This is one of those awful videos I watch when I'm on the treadmill at the health club.
I don't care! I love it! It's grandiose and wonderful.
“I wanna taste you, but your lips are venomous . . .”
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig
Nous sommes revenus, mes petits animaux!
(Just got home about two hours ago. We unpacked, and Partner is already asleep. I'm too jazzed to sleep. I absorbed lots of information while in Florida.)
(More soon.)
Saturday, October 8, 2011
The lady on the bus
Sometimes Partner and I ride the trolley to work. It's not really a trolley; it's just a squatty little city bus with shellacked wooden seats that send you flying if the driver takes a corner too fast. But it's crafted to look like a trolley, and it's a pleasant ride, especially on a sunny morning. Naturally there's a cast of characters: the driver (usually a blonde woman sucking a lollipop); an old man with withered legs and a big smile; a rumpled academic with a huge head of hair who naps surreptitiously.
Lately there's been a new addition: a woman about our age, who dresses in lots of layers of crepe and chiffon and fabric. Think “aging hippie,” if you will. She's very brisk, she engages everyone in conversation, she's loud and gregarious. To the point of being A-N-N-O-Y-I-N-G, especially on a quiet weekday morning.
This was a snippet from last week's conversation (she was sitting right behind us, I couldn't very well not hear it): “How are you?” another woman asked her.
“Oh,” Aging Hippie fluted theatrically, “I had a really awful day at work yesterday. I got a written warning. I think my boss wants to fire me or something. Anyway: that's neither here nor there. It is what it is. Oh, can I call you later, so that you can help me with that computer thing? You know I'm helpless with that computer stuff.”
I shudder with silent laughter, and I can't even look at Partner, his eyes are squeezed shut, he's trying not to laugh too.
Questions:
-
Do you find the expression “It is what it is” as loathsome as I do? I guess it's supposed to be deep: that's life, we have to accept it. But – sheesh!
-
What do you suppose was in the written warning she received? Did it have anything to do with her lack of computer skills? Her talkative nature? The fact that she's always calling friends on the phone from work?
-
Why is she even working in an office in the first place? I've seen her wardrobe. She could open a consignment boutique and market frilly dirndls to college girls. (Try saying those last five words over and over again, really fast.)
Anyway: she stopped riding the bus a few days ago. I think the written warning was followed by something a little harsher.
I will be looking for that consignment boutique in our neighborhood any time now!
Friday, October 7, 2011
Happy birthday, Partner
Today is Partner's birthday. If all is well, we should be in DisneyWorld (or Universal Studios) right this moment, having a wonderful time.
Our first meeting was a dinner date at Downcity in downtown Providence in 1995. (The place burned down a few years ago.) I ordered fish, which arrived burnt on one side and half-frozen on the other. I would have sent it back, but I didn't want to make a bad impression on Future Partner, whom (for some reason) I liked very much.
About a month later, we went to Newport Grand. We bet on a few jai-alai matches, and we put down some money on one of the Triple Crown races (either the Belmont or the Preakness – the records are unclear). I'd never bet on a horse race before, so he coached me. He pointed out that my birthday was July 10, and his was October 7, and his sister Peggy's was November 7, so it was obvious that the ideal trifecta bet was 7-10-11.
He was in line in front of me at the betting window. His theory about 7-10-11 sounded interesting, but – I mean, really? So I watched him bet those number, and then it was my turn, and I bet 1-2-3. (In Roseanne's words from the last season of her series, when her character won the lottery: “A perfect straight.”) And I thought no more about it.
Next morning came a call from Future Partner. “We won!” he yelled. “Twenty-two hundred dollars! How much did you bet?”
I was uncomprehending. “I'm glad you won,” I said. “But I didn't bet the same numbers you did.”
He was incredulous. “How could you not - ”
I didn't understand, you see. It was magical. He knew it right away. Me, it took a while.
That was sixteen years ago, when we were both young and foolish.
Now we are old and achy and irritable.
But we're still together.
Partner: I love you very much.
I hope you have a hundred more birthdays at least.
And I will still not bet the numbers you tell me to bet.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
FOR $2 ONLY!
Numbers are magical. Partner works with numbers for a living, and claims an intimate acquaintance with them. I myself have a kind of mystical respect for them. When I go to the health club, I always try to get a locker with a prime number on it. Why? Because. I automatically / reflexively check phone numbers and address numbers and years in my head, looking for magical correspondences. Partner and I realized early on that we were meant to be together, because his birthday is October 7, and mine is July 10. 10/7 and 7/10, see? Now add the ol' seven-ten split from bowling, and the fact that Partner's sister's birthday is 11/7 . . .
