I’m in New York City on the third day of a ten-day vacation. I lived here for so long and am so comfortable being here that in many ways it feels like I’m home. And yet, as the taxi from the airport rode the approaches to the Midtown Tunnel Sunday morning, I looked out over the Manhattan skyline and felt, I don’t live here anymore. I used to live here, but now I live somewhere else—now there’s a place where I’ve put down roots and watered them and fertilized them and weeded and hoed around them. Maybe some day I’ll transplant again. But not today.
Speaking of that taxicab, my JetBlue flight landed at 11:15, fifteen minutes ahead of schedule. My friend Matthew from San Francisco is here for a month, and over the past few years he and I have independently made acquaintance with some of the same people. He and a friend were going to be in the West Village at noon, and suggested I meet them there, but getting from JFK to the West Village in forty-five minutes would be impossible by public transportation and would be a miracle by cab. My jetway, however, happened to be only a few doors down from the exit to the taxi area, and I was the second one in line, and as I climbed in I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there in forty-five minutes? As the cab sped along the Van Wyck and the Grand Central, I thought, Wouldn’t it be crazy if I got there five minutes late? As we moved through the Midtown Tunnel, I thought, I’m going to get there on time. Sure enough, I pulled up in front of the address where I was to meet them with two minutes to spare.
I’m staying at the apartment of my friend Nancy, who left for Paris Monday afternoon. We spend most of Sunday afternoon trying to wrestle with her computer problems. She’s been working on a book for some time, and having had two computers crash on her in rapid succession, fears she may have lost the manuscript. I sure hope she hasn’t, and feel terrible for her. Just the stress of thinking she may have lost the MS is hard on her. I pray she finds the files.
Monday morning I went to the press preview for the Turner show at the Met. If there is such a thing as a Turner masterpiece it is both rare and flawed, yet I’d argue (as others have done, and better) that those few canvases—like Rain, Steam and Speed or The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons—and many of his sketches, watercolors, and oils have a power and energy with no like in the history of art. Their dynamism and Impressionism are often directly related to their subjects: the ocean, the sky, a train, weather. At times Turner’s dynamics were manipulated or marshaled, as with the precise angle of the flames and their reflection in the Thames in the picture of the Parliament buildings on fire, and the artist was criticized for that during his career. The power in his work pulls from within the subject and the composition, but from beyond the canvas as well, from the historical currents—the manifold industrial changes, social changes, political changes—that surrounded Turner and were part of his life and times. Their charge anticipates the Henry Adams essay “The Dynamo and the Virgin” and the canvases of Boccioni and other Futurists. In the sidebar for one canvas I read that during Turner's career oil paints themselves significantly developed and evolved, that there would appear something like a better yellow. He was known for touching up his work on Varnishing Days at the Royal Academy; musing over the retrospective, you get a sense that Turner was so caught up in his work that proprietary fell by the wayside.
By the way, I also learned that Turner is the artist for whom Britain's Turner Prize is named. I hadn't made that connection and in fact must have thought it was Ted Turner! The Royal Academicians would not be pleased, but what do I know? I'm just a Yank...and an Indian at that...
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Saturday, June 14, 2008
Downey
I love the combination of butter flavoring, a half gallon of Mr. Pibb in a paper cup, and three hours of air conditioning. In other words, I love summer movies, and this year has already been one of the best since…well, let’s say 2003. For those willing to argue the point, the top three films that summer were "Finding Nemo," "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," and "Matrix Reloaded." Not every year is great. Take 2006. "Superman"? "Returns"? Boo. The movie was in the top ten for the year and still didn’t break into the black. But for every big-budget studio clunker, for every "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace," there is the chance of a "Blair Witch Project" or even a big studio hit, as evidenced by the two Narnia films thus far. But I’d go back as far as 1984 for one of the all-time great summer blockbuster seasons: the top three films of that summer were also the top three films of the year. "Ghostbusters". "Beverly Hills Cop". "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom".
