Category: film
come to me
It’s been a long time since college, when I wrote my Marxist critique of It’s A Wonderful Life. I’ve been out of the film review game for some time, so I don’t feel particularly qualified to talk about the cinematic merits of Under the Skin, Jonathan Glazer’s re-imagining of Michel Faber’s novel, a film that blew me away to the point I was almost in a coma afterwards. I haven’t felt this way about a movie since I saw Apocalypse Now for the first time. On that night, over thirty years ago, the film was shown in a large auditorium-style lecture hall, one where a 300-student Psych 101 class might meet. The lights dimmed. Right from the first scenes of exploding, Napalmed trees and helicopter blades whirring and morphing into Martin Sheen’s hotel-room ceiling fan while Jim Morrison sang, “This is the end…beautiful friend…the end…”, I was mesmerized. When the movie ended, I walked back to my dorm room in Eastman Hall in a daze. I couldn’t speak. People may have walked past and said hello, but I saw no one, spoke to no one. My roommate was away. I remember turning on my twinkly Christmas lights, putting some Doors on the stereo, and just staring into space for what seemed like hours. I didn’t move, I didn’t speak. Even for days after, I thought about little else.
Walking out of the Nickelodeon Cinemas in Portland last Thursday on a foggy night, close to midnight, I felt the same way. My physical body, right down to the cellular level, had been irrevocably altered. As I walked back to my car, drunks shouted and spilled out of Old Port bars. I was an alien among humans. A stranger. While I watched a movie, Earth had been made new. I was discovering rain-soaked streets, buildings made of glass and steel, televisions flickering through bar windows, trees lit from behind by street lamps, as if for the first time. There was a deep silence to the world that I hadn’t noticed before. I drove the almost 45 minutes home with the radio off and the windows up, quiet in my pod. A few days later, I was working outside in some woods near my house. The wind whispered through the tall trees, and I thought I saw Scarlett Johansson’s alien moving through the undergrowth, a dark shape among darker shadows. But it was just some branches rustling.
Like thirty years ago, I haven’t been able to think of much else since. Talking about it seems futile. No one would understand anyway. Like any deeply personal reaction to Art, it would have to remain my little secret. And although I don’t have the vocabulary to discuss the theoretical aspects of this mesmerizing, truly visionary film or the hypnotic, cliché-busting, unexpected, typecast-smashing, insert-superlative-adjective-here performance of its star, as a man of a certain age in late period capitalist America, I do feel somewhat qualified to talk about one aspect of the film with some degree of competency: boobs.
Scarlett Johansson is our movie-actress version of Beyoncé: larger than life, reputation slightly out of proportion to talent, looks really great in clothes. An unobtainable Hollywood sexpot starlet, object of volcanic desire for men and women alike. Men want to possess her; women want to look like her. Or at least that’s the story we’ve been sold. Because here’s the thing. Johansson’s nudity in this film is almost completely asexual, almost anti-sexual. True, to the (also nude) men that she lures to their death, the alienized version of Scarlett is the slightly-out-of-reach ideal sexual partner. The genius of the film, and of Johansson’s performance, is that she takes this Hollywood fantasy, the one that she herself has been so adept at creating and cultivating these past years, and, like the poor men she seduces, completely and utterly sucks the marrow out of its false, bloated body. As the director said in an interview, “I think if people go there to get their rocks off, they’re better off going to see something else.”
The truth is Johansson’s naked body in this film looks rather, well, normal. If there even is such a thing as a “normal” human body. And that’s the other thing. There is no such thing as a normal or perfect human body. Anyone who has ever met a “movie star” in real life, as I have, will probably tell you, as I will, that they have way more wrinkles and much less hair than they do on screen. I’ve also been to quite a few clothing-optional beaches and have seen literally thousands of naked men and women. And let me tell you: there was nothing special about any of them. Beautiful and infinitely varied, yes. But none normal, none special, and none perfect.
Commerce and commerce alone has sexualized the human body. The only reason sex sells is because we let it. Men and women have bought into the fantasy of human perfection, but what Scarlett shows us, in her brave performance, is that the whole shebang is one fat lie. It’s the covering-up that seduces. The revealing holds no power. When we realize this, we will be free from the lies that constrain not only our physical bodies, but our emotional ones as well.
