Category: Mere Words

Rumor has it that a publisher made an offer on my book.

More to follow…

 

My recent efforts to expand my offerings in the publicity arena have resulted in a new website. Designed with the individual in mind, Mere Words Media Relations offers affordable publicity services to writers, actors, musicians, and artists of all disciplines, as well as the small-business owner. Famous people and large corporations aren’t the only ones who benefit from — or can afford — the services of a publicist. 

If you know someone who might be interested, please point them in the direction of the website or put them in touch with me. 

Thanks.

The house I was born into in Salt Lake City was located across the street from what is now a stylish, maze-like mall called Trolley Square — what back then was a dilapidated trolley barn. The house itself is gone, too; while far from a paradise, it indeed was replaced by a parking lot. Forty-four years ago, I was out delivering Valentines when I witnessed Mrs. Egan, who lived across the street from us, get hit by a car speeding along Seventh East, in front of Trolley Square. Years later, as a teenager, my best friend Ellis and I used to regularly play pinball at the arcade there. In 1996, I met Elliott Murphy when he performed at the Wooden Dog (before it relocated to Park City), the beginning of a relationship that continues to this day. I enjoyed many a dinner with my folks at Rodizio Grill. My friends Larry and Lou and Steve and Marv and I used to regularly escape from work for lunch at Desert Edge Brewery. And in 2005, I took my dad to see the amazing Grizzly Man at Trolley Square, the only time we’ve ever attended a movie together alone. Deb and I went to the mall, too, during one of our last visits to Salt Lake.

On Monday evening at Trolley Square, dressed in a tan trenchcoat and carrying a shotgun and a .38 and a backpack laden with ammo, Sulejman Talović, an eighteen-year-old Bosnian refugee, killed five innocent people and wounded four others. A quick-thinking off-duty cop quelled any further shootings and police ultimately shot Talović to death. The story, despite the Bosnian twist, is a familiar one: “Although he was a loner and withdrawn,” according to today’s Salt Lake Tribune, “Sulejman Talović seemed normal and ‘nice’ to the few people who knew him.”

I didn’t know him, but all of my aforementioned memories, good or bad, now forever take a backseat to the crimes of Sulejman Talović.

Slowly I take off my shoes and roll up my pants before dipping my toe — the right big one — back into the vast pond that is the blogosphere. More than three months have passed since I last posted here. Why? I’ve been busy as hell, for one thing: researching and writing my book, working with my agent to get it in front of publishers; and expanding my publicity services. More to follow about both.

About these last few months, with its challenges and achievements and occasional disappointments, I’m reminded of a passage from Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (based on the Georges Bernanos novel). With a face like a pinched and pious James Dean, Claude Laydu as the country priest writes in his diary: 

Keep order all day long,
knowing full well disorder
will win out tomorrow,
because in this sorry world,
the night undoes the work of the day.

I’ll be back soon.

Yesterday, walking along Flatbush, I passed a gentleman who had just emerged from McDonalds and who, by his dress, had hopefully seen better times. He looked as if, at some point in his life, he had tried in his way to be free. The man didn’t look at me but above me, towards the source of several throaty graaas and skveets. (I must confess that, at the time, I didn’t realize what I was hearing were graaas and skveets; but the reference materials I’ve since read assure me that’s indeed what I heard.) After I passed the man, I heard him crying out excitedly behind me, and turned to find him looking skyward. Pointing to the top of the telephone pole that stood between us, he approached me and said, “Peruvian parrots! I heard about them a year ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen them!” I looked up and, to be sure, several bright green birds sat on the telephone wire or fluttered in and out of the stick nest they had crafted around the transformer. 

“They’re the only parrots that make their nests like that,” I told him. “Other parrots just use a hole in a tree.” The birds often breed colonially in their single large nests, with separate entrances for each couple. Known as Monk Parakeets, or Quaker Parrots, the birds belong to a species of parrots that originally hailed from Brazil and Argentina. Legend has it that in 1967 or 1968, a large shipment of the birds, destined for sale at New York City pet shops, escaped at JFK. Over the prevailing decades, the birds established their domain and now, throughout Brooklyn, their nests are commonplace atop telephone poles, created around the warmth of the transformers (which apparently sometimes overheat and catch fire).