Speaking of Dr. Jones, I saw the fourth installment yesterday, and I’m sorry to say that it does not bear up to the wait or the hype. Harrison Ford will be 66 in a couple of weeks, and the trappings of a contemporary Spielberg action blockbuster reinforce that fact, and painfully. Ford was always great at playing stiff and sore after a long fight; now he’s stiff and sore going in. He’s older than Sean Connery was when the Scotsman played his father, and Spielberg treated Connery with proper respect. Here, the director has the sense to bring back Karen Allen and treat her like a gentleman would, but too bad that isn’t the case with the hero this time.
And the plot! What the—? Spielberg doesn’t always know when his access to Industrial Light and Magic and CGI gets the better of him. In fact, the best film of the four Indiana Jones movies is the second, "Temple of Doom". The special effects there support the story and the action, which is pretty realistic. In fact, the film caused a ruckus because of the scene where the Thuggee cult leader takes a living heart out of a man’s chest. I’d be willing to bet that if there had been the amount of metaphysical nonsense there is in the other three films, that scene would have passed by relatively unnoticed. In "Temple" the action sequences, no matter how farfetched, remained otherwise plausible. Sure, they pushed the limits of plausibility, but they succeeded.
I’ve already written about "SATC", but I want to put a plug in for "Iron Man". If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s by far the wittiest and savviest and liveliest of this summer’s popcorn movies. In fact, even in its weaker moments, it’s everything the Indiana Jones franchise is at its best. Downey has always been an amazing actor, part of his talent being his self-conscious awareness of his awesome talent. He has very nearly become a larger-than-life personality, and the movie plays to that idea. Pitt and Clooney are much-too-much larger-than-life. It makes it hard not to see their star power despite roles as simple and good as the ones they had in "Babel" and "Syriana" respectively. Johnny Depp, on the other hand, has learned since his Viper Club and Winona days to play his celebrity cards more discreetly, and has remained not quite larger-than-life. This continues to allow him to slide into roles as diverse as J.M. Barrie or Sweeney Todd, just as Downey slid in and out of the underrated "Zodiac" and the unseen "Singing Detective". I hope he'll be able to learn from Depp’s example. He’s talented enough to take your breath away and should play Indiana Jones in the next movie. Speaking of breath, it would resusitate all of Spielberg's stale ideas. Imagine Downey in a Spielberg film! He’s all the special effects a director needs.
Speaking of Dr. Jones, I saw the fourth installment yesterday, and I’m sorry to say that it does not bear up to the wait or the hype. Harrison Ford will be 66 in a couple of weeks, and the trappings of a contemporary Spielberg action blockbuster reinforce that fact, and painfully. Ford was always great at playing stiff and sore after a long fight; now he’s stiff and sore going in. He’s older than Sean Connery was when the Scotsman played his father, and Spielberg treated Connery with proper respect. Here, the director has the sense to bring back Karen Allen and treat her like a gentleman would, but too bad that isn’t the case with the hero this time.
And the plot! What the—? Spielberg doesn’t always know when his access to Industrial Light and Magic and CGI gets the better of him. In fact, the best film of the four Indiana Jones movies is the second, "Temple of Doom". The special effects there support the story and the action, which is pretty realistic. In fact, the film caused a ruckus because of the scene where the Thuggee cult leader takes a living heart out of a man’s chest. I’d be willing to bet that if there had been the amount of metaphysical nonsense there is in the other three films, that scene would have passed by relatively unnoticed. In "Temple" the action sequences, no matter how farfetched, remained otherwise plausible. Sure, they pushed the limits of plausibility, but they succeeded.
I’ve already written about "SATC", but I want to put a plug in for "Iron Man". If you haven’t seen it yet, it’s by far the wittiest and savviest and liveliest of this summer’s popcorn movies. In fact, even in its weaker moments, it’s everything the Indiana Jones franchise is at its best. Downey has always been an amazing actor, part of his talent being his self-conscious awareness of his awesome talent. He has very nearly become a larger-than-life personality, and the movie plays to that idea. Pitt and Clooney are much-too-much larger-than-life. It makes it hard not to see their star power despite roles as simple and good as the ones they had in "Babel" and "Syriana" respectively. Johnny Depp, on the other hand, has learned since his Viper Club and Winona days to play his celebrity cards more discreetly, and has remained not quite larger-than-life. This continues to allow him to slide into roles as diverse as J.M. Barrie or Sweeney Todd, just as Downey slid in and out of the underrated "Zodiac" and the unseen "Singing Detective". I hope he'll be able to learn from Depp’s example. He’s talented enough to take your breath away and should play Indiana Jones in the next movie. Speaking of breath, it would resusitate all of Spielberg's stale ideas. Imagine Downey in a Spielberg film! He’s all the special effects a director needs.
