Sancho Panza At The Wedding Feast

I quit Facebook today

2019-01-20T17:17:00.000-05:00

So here's a photo of my family for the transition back to here.

A review for Woods Vibe Beard Oil on Etsy

2018-01-14T15:30:00.002-05:00

A sandalwood post turns in a lathe as a smooth, muscular hand presses fine grit sandpaper into the recess between organic curves. Wood dust floats and warms in the afternoon sunshine of a cedar-planked workshop. Almond shells dapple the floor, islands in the sawdust sea. All will be swept up for kindling in the fire later to heat the soft cheek and vibrant beard of the woodsman as he cups a hot mug of tea, jojoba aroma rising in the steamy air. He eyes the wood that will be the table where his love will sit, where his love will be.

Les lumieres sur la Seine

2008-09-19T01:01:00.006-04:00

Jean-Philippe took off his tie. The bedroom was clean. The red duvet was stretched tight over the bed and there were vacuum stripes in the carpet. In the meager light of the bedside lamp, the room was faraway and still. The room was a bed and a clock and the glinting brass of the dresser knobs in the dimness.

He hung his tie in the closet and thought about undressing. He stretched his socked toes and dug them into the soft carpet. He was too tired to undress and shower, which he must inevitably do. He wanted to collapse into the sofa and quiet himself. His head was buzzing with the din of voices and the clanks, bangs, and crashes that were the thousand collisions of a dinner service. If he did not decompress himself, it would go on into his dreams. He would wake in the middle of the night, wide-eyed, his heart beating fiercely. She would ask what was wrong and Jean-Philippe would say, ridiculously, that table twelve had not received their soup.

When he came into the living room, she was on the sofa, her legs curled under her, her big belly strange under her breasts, long neck, and ponytail. She was nearly the same, except for the belly and the swollen breasts. He’d never had occasion to study the pregnant form and now he was struck by the disproportionate oddness of the growth. She was slim but for the doubled girth of her waist. Her familiar body changed. Something grew large inside her, displacing her organs and stretching her skin. It was implausible and unsettling, another of the animal encounters that are the humbling hallmarks of romantic love.

In the middle of the room, on the coffee table, was a large glass bowl filled with water. On the surface floated white candles and the heads of flowers. It was a favorite of his and he made sure to change the water nearly everyday. The flowers were from the restaurant. He turned on the tall stone fountain near the television and lit the candles and fell into the sofa near his wife.

The candles ceased their drift and floated motionless. The flames were reflected in the clear water and their light bled through the bowl onto the table and through the translucent petals of the flowers. The water cascaded down the rough stone of the fountain and fell into the basin with a steady slap. His wife did not say anything, would not until he’d spoken. He sat for several minutes without moving or speaking.

Finally, he said, “Oh, what a night.”

His wife, Juliet, had been a waitress up until a few weeks ago, and would probably be a waitress again. She did not work at Jean-Philippe’s restaurant, though she wanted to. She knew it would do more harm than good, and he knew it, so she never brought it up anymore, even in jest. But she knew what a night it had been for him. It always was. Jean-Philippe liked that he could tell her and she would know.

“What happened?” she asked.

Jean-Philippe looked at her, and she had that light. That stupid light that he did not want to see but it was really there. There was an obscure halo all around her, like in the paintings of the Virgin, where she glows from some unnatural light. It made her beautiful, as beautiful as she’d ever been, but all the time now. Every time he looked at her, she shined like dull gold. Her eyes were deep and bright. He thought it might come from some high self-satisfaction, some outrageous confidence in herself. Arrogant people are physically attractive, he thought. Other times, he wondered if it weren’t some chemistry, some new pheromonal mix inside her that was affecting the way he saw her. Why should she be so beautiful now? To prevent him from leaving her?

“You’re too beautiful,” he said. He smiled. “It was the same tonight. I’m exhausted.”
“Do you want some tea?” she asked.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Just don’t let me fall asleep.”
She was a waitress and now she was his wife. The mother of his child.
“What did you do today?” he asked her.
“I went to Huntington’s to see if they had that buggy. They didn’t. Then I stopped in the park and read about breastfeeding. I came home and had supper, then I took a nap.”

One of the waiters had quit tonight in the middle of the shift. He had lost it, and Serge trounced him. All night, every time he’d gone into the kitchen, Serge dug into him with that whiny pissant voice, all the time asking the same questions, and asking Jean-Philippe, too. Jean-Philippe, why did he do that? What was he thinking? What is he doing? Finally, the boy said he’d just go home. Serge sacked him. Jean-Philippe did not try to save him. There were sacrifices. Serge needed sacrifices. And Jean-Philippe would clean up the mess. He’d hire and train a new waiter, and push all the others harder.

“Any famous people tonight?” Juliet asked.
“Yes, the MP again. And that woman, Julie Christie.”
“Oh, she’s lovely. What was she like?”
“Yes, a lovely woman. Very quiet. She had a nice smile.”
“She was in Doctor Zhivago.”
“That’s what Brian said. Did you see it?”
“No,” Juliet said. “I’ve seen parts of it. It’s kind of long.”

The MP had been difficult. He’d returned the appetizer, said it had too much vinegar. Serge threw a short fit, and Jean-Philippe apologized to the MP for the mistake. Would he like another one, he asked. No, Jean-Philippe, said the MP, and he said the name like it was a big joke between them that this was not a real name. The English are always so pleased with themselves when they say his name. It makes him feel inhuman, like he is some dog named Jelly-Bean. They always say Jean-Philippe. They do not know anyone else’s name, and they expect him to come running at the haughty call of his.

“We should go to a movie,” Juliet said.
“Yes,” Jean-Philippe replied.

Years earlier, before they were married, they had gone to Paris together. Juliet could not speak French. She had tried to learn, but it didn’t take. Even now, her French was rudimentary. She had promised to enroll in a school, but then she’d gotten pregnant. In Paris, they had visited the English language bookstore, and they saw an American film subtitled in French. There was a famous production of The Misanthrope playing, but Juliet resisted going, in spite of Jean-Philippe’s enthusiasm. They did not go.

“Oh, I thought of a new name. I still like Carson and Quinn best, but what about Samuel? I like the idea of a little boy named Sam. He’d be charming like his old man.”
“And you like Samuel more than the names I said?”
“Well, I guess so. I mean, it kind of jumps at me. The French names I have to get used to. And, you know, this child will be English. It’s just a little strange for an Englishman to be named Pierre or Jacques.”
“I said Charles.”
“I know, sweetheart, but when you say it it’s one name and when I say it it’s another.”
“Okay, we’ll talk about it later,” Jean-Philippe said.

There was never any discussion about living in France. He’d been in London for six years and showed no signs of leaving. The work was too good, too great an opportunity, too high-paying to consider it. Serge, Jean-Philippe thought, was the best chef in London. There would be nothing like it for him in Lyon or Paris. He had been with Serge from nearly the beginning, and he could not start at the beginning again.
Still, it was remarkable that they had never made any plans. He had never thought that he would live in England all his life, and now he had an English child. Would the child speak French? Of course; he would learn both languages, as early as possible. He would know his father’s language, know how to speak with his grandparents. There would be regular trips to France. The money was there, even if it meant living in a smaller home for a time. Serge would build a larger restaurant and there would be more money. Juliet would work again. The child would be English, but he would love France.

“Jean, what’s wrong? Are you mad at me?”
“No. I’m just tired.”
“If you want to say something…”
“It was a long night.”
“Okay,” Juliet said.
“I’m going to take a shower.”

Jean-Philippe pushed himself from the deep seat of the couch. He walked toward the hallway that led to the bathroom. He turned to Juliet on the couch and began to unbutton his shirt. She watched him undress and offered a halfhearted smile.

She was bright and beautiful when he met her, that night Serge and he ate oysters and celebrated the third Michelin star. She looked then as she did now, except for the child that grew and pushed everything away. He was jubilant that night, and this handsome English girl smiled and flirted at him and his irresistible triumph. He had a future; he had made a significantly greater life than the one he had been given. That she was there, and pretty, was their story. Her lovely English smile was all that he lacked, and she became tied up in the new promise.

Levity

2008-08-07T13:34:00.003-04:00

Yesterday, I was promoted to captain at my restaurant, which is a big deal that doesn't happen all that often. I gave a speech to about twenty of my peers. The transcript follows (with apologies to Robert Howard and John Milius):

I have been characterized as an ambitious man. I don’t deny I own an unquenchable lust for glory. All my life I’ve been told to keep my feet on the ground and my head out of the clouds. There’s time enough for the earth in the grave. Now let’s touch the vault of heaven.

You have been my allies. I remember days like this when my father took me to the forest and we ate wild blueberries. More than 20 years ago. I was just a boy of four or five. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind.

Almost 20 years of pitiless combat! No rest, no sleep like other men. And yet the spring wind blows. We strive together. We can’t forfeit. We would only be back here another day. Perhaps in worse company.

For us, there is no spring. Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm.

We are at the hour of our triumph. We shall no longer suffer the trials that have hardened our hearts. Now is our glory. We are giants in this world. When the wolves come for us, they will feast. They will gather our flesh and remember Alexander and Charlemagne and the great Genghis Khan. We are the world-shapers.

