An Occurrence on the Acela to D.C.

I recently took the Acela to D.C. for the first time. It’s not as fast as the European bullet trains—-I once took the TVG to Bordeaux, and that was like being in a low-flying plane-—but the Acela has time-bending abilities.

I had a strangely cinematic moment on the way down to the nation’s capital.

I was reading the New Yorker, when I happened to look up just as we were passing New Brunswick, NJ. It’s distinctive enough, seeing the Raritan River, and then the white spire of Old Queens.

I went to Rutgers College, and lived for two years in town, on Bayard Street, near the train tracks. In the few seconds we were flying by, the sense of the deeply ingrained familiar drew my eye right to the window of my old apartment, straight on into my old kitchen.

There I was sitting at the kitchen table, as I often did to study, and in that instant, my twenty-year old self looked up from her book.

Our eyes met. My head was spinning. I tried to smile at her, but all I could muster was amazement. She smiled, but I realized it was a reaction to something she had just read, not to me. She had no idea she was glimpsing part of her future.

She looked happy and healthy. Suddenly she got up to answer the phone. It was "the call." That terrible call. The woman who sat back down at the table looked old and visibly crushed.

The motion of the New Yorker tumbling from my lap made me jolt and I blinked. I looked out the window, and we were just coming up to the Raritan River.

Six Frames of Film History

The film community is bidding 50th anniversary wishes to Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which opend on May 9, 1958. It isn’t one of my favorite Hitchcock, which include Rebecca, Strangers on a Train, To Catch a Thief, and Rear Window. But in 1995 I visited Robert Harris and James Katz at their office on the Universal Studios. They were deeply into the restoration of Vertigo, and one of Novak’s original suits was hanging on the door as part of their color exploration.

We had an interesting lunch, and Harris gave me 6 frames from the Interneg they had made from the original film for their restoration work. I always felt a little guilty about this, since Vertigo isn’t one of my favorites. But I had it framed in an archival shadow-box method to display, and over time I have become very attached it to.

This photo is from my frames: Madeleine at the foot of Golden Gate Bridge where she attempts suicide. Even in its 1” x 1 ½ “ size, it is stunning. I have my shadow box in a window nook, so that the diffused light will illuminate it. In the morning those fifty-year-old clouds look like Magritte, and the solitary iconic silhouette of the woman is endlessly engaging and haunting.

All that art, all that film history, captured on the proverbial celluloid. It was a wonderful gift from the restoration team.

Solitaire, Anyone?

There’s a scene at the end of the classic Emma Peel episode “The Joker” where Steed is playing Solitaire, and Mrs. Peel starts “helping.”

Mrs. Peel: “Red eight on black nine”
Steed: “I’ve seen it”
“Then why didn’t you do it”
“I was saving it for later, I was savoring it. Solitaire, as the game implies, is a game for one person”
“I know, highly antisocial”

It’s odd that Steed doesn’t call it Patience, which was the more-common British term for the game, or it was before Solitaire got bundled into Windows.

No matter. It’s all a nice pun since the episode is Mrs. Peel-centric; she goes off alone to play bridge with Sir Cavalier Rusicana, which is a ruse devised by an old German agent who wants to kill her. Highly antisocial on both counts.

I didn’t come from a card-playing family. My mother played a mean Canasta before she got married, and my grandmother liked to play Gin Rummy, and Mille Bornes with me, but that was about it. (Speaking of Gin Rummy, it’s on the cover of the New Yorker this week, with the guy creating a card-playing robot. Hmm. Card-playing must be in the air.)

I guess all kids pick up how to play Solitaire somewhere along the line. What we call Solitaire is actually a specific Solitaire game called Klondike. There are an astonishing 300 types of Solitaire listed on Wikipedia, Klondike and Spider being the most popular.

I had completely forgotten about this solo pasttime until, ironically, a New Year’s party a few years ago, in a crowded vacation house in Palm Springs. Everyone was playing Hearts, decks of cards were everywhere as were parallel games of Solitaire. And it was there that I entered the hypnotic place that is the Solitaire universe.