According to the experts, the birds are highly intelligent and social creatures. Those kept as pets routinely develop large vocabularies. The in-the-wild Brooklyn variety, however, are only known to say “Oy vey!” and “Fuhgeddaboudit!”

Yesterday, the man, still mesmerized by the site of the brightly colored wildlife, an unexpected gift outside the golden arches, reached over and touched my arm as he said, “They’re a blessing.”
 
      

Some lunatic has put online all 2,846 of Pauline Kael’s capsule reviews from her fine compendium, 5001 Nights at the Movies. While I don’t advocate the unauthorized hijacking of anybody’s copyrighted works (the site’s been out there for a while now, so who knows whether or not it’s been sanctioned), it’s indeed handy having these insightful cinematic kernels available at one’s fingertips. (Which is to say, it saves me the arduous task of getting up off my butt and taking the book itself off the shelf.) Such is the insidiousness of the Internet.

On paper or in cyberspace, one thing these reviews reveal is that Kael was at her best writing in the long form. Reduced to the amount of space usually permitted in Entertainment Weekly, often lost are the insights, the snap of her words, and the sense of enjoyment that shone through her writing. Kael, like Paul Nelson, was as much a stylist as she was a critic, in some cases rendering the reviews she wrote better than the films she was writing about.

Ten reasons I love living in NYC:

1. Thanks to nydeborah‘s brother and sister-in-law, last night nydeborah and I attended the opening of Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life, 1990-2005 at the Brooklyn Museum.

2. Thanks to nydeborah‘s persistence (tempered, I hope, by my amusement), we prevailed over the drastically mismanaged distribution of first come, first served tickets for the “conversation with the artist” and landed seats in the first row, right in front of Leibovitz and museum director Arnold L. Lehman.

3. The pieces of paper fastened to our seat backs identified us as “Guests of Annie Leibovitz.” Whoda thunk it?

4. nydeborah got to ask Leibovitz a tough question about life and death and the whole damn thing. (Leibovitz’s life with, and the death of, Susan Sontag is a major concern of the exhibit.)

5. A last-minute addition to the evening’s festivities was a performance by Patti Smith on the museum’s fifth floor, right outside the Leibovitz exhibit.

6. We were (again) right up front, this time stage right, for the short but lovely acoustic concert (close enough to see Patti, before the show, emerge from a backstage meeting with Leibovitz, her mother, Sontag’s daughter, and assorted family members, and wipe a tear from her eye).

7. For her last number, Smith recounted how, a few years ago at her annual New Year’s Eve concert at the Bowery Ballroom, “Someone came backstage and told me that Susan Sontag had been dancing to this song.” Then she and her band launched into “Because the Night.” Leibovitz rose to the occasion to dance with her five-year-old daughter Sarah while, directly across from us, Sontag’s daughter kept wiping away the tears.

8. Afterwards, serpentining our way through the museum and admiring Leibovitz’s work, we happened upon Lenny Kaye, Smith’s guitarist (as well as rock critic and the man responsible for the classic Nuggets collection). After saying how much we’d enjoyed the show, I reminded him that we’d met before (last month at Paul Nelson‘s memorial service), and asked him if I might interview him for my book about Nelson. Kaye admitted that he hadn’t known Paul that closely. “So I’m not sure how much help I’d be to your book. But,” he added as we parted, “I look forward to reading it.”

9. On our way out, we wandered through the reception, which by then was winding down, weaving our way through the various looming Rodins as I snagged a few of the remaining potato chips.