We are victorious today, friends, and that is good. But what is best in life?

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

To us, comrades. Tonight we drink deep.

La Strada

2008-08-03T14:23:00.002-04:00

I met a stripper who worked summers in New York to pay for drama school in Montana. I knew she wasn’t lying because she had big shoulders. She smiled a lot, too, ingenuously, which was how I knew she couldn’t see the irony. Of all the actors I know, the ones who don’t live in the big cities are the happiest. In another time, being the best Iago in Cheyenne would have meant something.

“Is this life?” is a question best asked rhetorically, at the right moments, like when you ride the TGV to Paris and watch the fields of mustard and Syrah pass as you lunch on olive tapenade and onion confit with fresh bread. That’s just one instance.

Another great time to ask “Is this life?” is when you are in a car in the Nevada desert with your Mom and your Dad and your baby brother, with nothing around for miles and miles, and a mad, dusty herd of antelope race across the road just where you are, no coincidence, just jolly good antelope fun, because what would you do all day if you lived in the desert?

The radio might have been playing the Mothers Of Invention and you might have been eating some convenience store’s poor idea of food (Twizzlers), but nostalgia is wonderful because it mixes everything up. If I recall correctly, the sky burned orange from the setting sun, I chewed Indian frybread (was it with chili, or was that on a different, pre-vegan trip?), and Arcade Fire were singing the chorus to “Wake Up”.

In fact, it’s rare that you would actually ask “Is this life?” consciously and presently. That’s a question that is easily inserted into memories, or used at the moment of remembrance. To tell the truth, that train ride was a rotten time in my life, though I could pretend brilliantly that it was all just so marvelous. But that’s part of living, too. You’ve got to pretend, because it’s all pretty rotten out there.

I’m hardly a pessimist or a cynic. I take the long view, which makes allowances for all kinds of nastiness in the world. Things are so much better than they were even fifty years ago. Consider Jim Crow, the Berlin Wall, or the status of women in America. The world has changed for the better and has always done so. This government sucks, America is a shameful place to live in, and things don’t stand to improve for some time. But don’t worry: someday—not this November or even four years from then—Ralph Nader will be president. Utopia approaches and we’ll all have pie in the sky.

Have you ever considered the destiny of the human race? Leave out all that stuff about Armageddon and the Rapture and ruminate on where we might be headed. There’s no true end, just this: the mixing, the love and hate, the writhing mass of people moving over the planet and beyond it. This is it. We’re in it, this one time, and it will never be any different for anyone else. This is life. Am I doing it right?

Funny how that girl from Montana inspired this introspection. I think about her life without me, and also with me, and the happiness we’ll miss by losing each other. I only knew her for four-and-a-half minutes, but now she’s mixed up with me. She’s one of the ghosts in my shadow, one of the collection of shades that really are the bulk of me. We are each of us a network of souls, a stew of the disparate elements informing us. I am her now, too. I am all of you.

A Life For A Life

2008-07-18T00:51:00.002-04:00

I had not considered this life. I have to now: I am in it. I have no doubt that it will end, only little idea of when. The hardest decisions to make, I suppose, are the ones that lead us from our good fortunes. My good fortune is nearly accidental. I have worked at it tirelessly, for years. Only I never considered it. I walked blindly into it—choosing this path, surely, but having no idea of where it led or ever announcing it as my ambition. It is not my ambition. It is only that I am very good at it, and that I sometimes enjoy it.

That’s enough, I think. I can prosper like that. Only the gulf between life and fantasy widens, and not only do I not know my way over, I’m losing sight of my dreams altogether. New dreams arrive. And everyday I have to convince myself that I do not want to open my own restaurant, my little vegan bistro featuring food inspired by Mediterranean France, Spain, and Italy, with good wine and cold beer (it’s damned hot today), blond wood and brass, live gypsy music, and old posters of Jean Gabin movies on the walls. (I will not say the name of my restaurant because I love it.)

I do not want that! I would be good at it, what with what I’ve learned running a similar place—though not nearly as good, because it belonged to somebody else—for three years and all that I’ve learned at my current job, one of the very best—hand on heart and it’s a consensus anyway—restaurants in New York City. Hell, I’d have the best vegetarian restaurant in New York, because no one does good Mediterranean food, though Counter comes close, but they are inconsistent and often uninspired.

See how seductive that is? Who doesn’t want to own their own restaurant? And when you’re as sure as I am that it would be good, it is a battle not to dive into it. It is not my dream, and it is too large to be a diversion. All my professional life has been a diversion.

I am in a new life, dear readers, not close enough to the last one, though similar to the one before that. I live again on Staten Island. I am a waiter, though this time, as mentioned, it is at a very fine restaurant (where, sadly, wholesale carnage is the order of the day). And though I have lost some things I should have held onto (this journal and my literary life, movies!, cooking, and, some days, my sweetheart), I have gained new things that are nearly big enough to make up for it, and even allow room for some of those old things (as you see here, with what I hope is the first sign of a comeback).

I have friends, or nearly so, which can go a long way to filling the absence of my best friend. I have taken up improv, which has inspired me a hundred percent, and though my ambition is not in performance (remember that I wish to make films), I find I am good at it and want to be better. I have discovered a great deal about myself, and have improved in all aspects of living. I didn’t see that coming. (I head to a class now, writing this on the ferry, which I think is a good place to write and plan on doing so more often.)

I gave up cooking for gardening, because there were no good ingredients available to me. Oh, they are coming now. Ten varieties of heirloom tomatoes, but especially Amish Paste, which I think will make an excellent sauce, Brandywine, and Cherokee Purple. Beets, too, and carrots and squash and cucumbers and herbs. My garden is well-worked and time-consuming. That is why I do not write (an easy excuse).

(Now I am waiting for a pizza marinara at an astoundingly good pizzeria in the East Village, and I have a glass of chilled red wine, a little frizzante, that is making me very happy. This place is only open four days a week, from five o’clock to whenever they run out of that day’s dough. I hate that I work nights, because improv and good food all happen after dark.)

Things may get better. I think a new promotion is coming at work, and with it perhaps less hours and much more money. I work incredibly hard and it still seems that this comes so easily. This allows me to think about moving to Manhattan, which would be a new life altogether. I have always disliked Staten Island, where there is nothing for me, except my family and now my garden. I hope to move after the harvest.

There will be more time then. I will get home sooner, and can write before sleep. I can write a screenplay, which must be my next step. I have ideas for short films that gnaw at me behind my temples. I have like-minded friends, actors and improvisers who push me forward. People have been waiting for me for over a decade. I have a streak of cowardice in me that I hope to smother.

I am a bon vivant, and that (now) is a weakness. I cannot enjoy life this much until I have struck a balance with my art. I cannot work and work just so that in my off-hours I can pretend that I am retired. I must work even harder. I must commit to my current job and move to the city. I can find a balance between a forty-hour job and art. Someday art will pay the bills and I will have equilibrium. Until then, though, I mustn’t spurn good fortune. We’re in a recession, you know.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning

2008-04-27T20:36:00.003-04:00

I cannot say where we left off, dear reader, in respect to my orientation in the world and the progression following, but it would be entirely safe to guess that I was tired, overwhelmed, and perhaps a little melancholy, and that any progression at the time seemed wholly in the wrong direction. But that’s obvious, as you can see by the lack of activity here in the last month. I forget so easily that talent is not innate and certain, but separate and predisposed to neglect, like a foster child. My care has been judged deficient.

Back again, then, and hopefully this time for good, though probably not. But quickly, to recap:

Work goes well, I suppose. The turbulence seems to have resided, as New York enters wakefulness and fewer people want to spend their time inside a restaurant. I finally have a decent schedule, all promotions and training complete, and the water looks decidedly calm from here on out. (I have been vociferous lately in decrying superstition, but—dash it—let me knock on wood for that last bit.)

What a rough few months! The amount of things I have had to learn only to become a waiter borders on the obnoxious. I know the ingredients of every dish of a seasonal menu that has changed three times since I’ve started (without ever having tasted them, as I am vegan and at my three-star French restaurant, the food most definitely is not). I have had a crash course in wine, a lost decade’s worth of knowledge (the decade lost to teetotalism*) in a few weeks (and continuing in a weekly wine course and a totally memorized inconstant wine list).

*(I am still a teetotaler at heart. I drink wine now only to have a knowledge of the damned stuff, and I have yet to experience a drunkenness beyond a glass-and-a-half’s worth of buzz. We’ll see if I go back to teetotalism at the end of this. I’ll save that deliberation for a later post. I can say that it remains my belief that I want to experience my life with all my consciousness and control available, and that strikes a hard—though not impossible—balance with the vino.)

(And to my friend, who always pictured me as a beer drinker: I have tried some microbrews and specialty beers that were quite appealing. Lovely stuff. The trouble with not drinking is that all you’ve got left to drink is water, soda, and juice. I have moved beyond the sweet stuff and like the crisp and fruity dryness of beer and wine with food. But all later, in another post.)

I have had other things moving in my life in the last short while which have also stolen my attention from you and this journal. I mean to garden this year and have embarked upon that. I have also been looking into the stock market because I cannot shake the idea of France and financial freedom. But details all for a later post. I really only meant to check in here. The night speeds on, I work all of tomorrow, and I had hoped to fit in a movie before sleep.

