Seth Kupchick's Blog: Bet on the Beaten, page 14

A great forgotten L.A. book

Ask the Dust by John Fante

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


It's a very hot day in Seattle and I'm reminded of Arturo Bandini walking around his Bunker Hill neighborhood in downtown L.A., the almost successful author of "The Little Dog Laughed," a long short story that he got published, and acts as a sort of carrot on a stick for this flailing young man, with dreams of greatness, living in squalor. I'm originally from L.A. so the kind of tension Fante paints in this short novel, the best of his that I read, was very nostalgic for me, especially the painting of an L.A. that my Grandparents knew, and that I could see in glimpses, but that never really existed for me. I was from West L.A., not downtown, and the Bunker Hill dream with the electric train going up and down the hill called 'angel's flight railway,' almost like a ski lift, also never existed for me, yet they were part of the unfinished or forgotten L.A. that I loved. You could see it in Olvera Street, or in the few canals they built in Venice, before they gave up the vision of L.A. being a European city, or something with more taste and style, than a real estate magnate's dream of turning a bunch of orange groves into the shapeless and formless 'Valley' a megalopolis. The old L.A. still lurked beneath the surface not only in the Tar Pits but the pages of books I more gleaned than read.

It's all kind of like the character Arturo Bandini lurking beneath the surface as well, not only of his own thoughts, but the city itself, on the verge of making it, but not really close. He epitomizes that early 20th century version of the American novelist, that holes up in a room above a greyhound station, just hoping to write that one great story that defines his life, and changes him forever, but seeks oblivion out of artistic purity and genuine poverty. Bandini spends the beginning of the book in a 'Walter Mitty' like fantasy state of becoming the next great American writer, kind of like an actor that lands a role, and sees red carpets rolling out before him. He waits for acceptance slips from publishers that never come, and starts a brutal relationship with a Mexican waitress in a local hole in the wall, that becomes the story, and how Bandini waits out his time in a kind of purgatory, waiting for success, or that inevitable knock on the door that never comes, and it's a frightening relationship, that I doubt had ever been covered in literature before, or not with such brutality. Somehow, Fante managed to make Bandini a likable character, like Bukowski was able to do with Henry Chinaski (Fante was Buk's literary hero, and if you want a primer for his novels, just read "Ask the Dust"), and it's a miracle that he's able to do this. Maybe it's because the racial tension and violence in the relationship he strikes up with the waitress, an almost film noir like cauldron of sexual tension, was a real enough depiction of the war between the sexes, not to be too offensive, and yet it both brings Bandini down from the heights of his illustrious fantasies, into the realm of a real man, with real confusion - you could say he keeps going up and down 'angel's flight railway' to non-corporal ecstasy and then back to corporal ecstasy, in the form of a beautifully innocent Mexican woman that he tries to love, but covers up his love in lust. It's a real story of sin and redemption on the way to fame, but I don't even remember how it ends, or if it's tied up so easily, and I doubt it is.



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astrology

I was taught that astrology was for dipshits and there was no coming back from studying it because it would label you a loser for the rest of your life, and anyone with a mind would stay away, not because the truths it revealed would fuck you up, but that you would lose your wits, almost like an L.S.D. casualty. I'm not sure anyone actually said this to me but whenever anyone talked about it in the intellectual world it was with scorn, and in the pop culture world of TV and movies, it was generally made fun of, as a pick up line in bars, reeking of insincerity, but I suppose this is what happens to every topic that makes it to the mainstream. Lord knows, my parents said the same thing about TV when I was growing up, and I'm sure they are saying it about Video Games now, and I'm not sure how to rebut arguments like this, except it's true that TV, or Video Games, take up time that you could spend studying..... astrology! (See how this game goes.) I've been studying the stars for over ten years now, and I still get a pang of insecurity, or guilt, everytime I admit that to someone, but I'm not so sure that's because I'm uncomfortable about it in my heart, or if I'm uncomfortable how people are going to interpret me for being a nitwit, or what buttons I'm going to push, because I never say it as an introduction, or if I do it gets swept under the rug, and then there's time for people to make their own judgements about me, and they don't usually have to do with astrology. I have realized that people have a hard time categorizing me (or anyone), that has several interests that don't join up in their head, but these preconceived notions of what a person is supposed to be are a product of society, and the people voicing them are victims of pre-condtioning in a way they didn't think possible, and not surprisingly these critics are the ones that usually posit themselves as 'aesthetes,' or 'high brow,' because we all know astrology is for 'loons.' Yes, I'm hypersensitive to other people's reactions of me so I turn inward and hide from the world what I really believe knowing that it's just going to upset them too much, and for childhood friends, or family, I get this better, because I didn't study astrology when I knew them, so they have no way to understand me in this context, and I let it go, but to people I didn't grow up with that just put a label on me 'willy-nilly' I have very little respect, because they are only showing their fears when they lambast astrology, or ignorance, and their judgements of me are furthermore ridiculous since they've already put me in a box, liking a certain kind of movie, or style of politics, but movies and politics are only reflections of life, like astrology,a nd I have nothing good to say about these people, either. I guess there is a tradition in human thought to make fun of what you don't know out of fear, but remembering that when you are the victim of prejudice is no easy matter, so I don't tell anyone I study astrology anymore, and this is very sad. I wanted to tell everyone everything I was learning when I first started, more than I wanted to show them my art, but not anymore, now I don't want to show them anything, for fear of their reactions. I realize I'm making myself sound like a 'lightning rod' in this essay, and maybe I am, but that might just be what happens whenever you stand up for something in this life that isn't a popular opinion that fits neatly in a box, or the politics of the day. I don't expect people to study astrology the way I have, because this has become a passion, but like with any passion it's nice to share it with others that are interested, but finding these people is very difficult, nor do I think everyone was meant to study astrology. In fact, very few people are meant to study astrology, just like very few are made to write, and yet we live in a society that has given the people the freedom of expression, so that everyone can say they are an artist, or an astrologer, without much repercussion, save in their own heart, where they know if what they are saying is true or not, but that's assuming everyone has a conscience, and while I'm pretty sure everyone does, that's not to say everyone's is the same. I also realize that time weeds out the poseurs but the downside of living in America, is that they poison the well for everyone.

I'm writing this post because I've recently joined FB and I was wondering how to show this side of myself to my 'friends,' many of whom knew me when I was younger, and not at all interested in astrology, and others that are musicians, or artists, trying to make their way in the world. To be honest, I joined FB to sell a novella that had nothing to do with astrology, and was the last bit of writing I did, before this subject took over my intellectual interests, and changed me in subtle ways that would be hard to explain, or register, kind of like trying to describe what you look like day by day, and how your face changes incrementally over time. I also realize that people bring in a lot of expectations when you say that you're into 'astrology,' let alone an astrologer, and while they also do this to you if you say you're an artist, or a writer, perhaps lifting an eyebrow in dismay, it's a familiar arch of the eyebrow that wonders if you are a poseur more than anything, not an absolute nut. Then you can show them your art and they either like it or they don't, but the game sort of ends there, and they've made their judgement, but astrology is a much harder position to defend, both as a legitimate student, or a phony. Of course, people want to know their future right off the bat, or what they are all about, and if you take the bait as an astrologer you end up saying something that they invariably agree with, or don't, and then you're judged. I'm not sure this was ever the point of astrology and in my studies, I tend to have my best reflections, or most pertinent thoughts, when I'm not feeling pressured at all, and am just lost in a conversation with someone about it, but this is asking an awful lot because astrology is full of rules something like painting, or writing, just don't have, or if they do, we're all familiar with the basic rules, and we don't ask too much about it, but in astrology the rules themselves are esoteric and take practice to learn, like learning scales on the guitar, so before I tell people 'who they are,' or, 'why they exist,' I try to go through the rules and how it's just a study of the seasons, and in that way is no different than poetry. Of course, I wouldn't do this to a skeptic, or someone riding my ass, because I think the only way to even begin to answer such huge and impossible questions that only spiritualists dare to entertain is to become a reflection of the question, not an answer.

Rethinking the M's

I wrote a lot of heady optimistic pieces about the M's but I don't think I ever promised greatness from this team, just excitement, and greatness in sparks, that were exciting enough to light the embers of expectation, and I caught the spark. I thought something special was happening in the first act, when they showed the ability to kill teams like real champions, and though this fire was just as quickly extinguished by a bad week of hitting, like they're having now, it was so much better than last year, that I couldn't help but feel the team made a quantum leap, and I'd still go there, even if they play below %.500 for the rest of the year, because they took us this far. I bought tickets for a game on August 9th against the ChiSox, thinking I was going to see an important game at the end of the second act, that might decide the winner of the division, or a play off spot, not that it was in the third act, but the third act in September is almost impossible to think about now, they are so lost in the drama of the 2nd act, the central meat to the story, and the fans are really going to have to sit out this losing streak, that is starting to hurt, and making even me test my faith, but I have had my ride with this team, and I'm willing to accept it may be over, without any of the subsequent commitment, but admittedly that would be a let down, since we've come so far together, me and the M's. We've had a number of dates this year and I'll admit I'm starting to wonder where the relationship is going, but I'm so high on this team, that I'm willing to believe we'll get through this rough spot, and build to a better future, and I think the post game Shannon Drayer show has tried to do the same thing, considering the unexpected surprise the season has been, one for the books. Yes, we're immersed in the second act of a movie wondering if it is going to be a memorable one, or sink like a stone, and I'm still betting it's going to be a memorable one, because it already has been, but how memorable becomes a question that's hard to answer, and I dare not to. They haven't scored a run in a lot of games, and unless they had a really good bottom of the 9th, I'm pretty sure they are going into tomorrow night's game a little under the weather, like Jenny and I feel, so maybe it's the sea air.

