DVDs From the Library-Whatever Works

There it was in the bin-the perfect evenings entertainment. A film written and directed by Woody Allen. Some great performers including Larry David. It touted itself on the DVD case "No Kidding: this is the feel-good movie of the year and a cinematic soul message."

I am an Annie Hall fan. I have watched it (and some of WA's earlier movies) many times and still enjoy it now. I think WA is an intelligent writer and film maker. But! Whatever Works only works 'part time'. It makes me squeamish to criticize Woody Allen but somebodies gotta do it.

It is so obvious that this play is WA's character from Annie Hall all grown up...From the opening scene it is also clear that Larry David is a stand-in for WA and the problem is he is incapable of delivering the lines with the same nebbishy, staccato style that WA used in Annie Hall. I am sure Mr. Allen couldn't deliver these lines like he used to either but that is why he is behind the camera now and he had the chance to pick someone who could! Or maybe he did and he didn't give Larry David the chance to do it, right? Nah! LD just couldn't and WA accepted the mediocrity. I can see it now. The whole cast and the lighting guys and the sound guys with their eyes rolling back in their heads and sick to their stomachs at the sixth grade quality of the acting. And WA (eyes firmly on the budget and the shooting schedule)saying "Cut! Print! that's a wrap!" or "Get me one of those tuna wraps off the catering table!"

There is entertainment value to this movie. It has a great cast and characters (I really liked Evan Rachel Wood as his nearly underage girlfriend. Woody still likes to think young girls are attracted to him!) and the (sometimes implausible) twists of plot are funny and compelling. There is a symmetry and logic to the story that is appealing. I want to like this movie. It just doesn't ever quite jell. Mostly I blame Mr. Allen. He was willing to accept dreck. I sense dollar $igns are the reason. If he had just kept his mind on the title of the story -Whatever Works- it could have...but it doesn't. If Mr. Allen had done his job and pushed this great cast to have done theirs this would have been a very good flick!

I give this film one cheap beer and I am going to watch Annie Hall as soon as possible to get the taste of tuna out of my mouth.

DVDs From the Library -City Island

City Island
Staring Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies and Alan Arkin

I had seen this movie once before and forgotten it completely (that should say something about it right there!) Some friends visiting our house for dinner one evening raved about it and Lizzy asked me to find it for her. I searched through the dreaded Library bin. There it was!

I am sure this film will become a staple of the Lifetime Network in the future so I could have waited. It has all the earmarks of the films that play on that basic cable channel. A little skin, a little confusion, fundamentally wacky and lovable people who screw up every thing but eventually get it right and end up with the right mate.

Andy Garcia plays a corrections officer who wants to become an actor. He hides his acting lessons from his wife who believes he must be having an affair. The balance of his family-wife, son and daughter-also have secrets which they harbor from the rest of the family. They all smoke and hide it. The son loves fat women and views them on porn sites. The daughter is a pole dancer/college drop out. Oh! and did I mention that Garcia fathered a son out of wed lock who just happens to show up in his jail? Just like real life, Huh? Actually it is more like a Marx Brother’s plot. Strangely it works and is entertaining-in the Lifetime Network sense of the word.

I like City Island. The place, not the movie. I think it could have been a better movie with the simple addition of more of the actual City Island. It wouldn’t have taken much to include more of the scenery and flavor of the homes and the views that this unique island/village within a city has to offer. The movie was ok. Enjoy it, but don’t go looking for meaningful messages or, for that matter, much of the Town of City Island. The acting is fair and the writing is ok too. I had a few good laughs. It would have been funnier with a couple of cans of Cheap Beer. That is what I rate “City Island”-two cans of cheap beer.

Full Moon-

It is a full moon again.
Don't tell me there is nothing to a full moon.
If there is nothing to the full moon
why does it pull at me so?
Why do the emotions
fill up
as if they were laddled out
of a silver cauldren
in the inky sky?
The images
of the black road
of the forest green wilderness
of the cold dark lake
are illuminated so boldly
that I ache from the contrast.
I believe in old wives tales
in fact
every twenty-eight days
I believe in nothing else.