Be well, kind reader.

Movie Journal #6: No Country For Old Men

2008-03-27T16:27:00.005-04:00

No Country For Old Men

Here is a flawless film, perfectly executed. It is philosophical without being cold, peopled as it is by real human characters, all caught up in a microcosmic game of ambition and expectation versus fate. It is a technical masterpiece, as was Hitchcock’s Vertigo, but like that film it has a soul that runs deeper than its genre or even its medium can contain. It is a great film.

Its strength is in the way it plays by the rules of the crime thriller, but also explodes the genre whenever it can. Here is a drug deal gone wrong and the innocent everyman who finds himself with a satchel full of cash. Here is the sociopathic killer on his trail, and the old sheriff chasing them both.

But look at the care put into Josh Brolin’s everyman character, the way he fills the role, and how observant the filmmakers are in creating a real person. His actions, his motivations, all ring true, surprising as they sometimes are. (I especially love when Brolin, unable to sleep, mutters, “All right,” and hops out of bed, because something didn’t sit right with him, and nothing could be done until it was fixed. I love also how this one choice, one of the film’s only presentations of compassion, condemns its characters.)

In noting traits of human nature overlooked or neglected by other storytellers and presenting them straight, with no exposition or ceremony, the characters come alive with simple strokes, short punches of dialogue (as in the sweet, terrific interchanges between Brolin and Kelly Macdonald), and long, silent stretches of action. And because the movie doesn’t explain everything that happens, the audience is involved more deeply in its dialogue and philosophical investigation.

Part of that investigation involves Javier Bardem’s character of Anton Chigurh, a remorseless, arbitrary killing machine who walks through the film, closer and closer on Brolin’s heels, murdering nigh everyone in his way. He’s like the Grim Reaper or the hand of fate, and has had to do a lot of the symbolic heavy lifting as to the Coen brothers’ intent in making the film. It’s not important whether he’s real or a ghost, a psychopath or Fate itself. As he says, he got here the same way the coin did, referring to the heads-or-tails chance he gives some of his victims.

Chigurh represents the meanness and inexplicability of fate. Our deaths seldom have any meaning in relation to our lives. Pianos sometimes fall out of the sky to crush us, and it adds nothing but awkward punctuation to our story. I like to imagine Chigurh as a person power-mad with his godliness, that each murder is an addition to his strength and a lesson to the victim. One of the movie’s best jokes is that in the end, even he is interrupted by the unforeseen hand of fate (and note how Chigurh’s own hand becomes disabled).

The very soul of the movie is Tommy Lee Jones’s character, who acts as narrator and Greek chorus to the rest of the story. He’s old, and life as he’s seen it has lost its charm. He can’t understand men anymore and hasn’t the energy to try. His opening narration sets the tone for the film, that we should watch the events unfold, but keep in mind that this is nothing normal or desired by any right-thinking person. Poignant, too, is when the movie points out that even he is wrong, the world hasn’t changed; only he has. And the closing scene, a short description of a dream the character had, touches just the right notes of despair and hope. It hasn’t escaped my mind since I saw it.

Movie Journal #5: Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom

2008-03-20T17:06:00.005-04:00

Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom

Now I see it, the difference. Where Raiders Of The Lost Ark was elegant, a mature homage and update of classic Saturday serials, told with wit and an eye for spectacle, awe, and myth, its sequel is merely that: a sequel, another breed altogether. It builds on what is suspected to have worked the last time around, and rather than a celebration of something beloved, it means to explode what came before. It wants you to forget the last go around, and does so mainly by turning up the volume.

Temple Of Doom is loud and graceless, a juvenile gross-out with little of the sense of history or cleverness of its predecessor. It seems to have been made by different people, except that it is again masterfully directed by Steven Spielberg, whose eye for composition is nearly matchless in all of cinema. It’s only that Spielberg lost himself in the whiz-bangery this time, and used character to serve the situation, rather than the other way around.

The most jarring insult is that the previously archetypal and revered Jones character is made to do things that go against the grain of what we know of him. He was an adult before, a man with a Peter Pan-like streak of mischievousness and cruelty, but in the cartoon world he’s made to inhabit this time, he comes off sometimes as a buffoon, or at least the straight man in a camp of buffoons, and it’s hard to believe he would tolerate that for as long as he does.

Symbolic of the movie’s failings is Kate Capshaw’s character Willie Scott, one of the most annoying and abrasive of all female performances and certainly not akin to Katherine Hepburn in The African Queen. Capshaw herself is not terrible—she’s a good sport—but the character is so two-dimensional and irritating, one can’t believe the cold Dr. Jones wouldn’t have just left her behind in Shanghai at the start of the movie, after convincingly (to the movie’s dumb villains, at least) threatening to kill her. Thankfully, this movie is a prequel to Raiders, and he has Karen Allen to look forward to.

Taken on its own terms, the movie is admittedly successful. It’s funny—I’m a fan of Short Round—and exciting, and moves quite breezily through all its set pieces. And one of those sequences, the heart-stopping mine car chase, is one of the greatest ever constructed. And there it is. That its ambitions rest lower than its predecessor's, and that it betrays its character a little, must be forgiven. It’s still Spielberg, after all.

Movie Journal #4: The Outsiders

2008-03-18T18:39:00.003-04:00

The Outsiders

I had never seen Coppola’s film of The Outsiders, for a number of reasons. It came after Coppola’s great period, and it seemed almost painful to watch a bad film from that great director. Also, I am averse to nostalgia of any kind, especially that of the 1960s (how grating was Across The Universe?), a period by now mythologized into something that can be nowhere near its truth.

There are, of course, exceptions, such as the Coppola-produced American Graffiti, but these films are usually set in a specific time and place as opposed to celebrating that time and place. Or perhaps there is no hard rule separating a nostalgia piece from a period piece, only a filmmaker’s restraint. In any case, the examples of ‘60s nostalgia pieces far outweigh the period films.

I needn’t have been so skeptical of The Outsiders. It avoids nearly all of the pitfalls of a film of this type in its depiction of the lives and characters of a small group of rough kids from the wrong side of the tracks in Tulsa. The movie isn’t infatuated with its milieu of greasers and preps, cars and bars, but instead dreams with its main characters of a better life than this one. There is little charming about their lives, and the film shares that same quality of great juvenile fiction from which it comes: that of a tale told true, with no lies or ornamentation, and a small amount of moral resulting.

The film is less than perfect. It suffers throughout from poorly written dialogue and a lack of focus from its fresh-faced, amateur cast of future superstars (and I blame Coppola for being too loose with them). But I did like Coppola’s direction, surprisingly fresh and expressionistic, and the movie’s tone of longing, its focus on the future and not the unhappy past.

Movie Journal #3: Into The Wild

2008-03-18T17:25:00.004-04:00

Into The Wild

Sean Penn’s film of Jon Krakeur’s splendid book about college graduate Chris McCandless’s admirable and naïve liberation from society and flight into the American wilderness must be credited for treating its audience to an expansive panorama, full of sights and people too seldom seen in the cinema. The movie is at times breathtaking in its depiction of America and its malcontents. It’s only too bad that these highs are so rarely hit in this drifting, overlong film.

Indeed, the book fared better at inspiring wonder, such as when the author visits a tunneled rock formation in the desert, or follows McCandless down the Colorado River into Mexico. In the movie, that wonder at natural beauty is replaced by an awe of McCandless’s spirit, and an investigation into his motives. The book was interested in McCandless, but more as a symbol of a common longing and youthful gusto.

The movie wastes its time on Chris’s family, and bores us with one of those gratingly soft-spoken, semi-poetic narrations by a female actor that have marred other recent films, such as Cold Mountain and Lord Of The Rings. It seems Penn, adventurous here if a little unfocused, was inspired by his work with Terrence Malick on The Thin Red Line. Malick is a master of this kind of film, the drifting, languorous, and poetic exploration of man’s soul and its relationship with nature. Penn has never played it safe, as an actor and as a director, but he doesn’t have the artistry to pull off something so ambitiously poetic.

It is the mark of a mediocre film that in viewing it my thoughts drift to other films of a common theme, and I begin to compare them (and more than likely I begin to long to see the other one, as if my appetite has been whetted). Into The Wild is a lesser work of art than the Malick films, and though it shares the same spirit, it is a pale cousin to Kerouac and Jack London.

It might have been stronger if character here took a back seat to story and scenery. Or better yet, if McCandless’s story involved more of the characters played by Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker, and Hal Holbrook, who are the movie’s true revelations and most sublime warm places. But McCandless forsook society and went into the wild. His tale is the lesser for it.

Movie Journal #2: Clerks II

2008-03-11T02:03:00.005-04:00

Clerks II

It is fourteen years since I first saw Kevin Smith’s Clerks. I have grown up, and Smith has not. He showed signs of it once, with Chasing Amy, and certain parts of the unfortunately uneven Dogma. But he never followed through, or perhaps he never escaped his own crude instincts or his fan base of groundlings clamoring for more of his clever idiocy.