What if they don't make it to the postseason, deep in the third act, that rounds out the season. I'll be publicly shamed for writing all of these good things about them, but I think you'll noticed that my optimism was measured, and that I liked their erratic unpredictable quality, that didn't really reek of a winner, but just might win the day, like an unknown actor storming the stage and becoming an overnight sensation. A successful M's was a Hollywood story, and I felt that at the beginning of the year in the first act, the promise of something special, but in June at the beginning of the second act, I really started to believe this team had something, and I'd say up until the All Star Break, they made me feel anything was possible, especially the final series with the A's. I'll admit that the series with the Angels after the All Star Break, was brutal, and losing two of three must've hurt, since the Halos were not only a division rival, but one of the best teams in baseball, and the M's played them even, to say the least, and I guess they should have won the rubber game, but in the words of the Seattle Times, "Rodney blows it in the 9th," or something like that, so it was a tough loss. I did listen to the 16 inning game and it really did have a 'to the death' feel by the end, and I just started wishing for anyone to win, and thought that whoever did would be more lucky, than better, because there was no clear winner, and the bend was being depleted, and still no one won. The M's lost that game, and that must have hurt, but then they came back to win one the next night in 12 innings, and I thought that was a big 'Fuck you,' to the Angels, and a declaration of war. Then they came back and manhandled the Mets in the opening game of the series, only to lose the next two in a kind of quiet inefficient manner, the bats going silent, and they are still silent, scoring no runs again, unless they broke through in the bottom of the 9th inning, which I doubt. I'm sure they'll have another winning streak before the season is over because I have to remember that we've got a lot of season left, and the second act hasn't even hit its peak yet, just intimated it, but August is the time where the competitors separate themselves from the pretenders, and put on the after burners for the final act starting in September, that feels like a lifetime away tonight in late July. I'm sorry to all the analysts out there like Shannon Drayer, but I had to establish my independence of analysis for the feeling I got for this team at the beginning of the season, and showed so much promise in the beginning of the second act, tearing up the Majors in June. But the second half of the second act has started rough, and again the Baseball Gods ask me to summons my patience, and realize that the season hasn't played itself out yet, and the book is still unwritten.

I don't know what to make of their acquisitions now that the trade deadline has passed, but the changes sounded minor. The only one that really surprised me was that Jose Montero had been called up and I remembered Shannon Drayer warning me of him in one of those down times the commentators were having at the end of the first act, when they were telling us not to get too excited about this team, because there were a lot of holes in the offense, even if they were exciting. Maybe this was sagacious advice, or maybe it was just 'Murphy's Law,' it was hard to tell, but I chose not to believe it, and think I was right, even if they fold tomorrow, or starting yesterday, or maybe on Wednesday against the Mets, when an overweight Colon, fanned them throwing over six innings of perfect ball. Yes, the M's have been very bad the last week and this is the time of the season, or the movie, that you expect the team to get on fire, but I'll admit they could wipe away this week with a good one next week, and yet baseball is won day by day, like acts of Congress, and the M's lost this week bad, much worse than I expected, so they're really going to have to pull it together. Do I sound anxious about this club? Well , I am because I started tasting victory, not just an exciting season, or something better than last year, but maybe one for the ages, the team of a generation, like the Mid-Eighties Mets were to me, or the Brooklyn Dodgers to a bygone era, and on July 12th when I went to the game with Jenny, walking through a festival in Chinatown, and onto the most exciting game of the year emotionally, the M's went onto beat the A's soundly, playing the best baseball they have in them. I went crazy when they kept Iwakuma in for the 9th, and even though someone tagged him for a two run homer, and I didn't care, and neither did anyone else. The M's were champions. Sure, that night only two weeks ago might have been gold dust, or a little bit of an intoxicant leftover from a drunken bash, that should have been forgotten at the door, but was thoroughly enjoyed, a poor man's 'Alice in Wonderland' kind of night at the park, but like a play it was beautiful. Last night, a commentator said, 'the bats seem to go hot and cold together, so that the whole team is either hot or cold," and that might be true, and part of what makes them exciting, because it promises that they might all get hot soon, and paint the town red! Conversely, it also implies that they might never get hot again, and go cold for the rest of the season, winning nothing, not even a wild car spot, which might not have been such a let down a few months ago, but given the manic-depressive swings the team has shown, would be a catastrophic disaster at this point, because I heard someone on 710 say that they were predicting 'World Series,' and that's not even a place I've dared to go with this team, preferring to think of them as "The Bad News Bears," a lovable bunch of misfits. I'm actually not even sure these M's are misfits in the classical sense, like the Oakland Raiders of the Seventies, just underachievers that got together one night and decided to win the A.L. West, and I think they talked the city into it, as unwilling as Seattle has been to embrace these guys, given a harsh decade of failure. I'd say the fans just started opening their arms to this team, on July 12th against the A's, a few days away from the All-Star Break, but instead of falling into them, the M's just missed, and fell askew. We'll see if they bounce back up, and find each other again.

The Apatow Dream Factory

I haven't written much about comedies so far but they are easily my favorite movie genre, and I'm just kind of a sucker for them, no matter how stupid they are, or how much they offend the aesthete within me. The film snobs that just can't wrap their head around why I'd pay money to see a movie like "Freddie Got Fingered" (it was the first one that hit my mind), and how I could reconcile my serious side with it. Recently, a friend of mine's daughter noticed that I was laughing at almost everything she said, and she looked at me with a straight face and said, "Do you laugh at everything?" "Yes," I said. Sure, I have a serious side and like Joni Mitchell sang, 'laughing and crying are the same release,' but when I'm not laughing I'm crying, and I like laughing a lot more, so comedies are my favorite genre, with dramas being second, and that would include really cheesy ones, I'm warning you, but we'll leave that for later. It should also be said that a real movie mind has to be sensitive to all the genres, because they all cross pollinate, and if you're a big enough fan to be a critic, you'd kind of have to give yourself up to all genres, because a true movie fan just has to pump movies into his veins, and like a junkie will take whatever is out there, and he's not always going to be so lucky to have just his favorite genre accessible, and even if he were he'd eventually grow tired of it and seek an 'action flick,' or maybe a 'period piece,' or how about a 'comic book movie,' but he'll always come back to his bread and butter, like a guy that likes brunettes over blondes, because a favorite genre is like true love and defies all logic. I hate people who question how I can like a movie like "Macgruber" and also like Tarkovsky, Fellini, Godard, or Bunuel, and think I'm somehow pulling one over on them, or faking a movie orgasm, because I'm not. I've grown up with movies and they are as much a part of me as my hair, or eyes, and to think that liking 'stupid movies,' somehow nullifies me as a 'film critic,' is one of the most preposterous accusations I can ever imagine, since the joy of movies is that they are not high art, and don't require a degree to understand, or a pass to a museum. They were the art for the people, and I'm afraid the aesthetes, or the pseudo art fans, or the unenlightened, want to take them away from the people and store them in a vault like a Rembrandt, completely removed from everyone, no matter how good or simple the painting, because by definition it is above most people's heads. Insanely, this has even happened to directors like Roger Corman, circa 2014, because ever since Tarantino, or around then, there has been a fetishizaion of bad art, so the snobs think they own that too now, even though it has to be the right kind of bad art, with just enough flourishes, and just enough cool so if you drop the right name (Corman), everyone will know you've got taste, but they miss the point too, and maybe even more pretentiously. At least the true snob admits he's a snob, but the critic that fetishizes just the right 'B' movie thinks he's with the people, when he's just as contemptuous of them, but in a more round about way.

I saw "This is 40," the other night on DVD, never my favorite thing to do, but it beats missing a movie entirely, and at least comedies are usually low brow enough that you don't miss the 'big screen' feeling that a big budget blockbuster serves up. I kind of knew I'd be entertained by it because comedies are my genre and Apatow has been a master of them for over a decade now, not to mention I'm a '40 something,' so there'd be some kind of instant relatability, but it wasn't a good movie. Like all artists that forge an identity in the public imagination, Apatow has already made his masterpiece, "Knocked Up," not to mention "Freaks and Geeks," but that was a TV show, and it's hard to imagine him topping that in a movie, but that's not to say he doesn't have a handful of other good ones that bear his stamp, but so much bears his stamp nowadays, that's why I've titled this piece 'The Apatow Dream Factory.' He uses a stable of actors (Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Paul Dunn, Jonah Hill, etc.), that have become so popular in the adult comedies of our day, not to mention the really stupid ones, that you could easily watch a movie that Apatow neither directed or wrote, with one of these stars, and think you're watching an Apatow movie, because his movies have a real feel. They are my generation's comedies actually, and they have enough realism, or serious intent, to try to show how Gen X'ers really live, and I need only think of how so many of his movies either have all but switched the traditional gender roles, with the woman as the bread winner, and the man as some sort of late adolescent dreamer, usually in the music business, probably because it's one step removed from the film business, but not that removed, and an awfully small step. I'd argue that his movies more than anyone's I can think of have been the equivalent of all those Woody Allenesque boomer comedies that were so new in the Seventies they all but defined how a generation looked at themselves, and while I'm not sure Apatow has redefined me, I have noticed that he's incredibly contemporary, in a sort of make-believe movie like way, but since he's making 'comedies,' he's allowed this freedom. Let's face it, his movies aren't post WWII Italian realism, obsessed with poverty and how to rebuild a Nation ravaged by war, but rather comic portraits of how the 'slacker' generation grew up, if indeed they did grow up.

