stepping into a motel shower stall.

Herewith a few stray observations occasioned by Laurent Bouzereau's Making of Jaws documentary, beginning with a few choice bits from the people involved:

Steven Spielberg says he wanted to introduce the audience to the character of Quint (Robert Shaw) by showing him in a public theatre watching the 1956 John Huston/Ray Bradbury adaptation of Moby Dick and roaring his head off. The people around him begin to leave until the theatre is empty save Quint; the camera goes out in the street with the fleeing patrons, followed by his bellows of laughter. Good joke. (Spielberg actually did shoot an ultimately unused introduction to Quint, seen in a music shop tormenting poor little Paul Goulart as he tries to bleat out Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" on a clarinet.)

Another of the Maestro's unfilmed set-pieces involved the Amity Island Harbormaster watching Don't Go Near the Water on a portable teevee as the camera fixes on a line of sailboat masts; one after the other, they bob up and tilt over in the swell as the shark glides beneath the keels. The Harbormaster leans out over the side of his boat to rinse his coffeepot out and ... (This scene was in its turn the genesis for the sequence, not in Benchley's novel, of those two dopey yeggs trying to lure the Great White in with a side of ham. Carl Gottlieb, the movie's Boswell and co-scenarist—Benchley got credit for his original, largely unusable, script and Howard Sackler asked to have his own name removed—notes that one of the idiots was originally to lose a leg, but that the later sequence of the lifeguard's limb falling to the ocean floor was "one leg too many—or too few.")

Susan Backlinie, the stunt woman whose intensely-felt work in the movie's opening sequence primed us all for the terror to come, says Spielberg asked her to intone the Lord's Prayer as the shark hauled her to hell and gone by the leg. Herself a born Catholic, neither she nor any of the other Catholics on the crew could remember how it went. Richard Dreyfuss also recalls walking in to a dubbing session and seeing Spielberg pouring water down Backlinie's throat to produced the desired effect in her voice. The fact that the young director noticed the need for such aural realism is a testament to his sense of craft, evident even at the relatively tender age of 26; it recalls Orson Welles' demand that James G. Stewart re-dub the entire horseless carriage sequence in The Magnificent Ambersons because he got no sense of the automobile's motion in the voices.

Spielberg was so enamored of Martha's Vineyardite Craig Kingsbury that he not only gave him the role of the ill-fated Ben Gardner, but also allowed him to improvise the garrulous character's many memorable bons mot. My favorite Kingsbury moment is the memorable pause he places between phrases on greeting Dreyfuss at the Amity pier: "Hello there ... young fella." That gap gives the line a natural feel, as thought it had been made up on the spot, conversationally. (I'm reminded now of a story a friend told me about a bus-tour he attended during a visit to the Vineyard. The guide was a local who, in common with any number of others, had a small role in the movie. He augmented this boast by adding, "And some of us had speakin' paahts.")

Roy Scheider's endlessly quoted line "You're gonna need a bigger boat" was an on-set ad lib.

John Williams suggested to Spielberg that the music should be composed as though for a pirate movie. That pretty much explains the score's heavy (and, to these ears, delicious) reliance on sea shanties and New England hornpipes as recurring motifs. Williams also cites a tongue-in-cheek hommage to Erich Wolfgang Korngold in the "Barell Chase" sequence—his own favorite moment in the score, and that of many of its fans, including this one.

Forthcoming in the Next Thrilling Installment:
Further of Your Faithful Servant's keen and wizardly observations on this most culturally significant (some would say "calamitous") of movies.

Movie Notes: "Ladies in Lavender"

2005-07-21T07:30:00.000-07:00

Saw this last night. Beautifully done, in a special sort of little British manner: charming, slight, but made with exquisite taste (itself perhaps a decent self-criticism) and with lovely performances by the two dames, Maggie and Judi. The actor Charles Dance adapted and directed. (It's his debut on both counts.)