Once we realize that we are all flawed beings walking around on the surface of this rainy, stony earth in imperfect coats of flesh, we can truly become human. In and under our skin.
the pat solitano, jr. diet
One set of workout clothes, one empty mayonnaise jar, one plastic garbage bag, one slightly-crazed helping of enthusiasm. This is my plan, probably minus the mayonnaise jar (I use an actual water bottle) and the plastic garbage bag (too crinkly and distracting). Starting this morning, I kicked my Tastykake habit to the curb and began my early-morning sessions at my local Y. I set my alarm for 4:15 am, turn on the coffee, slip into my gym clothes, and am on the indoor track, with some Radiohead in my ears by 4:45. I run/walk for 45 minutes, do some planks, relax in the sauna and head home by 6, to wake my sleeping family and get ready for my work day. This has been my habit on and off for the last five years or so, but winter, especially around the holidays, always seems to knock me off course. The body wants to hibernate and pack on the pounds for a long sleep, but we have to resist the urge. I quit drinking almost six months ago, and had an overly-optimistic idea that this fact alone would allow me to magically shed weight. But I made up for my steady diet of wine and beer with other substitutes, namely root beer, pizza, and slice and bake cookies. And the occasional box of swirly frosted cupcakes.
But as I watched Silver Linings Playbook for about the fourth time a few weeks ago, I realized that it doesn’t take much to change your life’s course. One of the reasons I think I’m a Buddhist is that I don’t really believe in the soul. I’ve never been convinced that there is some kind of inherent, untouchable me-ness to me. I seem instead to define myself simply by my likes and dislikes. In this age of self-curation, this is what most of us do, I think. The ever-present facebook “like” is the defining gesture of our day. I’ve always had a weak sense of self, easily swayed by other’s beliefs and actions, which may explain why at such a young age I believed that drinking would make me cool. I followed other people’s examples and twenty years went by, unthinking. I’m still swayed by three-star reviews in Rolling Stone. Almost any criticism of a work of art that I love will make me second-guess myself. And yet, works of art can inspire me for my own good. My weak self also responds to motivation. Like the kid I was who actually believed he was Han Solo, so I also, even in adulthood, find it easy to take on the character traits and motivations of others. Bradley Cooper’s character in Silver Linings, with his minimalist approach to better health, inspired me to put down my bad habits, don the metaphorical plastic bag, and get out on the road. Or at least the indoor track.
The larger theme here is really: what makes us who we are? If our true self only materializes when it bumps up against things we either like or not, then might we be less fixed than we think? But if we are more than our likes and dislikes, then where is that immutable core of our self? If one day I’m sitting on the couch eating an entire pizza and drinking three A&Ws, but the next day I’m in workout clothes running before the sun comes up, which one is the real me? Or do we refine our life as we live, burning off the excess baggage until we become a fine-tempered instrument, beyond birth and death? Maybe the reason I’ve always been drawn to the details, fictional or not, of other people’s lives, is my belief that if I just adopt a few utilitarian rules, I can finally refine myself. Maybe I think a pair of old gray sweats, a water bottle, some running, and a little enthusiasm will be enough to turn the corner on my lethargy and self-sabotage. Or maybe it’s late, and I should just go to bed. The coffee is ready to brew, and 4:15 am comes early.
go bag
In the movies, FBI agents, SWAT team members, counter-terrorism operatives and hired assassins always have their go bag ready, in the trunk of their Crown Vic or under their stained motel bed, so they can respond quickly to any dangerous, time-sensitive situation. As seasoned film-goers, we can imagine what’s in it: a change of clothes, polyester thermal undies, a flashlight, extra cell phone battery, waterproof matches, semiautomatic pistol, ammo. Maybe a few Clif bars, a grappling hook, some snorkel gear. Because you just never know.
I was never a Boy Scout, but as I age, I have begun to appreciate the value of always being prepared. I keep a roll of toilet paper in my glove box, just in case. In her car, my wife keeps bungee cords handy in case of tornadoes, so if the Santa Fe gets blown off the road and swamped by floodwater, she can strap herself and the kids to a guard rail, kinda like Helen Hunt did when she tied a leather belt to an irrigation pipe in Twister. Sure. Laugh. But she survived, is all I’m saying. Did you see her in The Sessions? BOY, did she survive. Her tank top stayed white too, if memory serves.