This leads me to "Knocked Up," the most successful Apatow film that comes to mind, and while it's weird to compare it to "Annie Hall," because Diane Keaton all but changed the fashion industry with that look, it somehow has a similar feel, or came at a similar point in Apatow's career, balancing the comedic and dramatic aspects of his work better than the films he's done subsequently like "This is 40." I think he made this movie after "The 40 Year Old Virgin," that was more of a straight ahead comedy, and yet even that movie was tapping into the generational themes that obsess Apatow, just more cleverly, perhaps, than many of his other movies, because the man is a 'virgin,' so right off the bat the traditional gender roles have been switched, and we're watching an almost late adolescent, early adulthood, coming of age movie, except that 'virgin' is 40 years old, and in some ways like the 'baby men,' that Apatow would go on to woo audiences with, for the rest of his career, albeit in different guise. The 'baby men,' really are 'baby men' in "Knocked Up," not yet defined by adulthood, and that might be the beauty of the movie, and what raises it above the others, because in the end it is a classic 'coming of age,' story, almost to the line, and yet it's disguised as a raunchy comedy, and it is kind of raunchy, something Woody Allen was never able to do well. I'd argue that the one night stand resulting in a pregnancy and fatherhood, as if by accident, was a great lynch pin, because neither character was ready for it, and really put the audience to the wall, considering the greatness of Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl. It also managed to walk that incredible line between drama and comedy that is so hard and that the critics have dubbed the 'dramedy,' epitomized by James L. Brooks with "Terms of Endearment," or Lawrence Kasdan, with "The Big Chill."

I'd argue that it may have started with "Annie Hall," as great a movie as it is, but it was a 'dramedy,' and was the cinematic influence that Woody Allen had. He started his career making 'screwball' Thirties comedies for the psychedelic set, and pumped them out for about five years, to greater or lesser effect, though all of his early 'funny' movies are a must see, and the height of this artist's career. Even 'Annie Hall,' was a let down from these heights, but such a perfect homage to Truffaut and the movies that Woody must've loved from an aesthete's perspective, that you just have to sort of applaud him, not to mention the script is endlessly good, and the casting perfect, nothing wrong. But for the first time maybe in the history of movies a 'screwball' but intellectual comedian, was going to be emotional, and speak to an entire generation, outside of the comedy genre, and he pulled it off in "Annie Hall," because it was close enough to a comedy, without being one, to be a 'dramedy,' and the best of Allen's career. It's a very hard balance to reach because movies generally want to be either a comedy or a drama, and while it's fine to have touches of one in the other, they tend to fall on one side of the fence, but the dramedy attempted to straddle the fence. I think I argued in a previous essay, "The Graduate, The Bar Mitzvah Boy," that Benjamin Braddock was the first character to really do this, and furthermore "The Graduate" was full of cool Sixties shots that must have been influenced by the French New Wave, and was a cinematic wonder, like Woody Allen wanted to be, instantly raising the quality of the movie. This is something Apatow doesn't seem to care about at all, because his movies look cheap, and I think that's why people write him off so quickly, but I think the cheapness has a point, a certain post modern detachment in the process, that would just as soon use an old cassette player, as opposed to a state of the art recording technology. Apatow's movies look like glossy TV, and there is almost no attention paid to lightning, or scenic location, since everything takes place in a sort of generic L.A., and that must be part of the appeal, that he's the first quasi-serious filmmaker to prefer his movies looking like Seventies TV, than to, say, Truffaut. I guess this puts them more into the 'comedy' camp than a more serious look gives a movie, but this isn't fair to comedies, just the truth.

The last two Apatow movies have felt very forced, and like he was tired of being funny, in the words of Woody Allen, in "Stardust Memories," my favorite movie of his, in beautiful black and white, right after "Manhattan," where he is met with resistance from his fans for going serious. To be fair to Apatow, this transition can be seen in "Knocked Up," because it's not really a straight ahead comedy like "Virgin," but it's also not as self-consciously serious as Woody Allen became, to an almost pathological degree with "Interiors," one of the most controversial movies of my childhood that no one liked, not even the Academy. It was a really forced attempt to make a movie like Bergman about a married couple disintegrating, always the stuff of great drama, and didn't feel like 'Woody Allen' at all, probably because he wasn't that good at it. He's found his own peculiar 'serious' niche since then that has to do with Dostoevskian ideas of good and evil, or art vs. life, and plays these out, ad infinitum. As the usher told me when I saw Allen's last movie, "Blue Jasmine," 'this is his 43rd movie,' or something like that, so when I say 'pump 'em out,' I mean 'pump 'em out.' Once you get past the funny ones, I'm not sure more than a handful are very good, but "Annie Hall," and "Purple Rose of Cairo," are unquestionable masterpieces, and then one or two slip in there, depending on your taste, but in my case it would be 'Stardust Memories,' or 'Manhattan,' a weirdly important one, that really got dark, and I'm not sure everyone got it, it looked so pretty, Allen's cinematic triumph, excluding "Annie Hall." Apatow does not have Woody Allen's output and yet his career seems to be going along a similar trajectory, starting very goofy and then shifting to a kind of 'dramedy,' though he hasn't gone as overtly dark as Allen has in some of his movies ("Interiors," and "September," come to mind), but he has definitely gone a similar path with his last two movies, "Funny People," and "This is 40," both 'dramedies' to the max, and declaring it much more than "Knocked Up," ever did, that managed to stay more of a comedy like Annie Hall, before drifting over into 'Eugene O'Neill' territory. I'm not sure a comedic filmmaker that decides to go serious is allowed more than one of these 'gems,' because they are both innocent of themselves, and self conscious, in a way that only youth is, a rare and beautiful thing.... the Beatles album "Rubber Soul" comes to mind, that really is their best, even if others were better, if that makes sense... capturing a fleeting moment of self-discovery.

"This is 40," was an angry movie, and the Gen X guy as an adult... finally... without coming of age... (like he literally is in "Knocked Up," faced with pregnancy and marriage)... is a truly frightening movie. The Gen X man in this movie doesn't have a sensitive soul but is a 'dick' in the words of his wife, in their only romantic scene, and he agrees. He's not likable at all, but he owns a record company, flips his hair, in a kind of cool wave, and looks like an Eighties movie star as a middle age man, par for the course for Apatow, but this guy isn't leaving his wife, or doing anything very daring, save promoting a "Graham Parker and the Rumors" re-release but Graham is too old to make it, and for better or worse joins the cast, and goes along for the joke, a kind of sad and pathetic epithet for the man, but maybe it will help his music survive, or hurt it, it's hard to tell, because he's a failure in the movie. "Rolling Stone ranked two of their records in the top 500," say's Paul Rudd, but it doesn't matter, they can't sell more than a few hundred records (like me!), but they were famous once. I wouldn't have shamed myself like Graham Parker did by appearing in this movie and playing himself as a joke because he's just not famous enough to make that funny, and it's just kind of off, like this whole movie is, as a genre collapses in on itself without restraint in an almost three hour long movie about nothing in particular.

"Funny People," and "This is 40," wander aimlessly, and it's hard to tell what either are about, and not in an artistic way. What makes them aesthetically confusing to talk about is that anything he makes has a lot of funny scenes because he must be very talented, or someone who works for him is, and that saves even Apatow's bad movies from the dustbin, because they are entertaining, but there is a difference between entertaining and good, and his last two movies have not been good. "Funny People," tried to have a lynch-pin in the plot like "Knocked Up," but instead of a pregnancy it was the death of a rich and famous comedian, that I want to say was played well by Adam Sandler, mentoring Rogen, an interesting duo and conceit, but the best intentions of this screenplay got subsumed into a stupid third act where Sandler tries to win back his first love in Northern California (a much less romantic 'Graduate'), before he dies, which he might not, I don't remember, because it may have been the most boring hoax in movie history. His love interest is played by none other than 'Leslie Mann,' Apatow's wife, and I'd doubt anyone remembers "Funny People" except that it was kind of boring. I fear that part of Apatow thinking he's our generation's Woody Allen is that he's going to make his wife a top-tier movie star, like Allen made of his girlfriend/wives (Louise Lasser, Diane Keaton, and Mia Farrow), but Leslie Mann just doesn't posses even an ounce of the talent that these three memorable actresses had; she may be alright as a supporting actress playing herself, a kind of 'with-it' L.A. party girl, but she just can't carry a dramatic scene for shit, and has almost no sense of humor. But she didn't bring either of these long winded dramedies down, and come to think of it 'Adam Sandler,' may be the king of the dramedy, because he was in James L. Brooks' "Spanglish," an unwatchable melodrama, with less comic flourishes than an Apatow movie, but Brooks is older. I guess a dramedy is kind of like a Fifties melodrama that can hide behind a self-assured shrug, if the drama doesn't work, and say it's comedy, a luxury melodramas didn't have in the Fifties, forced to take themselves %100 seriously, even if the actors were winking backstage.

Post All-Star break euphoria

I'm learning an awful lot about myself through the baseball season this year if only because it's forcing me to reimagine myself as a ten year old boy living for a game on the radio and the feeling of belonging it gave me, but the feeling was so pure I never would have called it 'belonging,' but rather being. I was a young American that really liked sports and the baseball season symbolized summer, the time away from school, that every kid looked forward to, or at least every kid worth his weight in individuality, and love, a free kid. The Mariners have made it easy to do that this year because they have put on a surprisingly good performance, and I'd argue in sports and art, that nothing is more exciting than being surprised by how good something is, rather than expecting it it to be good, and therefore a let down, even if it is a masterpiece; it's why I think so many people see the 'Mona Lisa,' or a painting like it, and unless they are studying fine art, or are just the biggest aesthetes in the world, are invariably let down by the hype. There was no hype to this season save that crazy feeling at the beginning of every baseball season that offers unbridled hope in April and May due to the lenght of the season, and that it's hard to really count a team out until June, and even then it's a dangerous proposition. Well, the Mariners survived into June and I'm not sure what the fans are expecting now, but the team is hot, and definitely a contender for a wild card spot, no small task given the mediocrity of this club for the last decade or so, and if they weren't in the A.L. West they might even be in the running for the division title, but it's looking like the A's and Angels are just too good, but there's still a lot of baseball left, especially for the contenders like the Mariners are, and in fact this is when the season really comes into focus, with the giddy highs and lows of the first act of the season behind us, and the transition to the second act officially over with the All Star Break, so that the fans can settle in and just enjoy the rest of the season. Sure, there's still time for any team in the Majors to fold, and kind of do a Swan dive, but it really doesn't feel like that's what's happening to the M's. They just played a three game series in Anaheim, that the Angels took 2 out of 3 from, but to call those games would be an incredible understatement, or missing the point entirely, because they were battles.... the first game went 16 innings and actually tired me out, and the second went 12, with the 3rd going to the bottom of the ninth, and both teams sounded like champs. The M's may have lost the series but in some ways they won the war in Anaheim, at least against themselves, because they came out of Southern California showing an incredible amount of heart, and proving that they can compete with the best, even if they aren't quite there yet, but there's still a lot of season to go, and this is when the really good teams come to life, and define how they are remembered, saving an all time great first half, like the M's had in 2001, but let's face it a season like that comes along once a lifetime.