As the young Polish virtuoso whose sudden apppearance in a Cornwall village sets up a small (tasteful, British) tempest of jealousy and buried sexual tension Daniel Bruhl is one of the most stunningly beautiful youths I've ever encountered at the movies. I kept looking for a physical flaw in this boy and couldn't locate one for a gander, as they say. With his finely-chiseled cheekbones, thin but sensual lips, thick boyish eyelids, aqualine jaw and slender yet surprisingly muscular frame (which, to our delight, we get to see in both a tailored tweed suit and a deliciously skin-tight period bathing suit) he not only acts a treat but is, as John Gielgud would have said, a dream of beauty. You can easily imagine him shagging other pretty boys in a Bel Ami video. At least, I can.

The only sort of odd note about the movie, or its story, is that—even though Dame Maggie converses with the boy in German, and even after he's learned to speak a bit of English—no one asks him how he got washed up on the shore in Cornwall. No one. Ever. Was he shipwrecked? We don't know. Did he fall off a boat somewhere in the Atlantic? Is he merely a figment of the world's fervid, pre-War imagination? Did fairies leave him on the beach for want of a cabbage-leaf? Pick one solution or any combination—it's all the same to Charles Dance.

Some thoughts on watching "All the President's Men" for the sixteenth time

2005-07-14T08:43:00.000-07:00

Too bad there's no Oscar for Casting ...

... because Alan Shayne would have won it, hands-down. This is maybe the finest ensemble cast ever assembled for a major movie (and yes, I'm counting Robert Altman's oeuvre). Every single role, no matter how brief, is cast with absolutely the right actor. Aside from the principals (Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford—in what is arguably his best performance—Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Hal Holbrook—chillingly serpentine as "Deep Throat"—Jason Robards—a perfect Ben Bradlee—and Jane Alexander) the movie offers a panoply of richly detailed character work from the likes of Meredith Baxter, Ned Beatty, Stephen Collins, Penny Fuller, John McMartin, Robert Walden, Lindsay Crouse, Polly Holliday, Allyn Ann McLerie, Neva Patterson ... and on and on and on.

The movie also provides an increasingly important pair of messages for the present era: 1) The utter necessity of a free press, unfettered by threats of jail-time for the current sin of refusing to reveal one's sources; and 2) The importance to a investigative journalism of appallingly tedious leg-work and the application of craft-something the would-be heirs of Woodward and Bernstein ought to take to heart instead of printing rumors as fact, and grabbing headlines without engaging in the soul-numbing practice of painstaking research. They've become so enamoured of what Woodstein achieved that they've lost sight of how it was done, and why it held up so magnificently.

Sick at home with (not sick from) Gene Wilder

2005-07-06T13:01:00.000-07:00

15 June 2005

I missed several days of work last week due to cold and flu-like illness, and filled in the time during which I was awake largely with reading. Herewith a few stray thoughts.

(Note: This was the only title I actually got to writing about. So shoot me.)

Kiss Me Like a Stranger—Gene Wilder's sweet little memoir, this month's package from Zooba.com

Wilder's approach to the book, punctuating his memories with a few asides and several conversations with his old psychiatrist, gives the material a kick. It's a gentle, humane little book—rather like the man himself, or at least my sense of what he must be like. It might have been just a bit longer; Wilder's observations on his movie projects and stage performances, and on the people with whom he's worked, are rather maddeningly brief—especially concerning the movies he wrote and directed himself, which generally get a passing nod. I adored Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother and The Woman in Red, and I'd love to know more about their writing and filming. Conversely, Wilder provides just enough about his two most famous collaborators, Richard Pryor and Gilda Radner. I always thought Radner and Wilder make an adorable couple, but I wasn't aware of Gilda's clutching need for validation nor that Wilder and Pryor, although a superb team on-screen, were (like Laurel and Hardy) little more than friendly acquaintances off the set. In keeping with his image, or at least with my image of him, Wilder has few bad things to say about people, and when he does they're either dead or anonymous. Which is probably as it should be.

"There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance": No, just unbalanced egocentric arrogant movie stars, apparently

2005-07-05T10:26:00.000-07:00

Listening to Wait Wait ... don't tell me on NPR has become a weekly ritual. Under normal conditions Adam Felber is not my favorite semi-regular panelist on the show. But Felber got off a remark this past weekend that will probably keep me laughing for a week.

