Tuesday After the 2009 Fourth of July Weekend

July 7, 2009 at 7:11 pm (Movies, Quotes, Son)
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It’s a gorgeous day. Son has gone to mail an application to work in the California Mid-State Fair, in late July.   Gracie is having one more day of IV fluids at San Carlos Pet Hospital, but the vet says she can finally go home this afternoon. YAY!!! Meanwhile, our older beagle, Bella, sleeps and snores as usual. But now we keep the back door to the garden shut, all the time.

For a while self watched the Michael Jackson accolades, and then she decided to go to the garden. It makes her feel a little mournful, to remember that she is responsible for Gracie’s near-fatal poisoning. What incredible luck, that Gracie pulled through. Otherwise self would feel very differently about the garden, today.

Last night, such was our little family’s jubilation at Gracie’s miraculous spunk and grit, that we broke out the popcorn and watched “Twilight.” That was quite an interesting movie! There is poetry in the cinematography, though the dialogue is mostly risible (”Hello, I am Edward,” spoken over a lab table. Many piercing, meaningful glances thrown Kristen Stewart’s way. Before self saw this movie, she was under the impression Robert Pattinson could act. Now, she’s not so sure).

Self thought the moody cinematography and Kristen Stewart’s performance were perhaps the best things about the movie. Hubby reminded self that the movie had won “Best Kiss” at the MTV Movie Awards (What a surprise: self hadn’t even known hubby was listening to the program). Self loved the opening scene, where a camera tracks a deer’s pell-mell progress through a forest. Also, the floor-level camera work during the movie’s climax, the way the action is inter-cut with shots from Kristen/Bella’s point of view, as she lies injured on the floor. Self thinks one of the highlights of the movie is the scene where the Vampire family plays baseball, all moody pouts (like no other family fun & games in the world, dear blog readers, but oh so ineffably cool), and the one where Robert Pattinson’s character tells Kristen Stewart’s character that he was trained not to take human life, but that doesn’t dampen his desire for real, human blood because not having it be a part of his vampire diet is “like eating tofu everyday.” (!!@@##)

Self, though, feels that any guy with hair as ridiculously blow-dried as Robert/Edward’s (It is, if one can believe this, even more ridiculous-looking than Zac Efron’s “do”) would be made the instant butt of all manner of high school jokes. Seriously!

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Quote of the Day: C. P. Cavafy

July 5, 2009 at 1:51 pm (Holidays, Places, Quotes, Voices, Writers and Others)
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6: 49 a.m. — Reading, in the garden, the poet C. P. Cavafy’s “Alexandria.” Last night, neighbors on two sides exploded rockets, gave parties. The noise spilled over into our yard, it was breathtaking. Read the rest of this entry »

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Eugene O’Neill Redux

July 2, 2009 at 6:13 pm (Plays, Quotes, Recently Reviewed)
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Self is extremely curious as to why the Robert Falls production of Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” closed early on Broadway ??!!

Self loved the play when she saw it at the Goodman!  It was definitely the highlight of self’s first trip to Chicago!

So, self was very happy to see an article about Eugene O’Neill in The New Yorker of 11 May 2009.  And she’s been wondering how to blog about it ever since.

Let’s see:  “Desire Under the Elms” brought the original cast –  Pablo Schreiber, Carla Gugino and Brian Dennehy –   to Broadway.  Here’s what Hilton Als has to say about it:

” . . .  the most powerful character in the beginning of “Desire Under the Elms” is the ultimate unattainable woman:  a dead mother.”

Wow!  That is just so funny.

The young hero of the play, Eben, is now “the only woman in the house; he wears his mother’s apron to cook for his brothers and keeps her parlor intact with a Norman Bates-like fetishism.”

Als has a really great way of re-creating dramatic mood.  Here’s how he describes the play’s opening:

” …  Falls opens the production in silence.  We see the two older brothers carting stones across the murky landscape.  Then we watch as Peter removes the entrails of a pig  –   the landscape can yield only blood, which is one reason that the brothers soon head for California.”

and

“We watch the daily life of the three characters  –  Eben, Abbie, and Ephraim –  develop to the strains of Bob Dylan’s Not Dark Yet.”

Als describes the play’s two young leads (Gugino and Schreiber) thus:

“Separately, they have spun poetry in the most literal-minded of mediums:  television.”