Like George Clooney’s character in Up In the Air, or echoing George Carlin’s famous riff on “stuff, ” I keep a go bag handy myself, especially during the summer months. This one was given to my son, who’s on the swim team at our local YMCA, by my sister. Swim season is on hiatus, so I’ve appropriated the bag until September. I used it recently to pack all my clothes and essentials for a 9-day stay on a Maine island. This beast is huge. It could practically hold a Smart Car. Or a toddler. Or a toddler in a Smart Car. Maybe even some clowns in a Volkswagen.
My bag is packed not for saving the world, but for saving myself. Board shorts, swim shirt, a few fluffy towels, sunscreen, an extra pair of flip-flops, water bottle. That’s about it. All I need for some karmic rejuvenation at my local beach or swimming hole. Ready in my trunk as we speak for those brief moments when the sun appears, or I’ve finished some landscaping work for the day and need to take a quick dip.
The backpack has a strong romantic appeal, doesn’t it? It lets us hit the road, Kerouac-style, anytime we want. To remake and reinvent ourselves in that classic American way we always do. Like Robert DeNiro’s thief in Heat, our backpack lets us walk out on anything in five minutes. It gives us a shot at freedom, even if it’s only mythical.
What did we do before backpacks were invented? We can probably date ourselves by thinking back to high school and asking if we had so much junk that we actually needed a backpack to schlep it around in. I know my parents didn’t carry backpacks to school. What happened? How did we all come to need a bag, preferably made of rip-stop, waterproof nylon and stitched in attractive, stylish, but not-too-bright colors?
Maybe in this modern era of constant, omnipresent advertising that tries to entice us to buy any and every thing we see, the taken-for-grantedness of social media and its resultant loss of privacy, NSA spying, errant drone strikes, and royal baby news, we want to hold onto, keep in close proximity, a few indispensable items. For when the zombies finally do stage their apocalypse, or better yet, when we see the sun and get the urge to jump in a lake.
To keep something for ourselves. If not our souls, then at least our stuff.
uptown problems
A long time ago a philosopher, maybe Sartre or Camus or some other pissy Existentialist, said nothing tastes as good as one’s own earwax. Isn’t that a delicious metaphor for suffering? In other words, we might complain about our own suffering, but we certainly wouldn’t want to swap our suffering, or our earwax, for anybody else’s.
In my case, life is good. I was blessed with a happy childhood. I have a college education. I have two smart, healthy, happy kids. I’m married to a beautiful, funny, compassionate and socially engaged woman. I really have it all. I shouldn’t complain. So you should know that the things I’m about to confess could definitely be categorized as first world problems. Or, as Brad Pitt put it so poetically in Moneyball, uptown problems.
Like Thoreau does at the beginning of Walden when he tells us, piece by piece, right down to the nails, how much he spent to build his cabin, I’m trying to give some kind of accounting here. I’m not dirt poor, but compared with many, many people I know, I’m pretty broke most of the time. Maybe it’s just the era we live in. Maybe it’s sequestration, austerity, or all the swapped derivatives still fluttering around. Maybe the giant pool of money is being shy. Maybe it’s the by-product of having children. Maybe it’s because I can’t make small talk with people and I sweat like a pig in most social situations, which makes it really difficult to go to cocktail parties and frequently causes me to step outside for air right in the middle of a conversation.
Or maybe it’s really because of the choices I made, because I didn’t want to work a job where I had to wear a tie or because I went to three colleges, one of them twice, before graduating. Maybe it’s because I dropped out of grad school, even though I didn’t officially drop out. I just stopped going.
Whatever the reasons, I know I’m less well-off than most of my friends. How do I know this?
I live in Maine and even though I was president of my high school ski club, I know I won’t go skiing anytime soon. Too expensive. So what that I’ll never be a member of the Sugarloaferati?
When I see a truck with the bumper sticker that reads “Life’s Too Short To Own An Ugly Boat” I want to rip its fucking bumpers off. I’ll never own a boat. Likewise, I will never have a need for a cabinetmaker. Or a gardener. Or a housekeeper. Or even a Merry Maid.