I really get the feeling with this club that I'm watching a memorable movie that is going to get me through the night, and leave room for lots of reflection, even if it's not the best movie of all time. The Mariners are completely living up to the hopes I had for them in the first act of the season, April and May, when they were relatively unknown, and the city had all but forgotten about them, drubbed into thinking they might never have a winner again. Sure, it was hard to tell if they were going to nosedive in June, but they didn't, and I'd argue they look stronger than ever entering the second half, like they know they are in the running for the penant, and feeling confident about their chances, not getting down with a lost, but just going to the park the next day, and making up the loss. I know there will be losing streaks and winning streaks to come, because the season is long, and nothing teaches you that more than really immersing in it, but I think they've hit the part of the 'show' where they are clearly not going to sink like a stone, or if they do, they will have already given me more entertainment than anyone thought they would, but I'm not going to be a naysayer, and remain consistent with most everything I've predicted in these posts, that this is a really good club with a future, at least this year, because free agency has sure changed the picture of long term success, but whether they make a trade in a few days or not, this team is going to be in it until the end, scratching for a playoff spot. I'll admit it's hard to imagine them going to the World Series right now, but that I'm even mentioning that this late in the 3 act structure of the season is really incredible, given how low expectations were, but it's clear these guys really believe in themselves, and the weak spots in their line-up aren't even feeling so weak anymore, but just part of the whole, like a great movie coalesces around cast, however many stars. You can tell just by listening to them on the radio that these guys really believe in themselves, and the way they manhandled the Mets last night after what could've been a 'let down' series after losing a couple of tough games to the Angels, and winning one, but I didn't sense that at all. Rather, they sounded like confident killers that had gone to Anaheim and won three straight, certain of their place among baseball's best, but I guess that's what's meant by losing the battle and winning the war. No, I don't care that the Mets are mediocre because in the words of the skipper, Lloyd McClendon, the Major Leagues are highly competitive and the Mets have won plenty of games themselves in this never ending season, but it didn't even seem like they were on the diamond last night, the sign of a winner.

"Midnight Cowboy" rethought.

I just wrote a blog about Westerns in general, but fear that I might not have given enough context to certain movies, especially "Midnight Cowboy," so maybe I'll try writing about it. I saw "Midnight Cowboy," either in Jr. High, or High School, and I must've been told by my Mother, that it was one of the definitive movies of the Sixties, or one of her favorites, and I can understand this. I really don't think a movie had existed like it before, because it was seriously critical of Capitalism, and the American myth of the cowboy, more than any movie had ever been before, and while some movies of the Fifties might have shown the impoverished underbelly of America, I'm not sure two characters like Joe Buck (the cowboy), and Rizzo, his gimpy Puerto Rican friend, had ever been show before, squatting and living off cans of beans, with absolutely no future or prospects. On one hand, the movie is a great homage to New York, but on the other the 'Big Apple,' is painted as a money grubbing machine that just kinds of spits the soul out with the promise of a better life, and that if you're not smart enough to be in the Warholian 'art crowd,' or rich enough to be on the Upper West Side, then you are essentialy forgotten by an America going the way of drugs and depraved sexuality, a real hole. I wouldn't say that Joe Buck or Rizzo are really 'anti-heroes,' like Scorsese made of the 'Taxi Driver,' or the Fifties movies made of their misunderstood 'rebels without a cause,' because these characters actually have very innocent hopes of success that the society just denies them, in spite of their good intentions, because I don't think there was ever a friendlier gigolo than Joe Buck, who almost gives his money away after a trick, or Rizzo the half cripple Puerto Rican pimp played by Dustin Hoffman, who really just wants to be a mover and a shaker, and would probably self identify as an anti-F.D.R. Republican, even as he's freezing to death in an abandonded building (Hoffman may be the weak link in the movie, because his haminess first started rearing its ugly head in this film, though it obviously works, but it's not a subtle performance like Jon Voight gives as 'Joe Buck.') They weren't disgruntled Hippies with a quasi socialist agenda, or idealized loners like the James Dean type anti-heroes of the Fifties, but men who want to feel alive in the world they are living in, and to make it crazier 'Joe Buck' literally dresses as a cowboy with a transitor radio to his ear, representing everything America was outside of the city. He was a victim of the 'rural purge,' when wunderkind Fred Silverman took over CBS and cancelled all the hick shows right around the time this movie was released in 1969. If anything, the city itself is the 'anti-hero' of the film doing everything it can to bring the characters down into a cesspool of loneliness and depravity, where all they end up doing is dreaming of moving to Miami and living on the beach but they don't make it in one piece because they've already been destroyed by their first American dream of making it in the City, and like F. Scott Fitzgerald said, 'there are no second acts in American life,' or something like that. They dreamed of reinvention in Hawaiian beach shirts, but I wonder if it ever would have worked, because once you are cracked it's hard to be put back together again.

In 'Ten Gallon Hats,' I tried to articulate the idea that "Midnight Cowboy" was really the final mutation of the Western into what we now think of it as a metaphor for a fading Post Vietnam era America, rather than a real rediscovery of the Old West that it represented to the Baby Boomers in the Fifties, and the perfect antidote to the conformist Communist vision of the happy little worker at one with society, and anything but an individual, a stance that's very hard for an American to take on in earnest, given the freedoms fought for in the Revolutionary War and articulated in the U.S. Constitution granting the rights of the individual to set his own destiny free of the King of England, or any future King, or at least that's what the framers seemed to want for the Country, whatever we've become. In our heart and spirit, we are a Nation of wandering Cowboys living in a lawless land that theoretically gives us the freedom to be anything we want, unlike the Communist state that demands subservience of the individual for the common good. It probably goes without saying but I'm not sure in the history of the U.S. we ever had a more profound enemy than Communist Russia post World War II, and they all but defined our ambitions domestically and internationally, and the Westerns my parents were raised on were part of the ideological war against Russia, and a movie like "Midnight Cowboy," brought down the ideological gunslinger in real time, not romanticizing him in the past, but trying to place him in the present, not an easy thing to do, as Joe Buck proves, being just a human raised in relative poverty and ignorance, but with good looks that became his gift. The good guy/bad guy Western couldn't survive "Midnight Cowboy," and the genre mutated into a modern telling of gigolo's and losers using the cowboy myth to bolster their identity (a la Gus Van Sant), or reimagining the past in a whole new way, with the Spaghetti Westerns articulating the shadowy line between good and evil with amoral heroes that are hard to read, but still representing American individuality like the Western Hero always will. I was gone on the Sixties in high school so I should say that I wanted to be like Joe Buck, and 'Captain America,' in "Easy Rider," both strangely free men symbolizing patriotism in a rather larger than life way. In spite of all the sadness, there is just something poetically haunting about watching Joe Buck walk down the streets of Manhattan measuring himself against a Marlboro man billboard with those haunting melodies guiding him on, like the melodies in a man's mind on the great plains, and in some ways Joe Buck is on the great plains in New York, more than he ever was back in the country, where he had a typically sad home life, that went unnoticed by the psychiatrists in the city, a product of post War America and all of the TV he watched, trying to articulate the greatness of a Country, but all alone in a sea of people, like the Western Heroes were on the plains, or like 'Captain America' is in "Easy Rider," on the great American highways built right after WWII, symbolizing the new westward expansion that begged us to travel, and seek new experiences, free of the State. Joe Buck was an uncomplicated hero like all great Americans, free of the intellectual trappings of Europe, and the privilege of a good education, a real maverick with his own moral code.

Ten Gallon Hats

My parents favorite movies were Westerns. They were raised on them like cereal, like every kid in the Fifties and held them dear in a way my friends and I held 'Jiggle TV' dear, and its many derivatives, though I'm not sure we had something like Westerns. They were the action movie of their day, just like the comic book movies are now the action flicks, with good and bad simply drawn. I hated them not just because my parents liked them, though I'm sure that would've been good enough reason, but I was taught to hate them in school by teachers my parents age, saying they were racist and xenophobic, against Native Americans, or Indians, a real sin in the early Seventies, but they could never get them out of their heart. I'd say this was true of many of the battles the Boomers fought, thinking they could escape their past, with a tab of L.S.D., or enough free love, but in hindsight the very notion sounds so fanciful, with or without drugs, that it's incredible to think they ever believed it, but they did. They all but barred my generation from liking Westerns, and went onto kill them at the box office, with their own pocket book.