Sunday, June 1, 2008
SATC
The Sunday afternoon of its first weekend of release, the audience for the new “Sex and the City” movie here in Buffalo—more accurately, Amherst—was nearly all women. There were about a dozen men in the sizeable crowd, including me and my friend Rick.
As a television show, “SATC” is a cultural icon, so the movie’s backers were smart to get a big-screen version done when they could. Because there was a lot of behind-the-scenes juice about the production of this one, the likelihood of a second movie remains uncertain. I for one would be surprised if the stars would commit to doing another, but then the market for movies for women is strong (check out that opening-weekend box office!). So who knows? And who cares, at least this weekend? Why rain on Carrie’s, Samantha’s, Charlotte’s, and Miranda’s parade? Some nearby whispers gave away the presence of a few SATC neophytes in the theater. As for the rest, they were happy to see the girls again. So was I--which is surprising, given how late I came to the party.
I didn’t watch SATC in the beginning. In fact, I didn’t watch it until it was in reruns on cable and later in network syndication. That once was my idiosyncrasy, not watching certain series. It was partly willfulness, a weird kind of snobbery (how can you be snobby about television when you don’t own one and can’t afford cable?), and my own, odd kind of cultural activism. I hated the idea that television was so accessible. I was still attached to the ideal of high art versus popular art, a breach that hasn’t entirely yet healed. SATC…it was television, and wasn’t that slumming? In the cultural capital of the world? I hadn’t come to New York to watch someone like Carrie. I’d come to New York to live like her, to be her. With the Cosmos, without the Manolos.
So it went…for a while. And whenever I was in the United States of Elsewhere, I could glide through family gatherings and college reunion parties on the fact that I lived in New York City myself, on the fact of having met both Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. More precisely, that I had waited on them. Waiting on them was good enough for Elsewhere, but when I returned to Manhattan, I wasn’t Carrie or Stanford or Aidan. I certainly wasn’t Big. I was small. The city was Big. And Reality and the City was tough. It wasn’t a show, and it was on twenty-four-seven. I didn’t Darren Star in it; I falling-starred. And kept falling. At first just in place. Then behind. On student loans. Tax filings. Credit card bills. I wasn’t getting ahead anywhere—not professionally, not personally. Life was kicking my you-know-what. At times I blamed the city itself. I fled to the mountains after 9/11 for two years, only to return thinking I’d changed (or been forgiven). When you try to escape reality, however, it will catch up to you later (if not sooner) and when you meet again, it will not be happy to see you. And you won’t be happy to see it.
I finally did something. I admitted I had to change, or was willing to change. Everything. From the outside in, inside out. I got help. Therapy. Support groups. More therapy. More support groups. Group therapy. And slowly and surely I did change. I genuinely began to feel lighter. My problems didn’t go away—they were waiting for me, and though I wasn’t happy to see them, to have them, because I wanted to change in order to meet them, it wasn’t so bad, wasn’t so hard. An honest confrontation with an unflattering mirror, not a sucker punch to the jaw.
In the fall of 2005, I left one city for another: Jersey City is only a PATH-stop away, but that five-minute ride under the Hudson might as well be under an ocean. Sure, mostly due to the housing bubble, there’d been a sizeable exodus of Empire Staters for the Garden State. They were making parts of Jersey City like the glittering island across the river, but not the part where I lived. I missed it, but I could afford my rent and my bills and I started repaying my loans and tackled my taxes. I could afford television and cable, and to make myself feel better, I started watching SATC in syndication. I was amazed by how funny it was. How schmaltzy at times, at others profound. It was like Friends without Joey, Chandler, and Ross. Seinfeld with a quartet of Elaines and without Upper West Side neuroses. Even edited for syndication, the show was as hopeful and lively as I myself had finally and genuinely become. I didn’t matter that it took me until my late thirties to reach the place I wanted to be in my mid-twenties. I’d arrived. I was there. It was Jersey City…so what? And watching the show made me believe that, properly scaled, a little properly-accessorized comedy and romance of manners, even largely feminine ones, isn’t such a bad thing.