I confided in a workman on the job
the other day
that I never walk under ladders
and , I told him,
I never get out on my wifes side of the bed.
These are, I thought,
the only two superstitions
that I believe in.
But sitting here
In the electro-magnetic spin
of the lunar gyroscope
it is quite obvious
there are other superstitious powers
that are, perhaps,
more compelling.
I believe in the pull.
I believe in the dark, cold side
of the unseeable universe.
I believe in free will
especially when
it is noticably interupted
by powerlessness.
I believe in crackling energy
and lay-wasted lethergy
in the same man
in the same moment
in the same place
unseeable and unknowable
by those all around him.

I believe the moon,
when it's full,
is wired to our souls
and it is broadcasting
with a high frequency.
in a wide band
and it covers me with a blanket
of power
of hate and lust and indecision
and panic and illogic.
Full, full , full
and as the phases
are drawn and quartered
the loosened grip
darkens.

In Times of Stress (The Peekskill Library)

It was all I could do to keep myself from killing the woman with the kid in the Library yesterday. Her toddler was pulling books off of the shelves and laughing while the fat bitch, in a voice that could be heard in the coffee shop four blocks away, kept warning the child not to play with the books. What the fuck was she doing in a library if she didn’t want the kid to ‘play’ with books? Why in the fuck weren’t they in the children’s library just across the hall? And meanwhile, how in the hell can they call this a library anyway when there was only one book by John D. Macdonald? F’ Christ’s Sake the man wrote about a hundred books and they only have one. And it is a small one. I searched all the shelves around the M’s just in case they were misplaced or in case the librarian’s couldn’t spell…I just needed one but it would have to be a heavy one so I could hit that fucking kid and her mom in the head and kill them. No JDM.

I changed my socks this morning. That is a good sign. It is a sign of my good grooming habits. Sometimes I just get up three or four (or five) mornings in a row and pull on the same pair. Usually sock wear like that coincides with shirt-inside-shirt wear. That is when I take off all my shirts and sweaters at the same time when I go to bed at night. So when I wake up in the morning they are inside one another and I can put them all on with one action. Really, this has nothing to do with grooming (neither does the socks) it is just laziness associated with a lack of direction and a touch of depression thrown in. I am seeing a lot of little signs like this (killing mothers and babies with heavy books and bad wardrobe habits). Here are some more.

When I woke up this morning I noticed the skin around my cuticles is chewed off on my thumbs. I am pretty sure I didn’t do this while I was asleep but who knows? Now that I have noticed it I will keep an eye out for my chewing and I think I will find that I am eating myself all day long. When I was five or six I used to chew my finger nails but my mother put a stop to that. She used a pepper potion that is sold just for the purpose of breaking people of the nail chewing habit. It worked. It burned my lips and mouth horribly but I am completely cured of nail chewing. In fact I can’t even stand to see someone else chewing their finger nails. The sound of a bit of finger nail bitten off (you know that little “click” that it makes?) turns my stomach over. I still have a habit of chewing off the skin around the edges of my thumb nails though. If my mother was alive she would know what to do but she’s dead so I just struggle with it myself. It starts when I detect a tiny, little bit of calloused skin near the nail and I try to get it off with my teeth. Skin is not easily removed by teeth and it doesn’t come off neatly. It comes off raggedy. It leaves a little raggedy bit that turns hardish when it dries out and then I have to take that off too and pretty soon I have largish, red patches of raw flesh near my finger nail. They hurt and it isn’t until they hurt that I realize that I have been eating myself and then it is too late to repent. The damage has been done.

Similarly, I used to eat the soft tissue on the inside of my mouth. Nip off little, tiny bits of it with my teeth. I am not sure I still do that. I will have to keep on my toes and see. I know that smoking stopped that cold for a long time. Smoking stops a lot of these bad habits but a long time ago I heard that smoking is a bad habit all by itself so I stopped. It wasn’t easy but I am actually very strong (except for wanting to kill children and mothers with books and chewing on myself) and I am proud to say that I have not had even a puff of a cigarette in more than twenty-five years. It must be a very, very strong habit though as I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t see someone smoking and want to go over and bum one.