Landscape architects will remain one client poorer thanks to me. I will never go upta camp. I will never have mulch delivered. Guys won’t come to my house in some kind of loader or dumper or whatever and move aside a section of my fence so they can eject a huge steaming pile of composted tree bark onto my nonexistent flowerbeds.
True, all my white undershirts have Brooks Brothers tags in them. (My uncle was the CFO of a huge power company and at a young age taught me to worship at the altar of the golden fleece). But I only have three of them and they were all bought at the outlet after the holidays when a 40%-off storewide sale was on. I look good from a distance, but when you get closer you’ll see the heel-poor socks, the frayed cuffs, and the pants with the olive oil splotch that I got while cooking dinner one night and that will never come out in the wash. My cashmere scarf, bought with a gift certificate and at 70% off, is my only luxury good. I have exactly three nice shirts, two pairs of pants, one black crew-neck sweater, one pair of good jeans, one pair of work shoes, and one pair of running sneakers. Most everything else is socks, boxers, and old t-shirts. Both my coffee maker and my television are inherited from my wife’s deceased grandmother. The coffee pot only makes four cups at a time so I usually have to make two pots each morning. My television is so old it can’t even begin to conceive of a Roku, even with the right coaxials. When my kids need new shoes I have to ask my parents for money. I’m 46 but sometimes my mommy buys me underwear. I’ve had to beg off social engagements because I didn’t have the extra $20 for dinner. I have returned bottles to get money to buy food. Within the last three years. My porch is so broken down I’m thinking of creating a Kickstarter campaign just to raise the money to fix it. When my toilet broke and flooded through my living room ceiling and someone said, “Why don’t you just call a plumber?” I just laughed.
As expected, I have indeed defaulted on my student loan. Still, I feel some weird, Stockholm Syndrome-esque connection to the New York State Higher Education Corporation. They’re my people, it seems. I don’t expect to have my debts forgiven. I took NYSEC’s money and I spent it. And yeah, now I owe that money, even if paying it back feels like paying back the leg-breaker who lent me money to settle my poker debt with the local mafia don. True, most of the money I borrowed gave me life-changing opportunities at good schools to learn lots of really great, crazy stuff and to meet some of the best human beings on the planet and to make memories that will stay with me until there are worms crawling out of my eye sockets. But some of the money I also spent on Long Island iced teas at Fletcher’s Karaoke Bar, White Russians at the Starboard (when I was going through the first of my many recurring Big Lebowski phases), and a share in a Rehoboth Beach weekend house two summers in a row. All that time I should have been in class at AU studying Master’s degree-level philosophy. Kant do anything about that now.
But the truth is I’m OK with all of this. I’m blue collar to the core. I’ll probably always have champagne tastes on a beer budget. I can still walk by someone else’s beautiful flowerbeds and compliment them without the least bit of jealousy. Because what is jealousy anyway but the poison you swallow hoping the other person will die? Or maybe that’s envy. Either way, I’m good. Over 2,500 years ago Patanjali, in his yoga sutras , said the hardest thing for a human being to do is to take pleasure in another person’s good fortune. Dude was right.
I’m telling you all this because maybe you’re feeling the same way. Just barely hanging on. Maybe it’s not even money. It could be a whole shitload of things unrelated to wealth and/or material possessions. Maybe you’re hiding behind your plasma TV. Holding it in, whatever it is, hoping it will just not be there one morning.
If so, I should also tell you about the time, a few winters ago, when my family was so broke, so out of food, so low on heating oil, that I sat in my fifteen-year-old Honda Accord in the church parking lot across from my house and pounded on the dashboard and cried until snot ran out of my nose and screamed “Fuck!” twenty times in a row as loud as I could until I had a headache and my throat was sore and then punched the door handle so hard over and over until I thought my hand was broken. My hand was fine, but I had royally fucked up the door handle, so much so that I couldn’t lock the driver’s side door anymore or sometimes even open it from the outside and so periodically had to get in my car from the passenger side and climb over the gear shift like some kind of goober just to get back and forth to work.
I spoke about this incident with a friend of mine who is a pastor. He advised me not to get the door fixed. To keep the handle broken as a reminder of how bad things can get, and also of how we can recover from these very same bad things. I took his advice and let that handle stay broken. I couldn’t afford to fix it anyway. I traded in the car two years ago.
But all that’s nothing.