He has good things to say about both, but it’s his analysis of the female character that really wows self:

“While watching Gugino’s pretty, deceitful, lonely heroine bringing down the house she so longed for, I thought of the imperious and beautiful Carlotta Monterey, O’Neill’s last wife …  Monterey, a former actress, knew how to love and torture and deceive him just enough to keep him writing about the same woman over and over again.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Quote of the Day: Guy Trebay on the Significance of the Sequined Glove

June 30, 2009 at 11:14 am (Quotes)
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It was impossible to look away from him  –  not when he was a dimpled child singer crowned with a pillowy Afro, not when he became a pop demigod uniformed in rhinestones and epaulets to command what were always referred to as his armies of fans, and not when his surgical transformations mirrored back to the culture the blurring of boundaries demarcarting adulthood, sex, and even race.

There was no way to know what was on Michael Jackson’s mind as he journeyed from boy to man and partway back, from a brown-skinned man to one so pale he required an umbrella when he went out in the sun, and from a pop star with a quirky but defined masculinity to one who seemed most comfortable in a more nebulous zones.  What seemed clear is that all of it was considered.  All of it was intentional.

More than almost any entertainer in memory, Michael Jackson was entirely of show business.

– Guy Trebay, The New York Times, Sunday 28 June 2009

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Self Missed All Kinds of Hot-ness

June 29, 2009 at 8:34 pm (Places, Quotes, Surprises)
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While self was in the Village yesterday, getting all kinds of lost on the hunt for the Cornelia Street Café and witnessing all manner of ass-grabbing craziness (”Hey, buddy, it’s Gay Pride Day and you’re in the Village!”  This uttered after a young man, strolling along with his girlfriend, had his butt grabbed by a bunch of somewhat drunken revelers and protested, “I’m straight!”), self completely missed seeing the following celebrities:

  • Johnny Depp, who was creating mayhem in an Italian restaurant in the Village
  • Rachel McAdams and Harrison Ford, who were filming “Morning Glory” in lower Manhattan

Self spent every day of this trip in the Village or lower Manhattan.  Couldn’t she have bumped into someone famous during one of her peregrinations?

Self thought she had a Mary Louise Parker sighting, but after she asked M if  the “Weeds” star had an apartment in the Upper West Side, M said she didn’t think so.  So that probably wasn’t Mary Louise Parker in a grey mini-dress self saw yesterday, rushing to the subway on 72nd and Broadway.  It sure looked like her, but it probably wasn’t.

M’s daughter Allegra did say that Mikhail Baryshnikov used to have an apartment nearby.  But no one has seen him around in ages.  He probably looks so different now that everyone thinks they haven’t seen him, even if they really are seeing him, if you take one’s meaning.

Oh well!  At least self had one certifiable celebrity sighting:  Anne Hathaway!  On her first night here!

And she saw Wells Tower, whose New Yorker stories self loves, in the flesh!  During his reading at Solas.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned

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Slightly Crazed Again

June 27, 2009 at 5:49 pm (Dogs, Movies, Quotes)
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. . .  but in a good way.

Self is getting ready to walk the divine Miss H.  Self is smitten.  Yes, self is smitten with dog love for Miss H.  For her absolutely fragrant paws, for her bright red harness, and her tiny little poops that are about one-tenth the size of a beagle’s poop.  No wonder the apartment is decorated with paintings of this wondrous creature.

In the meantime, self is also obssessed with finding a place to see “Hurt Locker,” which just opened in Manhattan (Self remembers seeing the lead actor in “28 Weeks Later”!).  The Wall Street Journal reviewed it yesterday.  The title of the review was Shock, Awe, Brilliance

!!@@##

The movie is about a “man who has a special relationship with bombs.  He loves the circuits that must be decoded, the detonators that must be disconnected.  He loves the challenge presented by each bomb, the chance to taunt fate and come up a winner or go up in flames; it’s the ultimate form of a gambler’s high.”