He is, honestly, still a very funny fellow. Clerks II is bursting with outrageous dialogue and spot-on pop culture references; I was nearly on the floor when drug dealer Jay performed the Buffalo Bill dance from Silence Of The Lambs. But, as always, he strives to make a more heartfelt, wise experience, and where Chasing Amy stung with truth, Clerks II is only unoriginal and uninspired, no more ambitious than any generic sitcom.

The film is not irredeemable. It stars Rosario Dawson, after all (a bright spot in a cast of amateurs), and has enough crude laughs to entertain. It’s only that Smith is so much smarter than this. Jersey Girl (unseen by me) may have been a step in the right direction; one hopes that Smith would overlook its failure and keep moving that way.

Movie Journal #1: Raiders Of The Lost Ark

2008-03-11T01:14:00.005-04:00

Raiders Of The Lost Ark

What do we do with these indelible masterpieces of our youth? Every scene lays just where it should, every line anticipated and delivered as if it were movie Scripture. Half the experience of watching the movie is remembering it, which leaves little room for freshness, and no surprises. Raiders Of The Lost Ark prospers on surprises.

It is difficult, too, that Raiders, inspired concept that it is, is rather simplistic. It is a concept executed. It has charms, but not human ones. It is a bit cold, an exercise totally in its genre, and forgets that Spielberg’s best touch is his lightest, those small human moments that balance and eventually outshine the big and the breathtaking. From Jaws, I remember most the three men around a table, trading tales, and from Close Encounters, I remember Richard Dreyfuss trying to convince his sons that seeing Pinocchio is better than miniature golf. (The reason Shyamalan is so good is because he cops this side of Spielberg and not the other, spectacular one.)

There are few such moments in Raiders. But for Karen Allen’s ebullient turn, the film is all chess pieces, archetypes moving quickly from place to place, scene to scene, to fit in as much as possible, all those B-movie tropes, all played with wit, and to never slow enough to stall.

What elevates the film is Spielberg’s masterful, playful technical artistry, and the expanse of its playground. Here is Spielberg still young, still unwise of the full world but confident enough to pretend, not yet second-guessing himself. He makes high art out of pulp, and delivers a pure cinematic experience. That it is sometimes imperfect, in its editing and John Williams’s relentless score, for instance, is forgivable. The film lives in both camps, high and low, and rests beyond any real critique. Isn’t this fun? it asks, as if that were all a movie should be, or could be.

Quick Change

2008-02-08T23:35:00.000-05:00

It is a strange intimacy we share, my dear reader, as you and I sit in nearly the same position, the same distance from our computer screens, and stare at the same image (that of Win Butler’s oh-so-serious earnestness), and think the same thought: where is he? Where is Reilly Owens and what is he doing?

Reilly Owens is building up a life, or imagining that he is. Perhaps he is still at work tearing down the adornments of the last life in search of a true structure. The truth is, I often have less idea than you do of where I am. But let’s not make this a sob story or an apologia. Here I am.

New York is as it was. It is winter still and I hate it. I stay locked up in my small room in my parents’ house when I am not working. I am paralyzed by the weight of my ambition, so much is the quantity of work I must do that I don’t know where to start and instead spend all my free time reading or watching episodes of television series I have decided it important for me to watch, for my education. Television because films are too much a commitment; and besides, I would rather abstain than watch my longed-for Renoir on a twelve-inch Powerbook screen.

I have worked a month: long, odd hours that I cannot get used to, and the process of setting up a life after selling off the old one drains my account as soon as it is filled. All my books are in boxes in a corner of my room. I have had to buy bookcases. I have had to buy a bed. I need a television for the Renoirs and a desk and chair because the third-hand secretary I have always used is loathsome to me, ugly and uncomfortable. I need a frame for my Jules et Jim poster.

I will buy all these things and put them in the room in my parents’ house that I have lived in since 2001, because New York is ridiculous, a town that must be dead because the only bright things I can name are its museums, storehouses of antiquity. New York, I do not love you. I will not work forty-five hours a week or more to live meagerly within your exhausted aura.

I remain with my parents because I like the commute to the city, three hours a day when I am held hostage and cannot dither between tasks. I read. When I am at work, I am stifled, a meat puppet hired out for a few hours, unthinking, unchallenged, blank. At home, I am pulled in all directions by all my selves: I accomplish everything through procrastination, cooking when I should clean, cleaning when I should run an errand, doing that errand when I should write, and never writing. But in between home and work, I read, and that is my accomplishment and my joy.

I am a bit lost, as must be natural at the very final close of a splendid chapter. Now I must write the next chapter of my life, and I am doing all the research necessary for it. I have an idea of what I do not like, and what I need, and where it must all end. Faith that I am good enough to pull it off, and goddamn these New York winters.

The Best Music Of 2007

2007-12-30T22:46:00.000-05:00

I had a lot of time to listen to music this year, and with the help of NPR’s wonderful All Songs Considered podcast and certain websites, I managed to keep up with what was going on in pop music in 2007, even in France (where the majority of pop music is English-language anyway). Here’s an opportunity to spread the joy—my ten favorite albums of the year.

This list represents the music that appealed to me most and stayed in constant play on my iPod and stereo while I cooked, exercised, or just shuffled around the apartment. This is the soundtrack of my French year.

Armchair Apocrypha by Andrew Bird

No record got more spin than this one. Andrew Bird manages to be progressive without losing his humanism, staying bound within a soft-rock/singer-songwriter classification, but stretching it as far as it can go. Bird expands his rock trio by looping pizzicato violin riffs and ghostly whistles over his rock guitar, and never lets things get stale. Melodies build and shift and the action stops and starts and flows in and out of itself. It helps, too, that Bird is a smart, funny lyricist, and his pleasant, if unremarkable, voice can be at the forefront while melding perfectly with the instrumentation and harmonies. Beautiful stuff.

Back To Black by Amy Winehouse

Amy Winehouse and producer Mark Ronson made the best-sounding album of the year with this, a modern classic soul record that can hold up against the best of the old stuff. The credit falls equally to each player. Winehouse has a great, smoky voice and terrific songwriting skills; her funny, modern soul plays like a blog entry (You made me miss the Slick Rick gig / … / Can’t believe you played me out like that), but the arrangements and Winehouse’s seasoned, bottomless voice make it timeless.

Good as she is, it’s Ronson that makes the record great. Everything sounds phenomenal, from the on-target horns to the prominent drum kit. Listen to Winehouse’s good-if-not-great stuff on her debut Frank and the second disc of the Back To Black Deluxe Edition (both released in the U.S. last month) to hear what a good producer can do for a capable artist.

Neon Bible by Arcade Fire

Arcade Fire’s Funeral is my favorite record of the last decade, and the band put on the best concert I’ve ever attended (good enough that having David Bowie play on the encore wasn’t even the highest point). There were high expectations for their next album. That sort of anticipation can kill an artwork for me, and I admit it took a few weeks for me to warm up to this record.

It’s a more ambitious album than the previous one, which was powered entirely by youthful gusto and tearful passion for life, love, and all that. Neon Bible never reaches those same heights, maybe because it’s now aiming for them. It’s as though the band, having discovered its own talent on Funeral, now wants to use its powers for good. While never as sanctimonious as U2, it’s still a little overblown. I miss the raggedness.

Still, I can’t deny the band’s urgency and power. Even if it’s not Funeral, it’s better than nearly everything else.

The Reminder by Feist

Leslie Feist makes rich, sensual, and meaningful pop music that also manages to be catchy and contagiously danceable, as evidenced by her lovely music videos. Few other records had singles as solid as “1 2 3 4”, “My Moon My Man”, or “I Feel It All”, songs that can appeal to a mass audience even as they remain close and personal. The album’s first track, “So Sorry”, cut through my own life so neatly I had to welcome its devastation.

I love unapologetic pop made by strong women (a group that includes Regina Spektor, Fiona Apple, and Jenny Lewis). Their voices are vital in a world crowded by men and bland princesses. Feist easily moves into that company with this record, the year’s coolest, most sophisticated pop album.

Once by Glen Hansard & Markéta Irglová

Even if I hadn’t seen the film this music comes from, I’d love each of the songs on this record for their quiet intensity and soulful longing, music composed by the lonely for the lonely, who are the only people who really understand love songs.

Glen Hansard has a powerful, affecting voice that plays nicely over the acoustic guitar, piano, and Markéta Irglová’s soft harmonies. It sounds heartbroken, poor, and Irish, and the reason the movie worked so well is because we believe it. This album hits right at the romantic heart of you, whether that heart’s been recently broken or never used.

And special note must go to the song “Gold” by the group Interference, which wins the Astral Weeks Award for best Irish romantic violin song of the year.

The Next Five

Challengers by The New Pornographers
In Rainbows by Radiohead
Under The Black Light by Rilo Kiley
Raising Sand by Robert Plant & Alison Krauss
Kala by M.I.A.