Playing Solitaire is a truly unique combination of the relaxing and compelling. For me the cheap thrill is at the very start—what are those 7 random face-up cards going to be? The number of random patterns is fascinating. How can 4 aces turn up out of 7? But they do. Sometimes it’s all red cards, sometimes all face cards. And from there—LIKE IN LIFE—you do what you can with the hand you’re dealt. There’s not a lot of strategy to Solitaire—I try to move the cards on the deeper piles first. I build up the suits whenever I can.

There is a satisfaction to winning, to seeing everything come out all right. There is also a crystallization when you see it just “isn’t in the cards”—what you want to do is blocked by the implacability of the binary red and black. Maybe that’s what helps at the end of a long day—it helps you let go of countless pieces of everyday life that don’t always fall into place. Move on, shuffle again, get a new set of 7 cards to work with. And seven, such a mystically, spiritually charged number itself. Some say it reveals the mind of God.

I only recently found a great website to play. It offers different backgrounds and various designs of cards. It also offers 13 different varieties to choose from, including a double decked Klondike. I highly recommend it.

No look at Solitaire would be complete without a glance at the Neil Sedaka song “Solitaire.” It’s a depressing song that has become a beautiful standard. Youtube has quite a collection of renditions, including Shirley Bassey, Clay Aiken, Norway’s own Sissel, and Neil Sedaka, But for me the definitives are from Karen Carpenter, with those lush, lush low notes, and Elvis, where the words resonate with painful layers of meaning to his own oddly solitary life.

There was a man, a lonely man
Who lost his love, thru his indifference
A heart that cared, that went unshared
Until it died within his silence

And solitaire's the only game in town
And every road that takes him, takes him down
While life goes on around him everywhere
He's playing solitare

And keeping to himself begins to deal
And still the king of hearts is well concealed
Another losing game comes to an end
And he deals them out again


The Carpenters



Elvis

The Words Are Six to One

She-who-must-be-obeyed, aka Blue Girl in a Red State, tagged me for a One-Word meme. It’s a fun exercise to encapsulate yourself like this in answer to specific prompts.

It reminded me of a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece I read back in February that has stayed with me. SMITH magazine ran a “write a 6-word memoir” contest, in honor of the legend of Hemingway writing a story in six words to win a bet.

Hemingway came up with “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Sadly evocative.

SMITH refined the story idea into a call for personal memoir, and their website has received over 30,000 entries, from all quarters.

They published a thousand of them or so in book form. The memoir chosen for the title is “Not Quite What I Was Planning,” sent in by Summer Grimes, a 25-year old hairdresser in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Beautifully said. And that it was sent in by a 25-year old makes it even more fabulous. (Let’s see what she has to say at 40.)

You can read through a bunch of them here in the New Yorker. (“Well, I thought it was funny" from Stephen Colbert)

At this point in time, here is my memoir:

Girl Interrupted, Must Return to Piano

I don’t mean it as drastic as Susanna Kaysen’s own actual memoir, or the film based on it. But in the sense that I was somewhere, and the fabric of that place was torn to shreds by The Talented Mr. Ripley, completely interrupting my life. And all of it revolved around my deep love of the piano and desire, as an adult, to learn to play.

The 6-words will change. There will be sequel.

And now for the One-Word meme, via Blue Girl and our very favorite Heretik. Pop over to see their oneness.

Yourself: Intense
Your Partner: Unknown
Your Hair: Highlighted
Your Mother: Inspiring
Your Father: A Memory
Your Favorite Item: My piano
Your Dream Last Night: pedestrian
Your Favorite Drink: Diet Ginger Ale
Your Dream Home: beachfront
The Room You Are In: Living
Your Fear: Paralyzation
Where Do You Want to be in 10 years: Paris
Who You Hung Out With Last Night: Bach
What You Are Not: Laid back
Muffins: Triple berry
One of Your Wish Items: Family
Time: 3:00 a.m.
Last Thing You Did: cook
What You Are Wearing: loungewear
Your Favorite Weather: Sunny
Your Favorite Book: GWTW
Last Thing You Ate: sesame noodles
Your Mood: balanced
Your Best Friends: scattered
What Are You Thinking About Right Now: practicing
Your Car: M104 bus
Your Summer: Sicily
What’s on your TV: House
What Is Your Weather Like: clear
When Was the Last Time You Laughed: today
What is your relationship status: Independent

Sexy Beast, I Mean Bing

Bing Crosby’s birthday is May 2, or 3. He was born in 1903, although his tombstone says 1904 because of a mix-up. This confusion about the simplest of a man’s details is the least of the problems with his legacy.