Ah, so many movies to see, so little time.  The Wall Street Journal also happens to look kindly on the following:

  • Cameron Diaz’s latest, “My Sister’s Keeper,” based on the novel by Jodi Picoult and also starring Abigail Breslin in yet another tearjerker of a role
  • “The Stoning of Soraya M”, about “a blameless young wife in an Iranian village . . .  buried to her waist in the town square and stoned to death by her fellow villagers, who’ve been misled by an unprincipled mullah . . . “

Neither of these movies are showing yet, back in Redwood City.  Self really wishes she could locate a cinema nearby, but even after a few walks with Heloise she hasn’t noticed any.  But, she knows that in New York, unless one knows where to look, one misses things, even huge things like movie theaters.  It may turn out, for example, that there’s a theater a block away, but self would have passed it without giving it a second glance.

And, lest one think that Journal reviewer is becoming “soft,” scattering positive reviews right and left like so many bon-bons, here’s a quote from the review of Michael Bay’s “Transformers 2″  :

What words of wisdom can a movie critic offer in the face of an antimovie that will give its many fans the pleasure of watching machines battling machines without the distraction of coherence or humanity?  Then a word did come to me:  Max-Lite.  It’s the brand of ear plugs I’ve found best for defense against deafening movies, and the brand I used to protect my tympanic membranes against “Revenge of the Fallen.”  If only I’d had protection for my brain.

(Whoops!  M’s daughter Allegra just walked in.  What. a. gorgeous. gal.  Legs that go on forever.  We agree on a place to have dinner tonight:  a burger place on the East Side.)

Self misses home.  She is glad that Miss H slept curled up against her side last night.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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What a Day

June 26, 2009 at 1:24 am (Booksellers, Conversations, Places, Quotes, Surprises, Voices, Writers and Others)
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Can you believe Michael Jackson died ???

Self heard the news on her way home from the Village.  She was with Drew.  He got a call from a friend, and in the middle of the call he suddenly turned to self and said, “Michael Jackson just died!”

And self said, No, that’s some kind of joke!

And Drew said, No joke.

His friend had gotten 10th row seats to Jackson’s upcoming concert in London.  The tickets were a thousand each.  Drew’s friend was pretty upset.

Then, just behind us, a group of people started talking about it.  We heard one man go, “Michael Jackson just died!”

“How?” self asked Drew.  “Was it suicide?”  (Why did that thought first occur to self?  She knows not the reason, dear blog reader)

Drew said, “No, some kind of heart attack.”

Then, we passed a group of tweens, somewhere on 3rd Avenue, and they were chanting, at everyone passing, “Michael Jackson just died!  He flat-lined in the hospital!  They couldn’t revive him!”  The girls were smiling, practically giddy with excitement.  How strange was that? Only in New York, etc etc

Self parted with Drew around Astor Place.  She was walking towards St. Marks Bookshop.  Then she remembered, she used to live here.  It was 30 years ago.  She sub-let an apartment from a New York City Opera singer.  The location was 8th and 1st.  Self somehow remembered the street as being somewhat “grunge,” she remembers stepping over the prostrate bodies of drunks passed out on the sidewalk.  There was a dentist who lived on the floor below hers, but she only saw him with a patient once.  The patient was seated in an ordinary wooden chair, and the dentist had tilted it back so that he could look straight into the patient’s mouth.  There were youths with green spikey hair and safety pins in their noses draped around the cube on Astor Place.

Now, 8th street is one sushi joint after another.  Self stepped into a beauty salon to inquire how much they charged for haircuts, and they said, $50.  How the street has changed!

Self was glad she went to the reading, for aside from the fact that Wells Tower has a real knack for describing gross-out scenes, she got to listen to a writer whose work she is unfamiliar with, Fiona Maazel.  And that girl just bowled her over.  Her piece was from a novel-in-progress, and the whole thing involved gerontophilia and even a mention of self’s beloved Spock (as in “Hello, I am Spock, I have no human feelings!” end quote.  Can you believe the coincidence, dear blog readers?  Spock is everywhere!  Self even expected Zach Quinto to pop up in the audience!)

After the reading, self hailed a cab and went directly home.  To prepare for yet another day of exciting and improbable occurrences.

Stay tuned.

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In a Tower

June 24, 2009 at 3:46 pm (Food and Drink, Places, Quotes)
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In a tower, self feels she is in a tower. The radio hums a meaningless drone, Heloise sleeps on her little pillow. Far below is the hum of traffic and the occasional siren. The schoolchildren in the classroom in the next building are silent today.

Yesterday, dinner with a cousin on East 40th street. The subway train from Bleecker to Grand Central had a functioning airconditioner, thank God. The crowds spilled out on 42nd Street, self’s feet ached from all the walking.