It gets into everything.
For example: I was at the store the other night, trying to decide which chips to buy, and then I noticed Chester Cheetah leering out at me from a big bag of Puffcorn with the legend: $2 ONLY!
Well, it's a big bag of Puffcorn, and – while I acknowledge that Puffcorn is mostly greasy air and orange coloring and salt – that's a mighty good price.
They did not insult my intelligence by making it $1.99, you notice; they made it a nice round reasonable $2.00. And not $2.00, but $2 ONLY! I love the reversal of the words: not “only two dollars,” but “two dollars only!” It's vaguely non-standard English – just enough to make you pay attention.
And it's bright orange!
As is the Puffcorn.
I am captivated by this. It makes me wonder how my brain works, and why it's affected by things like this. It tells me, most of all, that numbers are real; they're at work in the world, and they interact with us in all kinds of ways.
Do I need to tell you that I bought the Puffcorn?
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
My career as a poet
I was a poet, for a while.
I wrote poetry like a demon. I had notebooks full of lines, and words, and full poems, and sequences of poems, and sequences of sequences. I had a whole book planned out at one point, in five sections.
I won the Poetry Award at my college in my senior year, and I was sure it was a sign of future greatness. You know how successful and wealthy and famous poets are! (Yes, I'm being sarcastic, just so you know. But when you're twenty, it's a heady feeling. It's important to feel that way at twenty, I think.)
During the decade that followed, I wrote poetry constantly, and submitted it to the ten thousand little magazines that accept contributions. They changed all the time. A few are fixtures: Poetry, naturally, and the Kenyon Review. I never dared to approach them; I decided (sensibly) to build a reputation first. I got published! Always in little magazines. “Bardic Echoes,” I remember. I'd have to dig out the box of publications to remember the others. I'm sure they're all long dead.
I had a last burst of poetic inspiration while I was in the Peace Corps, in my late twenties. I wrote pages and pages of doggerelish rhyming verse. Some of it was actually clever, I think.
Since then: nothing.
My friend Joanne recently sent me a copy of the college publication in which my prize-winning poem appeared in 1978. Ah Jesus!
I so badly wanted to be a real poet. More than that: I was sure that I was a poet, and would somehow suddenly erupt into notoriety as a famous poet . . .
It didn't happen.
Ah well.
Maybe I'll have a burst of creativity sometime between now and 2040 . . .
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Book report: "The Driver's Seat," by Muriel Spark
The folks at New Directions, Krishna bless them, have put out a new series called “Bibelots”: small books, nicely designed, that pack a large punch. A couple of them are Muriel Spark's shorter novels, and one of those is her 1970 novel “The Driver's Seat.”
Yow.
In college, I wrote a paper on Muriel's novels. I read a few of them thoroughly, and a few of them very quickly. I only glanced at “The Driver's Seat.” It's only now, thirty-five years later, that I've actually read it carefully.
It is like acid in the face.
It is the story (told in the perpetual present tense, like several of her other novels) of a woman who intends to be a murder victim. (Or somehow she knows she will be a murder victim. Whichever. It makes no difference.) She takes a “vacation” from (probably) Denmark to (probably) Italy. She buys brightly-colored clothes and such, and makes a fuss along the way, so that everyone she meets will remember her. And she keeps looking for the man who's “her type.”
Which is to say: the man who will murder her.
And she meets him, and – horribly – everything happens right on schedule.
I first knew Muriel Spark through “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Yes, the movie is lovely, and Maggie Smith is amazing as Jean Brodie. But the novel is ten times more amazing. It zigzags back and forth in time; it gives us Sandy Stranger, the student responsible for Jean Brodie's fall from grace, as a nun, struggling with what she's done years later.
Another of my favorite Spark novels has always been “The Abbess of Crewe,” a novelization of the American Watergate scandal, set in an Anglican convent, with lots of classic English poetry and prose thrown in. Dry, perfect, funny, beautiful. “Be still, be watchful.”
And there are her short stories, and her poems.
A beautiful craftswoman, and strange, and very perfect.
You will perhaps hear more from me on this subject.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Rhode Island history: Shoveling snow for the mob
On my second day of jury duty this past summer, I reported in and sat in a room with 130 other people, waiting for something to happen. I did my crossword puzzle and eavesdropped on the conversations around me. The usual daily back-and-forth, with a Rhode Island accent: hotel cleanings, people dead in swimming pools, gold under the floorboards of an old house . . .
