Who’s that knocking?
April 10, 2009
One of my literary disappointments was Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula,” which I thought was one of the clumsiest works of fiction I had ever read. I came to it sort of in mid life. I read more non-fiction than fiction, but when I finally got around to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” I was enthralled, and I naively thought I’d have a similar experience with “Dracula.” It was not to be. The book is awkwardly written with unnatural dialogue and none of the philosophical depth of Shelley’s work. Of course, the idea that Stoker’s work should have any of those qualities originated only in my own mind, so I suppose I was disappointed more by myself than by the writer.
Maybe it was because of that experience that I find myself on the outside looking in at the current fascination with vampires, especially among young people. Obviously, I’m missing something. NPR this week ran a review by John Powers about a Swedish film “Let the Right One In,” that was intriguing. Powers calls it “the best vampire movie in the last 75 years.” It had only limited release but is now available on DVD, which was the occasion for the review. The principal characters in this film are a 12-year-old boy who is alienated from his parents and rejected – even tormented – by his schoolmates, and his new next-door-neighbor, the lonely girl Eli, who has been 12 years old for the past 200 years. Their mutual isolation draws them together into a relationship that apparently succeeds artistically on several levels.
It was a coincidence that I happened to hear that review, because vampires have been on my mind for several weeks, since we heard Michael Smith give a concert in Morristown. One of the songs he performed that night was “Vampire,” and it’s been churning around in my mind ever since:
Your life’s too short and love is gone too soon
Come with me and fly the dark of moon, the dark of moon,
Life’s not life if you must lose it
Death’s not death if you refuse it
Who can blame you
If you choose the vampire
Forever young
Forever young
Forever
As with most of Michael’s songs, this one means far more when you hear him deliver it – plaintive, chilling, moving.
Excuse me. I think I hear someone at the door.
Michael Smith’s lyrics: http://www.artistsofnote.com/michael/lyrics/vampire.shtml
NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102909283&ft=1&f=1008
Diddy and me
April 8, 2009
SEAN COMBS
According to the Miami Herald, Sean Combs called a restaurant in South Beach the other night and ordered linguine and meatballs, salad, and veal parmagiana over cavatelli for 10 people. Me, I would have ordered vermicelli instead of linguine. When we ate in Combs’ restaurant in Chelsea many years ago, none of that stuff was on the menu, but the “food for the soul,” as it was characterized, was enough to make a person forget for a moment any prejudice that nothing is really food if its roots aren’t in Italy or the Middle East. According to the Herald writer, Combs sent an assistant to the restaurant to place the order, but the assistant handed a cell phone to the owner-chef so that Combs could discuss the bill of fare personally. The chef thought the voice was too young to be Sean Combs, but eventually was convinced, and the two had a laugh over it. Combs and I have an arrangement: He sounds younger than he is; I sound older. I don’t order in for 10 people, and he doesn’t have 10 people in for sfiha that he made himself. So far, it has worked out for both of us.
“The pipes, the pipes are calling”
April 8, 2009
DANNY THOMAS
The Los Angeles Times is reporting today that of the 71 scripted pilots that are contending for spots on the broadcast schedules of five TV networks, 33 are half-hour comedies. The television industry evidently thinks we need a good laugh. How many good laughs we’ll actually get remains to be seen. The kind of writing that has characterized shows like “Taxi,” “Seinfeld,” “Frasier,” and “The Bob Newhart Show,” is hard to come by, and many television series are obvious at best and vacuous at worst. I wonder if folks more than 50 years from now will enjoy re-runs of “Surviving Suburbia” the way they do re-runs of “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners.” In fact, I wonder if folks next week will watch an original episode of “Suburbia.” Chuck Barney, writing in the San Jose Mercury News, said it for me: It’s not that this is a horrible show or even the worse sit-com on ABC. “It’s just that it has no real reason for being. It’s a series that looks and feels like hundreds of other sit-coms, with the same kind of tone, the same forced one-liners and the same ridiculously annoying laugh track.”
Why has television comedy declined so much? It might have something to do with the form. A couple of playwrights have told me that they wouldn’t write sit-coms no matter how much it paid, because they refuse to force a story into a shape predetermined by the schedule of commercials. I wonder if it also has to do with the backgrounds of the producers, writers, and actors, many of whom have grown up in television. I was talking with Marlo Thomas last week about her upcoming appearance at the George Street Playhouse, and that naturally evoked some conversation and even more memories of her father. Danny Thomas had a genius for humor, but he also had a chance to refine his technique in nightclubs, on the radio, and in movies before he ever went before a television camera. He understood comedy – understood that it had to have structure, consistency, and an underlying sympathy – all of which were factors in the success of his own show, “Make Room for Daddy,” and in “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Andy Griffith Show,” which he later produced.
