Sunday, January 28, 2007
No fame, no blame
When first I moved to NY, 17 years ago this year, I was struck by the blase attitude most New Yorkers seemed to have when confronted with famous people. I was from San Francisco, where sighting any of the handful of immediately recognizable local celebrities -- Robin Williams, Sam Shepard, any member of the Grateful Dead -- was cause for comment for days. It took me a while to appreciate that one of the reasons celebs like NY was that people didn't bother them on the street, no matter how much they might secretly crave the recognition.
Then again, the stars I spotted at first were of such low wattage that they hardly recognized themselves. I remember having lunch at
Wolf's Deli on 57th Street and sitting next to
Steve Allen, who was speaking into a minicassette recorder. The only person I could think to tell who would care was my mother back in Petaluma ("That's nice, dear.") Wolf's is gone now, as is Allen and my mother.
As time went on and my social circle grew I came to understand that the rules were not so simple. While New Yorkers feign a blase attitude, I have many friends (and friends' wives) who never miss making an opportunity to tell me what famous actor/writer/bon vivant they have recently supped/weekended/gone shopping with. They will even underline the connection, giving me the celebs bonafides and intimate details (names of pets and children, make of automobile, visible tattoos) so I don't miss the point. Whatever it is.
Plainly, this isn't a regional conflict. The other night I had dinner with a few people from the midwest who I didn't know. Within minutes it was made plain that the woman beside me was related by marriage to the most famous person in her city, one with more than its share, and what a burden it was for her and her family that everyone knew and made a point of belaboring the connection. (One I would not have been aware of were it not for her.) She told the table of a stranger who said to one of her children, "I just read a book by someone. Do you know who it is?"
The kid, for whom books still have pictures and end with a goodnight kiss, blanked. "Santa?" he said.
Just a reminder for all the egos in the room: there is fame and there is international superstardom. Any fool can write a book/host a show/star in a movie. Come see us when you've given away a few billion gifts.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
Where winter never ends
Finding a family-friendly movie to watch at home is a challenge when your 13-year-old daughter favors slapstick and your wife wants romantic comedy but you're in the mood for something more existential. I floated the possibility of the two-disc Beckett on Film that Netflix had just delivered but settled for something more meaningful and absurd.
Groundhog Day.
Actually, I had introduced Franny to the film this summer when we were vacationing in Amagansset but the DVD we rented out there was damaged and we only got halfway through
Bill Murray's endless day. Santa had brought her a fresh copy for Christmas and though I've seen it about a dozen times now, I found it had only improved with time. The time that stands still, of course.
I usually skip the extra features on DVDs but Peggy and I ended up watching a short entitled "The Weight of Time" afterwards, featuring interviews with director Harold Ramis, screenwriter Danny Rubin, Andie MacDowell and ubiquitous character actor
Stephen Tobolowsky who plays insurance salesman Ned Ryerson. (You know: Needlenose Ned. Ned the Head. Bing!) Rubin confessed that Ramis had changed the order of the script -- originally the audience met Murray's obnoxious weatherman Phil Connors when he was in demigod mode, boasting of knowing the story of every single person in town -- and made MacDowell more of a love interest.
The latter was an obvious move: without a girl to get it would be hard to care about Connor's dilemma, continuously reliving the same day, but by following his transformation from arrogant asshole to selfless saint, catching kids falling from trees and fixing old ladies' flats, Ramis did more than employ the character arc. He made Groundhog Day a story of enlightenment. He said he knew they were on to something when he started to get letters from Buddhists saying that he must be one of them, or Christians who said it was a parable of the Passion, and Hindus and Jews... I even saw it as a 12 step allegory: Connors, who lives only for himself, finds escape through service. It takes a while, of course. Rubin estimates Connors lives the same day in Punxsetawney for thousands of years.
"You are locked within your suffering and your pleasures are the seal,"
Leonard Cohen sang. Ned Ryerson might add: "Watch out for that first step; it's a doozy!"
Monday, January 15, 2007
California peace in rest
Continued from below: Given its history -- drunken, rowdy, half-cocked -- it should not be surprising that there are more
AA meetings in SF than there are in Brooklyn, and that's saying something. Not only can you get yourself a dose of program, if you're down with that kind of thing, at nearly any hour of the day up to midnight, you can find one that might specialize in people like you. Not just drunks, Jewish drunks (the 12 Schleppers), recovering Deadheads (Wharfrats) and the motorcycle punks who make up the infamous Tuesday night meeting in the Mission, Boys Night Out.