Someday I’ll tell you about the time my wife and I lived in Ithaca, NY, when we both worked for a video store chain making five bucks an hour because we couldn’t get jobs at Cornell and go to grad school for free like we planned and working at Video Ithaca was the best we could do and the only good part was that I got to watch every Woody Allen movie for free on the in-store TV while I was on the clock. We were always late on our rent, we lived in a crappy apartment in a run-down house on Cascadilla Street, charging our groceries to a perpetually maxed-out credit card, putting ketchup on our macaroni because we couldn’t afford Ragu and I spent too much time sitting on the back steps smoking too many cigarettes, the cigarettes of a truly depressed man, watching the snowflakes, the big wet snowflakes that only the Finger Lakes can bring, as they slowly drifted down the sky to mix with my smoky breath and ash and our crazy cat, the one we had to put down after I drank too much wine one night and tried to be playful with her but she scratched my eye anyway, the eye that still aches sometimes when it’s about to rain, and nearly blinded me, was clawing at the door.
We found out later from the vet that our poor cat wasn’t really crazy. She just had a brain tumor.
I should stop now.
green man
Dear friends,
You laughed when you saw me standing on the sidewalk in front of Renys eating organic black beans straight from the can. You asked me to come to your house and remove the package of half-eaten vegan cheese from your fridge that I brought to your barbeque or else you threatened to use it to shingle your roof. You knew that when I declared myself a vegan after reading books by Alicia Silverstone, Kris Carr, Peter Singer, Lori Gruen, Jonathan Foer, and Moby, it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t; inspiring writers all, the failure was completely mine. My most recent promise to reboot my karma and remain a vegetarian for one whole year lapsed after about a month. Let’s all agree: my commitments to diets or lifestyle changes or whatever you want to call them has been about as firm as my commitments to quit Facebook and Twitter. Yes, I’m a chronic lapser. Well, here I go again. I watched a documentary on Netflix last night called Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead. It chronicled the journey of an Australian man named Joe Cross, who used a 60-day juice fast to cure his chronic idiopathic urticaria, a painful autoimmune disease. And guess what? It worked. That film, and the time I spent in Woodstock this past weekend, where you can stand in one juice bar, throw a wheatgrass muffin, and practically hit another juice bar, has inspired me to make some changes. I’m thinking of a line from a Mark Eitzel song that goes, “I’m sick of food/so why am I so hungry?” That’s where I am right now; sick of food but hungry for a dietary rebirth. So starting tomorrow, I’m drinking nothing but juice for 30 days. I’ve got my NutriBullet and my Jack Lalanne. My only cheat day will be next weekend when my wife and I go out for one our regular sauna and sushi dates, when we go here and then here. Like Thoreau immersing himself in a bog, I’m going to immerse myself in green juice. Now, for that one last cup of coffee…
Cheers,
Henry (Michael)
in Luther’s room
I’ve recently become enamored of the BBC crime drama Luther, starring Idris Elba (Stringer Bell from David Simon’s The Wire, and another in a long line of Brits pretending to be Americans and fooling us all. Andrew Lincoln, are you listening?) The series, now streaming on Netflix, is beautifully photographed, deftly plotted and brilliantly written. It’s also emotionally gut-wrenching, occasionally gory, and borderline psycho in a Silence of the Lambs kind of way. But what I’ve really zeroed in on lately is Luther’s sparsely-decorated bachelor pad. His bed is on the floor in the middle of the room. His windows have no curtains, allowing his psychopathic, part-time sidekick to peer in from a building across the alley. His closet appears to be a wheeled garment rack hung with perhaps three outfits, all in the same drab grey. I think he might have a microwave stashed somewhere, and a few teacups. In the four episodes I’ve watched, although Luther has slept a few times (and at least once with his ex-wife), he doesn’t appear to have ever changed his clothes. Strange to say that what his fictional apartment represents to me is actually a real vision of my retirement, minus the detective work. You won’t see me on the golf course or taking flying lessons in my old age. Probably all my wife and I will be able to afford is a one-room studio in some hip city somewhere, where we’ll keep our futon rolled up against the wall during the day, and where the kids, although we love them dearly, won’t be able to come home to roost for any extended period of time unless they bring a sleeping bag, a camping pad and a generous honorarium. Our virtual urban cabin will be close to the library, park, and gym, and within an easy drive of the forest and the ocean. What we will save on landscaping we will put into books, food, and wood-fired saunas. The blades of our green juicer will always be sharp.