MARLO THOMAS
Marlo Thomas – who has her own package of insights when it comes to entertaining people – opens at George Street next week in Arthur Laurents’ new play, “New Year’s Eve.” She told me her father used to say, “Do you know what I would have been if I hadn’t been a comedian? A pain in the ass.” “And I think he really meant that in the deepest sense,” she said. “He would have had no outlet. He would have been a butcher driving everybody crazy trying to make jokes about the lamb chops.” That compulsion to be a storyteller – as opposed to the compulsion to fill a half-hour time slot at the expense of some nearly bankrupt auto manufacturer – may have been more at work in those who created television programming during the medium’s first three decades than it is now.
Stand back – there’s nothing to see here.
April 7, 2009
FARRAH FAWCETT
I probably should know better, but I usually have Fox 5 News on while I’m waiting for the nightly “Seinfeld” rerun, and that’s often the source of agita. Last night, for instance, anchor Dari Alexander began a report on the recent illness of actress Farah Fawcett by saying that Fawcett’s friends “deny that she’s at death’s door.” Think about it. What is that – wishful thinking? The story, when Alexander got around to telling it, was that Fawcett’s doctor reported that the actress had been hospitalized because of a blood clot that was a side effect of recent cancer treatment. In fact, producer Craig Nevius did say yesterday that Fawcett was “not at death’s door,” but Nevius wasn’t quoted in the Fox report. (The Fox web site does have a full AP story – with a tasteful lead – on its web site.) Real journalists know the connotation of a word like “deny.” Fawcett isn’t accused of a crime; she’s sick. It might make her feel better if the turkey buzzards weren’t so gleeful about it.
Netflix Update No. 4
April 6, 2009
JAKE
We watched the 2001 independent film “Lovely and Amazing.” This is my kind of movie: Virtually nothing happens. It’s a character study of a mother (Brenda Blethyn) and her two birth daughters and one adopted daughter (Emily Mortimer, Catherine Keener, and Raven Goodwin). All four have problems with self-esteem. Enough already with the self-esteem crises, yeah? But writer-director Nicole Holocefner plays this just about right, with a delicate balance of comedy and drama. And I love this – she makes it all right to want to smack every one of the principal characters into the real world even as one feels their pain and gets some sense of its origins. Holocefner may have written the part of the mother with Brenda Blethyn in mind. It’s the kind of poor-soul role that Blethyn excels in. Raven Goodwin, who wasn’t even 10 years old when this film was made, gives a very credible performance as a young black girl trying to fit into a white world. Jake Gyllenhaal has a fun role as a teenager who falls for Catherine Keener’s needy character, and Dermot Mulroney, playing a film star, has a unique scene with a naked Emily Mortimer – an actress with no confidence in herself – who insists that he tell her everything that is right and wrong with her appearance. That scene could have been exploitative and crass, but not the way Holocefner and the actors handled it.
“… when mercy seasons justice …”
April 5, 2009
JOHN DEMJANUJK
The Los Angeles Times had a video on its site in which the son of a man accused of participating in the deaths of thousands of people in a Nazi concentration camp, argues both that his father, John Demjanjuk, is innocent and that his father – now 89 and frail – should not be extradited. A U.S. immigration judge on Friday issued an indefinite stay of deportation based on the Demjanjuk family’s claim that making the elderly man travel from Cleveland to Germany for trial would be tantamount to torture. The stay will continue until the judge rules on the merits of the claim.
Demjanjuk has already been convicted of lying to authorities about his past as a Nazi guard, but his conviction under a charge that he was the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka death camp was overturned based on evidence that identified another man as that guard.
Now he is charged with 29,000 counts of accessory to murder at the Sorbibo concentration camp in Poland.
On the face of it, one might say that, inasmuch as he lied about his past in order to become an American citizen, it’s tough luck for Demjanjuk if travel would be hard on him or even kill him. However, modern technology makes it unnecessary for Demjanjuk to be in Germany for the trial; he could attend through closed-circuit television or a secure webcast. Also, in spite of what is already known about his past, American justice can be true to itself only by granting him the presumption of innocence on the charges at issue. If he is sent to Germany for trial and is acquitted, and dies prematurely because he was forced to attend in person, that would be one more injustice piled on all the other unrequited injustices of the past.
JOHN DEMJANJUK
If Demjanjuk is convicted of the charges against him, he should be deported to submit to whatever sentence is imposed on him – old or not, sick or not. Both the enormity of the crimes of the Holocaust and the fact that the roots of such crimes still exist among white supremacists and anti-Semites require that everyone who participated be brought to justice. But another suitable response to such crimes, especially when guilt has not yet been determined, is to act with the quality of mercy that was absent from the Nazi mind, a quality that is the antithesis of Nazi thinking.