I must've been part of the last generation that got spoon-fed this genre and predictably thought most of them were shit, and wondered why my parents took me to see something like "The Shootist" or that one with Marlon Brando, that no one remembers, probably not even Marlon Brando. I remember the great aesthetic question, 'is the western dead,' being raised, and such stars as Clint Eastwood, Paul Newman, and Robert Redford, resurrecting the genre for a brief moment, but those were the Seventies westerns influenced by their times, and focused on the 'good' outlaw, or the lone wolf misinterpreted by society, kind of like how the hippies felt. They weren't my Grandparent's Westerns with John Wayne shootin' up a few Injuns and then calling it a day.

My parents never pretended to hate Westerns, and yet their generation brought them down, because the moralistic simplicity with which the white man killed the red man was indefensible, and yet we are what we eat, and they ate those movies like candy, when TV was new, and they sat in front of all night, or spun Elvis on 45's in their rooms. It's no surprise to say the Boomers may be the most hypocritical generation of all time, but they killed their own with the Western, and taught me to do the same on an intellectual level, but on an artistic level they were the Western generation, taught in the goodness of America, and couldn't get it out of their blood, all but colonizing Santa Fe, New Mexico, twenty years later, but that's a tragedy that I care not to discuss.

The Western is dead, or at least it has been since "Brokeback Mountain," a great movie that America is just too homophobic to embrace, unfortunately, but we all don't live in West Hollywood, or the Castro. The Western is considered stupid by most young people, and I don't blame them, because I thought it was stupid too, and still do, usually, unless I'm in a really good mood, which I rarely am. They are boring and slow, with very little character development, settling on scenery and a slow pace. If anything, the thing I took away from Westerns the most was the slow pace and the scenery because that really does have an almost zen meditative quality when you're watching one, because there isn't much dialogue, since western heroes are men's men, and don't talk much, thank God. They just drift through the scenery of a free country that they both love and hate, seeing themselves as mavericks, or outlaws, abiding by their own peculiar moral code, which must be their relationship to God, based on a one-to-one relationship with God, that they were allowed to embrace in the 1800's, either because of Lutheranism, or the U.S. constitution, the first allowing a one-to-one relationship with God, the second freedom of religion and thought. Either way the Western Hero is a peculiarly American character but a also a historically quasi-accurate portrait, because he really existed in American culture, and there really were still Cowboys in the Fifties before industrialization killed them off, and some of my favorite westerns like "Hud," with Paul Newman, or "Bad Day at Black Rock," with Spencer Tracy, and Dana Andrews,illuminate this transition, not to mention the brilliant "Brokeback Mountain," in 2006, the heart of the W. years, and I still remember the President blushing when someone asked him if he saw it.

I guess "Dallas Buyers Club," is the new, "Brokeback Mountain," proving the Western is still alive, kind of like Joe Buck proved it was in "Midnight Cowboy," about an authentic that moves to the City in '69 to hustle on the street in his cowboy clothes, but gets taken for a ride, because he doesn't have a brain in his head, just the look, and the spirit. It's funny that the new Western has become a gay genre, but I guess that started with "Midnight Cowboy," in 1969, directed by John Schlesinger, that had done a movie a year before with Peter Finch about a gay psychologist in swingin' London, a disturbing, beautiful, and alienating feature. In Rizzo's words Joe Buck was a 'cowboy,' and he used this both as sexual idealization, and a put down, at the core. I don't want to get too much into "Midnight Cowboy," because it is just too big a movie to sum up, but safe to say Joe Buck was going through a lot of sexual confusion that stemmed from childhood and his relationship with his mother, that he'd flashback on all the time, along with those of his first girlfriend. Understandably, America wasn't ready to think of its cowboys as gay hustlers in New York City, in 1969, but Joe Buck was the modern day cowboy, and the evolution of what was happening to guys like "Hud," in the early Sixties, or the boys from 'Black Rock.' The Cowboy had been bought out by big oil in Oklahoma and Texas, in the early Sixties, and had just been kind of wiped out by industrialization, and the socialist bureaucratic State proposed by Roosevelt, where the lawlessness of the West was interrupted by a high moral calling on the part of the whole, because the Western Hero is an individualist at heart, living by his own code, and even if this usually boiled down to 'kill the red man,' it was his existential code, void of federal law, because the Country was just too big for the long arm of the law to reach out, creating almost the inverse of the 'dystopic' pic of "Mad Max," or "Repo Man," and why they might be considered Westerns too, with people in a lawless State without people, though in the latter there are very few humans left, and in the former 'westward expansion,' is under way, but not everyone made it to San Francisco for the Gold Rush.

There are very few Westerns left and not many people even understand what the point is in even watching them, and yet they are the one of the biggest genres in the history of movies, and must be struggled with, and contemplated. The Westerns gained real popularity after WWII because their protagonists were morally upright individualists, like we imagined ourselves on the world stage, America, a Country unlike those in Europe that relied on your family name and ancestry, but a new Country where you could reinvent yourself from nothing and start from scratch, a meritocratic idea, like starting from zero after thousands of years of debt. The great Western hero had no past or future, and in that way was the most existential character imaginable, living not so much by the Constitution, though he was armed, and taking refuge in the second amendment, but not really a political figure, because he was outside of politics, that was run by the sheriff, who more often than not was his enemy. The Western Hero was above politics, just like a true Libertarian candidate should be above running for the Presidency, because a true Libertarian doesn't really believe in a federal government, living one step away from the Western Hero, that lives by his wits and skill as a sharp-shooter.

The Western Man is the only unique thing about being American, and our parents were idiots to tell them to hate them for political reasons. I'll admit that I struggle with Westerns and often find them over-simplistic, and my Mom told me I did this at a young age, so maybe I really am a product of my generation, and there is nothing to be done with me. I also have a deep appreciation for the genre, and it's meditative almost zen like love of nature, music, costume, and color, that can overwhelm me, so I don't not care about the lack of character development. The classic Western character was often the same, but the genre was so all encompassing, that it took on sub-genres, and another of my favorite are the Noir Westerns like "High Noon," or "3:10 to Yuma," that question morality in a much more complicated way than the usual good guys vs. bad guys themes that the Republican Party glommed onto under the guidance of Leo Strauss, a mentor of Cheney, Wolfowitz, and 'Rummy' Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense. He saw the American man in the star of the TV show "Gunsmoke," and modeled his political philosophy after the show, and it was a good idea. The current Tea Party basically espouses a 'Western' kind of living where there are no taxes, roads, laws, or towns, and you're forced to live on your wits, without relying on a family, or a government, to impact your life, let alone a woman, but at least there the 'Western Hero' is tempted and sometimes succumbs. He is a romantic at heart, because he is a free man.

I was taught to hate America through the Western and it was a painful lesson that I don't think the younger generation is going to have to go through, all but bypassing them for the Seventies swingers of my childhood that were much more fun and relatable like Jack Tripper, from "Three's Company." But the Westerns have made me stronger and my struggle with them that continues to this day, has made me who I am. I admit that to be a real film buff you kind of have to get into Westerns, and though they don't have to be your favorite genre, you have to love them enough, to be able to write about a few with real beauty and intelligence, or at least contemplate a few, without the worry of doubt or logic. They are an essential genre in the history of film and while I'm tempted to say they carry on in other forms like the comic book movie, or the Van Damme/Schwarzenegger action feature, or 'Dirty Harry' for that matter, this isn't really true, because cowboys really existed in America, but Spider Man didn't (did he?). Westerns were historical in nature whereas these other genres that glorify the maverick living by his own code of justice, weren't.

I can hear the critics saying that 'Dirty Harry was historical,' as the idealistic cop pissed off by the bureaucracy that started under F.D.R., and that any 'cowboy' would hate as 'Un-American,' so that 'Dirty Harry' was fulfilling the cowboy myth in a historical way circa '71 and that might be true, but that would just put the cowboy in the city along with Joe Buck, from "Midnight Cowboy," good vs. evil, but it's hard to tell which is which, Dirty Harry or Joe Buck? Joe Buck is the real deal as far as his roots and style, but Dirty Harry has a steadiness of purpose that Joe Buck wouldn't even understand as he tries to process the modern world with a much more open mind than Harry Callahan, the greatest modern mutated Western hero that comes to mind. It's not surprising that Clint Eastwood all but put the Western through its last spin cycle before Joe Buck and the gay cowboy overtook it, withe the Spaghetti Westerns that helped define the Sixties along with 'Easy Rider,' both strangely Western like movies about lone wolves trying to be free, like the Western heroes of the past, living out the American myth, void of the great Socialist State message of a more just world, because the Western hero and the American man are a much more existential breed, living by their decisions and perhaps their one-to-one communication with God, under the starry nights, out on the plains, where the sky stretches like a canvas.

I should say I've seen this canvas stretched out and painted in motel rooms in Eastern Washington and the Southwest, the last vestiges of the Western myth, that barely breathes, the foreshadowed end here, but never complete, never really finished. The cowboy won't ever leave America as long as there is rock n' roll and freedom.

I should write about Sam Shepard since he was the great boomer writer on the Western, but he took up the popular terrain of the fading, or dying, west... a depressing thought for a cowboy, or a true American, because true happiness was found in westward expansion, that never ended, as long as there was land, which the U.S. had. The Civil War economically decided on the free states and capitalism, the economy of the people, where you could have a cowboy dream in industry, free of your past, or your family name, if you had a good business idea... America, the land of ideas. Sam Shepard's plays took place on the outskirts of L.A. to me, and were romantically bleak, like a Country in its decline, and you know a Country is in decline when it's great myth is being brought down, and though the Cowboy is kept alive in Shepard's play's, he's modernized, without a horse, and already half dead, watching cowboys on TV, like Paul Newman in "Hud" at the end of the movie, drinking whiskey in his room alone, and using the remote control like a gun.