Like the Olympian gods, he is largely forgotten and unloved today. Gary Giddins made a valiant attempt to focus attention on this Mozart of the popular song with his very ample 2001 biography Pocketful of Dream. And for a brief moment, pop culture glanced at “the first white hip guy born in America” (Artie Shaw). References to him occasionally pop up: two recent are in Ken Levine’s post of Mariah Carey’s topping Elvis for number 1 hits: "If everyone in the United States buys copies of “Rubberneckin’”, “Kiss Me Quick”, and “Old Shep” Elvis Presley can reclaim his rightful crown (of being number three behind the Beatles and Bing Crosby) and order can once again be restored to the universe"; and Kim Morgan did a post on Crosby, citing one of his lesser known films, Sing You Sinners.

But those are the extreme exceptions.

Steed is always teasing that I don’t speak up for Crosby, one of my lifelong passions. And so for his birthday this year, I will.

And I’ll start with the sexy guy, Bing in the 1930s.

This Bing is unrecognizable to those who only know the smiling face in the santa hat on the all-time classic Christmas CD, or worse, the guy in the Minute Maid commercials in the 1970s warbling “there’s nooooo doubt about it.”

But in the beginning, Crosby was young and compelling. He had a distinct, astonishing voice and a way of singing that was unlike any other on the landscape.

He was a heartthrob, best seen in a movie that is almost impossible to get, the original Big Broadcast (1931, but before they started assigning years to them). Crosby plays himself, and the scenes of the women stampeding him are funny but entirely believable. Women fell in love with his voice on the radio, and the early shorts and movies use that as a story line.

Here he is, in The Big Broadcast, singing “Please” accompanied by the legendary Eddie Lang, and a bit of “Dinah,” looking like a male model for Banana Republic. Lang met Crosby when they were both in Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra, and Eddie followed when Bing left the band. They were very close, and Giddins writes how devastated Crosby was when Lang died, hemorrhaging after a tonsillectomy. It was Crosby who had recommended that Lang have his tonsils out to help with chronic laryngitis.



In 1932 Marion Davies insisted on Crosby as her leading man in Going Hollywood, a wild pastiche of a musical. It’s maybe best known for the Grand Central extravaganza number, while the “Make Hay While the Sunshine” is almost too hard to watch.

But there is one scene that deserves a place in film history: a drunk, disheveled Crosby singing “Temptation” intercut with close-ups of the smoldering Fifi D’Orsay. It’s dark and evocative, with other cuts to blurry, tightly-packed bodies, swaying to the pulsating rhythms of the song. The comments on YouTube tell it all: “how young he is” and “how sexy he is” and “Crosby has more talent in his little finger than Sinatra has in his whole body” [okay, that one is just a nice swipe at the other guy].



Yeah. That’s what propelled Crosby into the hearts and imagination of an entire generation, three quarters of a century ago. He does gain new fans amongst the young, but it’s one by one as people stumble upon him.

One more (audio) clip: Crosby in 1931 singing “Star Dust.” It’s nothing like the standard Nat King Cole. He sings it with a wild abandon. Pure passion. Pure despair. Pure, natural talent.

The Welcome Wagon

In honor of the American—Brit spirit of this blog, I’m adding Tom Watson, a Labour MP for West Bromwich East and now Cabinet Minister for Transformational Government, and the author Christopher Campbell-Howes to the Neighbors. I met Tom in RL through the amazing Venn diagram of blog circles. He has a deep belief in the democratizing and ultimately transformational power of information, primarily through the Internet. The idea is that when citizens have more knowledge and specific information about anything, they will be able to make better-informed decisions on every level, from where to live to voting on important policy decisions.

Christopher Campbell-Howes retired early from teaching in Scotland to write in the South of France. It sounds like something out of a novel itself. He landed here one day, and now I look forward to reading his books, both his expat memoir French Leaves and his novel, The Night Music.

A politician in Westminster + Scotland. Hmm. I feel a flashback coming on.