But it has not rained! Not since the night of her arrival. Everyone talks about it, though: they all say it rained terribly last week, or a few days ago, or even just before self arrived. Thunderstorms! Lightning! It all sounds terribly dramatic and exciting.

From California drift echoes: Son is always out! But that’s what young men do, isn’t it? They go out. Hubby is always at work. But we’re lucky, aren’t we? That he has work?

Self reads yesterday’s New York Times. Ex-tennis champion Yannick Noah apparently now has a thriving musical career (and, judging from the evidence of the accompanying picture, still looks good). M says that “August: Ossage County” is a really good play.

Self hasn’t even called her niece and her nephews, all of whom are home from their various colleges. Her daily route has taken her from West End to the Village and back again. The Upper East Side might as well be on another planet.

For now, this apartment on West End Avenue, with Heloise the dachshund resting on a pillow beside her, is home.

Here’s something interesting self found in yesterday’s New York Times Science section. It has to do with food cravings, a topic always of immense interest to self. The title is “How the Food Makers Captured Our Brains” :

As head of the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. David A. Kessler served two presidents and battled Congress and Big Tobacco. But the Harvard-educated pediatrician discovered he was helpless against the forces of chocolate chip cookies.

In an experiment of one, Dr. Kessler tested his willpower by buying two gooey chocolate chip cookies that he didn’t plan to eat. At home, he found himself staring at the cookies, and even distracted by memories of the chocolate chunks and doughy peaks as he left the room. He left the house, and the cookies remained uneaten. Feeling triumphant, he stopped for coffee, saw cookies on the counter and gobbled one down.

“Why does that chocolate chip cookie have such power over me?” Dr. Kessler asked in an interview. “Is it the cookie, the representation of the cookie in my brain?”

Et tu, Dr. Kessler?

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Reading for the Day: William Langewiesche on Birds and Aircraft

June 18, 2009 at 9:53 pm (Quotes, Writers and Others)
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When Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed US Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River a few months ago, he became an instant folk hero.  The following is from an article about Sullenberger in the June 2009 issue of Vanity Fair:

From 1990 through 2007 in the United States alone, civil aircraft struck birds on several hundred thousand occasions, often killing multiples at a time.  The toll leveled around 2002, apparently because of the decline in air traffice following the September 11 attacks, but this proved to be a temporary retrieve.  By 2007 the slaughter had soared to record levels, and with it had come a tendency to blame the victims and persecute them on the ground.  There are some six billion birds in the United States, every one of them an easy target.  Persecuting them on the ground is known as “mitigation.”

What have we wrought?  The answer, again from Langewiesche:

State wildlife agencies “captured breeding pairs of an endangered but super-size subspecies known as the giant Canada goose, and by clipping their wings forced them to settle permanently into authorized nesting grounds along the Eastern Seabord and elsewhere in the United States.  The offspring of these clipped-wing geese imprinted to the new locations, and, having lost the collective memory of migration, became full-time resident populations.”

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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Summer Reading: “Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro”

June 18, 2009 at 4:53 pm (Quotes, Voices, Writers and Others)
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Last night, while hubby and self were having dinner in front of the TV, we heard on the news that a second Bay Area resident has died from the A(H1N1) virus, this one a middle-aged man who had no prior history of susceptibility.  And yet, here we are, still going about, still watching movies, still driving here and there, and the news makes no difference.

Only, it is difficult to sleep.

Dearest Mum is wherever she is, self doesn’t call anymore.

On self’s lap is a big, heavy book, with the story “Faith, Love, Time and Dr. Lazaro.”  The author is Greg C. Brillantes.  He, like self, was an Atenista.

The story is about a doctor in some un-named provincial town (There is mention of a San Miguel Bridge –  where would that be?).  The doctor has to make a night call, so his teen-aged son offers to drive.  And while they are driving, the doctor thinks of “light-years, black space, infinite distances; in the unmeasured universe, man’s life flared briefly and was gone, traceless in the void.”

Self thinks these are extremely heavy thoughts.

And no wonder.  A few paragraphs on, an image comes to the doctor’s mind:  “slashed wrists, part of the future dead in a boarding house room,” the doctor’s other son.

Brillantes writes:  “Sorrow lay in ambush among the years.”

What. a. beautiful. sentence.

Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.

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