The Western was a corpse to me and I shit all over it, even though I understood it was good art, sometimes, or occasionally, because any great objective movie mind knows that there are only so many genres not including the genre benders, and there are only so masters of every genre, and they all must be studied, even though no honest person on the earth would expect you to be partial to every genre, and ultimately picking a favorite. But a real movie fan loves the good and bad of every genre, as well as he understands himself, for the movie mind becomes the movie, and the movie becomes him, a case of art imitating life, or something exactly backwards, life imitating art, an impossibility, except in a concave mirror. It's also important to note that there is almost nothing Jewish about Westerns except that some anti-McCarthy types infiltrated the genre, and made a few like "High Noon," that really simulated a 'witch trial,' but these were rare, and playing on the established themes of good vs. evil, and a shoot-out at the end, with good emerging victorious, an optimistic myth for a young Country, with an individualistic hobo as a hero, without a wife or a child, let alone a past, but a few good skills, that keep him alive. The Western will never go away, but knowledge of it will. The subtlety of the genre will disappear, from the oddball anti-social ones, to the very mood a night with a Western on can create, kind of like being out in the West on a camping trip, a good feeling, with the quiet sounds of the TV crackling like a fire.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Movie Fan

I grew up with a TV in my room, but I didn't have cable and would have to sneak to my parents room to watch this, though they didn't mind. It was the Seventies and VCR's didn't even exist yet, but beta-maxes may have, and yet no one I knew had one, or if they did, they were the only person. You still had to catch your show or movie when the station aired it, or else you missed it entirely, and I put a lot of faith in the accidental fortune of finding a great movie on TV, something I take with me to this day, thinking that pre-programming your evening takes all the fun out of it. Sure, I know what's on TV, so I do pre-program my evening in a way, but even in 2014 I'm taken by the element of surprise when a movie comes on, and that's pretty much how I lived my life as a movie fan. I thought that movies were special and if you saw one you were meant to see it, one of the lucky ones, and if you were really a fan you'd talk to your friends and they'd tell you the names of movies, and when they came on you'd watch those. I was such a geek I'd look for the four star movies in the TV Times that came in the calendar section, not even the TV guide, that you bought at news shelves in supermarkets, and circle all the four star movies, but more importantly would read the little snippets about all the movies, and get just as excited about a one star affair, but I wouldn't stay up late at night to watch it. Granted, I loved movies, but I was also trying to educate myself like maybe someone does with books, trying to read to better themselves, but I did it with movies, thinking they were just as high an art form, and that could be because my parents loved movies as much as, if not more than books, and I lived in L.A. with a movie obsessed mother and went to the theater all the time, so I saw movies on TV and out. I knew when I was watching "The Execution of Private Eddie Slovick," that I was watching something none of my friends were, nor did I expect them to, or know how to talk to them about how I was trying to gain a real film literacy, because I'm not sure I knew what I was doing. I wasn't watching all the 4 star movies because I thought I was going to be a famous film writer one day, or a director, or an actor, but really just wanted to learn and improve myself. In another community, with other parents, I may have gone to Temple to do this, but in my life the way the cards were dealt, movies took me there, and TV was for entertainment. In my memory KTLA, channel 5, used to play a movie at 8 o'clock every weeknight year 'round, and though I'm sure there were exceptions for Angels games, or the occasional special, they did this pretty consistently, advertising the movies they were going to show like a night at the theater. I had a TV in my room and would often eat dinner and watch these movies alone, like a guy reading a book, and got really into them. It was the late Seventies and they'd mostly show movies from the Fifties on, with the occasional Noir thrown in there, but not much from the Thirties, or the Golden Age, and would save that for 'Movies 'Till Dawn,' so if I really had a bout of insomnia I could catch an old Bette Davis movie, or just one of those great silly romances from the Thirties.

Z channel was my second education but when I think about it I'm not sure it was only for the movies but the layout of the whole channel that just reeked of the obsession of a crazy film fan. Z channel had a very colorful, non-advertised, magazine that came out every month announcing the schedule, but much more importantly EVERY movie had a thoughtful review, though some were kind of longer than others, with black ink on a light blue page, or a soft sunset orange, and I'm pretty sure the reviews were written by Jerry Harvey, the Svengali behind the Z Channel, but I'll get to that in a moment. The movies were also grouped by director, or theme, and somehow referenced as part of being a theme that the Z channel was tapping you into, so that you could get a real feel for mini-film movements, that the Z channel thought you should know, and since it was the only movie station in a pre-cable world, and everyone who was anyone had it because the idea of watching contemporary movies at home was so new everyone was on the Z channel's wavelength. There is a fascinating documentary called, "Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession," and it's a must for anyone in my FB homeroom, who grew up on it, and really explained an awful lot to me. I was undeniably influenced by the late Sixties/early Seventies art house movie vibe, but there wasn't a really a face behind Z channel, just a vision, and the only commentary outside of the magazine, came from a half hour, or an hour, interview show with an aged local critic ironically called "Charles Champlin," and would have the great actors and directors of the day on. I'm sure most of my friends didn't watch this, but think of it as a kind of Bravo show, like 'inside the actor's studio,' or something for real geeks, but the interviews would reflect Z channel's programming, and in the arts and entertainment world Champlin's interviews had a similar think-tank feel to the Charlie Rose show, without all of the latter's pomposity (sorry, Charlie Rose, but it's true). It's hard to explain because the documentary almost made me feel like I was watching a version of "The Wizard of Oz," made only for me, because behind all of the art house glamour of the Z channel, with the brilliant film insight, and the great soft porns of Sylvia Kristol on every weekend, somehow celebrating that divine moment in Seventies porn when "Deep Throat" was a big hit, and people were imagining porn and high art becoming one like Paul Thomas Anderson showed in "Boogie Nights." Jerry Harvey was like the Wizard in the "Wizard of Oz," one man with a big vision wanting to change the world with movies, making him almost like the Wizard pulling the strings on everyone's collective mind. Jerry Harvey really was like the Wizard, a struggling screenwriter, that never gave up his dream of writing a great script, and may have never done it, but in the process did so much more, really defining himself as a connoisseur and a taste-maker, no easy task. Jerry lived a truly brilliant life because on one hand the documentary is the story of a failed artist, kind of like the great "American Movie," and like the failed alcoholic director living with his mother, Jerry was obviously so 'lit' that he has the fascinating complexion of a failed artist, but his life was anything but a failure, making his story a really fascinating one. If anything, Jerry Harvey, and maybe someone like Pauline Kael, were great examples of how the 'think-piece' mind was making its way into the Hollywood Studio system, and transforming it with a new kind of intellect that was given some influence (Warren Beatty moved Pauline Kael out to L.A. to work in Hollywood), and part of the reason the movies of the Seventies were so good. Jerry even ended up living like a celebrity but it was all behind the scenes and I only knew this impresario through his shadow character, the brains behind the Z channel, wielding his taste.

The KTLA movie was more ubiquitous going for the number one hits that had proven themselves at the box office in their day, and then regurgitating them as classics, but that didn't make them any less worthy. I'm sure there was a 'Jerry Harvey' kind of guy behind the programming at KTLA, but safe to say he had none of Jerry's freedom, that he accidentally carved out for us, and had to stick to the hits, but that's it's own kind of art form, and not easy to do. It's hard to be the guy in the party in two wings of the party at once, because it's not the more obvious, if stupidly brave, revolutionary position that somone like Kael or Harvey staked their reputation on, if for nothing more than they loved movies more than anyone else, and could talk about them. The programmer at KTLA had to be clever and play those slightly subversive movies that the masses loved enough, over and over again, to make his point clear, but he also had to capitulate to the norms of his day, and make for good family viewing on other nights of the week, meaning good moralistic films, of which there was no shortage after WW II, excluding the 'dark' noirs, unless it was a true classic like "Double Indemnity." The movies I remember most from the 8 o'clock feature are still among my favorites and they really got into those from the late Sixties or early Seventies that were the 'coming of age' movies for my parents generation, romanticizing a time, that I could almost taste as a kid, but was slipping away every year I got older, making the movies from that time all the more precious; "The Graduate," "The Heartbreak Kid," and "Goodbye Columbus," are still among my favorite movies of all times. They also played a lot of the great black and white's and colored dramas from the Fifties, and I'd say this gave my film knowledge more of a backbone than the Z channel alone could have, more obsessed with the greatness of the times we were living in, and not as curious in looking back unless it was to highlight the career of an actor or director, that had started in the Fifties, but not for the era alone. KTLA was old school, and still had the moral structure of the Fifties L.A. man, showing the local news after the show, making it more shocking when they played a movie like "Midnight Cowboy," or "Taxi Driver," and really showing them for the radical statements they were at the time. You can only realize how cutting edge a movie is when you compare it to those of its day, not ones made in the future, that have absorbed its aesthetic breakthrough, and spewed it out in a whole new way. The 8 o'clock movie created this kind of relief because for every mainstream breakthrough there would be four or five boiler plate movies of the day, that I'd watch too if I could stomach them, but were not the important ones I lived for, and if they bored me I'd just watch TV, my true guilty pleasure. But even the mediocre war movies, or overly moralistic dramas, were an education, or a great landscape background that brought out the important movies of the day, just like a great background brings out the figures in a painting, with the bad movies as the relief and the great ones as the stars.