Netflix update No. 3: “Next Stop Wonderland”
April 4, 2009
HOPE DAVIS
Last night we watched “Next Stop Wonderland,” a 1998 film about a young woman, played by Hope Davis, whose erratic, activist boyfriend, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, leaves her once again – for good, this time, he says. While she’s getting used to life alone, her mother (Holland Taylor), who has issues of her own, places a personals ad for her daughter without asking permission. In the background is a young man (Alan Gelfant) who works as a plumber for his compulsive gambler of a father but volunteers his time at a Boston aquarium and is studying to become a marine biologist.
This movie is reminiscent of a 1983 TV flick, “Your Place or Mine,” that starred Bonnie Franklin and Robert Klein – who coincidentally plays a role in “Next Stop Wonderland.” In that movie as in this one the couple who are meant to be together don’t meet until the last few minutes.
“Next Stop Wonderland” is worth seeing. It is a careful study of character – and character flaws – and philosophical without being heavy-handed, amusing without being exploitative or patronizing. Brad Anderson’s quirky direction puts an element of the unexpected into every scene, and his use of Boston locations gives the whole film a rich visual context. Faces apparently are an important part of storytelling for Anderson, and I’m a sucker for that perspective. The casting – including the secondary parts – served the story well. It’s hard to look away from either Hope Davis or Alan Gelfant. All the performances are credible and witty.
It’s interesting that the posed promotional shot for this film has Davis sitting on top of a railroad car wearing a very short dress with a very low neckline. Her character in the movie is nothing at all like that. Apparently the ad department thought the potential audience was too stupid to be attracted to the movie on its own merits.
The land of the free
April 3, 2009
I realized this morning while I was shaving that when I first visited Yankee Stadium, it was not yet 30 years old. (Shaving is like hitting, Yogi: It’ s better not to think while you’re doing it.) Anyway, that calculation got me to thinking about the new “Yankee Stadium” – as though there could be such a thing – and I got angry all over again about Macombs Dam Park, a wonderful, expansive facility that was destroyed so that the Yankees could build a stadium better suited to fleecing high rollers. The park is supposed to be replaced – at an enormous expense to taxpayers, most of whom will not benefit at all from either the new stadium or the so-called replacement parks. And no matter what the city does, when it gets around to it, it will never really replace Macombs Dam Park, which was a jewel in the midst of a hard-knocks, congested neighborhood. If the Yankees and the city wanted to tell the people of the South Bronx once and for all, “You don’t matter,” this was the way to do it.
“God save our gracious queen ….”
April 2, 2009
MICHELLE OBAMA
Television newscasters last night were preoccupied with questions about why and how the Obamas touched Queen Elizabeth II. The Obamas gave the queen the two-handed shake, and that – according to people who care about such things – is reserved for those one knows very well, indeed. Also, Michelle Obama put her arm around the queen at one point, and that – so the experts say – is flirting with impropriety (although it was obvious in the clip that was run over and over and over again that the queen also briefly touched Michelle Obama’s back during that encounter). And, of course, there’s the iPod.
This business gets me thinking again about the purpose of monarchy in the 21st century, at least in places where the monarch does not govern. Monarchs who do govern are problematic in themselves, but that’s another issue. I discussed this once with a chemist in Denmark. We were having dinner, and I asked him why he thought a country like his – advanced in most ways – hangs on to the monarchy, in that case, Queen Margrethe II. Denmark has so far removed the monarchy from any real influence in government that members of the royal family do not vote in elections, although they have the right to. The chemist thought about this for a few seconds; he seemed to never have considered the question before and certainly didn’t have a pat answer. Finally he said, “Well, she is Denmark, isn’t she?” which I guess is as good an explanation as any. Of course a flag serves the same purpose, but if you hug a flag, it doesn’t hug back.
Where is Emma Goldman when you need her?
April 1, 2009
It was heartwarming to read this morning that among those who broke into the Royal Bank of Scotland and fairly trashed the joint were anarchists. I’ve always been attracted to anarchism as a political idea because, as far as I can tell, anarchists have never agreed on what it means. In that regard, it’s like existentialism in philosophy, a perfectly good term, according to Jacques Maritain, except for the “incidental disadvantage” that it “has been used to mean so many things that it no longer means anything at all.” What could be more suited to a word like anarchism than confusion over what it signifies. The word certainly has panache. If I were going to break into an institution like the Royal Bank of Scotland and throw keyboards through the windows, I’d certainly like to be identified in the press as an anarchist. Who better than an anarchist – whatever that means – to make such a graphic protest against a stodgy old institution that just gave its chief executive officer a million-dollar-plus sendoff after the government had to rescue the bank from the consequences of its bad business practices? Sound familiar?
I think my favorite anarchist is Errico Malatesta. His surname reminds me of a squib from George Ade: “The more he thought about it, the more his head hurt.”
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