SATC is post-op Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal and Michael Tolliver with the coastlines and bustlines and orientations all reconfigured and styled within a spiked heel of its multiple lives. And that fits, because back in the Eighties Armistead Maupin’s serial was my SATC. It gave me more than information about the life I needed and wanted when I was a young gay man on the West Coast. Through TOTC I learned about poppers, The Castro, the Stud, the baths, the mores and manners that obtain in urban interaction with strangers and other lovers. I learned about AIDS, about loss, about love, about life. I learned too many of those lessons on paper, however, and at times didn’t get to apply them as much as I wanted to. But I tried. I really did.
Now here we are at last, I and the movie and the city, unfolding on different levels, at different paces. And places. I still live in New York…State. Watching the movie at my local multiplex (seven dollar matinees!) I was happy to settle back for my own romance-and-urban-nostalgia trip. There were almost more layers to watching the movie than I could handle. In the last years before I left—and in reality, through personal and professional circumstances, including my last Manhattan jobs, as maitre d’ in two popular restaurants—I’d become friendly with more than a few of the stars onscreen (genuine tact forbids me from mentioning which). In the last years before I left I’d watched the city shed its grime and grit and become close to movie-scene perfect. But like the onscreen rain-slicked shine on the cobblestones of the Meatpacking District, that perfection comes at a cost only some can afford. I couldn’t anymore. That had become real to me, but I had changed. I’d outgrown running from reality; I’d even learned to meet it halfway. But I hadn’t yet tried to create one, one that was mine.
I have vivid memories of the streets and shops and bistros. I even have my memories of meeting Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. I have my memories of watching Parker in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Many times during the movie thought, I’ve been there. I know where that is. Oh, my God, there’s _________! I didn’t know he/she was going to be in this! Like cuts on a gem, these facts and facets folded over and under each other in several dimensions while I watched the movie, and when I came out it took me a moment to remember where I was. Then, also like a gem, it was clear. Oh, yes, I thought, I’m here in Western New York. This is my life, where the price of gas is over four a gallon and I’m learning and living still. And not just on paper anymore.
As a television show, “SATC” is a cultural icon, so the movie’s backers were smart to get a big-screen version done when they could. Because there was a lot of behind-the-scenes juice about the production of this one, the likelihood of a second movie remains uncertain. I for one would be surprised if the stars would commit to doing another, but then the market for movies for women is strong (check out that opening-weekend box office!). So who knows? And who cares, at least this weekend? Why rain on Carrie’s, Samantha’s, Charlotte’s, and Miranda’s parade? Some nearby whispers gave away the presence of a few SATC neophytes in the theater. As for the rest, they were happy to see the girls again. So was I--which is surprising, given how late I came to the party.
I didn’t watch SATC in the beginning. In fact, I didn’t watch it until it was in reruns on cable and later in network syndication. That once was my idiosyncrasy, not watching certain series. It was partly willfulness, a weird kind of snobbery (how can you be snobby about television when you don’t own one and can’t afford cable?), and my own, odd kind of cultural activism. I hated the idea that television was so accessible. I was still attached to the ideal of high art versus popular art, a breach that hasn’t entirely yet healed. SATC…it was television, and wasn’t that slumming? In the cultural capital of the world? I hadn’t come to New York to watch someone like Carrie. I’d come to New York to live like her, to be her. With the Cosmos, without the Manolos.
So it went…for a while. And whenever I was in the United States of Elsewhere, I could glide through family gatherings and college reunion parties on the fact that I lived in New York City myself, on the fact of having met both Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. More precisely, that I had waited on them. Waiting on them was good enough for Elsewhere, but when I returned to Manhattan, I wasn’t Carrie or Stanford or Aidan. I certainly wasn’t Big. I was small. The city was Big. And Reality and the City was tough. It wasn’t a show, and it was on twenty-four-seven. I didn’t Darren Star in it; I falling-starred. And kept falling. At first just in place. Then behind. On student loans. Tax filings. Credit card bills. I wasn’t getting ahead anywhere—not professionally, not personally. Life was kicking my you-know-what. At times I blamed the city itself. I fled to the mountains after 9/11 for two years, only to return thinking I’d changed (or been forgiven). When you try to escape reality, however, it will catch up to you later (if not sooner) and when you meet again, it will not be happy to see you. And you won’t be happy to see it.