This leads me to "The Hustler," easily one of my top ten movies of the early Sixties, if not ever, but I'd have to watch it a few more times for that moniker, or maybe I've watched it just enough. KTLA would advertise it like they were showing you the most important movie ever, a sort of "Raging Bull" for my Grandparent's generation, and something Z channel just wouldn't have done, not that Jerry Harvey didn't like "The Hustler," but he would've been more into some obscure psychedelic late Sixties movie Paul Newman was in (did that happen?), than something so tried and true as the story of 'Fast Eddie and the Fat Man, Minnesota Fats,' played by Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. 'Fast Eddie,' was an anti-hero for the Fifties, a drifter pool shark that goes from town to town ripping off the locals and then fleeing before someone beat the shit out of him. He also starts an amazingly vivid and haunting alcoholic love affair with a broken down rich girl living in an apartment alone that wants to be a writer and sees the greatness in 'Fast Eddie,' even if he doesn't see it and imagines lifting them both out of their suicidal alcoholic affair, where they just sit around drinking and fucking, trying to figure out how they are going to survive. In some ways, the "Hustler" was almost like a noir, because Piper Laurie is definitely a femme fatale, a crush for the ages, and they do meet in a Greyhound Station, just hanging out wasting time in a coffee shop, but the movie somehow has an uplifting message in spite of how sad it is that affirms their love at the end (spoiler alert), and though they have a hard time of it 'Sarah' and 'Fast Eddie,' are a romance for the ages, even if they are doomed, but maybe that's what makes "The Hustler" so great. It really did have that message to the wayward souls of the world that dedication to art, or pool, or sports, would win the day, in spite of how troubled you were, so that 'Fast Eddie' takes the anti out of anti-hero by the end, and transforms positively. The same can't be said for the Seventies anti-heroes that the Vietnam War spawned, and that Martin Scorsese famously filmed, but he wasn't the only one. It could be argued that Jake LaMotta from "The Raging Bull" has all of 'Fast Eddie's' passion for boxing, easily equaling his courage and dignity, but his love affair is %100 self-destructive, unlike Piper Laurie and Paul Newman that are goaded on by some kind of highfalutin' ideals through Sarah's poetic vision when she writes, 'twisted... crippled... perverted...' in red lipstick on George C. Scott's bathroom mirror ('Fast Eddie's' manager), before offing herself, not exactly a happy ending, but one promising redemption for 'Fast Eddie,' even if a lonely one. The anti-hero of the Seventies didn't offer any redemption for anyone and if anything served only as a reflection of how sick society had become, making an almost Charles Manson-like statement against society, so that in a court of law you didn't know whether to indict the anti hero or society. "The Hustler" takes you to this ledge because 'Fast Eddie' is a victim too, but the heroes and villains are easier to see in the story, and ultimately Eddie is both. I'm not sure Jake LaMotta, or Travis Bickel from "Taxi Driver," ever achieve this kind of internal victory, although they fight for it through physical and spiritual discipline, and Travis has some sort of winning charisma, but I'm not sure about Jake. In the end, both are mere slaves to society's wishes, but not Eddie who through the love of a woman finds his inner peace.

Oh yeah, Scorsese ended up directing the sequel to "The Hustler" 25 years later and called it "The Color of Money." 'Fast Eddie' was played by Paul Newman, but he was no longer an anti-hero, a stance he was already leaving at the end of the original, but neither is Tom Cruise, 'Fast Eddie's' protegee. He is more of a likable party animal than anything else, dancing to "Werewolves in London," with a pool stick.

The All Star Game, or 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'

We're at the 'All-Star' break that always happens in Mid-July, right around my birthday, and has come to define the baseball season in a rather dramatic way, much more than the NFL's, NBA's, or NHL's, equivalents even pretend to, but I'm not sure why. Some of it must have to do with baseball being the national pastime, and we're just more collectively tapped into it as a culture, than the other major American sports, though I know baseball is number three right now, but it's not out, and the All-Star game still counts for something. It might have to do with it being in the middle of July, around the time many Americans take vacation, or a break from the heat, at the height of the dreaminess of summer, that always reminds me of Shakespeare's romantic comedy, "A Midsummer's Night Dream." Indeed, the All-Star game does feel like a 'midsummer night's dream,' because there is something just kind of unreal and magical about it, a hot ticket. Not only do all of the game's greats come together to take each other on, but there didn't used to be inter-league play until recently, and it's still limited, with very few games between the leagues. Seeing the American League vs. the National League, had a kind of sacred quality, the only other game to approximate what the World Series represented, the best of the two leagues coming to face off, to pick a champ. Sure, nothing was ever on the line in the All-Star game, when I watched it as a kid (now home field advantage in the World Series is on the line, or maybe the DH, I don't know), and yet there is a certain momentum and tug-of-war feel to it that does define the rest of the season, that is essentially one long pennant race, but let me stress long and trying, like all of baseball, the sport that taught me patience, not only within the length of a game, but a season. I've never done stats on how many times the AL team wins they win the World Series, or vice versa, but I'm sure someone has. More than that, I have a feeling that a strong performance in the All-Star game can really propel a player through the second half, and prove to his squad that he's got what it takes to lift them up for the second half of the season, when the real battle for a team's ultimate identity takes place.

I've also noticed that the All-Star game seems to happen on a Tuesday in Mid-July every year, and while this may not seem like much, since I'm sure the other sports have their game occur at a similar time annually, I can't help but notice that we also elect our politicians on the first Tuesday of November, every election cycle, and like election day someone wins MVP and comes out a real winner, like winning the Presidency, because there is nothing like the All-Star game to a real ball player, because it is the bedrock of the major league tradition, on which everything hinges. Baseball was built for the radio, and the slowness of the game makes it perfect for announcers to talk stats, playing their own version of trivial pursuit by remembering great teams or seasons from any point in the past, or just story telling about all the cities they travel to, and the crazy schedule they are on with the team, almost like a travel diary. The game can have a plodding pace, not to mention the endlessness of the season, and this just makes for storytelling and talking about the game, while you're watching it, triggered by the game, maybe like real movie fans are triggered by a bad movie to talk over it and remember all the fun bad movies they've seen, a rare treat. Football, basketball, and hockey just move too fast to leave much room for the musings and ruminations of a true baseball fan, or announcer, lost in a 'midsummer night's dream.' I think the Tuesday in July unconsciously hearkens to the Tuesday in November when the citizens of the Nation came together to pick their leaders, reflecting their will in the government, a representative democracy. In the same way, the people come together for the All-Star game, voting for their favorites to get in, on ballots I still remember from being a kid, kind of like SAT tests with little holes you punched in for your favorite at each position. Stuffing the ballot box became a kind of tradition itself, like dirty politics, but now I think they vote online, and it's probably impossible to stuff the ballot box, unless you change your username over and over, but I'm not sure. Either way, the first half of the season is a kind of political party primary that decides who gets elected to the big game, but the MVP isn't decided by the fans, so in a way you could kind of say that the Congress (the players on the field), kind of pick the President, the All-Star, so it's not true Democracy, like America, but close.

I'm going to take a big breath right now because I'm a Mariner's fan, and this time last year they were all but out of the pennant race, barring an incredible second season come back, that would've taken a lot of hitting that they didn't have. This year the Mariners are more than in the pennant race, they are second wild card as July 15th, 2 1/2 games ahead of the Royals, I believe, but 8 behind the division leaders, the A's, but that's only because they are the best team in baseball by a lot, blowing everyone's mind. I went to Saturday's game at SAFECO field, named after an insurance company, and the M's must've had more fans there than they've had in years. I took Jenny and saw a festival in Chinatown before the game, and felt the warm summer air on my skin, basking in a perfect night for baseball. We sat in the view section and cheered Iwakuma on and the whole team, and the Mariner's gave us one of those complete games, where the pitching was great, and the hitting was too, making them look like a serious contender against anyone, but it was a great game, and the hitting can just easily disappear. I know they are about a starter shy of really fulfilling themselves, but #99 James Jones (symbolically representing the %99'ers???), could be the next Jackie Robinson if he can just hit with a little more power, has been an unbelievable contribution to the offense. Chris Young, the Princeton graduate, said that he thought the Mariner's were going to play much better in the second half, and on artistic grounds alone I agree with him, because their first act in April and May was spotty at best, soaring and swooning, but at least they were exciting and romantic, something last year's team just wasn't, and that's a hard thing to define, save that they didn't score runs. This team had a kind of mad romanticism from the beginning, teetering on existence, but they've definitely upped their odds of existing, making an appearance in October, deep into the 3rd and final act of the sweltering season.

The All-Star game actually happens a little after the mid-point of the 2nd act, because the Mariner's have played about 95 games, and there are 162 in a season, making 81 the real mid point, but that would make sense, since the pretenders can pretty much be sorted out by this point, with only a member or two on the AL or the NL, but every club gets at least one. The Mariner's went into the All-Star game swooning and soaring, kind of like how they played the first act, but with more confidence and strength, so that I wasn't really questioning if Chris Young was probably right, and that the fans hadn't even seen the best to come from the Mariner's. They are a much stronger team now than they were in the 1st act, and if they were a movie, you'd say they are gaining strength and momentum, going into the second half, and whatever was wrong in the 1st act, or questionable, you've almost forgotten, because like a good movie they captured the hearts of the fans. Excluding opening day, I'm pretty sure the Mariner's drew more fans on Saturday night than they have in a decade, and I'd expect more of this as the season goes on, especially when Felix, the King, that has a section in the ball park called 'the King's Court,' where everyone wears yellow, and pretends they are judges honoring Felix, waving 'K' cards (not very constitutional, and I don't get it), will sell out, and so will Iwakuma when he's on the mound, a true Japanese ace. They just won a big series game against the A's and looked so good Saturday night, that I think Chris Young, the intellectual, may have figured out something, and the best really is yet to come. I'll take this break happily, dreaming of the future, and not to gloat, but I think the few blogs I've written about them ('Mariner Mash-Up,' 'The Three Act Structure in Baseball,' and 'The Mariner's Suck! (just kidding),' will all stand the test of time, as every sports piece must to be judged, because if there isn't this critical criteria, than any asshole can come along and say anything he wants about any team without any consequences, and this doesn't show much thought. Maybe I should write a post about that called 'Welcome to the Blogosphere.'