A perfect vision of leisure. And I’m sure my wife wouldn’t mind if Mr. Elba was there to join us.
great & not much left
I went to the movies recently (Soderbergh’s Side Effects, a film, as fate would have it, about pharmaceuticals both real and imagined) and noted with sadness that Good & Plenty were no longer offered for sale. Yes, I could get nachos with molten cheese pumped out of a vat, or warmed-up chicken fingers, or ice cream “bites.” But no black licorice of any kind. “We only have red,” the clerk told me. I didn’t have the courage to tell him that there’s no such thing as red licorice. I mean, there is, but not in my book. Ever since I was a child, when my Nana Mary used to give me black licorice jellybeans at Easter time, I’ve been hooked. But lately, being a black licorice lover is like being a cult member. And not a big cult, mind you. More like nine people in the basement of somebody’s raised ranch on a Friday night. I’ve heard of recent studies on so-called “irrelevant” or “old man” candy. I won’t deign to quote them here. All I know is: whatever it is you like, then that becomes “the best” for you, much like the Zen fable where Banzan becomes enlightened after overhearing a conversation in the market. Hey, if you prefer room temperature Canei with a screw-top cap, then that’s your Graves. Twizzlers and coffee for breakfast? It’s a free country. I know my candy isn’t sexy. But maybe the G&P I’ve been downing by the boxful lately are a gustatory reminder of my childhood, when they showed Goofy cartoons before matinees instead of Pepsi commercials and extended First Looks at the new Cougar Town season. I’m thankful to my grandmother for setting me on the right path. She could have fed me Werther’s Original instead. And that would have been just wrong.
recent crushes
1. Sanshiro and The Gate by Natsume Soseki. The Master.
2. Anything by Javelin. Fun, electro-duo out of the People’s Republic of Brooklyn.
3. Lives of the Novelists by John Sutherland. 294 short bios of some the greatest (and under-appreciated) writers.
4. Polar brand Collins Mixer (minus the vodka).
5. Jiro Dreams of Sushi. The world’s most perfect documentary. May make you book plane tickets to Japan.
6. Spiral (Engrenages), or, the French The Wire. You’re done with House of Cards, and sick of Homeland. Now streaming on Netflix.
7. Holy Fire by Foals. Not their best but damn good enough.
8. Tastykake cupcakes. I never knew how much I missed Hostess until they went bankrupt.
9. Anne Hathaway’s dress. No need to apologize, my dear.
10. Parlor Games For Modern Families by Myfanwy Jones and Spiri Tsintziras. Turn off the Wii and grab a deck of cards.
11. Bonus: My new shoes. Once a punk, always a punk.
thought experiment
Unlike Eliot’s coffee spoons, it seems that most of our modern lives are measured out in two-year cell phone contracts. The amount of anxiety I feel at the approach of this telephonic event horizon is way out of proportion to its importance. I waver between iPhone and noPhone. With a newly-minted middle school daughter, giving up cell phone contact altogether seems unwise, and I’m sure, would be unforgiveable. And yet, the prospect of adding unlimited texting to my already ginormous Verizon calling plan fills me with terror. Like The Blob, every time I look away and then look back, my bill has grown. My plan must change to assimilate more and more features. Voice, data, texting, insurance, multiple lines, taxes and fees, etc. Like the sad humans, enslaved by their robot overlords in The Matrix, it feels as though there is a digital umbilical cord, attached to the base of my neck (or in this case, my checking account) that sucks my money away into the ether. And after another two-year contract, what would I have to show for it? Some snarky tweets and hundreds of long-forgotten phone calls? Which leads me to think that I should just chuck it all and expend my energy, which at 45 years old seems to be shrinking by the year, on something I have always wanted to do: becoming a real writer. Not the one-hitter types on Facebook and Twitter. A real writer. One that perhaps uses a pen. I have a friend, a novelist, who essentially gave up reading for two years so he could summon all his available energies teaching himself how to write. Maybe by freeing myself from my 4G LTE tether, I can leave the snark behind and create something that will be longer than 140 characters and last longer than an invisible conversation.
what would henry do? 