I knew that this meeting was going to be slightly unorthodox when the opening statements were read to backtalk and cavils from the regulars there; instead of "higher power" one dude kept calling his higher power "vagina" (works for me) and some of the standard AA texts, like the excerpt from the Big Book chapter entitled
How It Works, had been freely and obscenely adapted as well. The meeting never actually came to order but just when I thought things there might be too out of control for the first timer I had brought with me, a funny thing happened.
In order to speak, meeting members had to wear a plastic Viking helmet, complete with horns, and when these guys donned the ceremonial helmet people shut up and most of what the speakers said was more familiar. Reocovering drunks and junkies talked about how much better life was now that they weren't living just for themselves, but cared about other people, and when it came to recite the
serenity prayer at the end, even God got his due.
Her due, I should say.
Having lived in NY now as long as I lived in SF (16 years) I find my loyalties rather divided. For a long time after I went east and decided I liked it, I derided what seemed to be the predominant mood in SF: tiresome self-contentment flecked with liberal guilt. People in NY are generally too miserable to feel either contentment or guilt for too long, and that keeps the cycle on agitate here, with just enough lack of total disappointment to keep things from flooding over. Think of Wally Shawn's definition of a good day in
My Dinner with Andre (no cockroach in coffee cup) and you'll get what I mean.
But on this trip west I felt a shift in my prejudices. Most of my old friends there confess to finding the city's love affair with itself boring but they are proud of their priorities. No matter how rich some people in the Bay Area are (and the richest are some of the wealthiest in the world) everyone has had the experience of finding a meeting cancelled because it's just too beautiful out. How many times has this happened to you in NY? It's not exactly "Surf's up!" (though the waves near Devil's Slide have become the stuff of legend) but the impulse is the same: what could you possibly be doing that is more important than getting out into this beautiful day? All of nature has conspired to make your human plans seem petty.
That will keep your load in balance.
Sunday, January 14, 2007
California rest in peace
I took advantage of the break between semesters to go back to SF for a week. Heading west in the winter used to be a way of beating the cold but global warming (or "climate change," as
Republican pollster Frank Luntz wouild prefer) has set our continent on a bizarro-world path. The east coast is enjoying spring-like temperatures, as much as we enjoy anything here (most people I know are freaked out by the weather) while the Bay Area was reeling in the wake of thirty degree lows.
San Francisco itself looked especially empty on this trip; I was reminded of a trip we took to Paris after the deadly August heat wave three years ago. "Daddy," my daughter said as we trooped through the vacated Rive Gauche, "do people actually live here?" In SF the question is not so much do people live there, since I saw plenty of live bodies in cafes and restaurants, but how do they live? With the priciest real estate this side of Hong Kong (NY is a relative land of bargains) I marvel at the midday cappucino sippers, tapping on their three thousand dollar laptops while the money trickles in... from somewhere.
Michael Moore groused about the same thing in his first film, the slightly specious documentary
Roger and Me. He had been given the heave after a brief and ineffectual stint at
Mother Jones and the bitter taste left in his mouth reminded him of dark roasted beans and the seeming slackers who enjoy them at any given hour in SF. He was fired essentially for not doing anything, while MoJo's last editor, my old pal
Russ Rymer, was sacked for doing too much. Over breakfast at that old North Beach standby, the Cafe Puccini, he told me that he knew the end was nigh when an overlord told him, "There's nothing in the magazine that couldn't have appeared in
The Atlantic."
And he didn't mean it as a compliment.
While the question of how people live in SF remains on the table, one need only look out the window to get the why. The most spectacular new view in the city can be found at the top of new
De Young Museum in the middle of Golden Gate Park. On a clear day you can see the city entire, more glorious than most of the funky Northern California art on display. My brother Ethan and I circled the observation deck and reveled in the sunlight and crisp colors before heading off for lunch at a Burmese restaurant. My sound track as I drove was the new album by the
Red Hot Chili Peppers which also seems to grapple with the meaning of California. Those guys are all in recovery now which reminds me of a meeting I attended...