Honorable Mention

Favourite Worst Nightmare by Arctic Monkeys
The Flying Club Cup and Lon Gisland by Beirut
Black-Out by Britney Spears
Untrue by Burial
Some Loud Thunder by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Super Taranta! by Gogol Bordello
Sound Of Silver and 45:33 by LCD Soundsystem
Alright, Still by Lily Allen
West by Lucinda Williams
The Stage Names by Okkervil River
Boxer by The National

Sleeping Beauty

2007-12-23T20:16:00.000-05:00

A funny thing happened on the way to adulthood: all my sisters turned into women. It’s something you don’t expect, that day you look at your kid sister, the one who used to dominate your home and life with her toys and songs and absurd fascinations (the Olsen twins), and see instead a Jane Austen heroine, someone emerged from that long, unambiguous, and unambitious childhood and adolescence into astonishing womanhood, and all in that single day.

Today is not that day for Coleen, my sister of twenty-one years, though it is her birthday. Her maturity came earlier, a year or so ago; hard to say, as I was not always here. But that did make it easier to spot it, Coleen’s blooming: she was here when I arrived.

What a funny, lovely girl! She always was, but now she comes in a more handsome package: student, worker, teacher. I meet her in the hallways and kitchen of our house. She is my next-door neighbor, and I catch her coming up the stairs on her way to her room. Ours is such an easy relationship: late-night banter about work and television (we both mourn Arrested Development and Veronica Mars and obsess over The Office), and sometimes come unprocessed, unprotected thoughts and fears. Rare is a connection this genuine.

Part of it is because Coleen is so uninhibited and confident. She has a terrific sense of humor and fearlessness about herself. She seems impervious, something common in our big household, but stronger in Coleen. It’s wonderful to meet an intelligence so incapable of being offended, especially when I can be so aloof and offensive. We can all be remarkably distant in this family—small feelings (and our lives are collections of them) fall through the cracks when much larger things are at stake (falling grades, sexuality, destiny). These connections keep us from drifting out completely, and it’s easier when we find each other so easy. Coleen is easy as they come, which is the best thing I can say about her on her birthday.

She proved herself years ago the funniest of us, no small feat in this clan, and it was through that combination of courage, ebullience, and wit. She’s a mad pleasure to be around, never a drag, always the beaming bright spot of a room. How can I be looking to my little sister for approval? I should have this together by now, and I do, but Coleen has exceeded me. She has a natural ability to dominate a party without over-dominating it. If the world were a wiser place, she’d be voted Most Popular of Everything.

What’s most charming about all of this is that Coleen has the self-deprecating manner of someone who doesn’t know how good she is. She hasn’t learned to flaunt her natural gifts, thank God, lest she lose them. Now, she’s a lovely clown, like Elaine Benes, one of the boys, but still very much a girl, the ideal woman.

And only twenty-one! Our great fear for Coleen (and all of my sisters) is that she’ll be interrupted on her path to her great destiny. Some vestige of childishness will sabotage her life, some boy will get her pregnant or make a joyless homemaker out of her, so much squandered potential. We haven’t yet learned to trust her.

She is studying to be an elementary school teacher, another bit of effortless, perfect positioning, whether hers or the universe’s. It’s an exciting time for those of us in the Coleen fan club. She moves slowly and assuredly and falls easily into perfection.

Happy birthday, little woman!

I'm Not There

2007-12-20T16:58:00.000-05:00

I might have forgotten to mention that we would be going on break here at Sancho Panza. A month-long sabbatical in fact, obviously necessary to pressurize ourselves in preparation for a new life, one like the old one, and nothing like the last one, that holy sabbatical, an island out of time that will be forever suspended above everything as an example of life when it was good, or very much near it.

I am back in New York, standing on the cusp of the future, all black. And mostly I mean that as it is unrevealed to me; I have every opportunity open. I might begin again in New York or I might board a train tomorrow for Chicago or Los Angeles or Napa Valley (all places in consideration). These opportunities are there because of that other metaphor, the one that the future is black because it is unhappy.

I have lost my love, my great love, the best I ever had. My sweetheart is gone, my companion, my best friend. We fell apart. We speak still, across a continent, and tell each other of all we thought of them that day. These are long lists. For the past two years, I did nearly everything with my sweetheart in my mind. Now I have no one to do anything for. I have to learn again how to be alone, something I thought I knew. Life is better together.

I miss France, too, and would move back in an instant. It was an extraordinary time. The land is beautiful, and the culture and traditions match wholly with my person. There is a greater appreciation there of the earth and produce and food and family, and people are more involved with art and politics. I have seen France and now see greater the flaws in America. It has been a difficult transition.

The change has been made worse by my moving from sunny Provençe to cold, dark New York. It is a hard thing to say goodbye to sunshine. I can’t bear the prospect that I may not see a true sunny day for the next three or four months, and a sunny season until May at least. Plenty has been said about how the changing seasons and long winters harden us and make us better and more interesting people, but, honestly, civilization was begun in the sunny places.

I’ve been looking for work, or rather, preparing to look for work. It’s all such a long process if it’s done right, if you really want to move up in your field (and mine, at this time, is the restaurant industry, which I love and cannot deny loving and would not want to work in anything else now I have a true taste for it, the rush of it and the near-religious aspects of it—food, community, sublimity—even though my true calling must be in the arts; mustn’t it?).

I have had to make a great résumé and a striking cover letter, and I’ve done my research on which restaurants I want to work in. Only the best, really, because that’s where I can learn. Difficult, as I can’t afford to eat at these restaurants now, but I’ve been doing a lot of reading. And I’ve had some good, if frustrating and puzzling, responses from some of them. (“Great résumé, you’d be perfect, but we’re not hiring. Call us in January.”)

You can see, friends, that I’ve had a rough month. Exiled from paradise, bereft of love, money and sunshine fading, and having to prove myself to strangers using only the finest cotton paper and a minute of face-time (and if you want to feel like a middle schooler again, go looking for a job in a four-star restaurant: “My hair is long and stringy, I’m fat, my face is broken out, and I keep saying ‘yeah’ when educated people say ‘yes’.”)

It’s a vicious circle: I don’t write because I feel bad and I feel bad because I don’t write. Sorry to have left you hanging. (Oddly, though, in this time, the number of visitors here quadrupled. Something to do with Google Image search finding me, but it’s nice to see so many new faces.) I’m going to do my best to keep a regular schedule from here on out.

(And since most image searches that arrive here are for pictures of beautiful women, here’s a photo of Cate Blanchett, who remains my favorite working actress, not least because she was stunt-cast in I'm Not There and still managed the best and most sympathetic Dylan impersonation in the film.)

Closely Watched Trains

2007-11-12T15:24:00.000-05:00

Not much movement here at Sancho Panza I’m afraid, and I do apologize. We are a week away from moving this operation to Paris, and then a few days later to New York. It’s a rough time, logistically, because we have to go through all the stress of closing down an apartment and all that business, but in French, which makes it that much harder. We’re getting somewhere, now the last day is imminent, but there is a lot to do and I’m not in the right frame of mind for writing very much.

We found out yesterday that there will be a countrywide strike this week, effectively closing down all trains and public transportation throughout France. We’d bought a train ticket to Paris a few weeks ago, and for the very day that they have declared the big strike day, because that’s when teachers will join the rail, bus, gas, and electricity employees, as well as the students, in their strikes.

The teachers and the transportation and utility employees are all fighting to retain their sweetened pension packages in the face of new president Sarkozy’s “Americanization” of the country [read: more work hours, less money]. The students are protesting recent changes to the university system.

It promises to be an exciting time, and I would normally revel in it, except that I have to get myself to Paris, with eight big suitcases, a girlfriend, and a cat to boot. If the trains don’t run, we’ll have to rent a car, which will cost us three or four times as much money, plus more time and stress. I was really looking forward to a nice train trip. I do love the trains here.

I’ll try to pop in now and again in the next couple of weeks, but if you don’t see me, I hope it’s because I’m having a good time rather than a bad. Back to work.

Bringing Up Baby

2007-11-06T12:29:00.000-05:00

Thomas is seventeen. Great Scott, I don’t see it. The Owens baby is practically an adult, one year shy of being eligible to run for political office or ready now to sign up for military service: little Tom, terrified in the back of a Humvee, white knuckles on the stock of a heavy gun. Tiny Tom-Tom, who can now rent Eyes Wide Shut with impunity.

Unbelievable, that the little rat let his childhood slip by us so fast. Not that we didn’t see it: he’s been bigger than all of us for a couple years. (“Check out these trapezii. Jacked out of my mind.”) And he’s made a distinct divergence from any paths we, or at least I, had laid out for him. I didn’t raise him to be a football star.

I can’t see adulthood yet, but I can see his separateness, his individualism. He’s been bucking his babyhood for a long time, and why not? He’s watched the rest of us leave. He’s had as much a chance to be different as any of us: lastborn, male, country-raised and city-tested. Now he’s what none of us has been, an only child. Why should I have expected Mini-Me?

And that’s what it all is. It’s been hard to let him go. He was ours, and he was mine. Brother, finally, after five sisters. Friend, comrade, bro. I did my best with him, and he was good to me. The zombie movies, the adventure films, I think they stuck. The comic books kind of stuck, or not-so-much. Rock ‘n’ roll, meh. At least he knows The Beatles. And we’ll always have Goldeneye.

I don’t fault Thomas, of course. Just my early experience of a parent’s heartbreak. He found his own friends, more contemporary than me. Somehow, he came to like hip hop. And bad movies. And he’s just never going to read Sandman. So my sympathies shift to my father, who suffered my impatience with Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa, and who never raised the athletic spirit up in me. It’s inevitable that a child should create his own personality, but no less difficult for that.