Playing hooky to 'St. Elmo's Fire'

I saw St. Elmo's fire in the Spring of 1986, and I can recall very few movies so clearly, but seeing it was an act of rebellion, because I was graduating from Uni High, and was taking the day off, being a bad boy (ha!). I wasn't doing much more than a lot of derelicts were doing on a day to day basis, but they were more into taking bong hits, not that I didn't like that, but I put an artistic spin on all of my pursuits, because I was a failed athlete turned artist, a cliche kind of like Hubble Gardner in the movie "The Way We Were," a top ten movie for me, that I all but have memorized, because it was like watching a refraction of my life. 'Everything came too easily,' to me too, like Hubble wrote about himself in his story for Freshman English that garnered him rave reviews.

"The Way We Were," may have been the first cheesy love story that I was into, but that's really diminishing it, because it was one of the greatest movies of all time, and a gift that my Mother helped give to me, though I would've watched it on my own, and did many times, but just a beautiful story, that lives forever. I'm not sure whether it started out to be this way but "The Way We Were," just sort of turned into one of those all time classic love movies that have come to define the French, and it came out around the time of "A Man and a Woman," a movie I could never get into, but admit is great. The "Way We Were" is great too, in league with Redford's and Streisand's best movie, and I want to say it was THEIR best, and what made it such a great timeless enduring sappy stupid love story, that I've come to watch more than any other, a real treat, and much more than a 'chick flick' like the fictional character Samantha Jones said on "Sex and the City." You could watch that movie a thousand different times and see it a thousand different ways, and I know that because I've tried. It's more complex than the "Graduate" that I wrote about, because that is just too simply a great work of art, but the "Way We Were," is not so pure, whether by design and accident, but equally as good, and therefore more tantalizing as I grow older, and bend out of Benjamin Braddock, the "Bar Mitzvah Boy," as I called him in my blog.

"St. Elmo's Fire," was edgy when it came out, easily an R rated movie, that took it to the limit for my stunted generation, but R was pretty cool. I'm not sure I judged it like a critic and I'm thankful for that, and this ties into something I posted on FB recently, that I was afraid that the 'art' of the going to the movies was lost, because a lot of the enjoyment had to do with getting out of the house and going to a movie theater, whether alone or on a date, because they worked well either way, but were very different experiences. I'll forever equate "St. Elmo's Fire" with one or two of the 'bad boy' experiences I had in high school, because on outward appearances I lead a pretty normal life, due to pressure from my conservative family, but on the inside I was going crazy, so I was forced to express this through rebellious acts like seeing "St. Elmo's Fire," in early June with a good friend in Westwood Village, feeling like I understood life. I wish I could say this had everything to do with my rebellious feeling, but I think as much of it had to do with the movie that made me feel adult. It was about 'post-graduate's,' just college graduates, one step up from me, a high school graduate, but I was going away to Santa Cruz in a couple of months, already accepted, and in the same predicament.

Sure, the characters in "St. Elmo's Fire" were older than me but they echoed the original 'brat pack' (Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson), that spoke directly to me just a year or two before. They were playing older characters, more mature, and having sex with each other, more defined, but not yet defined, or defining each other, making for a fascinating movie. It was like the great precursor to Gen X cinema, while at the same time stuck in the past, a schlocky masterwork, that was both ahead and behind of "The Breakfast Club" that preceded it. "St. Elmo's Fire," had two big actors from the original 'Brat Pack,' our rat pack, but they added a newcomer, Andrew McCarthy, as the romantic lead, and a couple of newbies, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, and boy is it weird to use the word 'newbie' when referring to them, but I guess that tells you how old I am. For Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, the newbies, it was the beginning of an illustrious career, but for Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson, it may have all but ended their career, not because their performances were particularly bad, and I'd probably argue they were good (they were a couple with confused ideals), that for whatever reason "St. Elmo's" was the straw that broke their back. I'm not even sure that John Hughes, the Fellini of the 'brat pack,' directed the movie, but "The Fire" broke the 'brat pack' forever, and I don't think it ever united again. It was like a genre had stretched as far as it could and snapped.

The movie felt like a cross between a sort of second-wave new-wave story of the boomers, with a hint of my generation, but they were distinctly older, and the biggest conflict seemed to be whether they should sell out or not, and what exactly selling out meant. In some ways, it may have been the first movie to put this question into perspective, because up until this point, it was assumed that a 'sell-out' was bad, and that someone that stayed true to the truth seeker's path was, well, true, but the lines were blurry in "St. Elmo's Fire." It didn't hurt that Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, he as the saxophonist staying true to his dreams, and she as the lost art school girl, gone to cocaine, were an interesting couple, because they didn't sell out, or fuck (I don't think), and yet they were the losers of the bunch. The couple that really took on the question of selling out were Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson. They were living in D.C. and she was working for a good democratic party cause in 1986, a pre-Dukakis but post-Mondale era, when there was more than one liberal in the Senate, and Gary Hart could still be President, carrying J.F.K.'s torch. Judd Nelson was a young Republican but a kind of lit one like Alex P. Keaton on "Family Ties," or a character out of an Ayn Rand book, but I don't remember either character necessarily winning the war over the debate of their love, except that she has an unforgettable affair with Andrew McCarthy, the poet, in the shower, a contradistinction to Judd Nelson, and yet a similar type, true to his ideals. In fact, they are the thee idealists of the movie - Judd Nelson, the political operative, Ally Sheedy, the political idealist, and Andrew McCarthy, the artistic tortured wounded idealist, all coming to a head, as they do in real life, and a great triangle, almost like "Reds," with Warren Beatty as John Reed, the socialist idealist, Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill, the tortured artist, and Diane Keaton, the muse caught between two worlds, but "St. Elmo's Fire" was better, if less instructive. It not only had this story but another one of a tortured love affair between two in between generation'rs, Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, as coke heads party freaks afraid to grow old, like the boomers, and a much less serious sub-story.

I loved "St. Elmo's Fire," like I love all bad cheesy art that stands the test of time. I wish Mark Wyatt a happy birthday for drawing a great sketch of it, that takes real courage, and since he was a little older than me, maybe he was seeing the characters from the rear-view mirror while I was flash forwarding to the future, but I don't think I ever felt so delinquent watching a movie and that either makes me the most pathetic person in the Universe, or a hopeless romantic, or a little bit of both. I know "St. Elmo's Fire" is a bad movie, but bad movie's like that don't come along very often, and I've come to respect that more as I get older, because that's a sacred pact a movie has between the zeitgeist of the times, that is unspeakable, so much so Rupert Murdoch doesn't even know about it. The movie killed two stars and created two more, and even a bad movie that noteworthy is a success, in a film lover's mind, but accidents don't happen by accident, and the movie let that happen, the ushering in of the new, the second wave boomer story, and the killing of the former, the fucked up Gen-X story, so that the boomers won in "St. Elmo's Fire," by accident. Rob Lowe and Demi Moore, the tortured party souls, became huge stars while Ally Sheedy, Judd Nelson, and Andrew McCarthy, taking on the real Gen X struggle of how to conform to a corrupt society when you've been taught by Ex-Sixties revolutionaries that society was fucked-up, were on their way out. Hollywood dropped them soon after 1986 when "Fire" was released, because I think that the struggle they represented from the original 'brat pack' was worn out, or so Hollywood thought. The transition between the first wave of the baby boomer generation, and the second wave, was hazy for a few years of my teenage years, but then quickly was taken over by the second wave boomers, best symbolized by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the popular imagination, but by Demi Moore and Rob Lowe in "St. Elmo's Fire," tabling the real concerns of Gen X that were to be addressed in 'grunge,' the music not the movie.

The original 'brat packers' were excluded from grunge, ushering it in but nowhere to be seen when it hit in the early Nineties. Anthony Michael Hall had the most tragic demise of the original stars, really losing his magic, but they all disappeared (Molly Ringwald to France) in almost historic fashion, barely resurrected even in trivia, and yet they existed for a horribly painful moment when our parents born in in 1945 were getting old, especially by their standards, and the generation beneath them had yet to come up, and everyone was looking for the youth (us) for an answer. Hollywood, as if she was a person, took away all of our adolescent heroes that should have represented us as we got older, and maybe they would have, but the John Hughes movie ended with "St. Elmo's Fire," and nothing like it has ever returned, though I guess "Napoleon Dynamite" was this for another generation, a worthy movie, but I'm not sure a 'star making machine' was made of it like the brat pack with all their angsty swagger, my friends. "Napoleon Dynamite" was more of a one off that set off some minor explosions, but the 'brat pack' were huge in a pre-internet, post ET era, and it's interesting to see how they died, killed off by the budding roots of an older generation, coming into maturation, and threatened by the young buds. My heroes were killed and I barely noticed it, because they were replaced by new heroes in "Pulp Fiction," although there was nothing new about John Travolta, he'd been fucking me up since '76 in "Saturday Night Fever," another unforgettable movie-going experience that is being lost, but I don't think many people care, and if I told them my "Saturday Night Fever" story, they'd never want their kids going out again.

I felt older walking out of "St. Elmo's Fire," like I'd literally aged watching the movie. It was the same movie theater in the village next to the Taco Bell where my friend Sean Barth's sister worked as an usher, and talked about how people left the "Deer Hunter" crying; the same movie theater where I saw "Baby It's You," and probably had one of the sweetest most unforgettable movie going crushes of my life on Rosanne Arquette, that I still cherish, since it was rare; I also saw "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy" there and there may have never been a Woody Allen movie I appreciated more, still one of my favorites, even if my intellect searches for deeper movies of his, because I never enjoyed watching one in a movie theater more than that one. Woody made me feel like a real movie fan that day, a guy who lived for the movies, and could watch "Anyway Which Way But Loose," "Eddie and the Cruisers," or "Cannonball Run II," and still appreciate the comic subtlety of a neurotic New York City Jew, making me feel like the biggest movie fan in the world, like Woody made of Mia Farrow in "The Purple Rose of Cairo."