The topic was Tom Cruise's current, and very public, meltdown: his latest rant against antidepressants, the "pseudo-science" (a subject on which he ought to know plenty after all those years of Scientology) of psychiatry and the "irresponsibility" of Brooke Shields taking psychotropic drugs after a severe bout of post-partum depression. The discussion turned to Tom's bizarre history of publicity-grabbing devices (usually indulged in right on schedule: when he has a new movie in release) about which Felber noted, "Sometimes he shows up with a beard, sometimes he shows up with facial hair."

I don't know how many in the Wait Wait ... audience got the joke (the laugh was not one of the episode's larger bursts of public merriment) but I nearly fell off the couch.

Adam Felber, I officially love you. (But not in a gay way. Heh-heh.)

Tommygun

2005-06-27T09:54:00.000-07:00

In today's Slate Edward Jay Epstein weighs in on the current Tom Cruise feeding-frenzy, noting that an informal People magazine poll finds an unscientific 62 percent of respondents presume Tom's hysterical crowing about his romance with Katie Holmes to be a publicity stunt. (The other choice was "True Romance.") Epstein observes that once this " statistically meaningless result" went public, "it spawned a frenzy of stories dangling the bizarre idea that the romance had been faked to publicize" Cruise and Holmes' respective new movies.

While I suspect this is at least partially true—Cruise is a very savvy dealmaker—may I run the risk of incuring his wrath (or at least, that of his legal team) by daring to suggest that, as with so much self-generated Cruise news, this latest round of ballyhoo is calculated to proclaim once more the irrefutable evidence of our Tommy's utter, utter, jubilant heterosexuality?

Why else would a man his age bounce off so many teevee studio walls like a love-struck adolescent? Why else make such a bona fide fool of himself?

We may be forgiven if, along with our eye-rolling disgust, we also sense the fine Italian hand of Tom's Scientology handlers.

Let me state, for the record (and for any of the minions of Tom Cruise, Inc.* who happen to espy this little speculative essay) that I am not alleging or asserting anything about Tommy's proclivities. While I admit to hearing some interesting data on the subject from an unimpeachable source, as they used to say in the '70s, neither I nor anyone not intimately involved with Mr. Cruise can say with any certainty what (or whom) he does in his off-hours. And in a sense it doesn't matter. If Cruise were to begin spouting off at every opportunity about the evils of homosexuality, it would matter. Denying you're queer is one thing, however sad. Going after your own is something altogether else. (Did I mention that I'm asserting nothing about Tom Cruise's sexuality? Just checking. Don't want to give those kindly lawyers at TCI any cause for concern. Heh-heh-heh.)

It is, however, a well-documented fact of life in these here United States—or in Los Angeles anyway, residence in which Gore Vidal assures us still constitutes living abroad—that Scientology depends for its very existence on a captive membership. Not, perhaps, literally (although there have been allegations) but its recruiting officers are busily engaged in ferreting out whatever "dirt" can be discovered about local celebrities, all the better to blackamil you with, my dear. This is particularly crucial when it comes to the big names. The bigger the name, the deeper the digging. And the bigger the name the more prominence his or her devotion to the cul—er, religion—must be given in interviews and other attendant publicity.

Again, I'm not saying that Tom Cruise or John Travolta are homosexual—Heaven forefend and perish the thought! Truly, Your Honor—but isn't it interesting that, as their respective stars have risen, so too has the vigor of their public devotion to Scientology? Travolta even managed to get some poor shmucks to finance an L. Ron Hubbard-based fantasy flick a few years back, the reverberations from which bomb are still being felt along the Pacific Coast Highway.

Hence—perhaps—the recent spectacle Tommy Boy has been making of himself for the alternatively star-struck and cynical members of the press. He couldn't be more ludicrous if he made his appearances draped in gold lame and shrieking, "I'm straight! I'm straight! I'm really really really really straight!" with a manical grin. (Thinks: are those teeth, like Betty Grable's gams, insured? And does he have any idea how frightened he looks when he flashes them?)

Like most of the self-serving prattle one hears from Out There, as Dorothy Parker used to call it, I suspect Mr. Cruise's rather pathetic outbursts are designed to serve both God (or whatever it is Scientologists worship) and mammon. In any case, Tom's publicists must be damping their beetled brows: if the public—or the readers of People anyway—can be counted on to believe their client's antics serve as transparent cover for hype, said public will certainly look no deeper for a motive.

Hooray for Hollywood.