I am continually surprised by Thomas. He’s loopy, you know, like the rest of us. He’s a brave dancer, half-retarded, half-suave. He’s got a quick sense of humor that’s incompatible with his normal stone-faced serenity, which we read as innocence—the boy is still a boy.

Thomas has an infuriating sense of competitiveness, which is satisfying for me, because my sweetheart doesn’t play any games that don’t result in everybody winning. [Side note: Just the other night, she learned about Six Degrees Of Kevin Bacon. I explained it to her and asked her to give me the name of a movie star, whom I would then link to Kevin Bacon. When that round was finished (Nicole Kidman in two degrees), we had to quit because the pressure was too great—that is, the pressure on her to think of a movie star.]

The boy has beaten me at so many games—so many of my own games—he won my respect through his own work, and not nature’s progress. How was I losing to my baby brother? Board games (obviously, in Scrabble, I lost because I was overreaching), video games (I was out of practice), athletics (well, he’s made it his specialty, hasn’t he?). Trying to beat Thomas at anything is like trying to sneak up on a cat. That cat’s been a step ahead of you since before you woke up this morning.

I really think he’s some kind of a hustler, like Woody Harrelson in White Men Can’t Jump. From the start, you underestimate him, because of his bad haircut, his dumb music, his blank goofiness. And you’re done. He’s above your level. God, it’s maddening.

So there is something there, some burgeoning person. He’s still in the awkward body of a teenager, and it discredits him. Because he’s stayed up with us, though he’s more than a decade behind some of us. He’s had all the privileges of our instruction and all the challenges of our inclusion. I think it’s made him great. He fought for his own character and succeeded. He is who he’s made himself, and not any of us. I can’t fault the boy for anything.

And when the time comes, the hour of my great adventure, my magnificent destiny, he’ll be a great, valuable friend to me, capable soul and brother. Welcome, Thomas, to my high esteem.

Happy birthday, kid brother!

The Atavist Damns You All On His Blog

2007-11-02T08:38:00.000-04:00

Now is the magic time.

Summer has exhausted the sun and the green things of the earth have swallowed up their abundance. Trees fat on plenty count another ring and bear down for the dormant season. They expend themselves on a last gasp, bright green leaves drooped with ants explode to red then gold and the wind shakes every living thing out. Every last sunbeam catches, and then the sun burns out before any earth thing has given up.

It’s the moon season coming. Furious winds blow out of the great earth and steal away each last dry and cracked leaf. They fall far and long in looping, swirling descents whose grace dwarf humanity’s attempts at beauty: no plastic art has eclipsed the complex, everyday miracle of motion in nature. Who has studied a painting for as long as they have a flame or the surf or the rustling of ten thousand leaves in a gentle breeze?

Black leaves line the banks of the river. The trees are stripped bare and shrunken. Moonlight falls splashing on every inch of the black earth. Things stir in the soil. All the flying things, the insects and the birds, have decamped or burrowed in. The air is empty, except when the wind blows mad and twisting and picks up the deposited earth and the spindly branches of naked trees are dressed again in a shaking jacket of lost twigs and leaves. It’s the haunted time.

What was swollen in the summer is parched now. The summer earth was covered in pulsing veins of invasive humanity, greedy as the trees for sun-blessed life. Now they are burrowed in like the insects. Whole parcels of earth go vacant for days or weeks or entire seasons. Now is the old time. Shy spirits walk in ancient forests, raised by the silence and the starlight.

Now is the magic time, the old time, the season of communion. These false lives, the path of a hundred centuries diverted in the last by commerce and invention—not progress, convenience—fall low before a higher altar. The wind blows the forest in and the rain beats down, patiently, everything. Now is our time, a fraction of real time.

My old people watched the stars wheel and the winds turn and the story of the world was written in blood. The story of us was not separate. Heavy and inconsequential gods moved and trafficked with us, and we saw the spirit of things. There is but one god now, barely. There is the church, who have burned up our story and replaced it with theirs, far away and never was. There is the story of mankind only, no more the story of the world.

But here the world persists, now in the old season of communion, the devil world, relentless, diminishing our lives and punishing our rupture. The sun abates and the trees steel up for the whipping season, when the world will thrash us. Our hot engines spin faster, louder, hotter, dirtier to seal us up from the world’s drubbing.

Time was, in the magic time, they moved slow feet in the layered leaves, among the moon-fed toadstools, moss, and lichen, moon-stalked, starlit, wind-spun, wind-chilled, and the world was vast. The world was greater than us. It was the leaves and the earth, but it was the moon, too, and the stars. We knew the greatness and there was a place for us in it. The little gods danced in fires and made the barley high. Winter came in on the backs of stags and sometimes mischievous spirits kept the wood from burning or the hens from laying. There were great gods, too, though they had no names, and they stole the breath from the mouths of children. There was a price for living in the world.

Gods don’t change, and they don’t die, and they don’t go away. These trees that shake above us and drop their leaves on ancient ground are part of an old world. The winds that push us carry all the old world, all our dead in dust. In the lonely parts of the world, in this magic time, I can hear the old gods running. We can’t write the story of the world; it writes us.

The Quiet Man

2007-10-25T12:21:00.000-04:00

Let us broach the subject of my father and investigate him in small amounts. The danger shows even here, before the words have started flowing, as my brain becomes crowded with sentiments and remembrances and theories and emotions. There is so much to say.

Let this not be an obituary, because the man is only-half-lived. Fifty-three today and fifty-three these days is middle age—early middle age. I know men fall sooner than 106, but men like this?

He stands stooped in his garden and pulls flowering yellow squash from the vines. The basement is filled with paper bags of his tomatoes. He tells my mother he will be a vegan, but maybe she knows better and keeps cooking everything with a pile of sausage. Once he ate a live mussel from the cold Maine seawater and fell violently ill.

My mother tells me what he says to her in secret. To me he says my veganism is turning my bones to paper. He tells me how Bush is strengthening America, but he has voted for Ralph Nader in the last two elections. One morning he told me to enlist in the military and by dinnertime he said I should marry my Canadian sweetheart before the draft started.

He must be a madman, or a child, the way he talks. He is cockamamie and calculating. Only he has the ability to enrage me, like when we found ourselves on the same bus after his workday and my attendance of a peace rally. He declared for all around him his endorsement of ethnic cleansing. He didn’t believe it (how could he believe it?) but he said it to get a rise out of me. Sure, it worked.

He doesn’t believe in anything so much as contrariness, and he’ll say something just to beat you. I take some of that from him. I think all my siblings have it. We have his great sense of humor, which even my mother has adopted lately, but we also have his button-pushing contrariness, his small cruelties.

(I wonder if we need only a Katherine Hepburn to show us not as tormentors but gamesmen. But I fear, too, that we are better-matched with Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In any case, let us thank the women we love for resisting what must be a very strong urge to put arsenic in our lentils.)

If he is half-child, then the other half is God. The years between our visits show me his age now, in the gray in his beard and the weathering of his skin. He looks like what he is, a descendent of Celtic & Saxon warriors. His is the face I read in Beowulf. He is still taller than me, still stronger. He still runs marathons.

His accomplishments have always been greater than mine. Any greatness in me belongs at least a little to him. He was father to all of us, all seven, and husband to my mother. He worked all his life, two, three jobs at once. He served his life up to his family above all else, and I never once saw a fit of depression or rage or anxiety. There was food for us, and a home, against harsh odds, and if we lacked anything, we didn’t notice, or were compensated with affection and fraternity.

If I believe myself a complicated person, then I must allow the same for my father. Not simply breadwinner, workingman, authority, father, but man. His history doesn’t belong to me, close as we are. I think the great lie is that we know our parents, whom we can’t even begin to know until now, as we grow and age and see life hard. There was much more to their lives than me, and it used to be that I was the only thing. My father had an entire life before me, and another one during. He has another life now.

What I know about him is facts and trivia and everything else is emotion or parental propaganda. He was born someday somewhere and then lived here or there and these were his friends. But what about that time in the army? What about that time in Alaska? What did he know? What does he know now that I won’t for twenty-five years?

There was a dinner a long time ago, when my family lived in Florida and we visited my father’s family in New York. There were the Owens brothers around a table—old hooligans trading tales. I heard stories that weren’t about me, brickbat rumbles and brushes with death. I disappeared from my father’s life, and my own. Mine may not have been the most important life in the history of the world. My father did it first, and differently, and he’s still doing it.

I continue to find out who my father is. Slowly his life is revealed. It hasn’t changed my opinion of him: moral, loyal, strong, and selfless. It has removed his godhood and shown me the man. That frustrating old fool tending his grapes this October morning has had it harder than I ever guessed, and bigger and faster and deeper than I ever realized. His story is large and worth telling. I hope someday I’ll know him enough to do that.

Happy birthday, Pop.

Fear Eats The Soul

2007-10-16T13:48:00.001-04:00

It’s time for a statement of principles. Let’s get to the bottom of me, finally and firstly. Let us define me and then start from that. I cannot have a direction until I have a standpoint. Let me let you know me, and let me say aloud what I’ve always meant you to hear. (Mother, look away.)