10. I got to go home with nydeborah.

While it certainly wouldn’t qualify for Paul Schrader’s canon of great films (or anybody else’s, for that matter, including mine), whenever I happen across this 1957 movie (sometimes calling itself The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas) when it airs on Turner Classic Movies, I inevitably watch until the end. Director Val Guest treats screenwriter Nigel Kneale’s intelligent script so matter-of-factly that parts of the movie achieve a documentary feel (helped along, admittedly, by the wealth of stock footage of the Himalayan mountain range and avalanches). 

I remember staying up late one night to watch this, for the first time, as a child, and being absolutely mesmerized by Peter Cushing’s long-awaited face-to-face encounter with the Yeti. The effect remains the same for me today: menace mixing with mystery as the unbelievably tall beings step from the shadow into the light, finally revealing the eyes of the Yeti. Those age-old eyes. 

“You see, in this world there is one awful thing, and that is that everyone has his reasons.”

I’ve known that quote well for many years, thanks to the writings of Paul Nelson (who referenced it often), just as I’ve known that the man responsible for originally uttering those words was Jean Renoir. But until last week, when I watched his fine film The Rules of the Game for the first time in over twenty years, I didn’t know (or I’d forgotten) that the quote emanated therein. Spoken by the pivotal character Octave, played by Renoir himself, hearing the words spoken aloud, in French, was a surprise and a revelation.

(In writing a biography of Paul Nelson and collecting his best writings into book form, and trying to understand how someone so talented and so loved came to an end that few of his old friends could comprehend — living a life that was solitary at best, lonely at worst, while no longer writing for publication — I’ve been tempted to rely on Renoir’s words to explain and excuse what happened. Thus far that strikes me as too easy; but then, I’ve more than once used Renoir’s quote to explain my own actions.)

In the September/October 2006 issue of Film Comment, director Paul Schrader writes an ambitious, lengthy (the longest article the magazine has published in its 42 years), erudite, and sometimes impenetrable piece entitled “The Film Canon” (the introduction to which may currently be found online). Supposedly sans favoritism and “taste, personal and popular,” based on “those movies that artistically defined film history,” he cites The Rules of the Game as the number one greatest film of all time.

According to Schrader: “For me the artist without whom there could not be a film canon is Jean Renoir, and the film without which a canon is inconceivable is The Rules of the Game.”

It is no doubt a great film: funny and poignant and heartbreaking and, ultimately, very moral (thus satisfying Schrader’s dictum that “no work that fails to strike moral chords can be canonical”). But even if it were not, if it were only a so-so movie that happened to contain Renoir’s memorable quote, which spoke to me last week as if it were Paul Nelson trying to help me understand, there’d be a place in my heart for The Rules of the Game.

“Let me tell you about the very rich,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote. “They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.” 

The very rich are also different because they can afford to spend $4.00 for a regular order of fries at Pommes Frites in Manhattan’s East Village. Six and a quarter will get you an unbelievably large helping and, if you’re hosting a small party, you can order a double for $7.50.

                                                                        

 

Now, I’m not very rich (or even rich), but I partake of Pommes Frites — where the fries aren’t French, they’re Belgian — whenever possible. Two nights ago, I circled the block numerous times, each time more desperately, in search of a parking space. Parking, alas, is the only thing missing from Pommes Frites’ menu. Last night, however, thanks to nydeborah graciously offering to remain in the double-parked car while I hurried into the restaurant — as deep as a sidewalk is long, and about as wide, too — I got my fry fix. 

About the menu: fries. That’s it. Just fries — and more than two dozen gourmet dipping sauces. For a boy from Salt Lake City, the home of fry sauce, this is heaven on earth. I recommend the roasted garlic mayo. 

Like all things truly decadent, the desire to gorge yourself with these long, lithe pieces of potato is quickly satisfied; but that doesn’t stop you from wanting more, eating more. And by the time you’re finished, a slightly dirty feeling supplants the one of satisfaction, and you drop your head into your greasy hands, stomach so full it aches. But, ending this post with a quote by the same author with whom it began, “Sometimes it is harder to deprive oneself of a pain than of a pleasure.”