Nipping off bits of my mouth is not something that someone else would know I am doing while eating my thumbs is quite noticeable. I don’t want people thinking I am crazy or self destructive or anything so there is one other thing I do when I am stressed-Canadian muscle exercise. In phys-ed they used to call it something like “dynamic tension” or maybe it was Charles Atlas who called it that??? Supposedly the Canadian Air Force uses it to keep in shape. I use it to get out the tension in my body without anybody seeing that I am all messed up inside. I do it by tensing up a group of muscles in my neck or jaw or arm or leg and keeping it tense until a count of ten and then letting it loose. I move the tension all over my body and then, when I am done, I am loose. I think this is invisible to everyone around me but sometimes I am not sure. Maybe they can see it happening-especially in my face and neck when the tendons sort of push out like the strings of a tennis racket. And I think the neck thing might make my ears wiggle too. Sometimes my feet and hands might jump around a bit but I think most people would just think I am just a little bit nervous or a little bit spazzy, which is OK. That is what I did at the table at the library yesterday and when I was done the woman with the kid moved away from me and left the library. I felt good and she and the kid were gone so I didn’t have to kill them with a book.

Long Island

The old ladies (Mutti and Great Oma) are inside with Elisabeth. I am out on the front porch bathed in the Long Island breeze, beneath a cloudless sky. The shuffling sounds from within are a combination of Elisabeth’s attempts to attain domestic order and the competing geriatric chaos. It is an endless loop of forgotten moments. It is Elisabeth’s persistence. It is the squabble of retreaded motions of love and strain and concern. The “white noise” of the traffic on Stewart Avenue is punctuated, every fifteen minutes or so, by the wail of the Long Island Rail Road at the nearby crossings.

Mutti is complaining that she does not want a bath. She cannot be heard clearly from the porch but I can tell (mostly from Elisabeth’s end of the conversation) that that is the problem being worked on at that moment. Mutti doesn’t believe she has a problem with hygiene. It is not her fault but it is still a problem. She can not remember five minutes ago. She can not remember if she has had a shower or bath today or yesterday. Bathing is not among the small group of biologic urges to which she will automatically respond, those being-eating, urinating, defecating , sometimes sleeping and , of course, breathing and maintaining a flow of blood trough her veins and arteries. She might forget that she has prepared four variations of lunch. She might take out bread and cheeses for sandwiches, and then forget the sandwiches and begin to defrost three or four casseroles within one hour’s time…That is behavior you expect when she becomes hungry. But one need never fear that bathing will be overdone-or done at all. It is not one of the biologic imperatives and is, therefore, never done without the aid and urging of others. Even the smell of the body “aroma” is insufficient impetus for her to bathe. (It is overpowering when one first enters the sealed up atmosphere of the house. They insist that all the windows be closed, and all the doors locked). She is immune to her own odor, whether by acclimation or mental defect, but she is not without opinion on the matter of taking a bath when urged on by her daughter. She believes that she continues her life-long habit of cleanliness and she fights and complains when Elisabeth begins to prepare a sudsy, warm bath. She chafes at the thought (however fleeting) that she is dirty. That she needs her daughter’s aid in keeping clean. That she has not attended to her own most basic functions and maintenance. Just as she “knows” that she shops daily at the Key Food (she has not been to the Key Food in years). Just as she keeps the laundry clean and stacked neatly in the dressers for both herself and her mother (her daughters-Kathy and Elisabeth-shop and do the laundry and clean and scour every square inch of the house each week) and if she feeds the cat seven or eight times a day or forgets to feed it at all (the daughters take the cat to the ‘vet’ and it is to them that it owes it’s skinny little life!) Mutti’s life is one long illusion of self-sufficiency.

Come the afternoon on this gift-from-God day the windows of the house and basement will have been opened and the air exchanged, the sour for the fresh. The shelves of the refrigerator will have been cleaned of the rotten and fetid leftovers that Mutti and Oma cannot bear to discard. In place will be fruit and new bread and cake. In the freezer there will be fresh casseroles for the week, labeled Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, all the way to Saturday when fresh ones will magically appear again. The two old women will have emerged from their fragrant baths renewed and dressed in fresh clothing.

Elisabeth comes out and sits next to me on the porch. I noticed she has been limping a little bit. She “shooed” me out of the house a half hour ago while Mutti complained loudly from inside the little first floor bathroom where the water was filling the tub. Elisabeth loves to sit on the beach on beautiful days like this one. Instead she attends to the raving needs of the two blood relatives for whom she is named. Sitting for a moment in the sun, on the porch, she lays her head back and the rays strike her face squarely. She drinks in the warmth. She doesn't need me to remind her that a few more times around the earth and the sun’s slanted, weak rays will have given up their warmth to another winter. There will be ice and snow but Elisabeth will still be making the trip to Long Island.