Religion

There is no God, in any sense. There is no Christian or Jewish God or Allah or any of the Hindu deities. And before you chime in with your surety, first define which God you mean, and allow me to ask you why a somewhat larger group believes something totally different, and why there is little solidarity even within your own group.

I was indoctrinated as a Catholic from birth. When I began to define my own beliefs, I became an agnostic, which is to say I no longer believed in the same God I used to, and I didn’t know what else there might be. Recently, I applied an afternoon’s thought to the subject and decided my ambiguity was a weakness. I had to stand for something.

I am an atheist. There is no God. If there is a God, there might as well not be one, because it has no influence upon me or the universe. I shall live out the rest of my life as though once the universe exploded from a very small thing, and all the stars were born, and all the other rocky bits came from the stars, and on one rocky bit there were very small things that moved against the wind, and they kept doing that until they were much bigger, and they multiplied and moved on, so that one became a marmot and another a nightingale (just as one of my litter went to Philadelphia and became a nun and I came to France and became an atheist), and some started to use tools, and they liked it, and kept messing about until they knew how the tools worked, and so on, and some thought God and then thought war, and all this was called history, and what it all was for was not me or anyone, and I am here and caught up in it, one wave in a great sea, up and down and gone forever.

I live life as a kid in a candy store. I don’t care whether God or the masons made the shop, or whether it was St. Augustine or the Starlight Co. that invented peppermints. I will enjoy my time here and what I am privileged to know. I have instinct and instruction to guide me; I shall not steal or engage in malfeasance, lest I have some bad thing delivered on me. This is not fear for the punishment of sin or even karma. This is common sense for social beings.

I am in a much better position than Mother Theresa was in, as she devoted her life to serving God and for most of it couldn’t even believe in Him. She accomplished many wonderful things that I do not think I could do, but she was so unhappy. She might have done the same things for herself only (that is, for humanity) and been more content. Why did she struggle for so long with a God who was not there? When we were here? When all the ingredients for happiness and enlightenment were here?

(And I should mention that I am not a Buddhist, and Buddhism is not a religion, but I do believe in many of its tenets. It is as sure a path to contentment as anything; I may someday travel on it.)

I speak mainly about Christianity, which is the only religion I have any real experience with. What I know about Judaism makes me feel that it loses the bright things about Christianity—mainly, the teachings of Christ—and is too grounded in the mess that is the Old Testament. Islam is foreign to me, and, sadly, stigmatized. I have heard some good things about it (Cat Stevens’s eloquent explanation of why he converted) and will someday read further. I do not believe it can win me because I am not looking to be won. I am content in my faith. Hinduism is exotic and beautiful, though I am ignorant of a great deal of it. It seems quaint with its multiple Gods and incompatibility with science (something the monotheists try to include). It is something that should be as extinct as the ancient Roman and Norse beliefs, but it thrives.

If I have an affinity with anything, it is with pre-Christian animistic pagan beliefs (Celtic, aboriginal American) in a spiritual correspondence with the natural world. There is an energy that moves through things, layers that have yet to be explained. I don’t believe in any of it as conscious entities, but I do recognize a connection with it and an ability to harness it.

Here is more ambiguity. I am not a pagan and I practice little of it, except in a reliance on medicinal herbs over pharmaceuticals and a certain bolstering of spirit I receive when I enter a forest, which I recognize as a transference of energy. I do not equate any of this with true religious beliefs. It is an opinion that there are things we cannot see but can someday be measured, which is opposite of a belief in God. If I feel a life-shaping connectedness with starlight and trees, it has more to do with the history of our evolution than with mysticism.

There is a stigma attached to atheism. Some equate it with nihilism, that I believe in nothing and life is meaningless. In fact, it is entirely opposite. Life is everything and there is nothing beyond. We are here now and we should not waste our time fearing the unknown or believing the unfelt. Atheism is an affirmation of beauty in existence. I live now. There is no past I can recall and no future to influence the present. If the Christian God is real, then I shall go to Hell, which the Christians define as the absence of God. What changes? I shape my life here and hereafter.

That is another stigma, that atheists take themselves out of the race, that they idiotically discard their chances of being on the winning team. If there are four major religions (not counting Buddhism) and as unlike each other to be totally different, the majority of the world will lose the game. In this case, I reject God. Let me go with the losers, who are more diverse and interesting. And if Christianity is the winner, which sect? Do Mormons share Heaven with Catholics and Quakers? And if I am not there and my mother is, what will her Heaven be like without me? It is a fun game, but it’s a little silly to devote so much energy to it.

I have shed God as I would a bearskin coat in the tropics. I feel the sun and the breeze and suffer nothing for the fear of a winter that will never come, though some men some years ago (and a relatively short while) convinced us it would. I am lighter, happier, better for it.

Human Desire

2007-10-12T07:47:00.000-04:00

Buddhists believe that only when we are free from desire are we ready to achieve bliss. I’m not a government-registered Buddhist, but I have read a bit about them and they seem all right. I like that part about the love and oneness and fair treatment of all folks and that’s how we’ll all enjoy paradise together. Like whatshisname said. Jesus.

I thought they might be right about the desire stuff, so I’ve been keeping a log of my daily desires, the stuff that pops up in my head in the middle of all the sexy thoughts. (The iPhone is considered a sexy thought.) And when I look at the list, I realize that if I didn’t desire all this stuff—or at least if I had it already—I’d probably be a lot happier.

Catalogue Of Desires
October 11th, 2007

10:37 A.M.–– Pancakes
This is generally how I start all my days (except that this day began a little earlier than usual). This is a great first desire to have, because when I actually fulfill it and eat a stack of pancakes, I feel terrible for the next five hours. Desire doesn’t fill you up; it bloats you roly-poly.

11:12 A.M.––A giant griddle
This desire always comes saddled with the pancake one. When using a single pan to make pancakes for two, look forward to a long wait, which means a lot of NPR, house-cleaning, and a bowl of cereal while the pancakes take their sweet time coming. And don’t ever eat them as they come off the stove. Save them in the oven until they’re all done. Otherwise you’ll eat one and get sick and have all that batter left over. And how else are you going to test your fortitude in the morning than with a stack of syrup-saturated pancakes that get less pleasant by the forkful?

12:07 P.M.––A big flat TV
Now I feel gross and immobile. It’s past noon. There’s a sink full of dishes. I haven’t showered or shaved. I’ve been up for almost two hours and haven’t accomplished anything. This is how the day starts. I just want to sit down in front of a big TV and wait until my impetus slingshots back and picks me up again.

12:46 P.M.––An impetus
I forgot that I never really received one. Ever. Except the fall from the womb. Which is just enough to get me to the grave. Not quite enough to get me to turn off Veronica Mars.

12:47 P.M.––Six more seasons of Veronica Mars
Hey, bliss is nice and everything, but can it really be better than Veronica Mars? Like, is enlightenment really so great that I’m going to be cool with the fact that all of the ingredients for a great entertainment are just sitting there, unused? Is that what nirvana is, the ability to say, “Even though mankind can come together to make a great thing and keep it great forever, we’re not going to because chilling out is so much better”?

1:22 P.M.––Time machine or past military service
This is when I begin my daily ablutions. Shower. Shave. Then I get dressed. I always go about it grumpily and wish for either a time machine to go back and wake up at eight o’ clock and start my day right or military training so I’d be disciplined enough to get a proper start everyday. Usually these desires serve to pass the time easily, because I either start thinking about the possibility of time travel in a post-Einstein universe—future travel is possible; past travel may be possible if wormholes exist and can be manipulated—or the adventures I would have if I were a more physical, worldly man, and how one might get into the work of treasure hunting, which, really, is what all of us want to do.

2:31 P.M.––Wes Anderson’s life
Globe-trotting filmmaker with homes in Paris and New York. Critical and popular cachet. Carte blanche. Taste. Style. Money. Interesting friends. Talent. There you have it. And not just him, and not that he’s even my favorite filmmaker. He just kind of embodies that mode right now. (And this desire comes up at just this time because I have once again sat down in front of a blank screen and begun to wait for lightning to strike the top of my pointy little head.)

3:42 P.M.––Tetris
Over an hour into writing, I’ve gotten past the stage at which I just stare and think for fifteen minutes and the next stage of sporadic and sometime brilliant composition. Now, spent, I really wish I had Tetris on my computer, which I used to have, until I started playing right through the time I should have been writing. It made the whole process easier, but, like with pancakes, I just felt terrible afterward.

4:46 P.M.––A new computer battery
“Goldarn sumbitch piece of––! Used to last over three hours! Just when I was about to write something really first-rate!”

5:02 P.M.––A more compassionate world
At just the time that I start preparing for dinner (shopping for a half-hour, prep for an hour or more, cooking for up to an hour), I begin to wish people would just wake up and realize you’ve got to love everyone, including yourself, your enemies, and all the animals the Lord has given you dominion over. Because if we achieved this, all fear and violence would disappear, and we would all work together to create an earthly paradise. Eden is not such a lofty goal. And I might just have a place to eat tonight, one restaurant in this whole country that didn’t fry up the decomposing flesh of an unclean animal and dress it in the dirty, pus-tainted milk of oxen or some other animal that wasn’t put here to give us suck.