Then, after about an hour, the guy next to me muttered to me: “Think they'll call us?”
So we talked.
Oh, children, I thought I was the mayor. This guy was the mayor of all mayors.
You've been three places? He's been eight places. He was in the military, and a firefighter, and his wife's from Denmark, and he's a millionare -
And his stories, while not entirely dull, were very slow.
He was a regular Rhode Island type. Retired - “I could be at home next to my pool now!” - and with a son, and grandson, who's on the honor roll for I don't know how many years now. Older than me. Not bad-looking – probably quite handsome in his day – and mentioned at least seventeen times that he was Irish, in case I didn't know or couldn't tell. He mentioned two side businesses, and a couple of mob connections back in the day.
I'll spare you the really dull stories. This is the good one:
“When I was a kid, there was a family on the block, and we all knew they were connected. [Note: he told me their name, and I've forgotten it. I wish I remembered it, I could check his story. Marinelli? Mazzuchelli?] They ran everything, numbers, collections, the whole thing. They were deep into it. So, in the wintertime, all the kids shoveled snow. Twenty-five cents a house. Except at their house, it was five dollars. And he made you hot chocolate, and his wife made you a sandwich. But he came out and inspected afterward, and there had better not be any snow out there, because he'd check! And he'd let you know what you had to do, because he wanted his sidewalk cleared!”
That's the best Rhode Island story I've heard in quite a while.
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Sunday blog: Frank Zappa's "200 Motels"
One of Frank Zappa's dearest wishes was to make a movie called “200 Motels,” about how tours make musicians go insane. Zappa finally made the movie in 1971, and it's a raggedy mess, but there are some brilliant moments, and this video gives you the heart of the movie: a six-minute animated nightmare called “Dental Hygiene Dilemma,” in which bass-guitarist Jeff Simmons is torn between Good (personified by an incense-burning Donovan) and Evil (personified by a Zappaesque demon wearing a crash helmet).
Take some of your favorite medication and watch it. It's a good old time.
God, I wish it were 1971 again.
What am I saying? No, of course I don't!
Saturday, October 1, 2011
The perfect movie: "Annie Hall"
We have talked a lot about movies recently: good, bad, memorable, unmemorable. Movie-lovers get a little crazy about movies.
How about this, then: is there a perfect movie?
There are all kinds of quantifiable / describable things that make a movie truly great. It needs to be fun, and watchable, and susceptible to interpretation on many levels, and engaging, and contain excellent performances and clever / memorable dialogue, and be directed compellingly . . .
I have a short list: “The Red Shoes.” “The Lion In Winter.” “Casablanca.” “Citizen Kane.” “The Maltese Falcon.”
But the other day I walked into the house, and I could hear the TV in the next room: Partner was watching a movie. Diane Keaton and Woody Allen were arguing, and . . .
Well, of course, “Annie Hall”!
I have seen it more times than I can count – probably (I kid you not) a hundred times. I know most of the dialogue by heart. I had a friend who, when she phoned me, would not say “Hello,” but rather a random line of “Annie Hall” dialogue; my response was supposed to be the next line of dialogue in the movie. One call went like this: “Hello?” I said.
“Are you getting your period?” my friend rasped.
Too easy. “I don't get a period!” I said. “I'm a cartoon character!”
Woody achieved – to use one of his own expressions from the movie – maximum heaviosity in this film. The brittle chemistry between Woody and Diane makes everything work. The dialogue is perfect: witty without being arch. Woody had fun using every film technique of the last fifty years – split-screen, subtitles, animation – for a minute or so each, and they work beautifully. Woody actually speaks to the camera frequently, and it's not stupid or uncomfortable, it works: it makes the movie personal and engaging. The characters walk freely into scenes from their own past, and comment on them, and observe them. (Woody's classroom scene at the opening of the movie is a classic: he actually joins his own nine-year-old self in an argument with a smartassed nine-year-old girl.)
Okay, so it's a funny movie about a twice-divorced guy from Brooklyn who gets into a relationship with a not-so-dumb girl from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.
It's also a bittersweet/sad movie about a twice-divorced guy from Brooklyn who gets into a relationship with a not-so-dumb girl from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.
I remember watching the 1978 Oscar ceremony about a month before I graduated from college, back at Gonzaga in Spokane, with my friend George. George is (if you can believe it) a bigger Woody Allen fan than I am. When the Best Picture award was given to “Annie Hall,” George actually shed a tear. I've never forgotten it.
If you've never seen this movie, do yourself a favor and see it.
It's perfect.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)