I finally did something. I admitted I had to change, or was willing to change. Everything. From the outside in, inside out. I got help. Therapy. Support groups. More therapy. More support groups. Group therapy. And slowly and surely I did change. I genuinely began to feel lighter. My problems didn’t go away—they were waiting for me, and though I wasn’t happy to see them, to have them, because I wanted to change in order to meet them, it wasn’t so bad, wasn’t so hard. An honest confrontation with an unflattering mirror, not a sucker punch to the jaw.
In the fall of 2005, I left one city for another: Jersey City is only a PATH-stop away, but that five-minute ride under the Hudson might as well be under an ocean. Sure, mostly due to the housing bubble, there’d been a sizeable exodus of Empire Staters for the Garden State. They were making parts of Jersey City like the glittering island across the river, but not the part where I lived. I missed it, but I could afford my rent and my bills and I started repaying my loans and tackled my taxes. I could afford television and cable, and to make myself feel better, I started watching SATC in syndication. I was amazed by how funny it was. How schmaltzy at times, at others profound. It was like Friends without Joey, Chandler, and Ross. Seinfeld with a quartet of Elaines and without Upper West Side neuroses. Even edited for syndication, the show was as hopeful and lively as I myself had finally and genuinely become. I didn’t matter that it took me until my late thirties to reach the place I wanted to be in my mid-twenties. I’d arrived. I was there. It was Jersey City…so what? And watching the show made me believe that, properly scaled, a little properly-accessorized comedy and romance of manners, even largely feminine ones, isn’t such a bad thing.
SATC is post-op Tales of the City, Anna Madrigal and Michael Tolliver with the coastlines and bustlines and orientations all reconfigured and styled within a spiked heel of its multiple lives. And that fits, because back in the Eighties Armistead Maupin’s serial was my SATC. It gave me more than information about the life I needed and wanted when I was a young gay man on the West Coast. Through TOTC I learned about poppers, The Castro, the Stud, the baths, the mores and manners that obtain in urban interaction with strangers and other lovers. I learned about AIDS, about loss, about love, about life. I learned too many of those lessons on paper, however, and at times didn’t get to apply them as much as I wanted to. But I tried. I really did.
Now here we are at last, I and the movie and the city, unfolding on different levels, at different paces. And places. I still live in New York…State. Watching the movie at my local multiplex (seven dollar matinees!) I was happy to settle back for my own romance-and-urban-nostalgia trip. There were almost more layers to watching the movie than I could handle. In the last years before I left—and in reality, through personal and professional circumstances, including my last Manhattan jobs, as maitre d’ in two popular restaurants—I’d become friendly with more than a few of the stars onscreen (genuine tact forbids me from mentioning which). In the last years before I left I’d watched the city shed its grime and grit and become close to movie-scene perfect. But like the onscreen rain-slicked shine on the cobblestones of the Meatpacking District, that perfection comes at a cost only some can afford. I couldn’t anymore. That had become real to me, but I had changed. I’d outgrown running from reality; I’d even learned to meet it halfway. But I hadn’t yet tried to create one, one that was mine.
I have vivid memories of the streets and shops and bistros. I even have my memories of meeting Candace Bushnell and Sarah Jessica Parker. I have my memories of watching Parker in the revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Many times during the movie thought, I’ve been there. I know where that is. Oh, my God, there’s _________! I didn’t know he/she was going to be in this! Like cuts on a gem, these facts and facets folded over and under each other in several dimensions while I watched the movie, and when I came out it took me a moment to remember where I was. Then, also like a gem, it was clear. Oh, yes, I thought, I’m here in Western New York. This is my life, where the price of gas is over four a gallon and I’m learning and living still. And not just on paper anymore.
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