5:43 P.M.––Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen
Well, as long as I’m cooking everyday—a task I do enjoy so long as I can choose not to do it once in a while—I should be doing it in a blissed-out cuisine like Chef Ramsay’s. Well-lit, large, and stocked with beautiful equipment, from convection oven to high-quality knives. A great big cutting board, a huge refrigerator, and a herb garden. When cooking frustrates me, it’s always because of the equipment I’m using.

7:38 P.M.––Salt
See, how does this desire thing work? If I desire more salt in my mushroom stroganoff, does that put me on the wrong path? Should I just let it go? And if so, doesn’t that path become a bit austere? Like, I wouldn’t be eating stroganoff anyway, but raindrops or something like that.

8:04 P.M.––A renegotiated contract with God on this whole sustenance thing
I overeat a bit. I like food. I’m a ripping-good cook, and I make a lot of food. And when dinner’s over, I enjoy a buffet dessert, one of everything in the house. But the way it’s worked out, I can’t get into the Vegan Society because no one believes someone as [stocky, muscular] as me could live on pansies. And I can’t believe it either. In some respects, I’m already close to the Buddha.

After dinner, I’ve done all my work for the day. (Backtrack; you’ll find work in there somewhere.) From here on, I’m pretty much enlightened. A full belly, good music (stolen from the internet, so there wasn’t too much desire involved), a movie or a TV show, and quality time with my sweetheart leaves few of my needs unanswered for.

Although, when I didn’t have a sweetheart, nighttime was when my desires became most intense. But that’s all fixed now. Desires satisfied. And it’s made me somewhat happier. I guess I don’t really understand the Buddha’s beef with want. If I didn’t want anything, we wouldn’t be connected now. If none of us wanted anything, we’d pretty much all be down by the river or wherever, mouths gaped, drooling, unable to communicate except through grunts. And all the grunts meant, “I feel great.” Even if we didn’t feel that great, like if we had smallpox, we’d believe we felt great, because we had no unfulfilled desires. But really we kind of wanted a cure for smallpox, except there was no cure because no one ever asked for one.

So, through this reasoning, you can see why it’s important that I get that big TV and that awesome kitchen and the salt (which I already took). It’s our collective destiny. Progress and all. Checks can be sent to the address on the right.

The American Friend

2007-10-04T15:44:00.000-04:00

Dear Joey,

What strange relationships we foster! I cannot remember your face or the sound of your voice, yet through our biannual correspondence I am forced to consider you my most loyal friend. I dare say I will have to come back to Los Angeles before I die simply because you have made it feel more my home than any other place. “A letter from Los Angeles!” I cheer, and my heart glows to a color and temperature that if they were quantified would be called Home. Why doesn’t Crayola produce a box of feelings? Rage, lunacy, kinship, absence of God. How we see these cannot be so unalike.

You do me a great service, too, in quashing my sweetheart’s recurring opinion that I am incapable of making or keeping friends. An aberration she calls me, a total perversion of man’s social tendencies. She tells me of experiments with apes, infant primates raised without any companionship. They had pleasant quarters, were fed, and given some toys, but eventually they stopped eating and starved to death, afflicted by a crushing loneliness. I use all those twentieth century experiments with apes as my own moral guide. I shall do no practice that killed an ape. Here is your letter returned.

I’m sorry I missed you in Barcelona, but I have a fear of Gaudí, and if I ever saw one of his chaotic buildings in person I might surrender to it. Here in France I flinch at all art nouveau flourishes and move quickly away. I cannot embrace such skewed visions, like some Dr. Caligari nightmare come true. My heart races and I reach quickly to clutch the clean forms of my iPod and iPhone and remember that we all dream of a Jetsons future, where all buildings are temples to technology, devoid of humanity’s whimsical madness. But now rushes my heart as I try to find a building under all of Frank Gehry’s curling titanium. Fantastic, all of it, but sometimes as impenetrable as a Pollock painting. My favorite part of MOMA will always be the design room, which honors Legos and desk lamps.

(I have just come from a screening of the 1949 film of The Fountainhead, the cinematic polemic against collective thought. Gary Cooper represents the individual, the architect whose Frank Lloyd Wright buildings are too racy for a New York that still constructs buildings in the Grecian style. The film makes a good point—over and over again, like a hydraulic woodpecker.)

Time passes too easily here. Now we approach the finish, I feel like Wendy leaving Neverland for good. We have begun to make plans again, to re-enter the human race and America. It has been nice to be away, to leave behind the shame of a nation in decline. I have not become French—I have only left my American struggle for awhile. Now I have outgrown Catholicism, I have a new guilt, that of the liberal in America. Every day that I wake up and go to work or watch television or enjoy myself is a day I have let everyone down, because I know our sins and have not worked to redeem us. We are wrong on everything. How can that be? I wish we could be invaded by Swedes.

I have a plan for myself. People ask. This is it: I will make films. First, I will write television. First, I will write fiction. It will all come this way. I have thought about school, if only because my future me lives in a small, charming home with an observatory, and I need to take an astronomy class. Otherwise, I will only look at Saturn, and not all that often. Also, I think I would like to attend Oxford. I think my relationship with America is that it hurts me too much to watch. My stupid morality: if Nader runs, I have to vote for him. I hope he runs.

You see it is not enough to think right? We have to dedicate our lives to a struggle. My sister trains to be a nun. My sister trains to be an inner-city schoolteacher. My sister trains to be a child psychologist. My sister trains to be a park ranger. My sister devotes her life to raising her child correctly. What motivates us? Do we all struggle with this guilt? My dreams all cast me as a Messiah: a politician who guides America to righteousness; a philanthropist who gives away his billions to do the work all others selfishly refuse to do. These require me to get somewhere first. In the meantime, I am dedicated to myself.

No work of art ever changed the world, although Do The Right Thing did a number on me. And who is into himself more than Spike Lee? I think I am on the right track.

These letters are lessons in entropy. I will finish soon.

Good Joey, I do not know when I will see you again. I will have to resettle in Los Angeles someday and soon, for that television bit of the plan. I think I have to assimilate again into American culture, and then see where I am pointed. I must continue to write. I will say that I have little love left for New York, and can think of no charms it holds over Paris except in frequency of restaurants for vegans. But that can hold small sway, as I have become a brilliant cook, and prefer my food to nearly anything I have had in New York.

Let us make a plan, Joey, to sometime see each other, and find whether we aren’t better friends now than we ever were. In the meantime, be well, and work hard.

Sincerely,
Reilly

The Root Of Humor

2007-10-01T11:13:00.000-04:00

“Light a cigarette, Jean. Listen to me.”

“What is it?” Jean asked. He’d been in the process of lighting a cigarette. He gave Bernard a quizzical look and flared a bright match near his lips. He sucked in the smoke and let his shoulders drop a few inches. In a minute he would take off his jacket.

The thick flesh of Bernard’s hangdog jowls nearly quivered. He’d just shaved, Jean saw. Twice a day all his life and, presently, there was no wife. She left, or he kicked her out. That story wasn’t set in stone yet.

“I had a drink at Les Halles today,” Bernard began.
“Sure that wasn’t yesterday?” Jean chided.
“Shut up. Listen. You know Henri? He sells the potatoes?”
“I know Henri. On Bastille Day I get my blue, white, and red potatoes from him.”

“Shut up, jackass,” Bernard said. He paused then, and laughed, and remembered the year his wife made a potato salad that looked like the tricolor. They’d pissed her off by eating all of fraternité and not touching egalité.

“You made her leave, Jean.”
“I’ll buy you a drink.”
“Good. Bourbon.”

Jean ordered and the barman put up two glasses of bourbon. They each took a swallow. Jean repositioned himself against the bar to face the door and Bernard. “What about Henri?” he asked.

Bernard chuckled. “Ho ho. Listen. He goes around early to all the farms. All the little farms around here to get the local stuff. He gets the other stuff, too, from the south, but he gets the local stuff because it’s better. Some of these places are just a few acres, but that’s okay for the potatoes. So he has a lot of these small farmers and sometimes they give him a crate of dirty potatoes they pulled up an hour before. They don’t wash it. That’s okay—he’ll do it.”

Bernard took another drink. “One place is this old woman. I think there’s an old man but he doesn’t get up anymore. She pulls up the potatoes and puts them in a crate near the house. Henri has to pick up the crate because she can’t do it. Too heavy. Dirty potatoes.

“Henri takes them to Les Halles and washes them in the sink in his stall. He’s selling yesterday’s potatoes and washing today’s. He gets to this woman’s crate and starts washing them. Some are really caked. Fresh from the ground. Beautiful. He finds one like a big ball of dried mud. He starts picking at it, runs it under the faucet.”

Bernard put his chin to his chest and laughed. He found his breath and said, “You know what this old woman dug up? Threw in with the potatoes? Goddamn grenade!”

Bernard laughed in full bourbon-coated guffaws. Jean was nonplussed.

“No!” said Jean. “From the war?”
“From the war! And still live!”
“Bullshit,” Jean said.
“The gendarmes had to come. They cleared out Les Halles for an hour. That son-of-a-bitch was cleaning it with a potato brush!” He was really bellowing now.