Back to the great Parliamentary romp I had when I was a senior at Southampton University, Hants. Through a friend of a friend, I was going to house-sit for a week in Wembley on our break. I went over to Ireland for a bit with a fellow American, and then went from an overnight Rosslare/Fishguard crossing straight to London, where my hostess met me. Her name was Carol, and she worked for a Scottish MP at Parliament. She had arranged for me have lunch with her boss—-whose name I am very sorry to say I don’t remember-—in one of the parliamentary dining rooms.

It was such a whirlwind—-not much sleep on the ferry, then meeting Carol at the employee entrance of Westminster. It was exciting going through all the checkpoints into the building (even back then) through a maze of behind-the-scene corridors, finally to the dining room. It’s a little blurry, but all of a sudden we were on the terrace of the building, right on the Thames, drinking sherry. It was thrilling. I tried to sear into my brain what an amazing place to be. (At that time there were no tables and chairs on the terrace.) Then we had lunch. My Scottish MP was an older, burly gentleman or a man. Thank God his accent wasn’t too thick, so I could follow his stories. Before I really realized it, I was being drunk under the table. Ah, those were the days. Wine, more wine, Irish coffee. I could barely keep up, I was tired from little sleep, and I started getting giddy from the wine and spirits, but I don’t remember any catastrophes. Soon the MP was off, back to work, and Carol was ushering me through some of the public corridors, back to the street.


The next day Carol left for the Cotswolds with her husband and 2 kids, and I had the house for 2 weeks. Which was very nice when the Englishman I had met on the Dingle Peninsula came to town . . . .

Here’s a cup of Sunday tea with Steed and Mrs. Peel, a la Peter & Gordon, for the new neighbors.

The Cost of Living (as Don Grolnick Understood It)

If I ever start to feel jaded or a little weary with blogging, I now have a moment in time to turn my thoughts to for some instant renewal. That moment is when I first watched the video memorial that Matt Zoller Seitz created in tribute to his wife, Jennifer Dawson, on the second anniversary of her shocking death at 36.

A husband’s memory of his wife is one of the most personal experiences there is. In another age the artists offered their tributes in verse.

Milton wrote:

METHOUGHT I saw my late espoused Saint
Brought to me like Alcestis from the grave,

Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint,
Came vested all in white, pure as her mind:
Her face was vail'd, yet to my fancied sight,
Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shin'd
So clear, as in no face with more delight.
But O as to embrace me she enclin'd
I wak'd, she fled, and day brought back my night.

It is an exquisite poem, particularly the last line, one of my favorite in all poetry. The poignancy of the beloved being alive and seen in the dream is heightened by the literal darkness that waking brought to the blind Milton.

Thomas Hardy wrote several poems about his wife Emma after she died, capturing her spirit here in how she never bothered with formal leave taking.

Without Ceremony

It was your way, my dear,
To be gone without a word
When callers, friends, or kin
Had left, and I hastened in
To rejoin you, as I inferred.

And when you'd a mind to career
Off anywhere -- say to town --
You were all on a sudden gone
Before I had thought thereon,
Or noticed your trunks were down.

So, now that you disappear
For ever in that swift style,
Your meaning seems to me
Just as it used to be:
'Good-bye is not worth while!'

And now a contemporary artist/filmmaker has added to the world’s sad and important in memoriam literature. It’s important because the generations who come later find comfort in knowing others have suffered the great pain, and dealt with it.

Matt’s in memoriam is not poetry, but a video on YouTube. It is a haunting piece set to the mastery of Tony Bennett singing “Some Other Time” accompanied by the incomparable Bill Evans. The words so beautifully add dimension to the images of a young woman who was daughter, wife, and mother.

"Where has the time all gone to?
Haven't done half the things we want to
Oh, well
We'll catch up some other time"

It’s all part of the revolution we are witnessing; that this haiku on the deepest experiences of LIFE—-told through images--combined with such towering talents as Bennett and Evans, is sitting on our desktop, as accessible as e-mail. I still find it extraordinary. I think the overall impact of this creativity will not be understood for many years, but I am certain that humanity, one individual at a time, is the better for it. And Matt's blog is the reason so many of us know him. His work drew us all back, the way the best blogs will.

I know that anyone who finds Matt’s video for Jennifer, say through the Bill Evans tag, will be moved by the love that embues it. And you just can’t ask for more, given the circumstances.