New Yawk, New Yawk!
Had a nice noisy lunch at an Irish bar on our way to the Paramount Hotel yesterday, after an uneventful train ride. Then left our stuff at the hotel and went to kill some time at the Public Library, since our room wasn’t ready.
An interesting miscellany, the library sort of emptying out its attic for its hundredth anniversary. A lock of Mary Shelly’s hair, e.e. cummings’s typewriter, a primitive (1911) but beautiful movie of the Ballets Russes, letter from Picasso to Jean Cocteau, a macabre letter-opener that Charles Dickens had made from a favorite cat’s salvaged paw, Hemingway’s first draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (scribbled on a blank page of a John P. Marquand novel), Annie Proulx’s 4”X6” watercolor notebook (painting and writing, like my notebooks but with a little more painterly skill), a page of “The Waste Land” with Ezra Pound’s emendations, Malcolm X’s 1964 journal just before he was killed, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick (which her husband found floating in the river after she walked into it), a huge (“double elephant”) Audubon page, and a glass box with memorabilia of Jack Kerouac’s on-the-road kipple – a harmonica, corncob pipe, rolling papers, empty Valium bottle – and the one thing whose provenance I would like to see verified: a yellow see-through plastic Bic throw-away lighter.
(Bic’s site says they’ve been making lighters for 35 years. Kerouac died in 1969.)
On our way back from the library we made a traditional stop at the Pain Quotidien for a coffee and nibble. Gay did some phoning and we nailed down a free movie, a Paramount showing for Writers Guild members of the new Charlize Theron vehicle Young Adult.
I’m not wild for movies about writers, as I’ve said here before – they never seem to spend a lot of time scratching and staring at a blank piece of paper (or, as Joyce Carol Oates memorably said, “picking your nose and playing with the cat”), but Charleze Theron gets a lot of mileage out of this film’s unusual premise – she’s a YA novelist, prolific but blocked, and she goes back to her highschool hometown, ostensibly for inspiration. Then things get ugly. And beautiful.
When Theron wants to be beautiful she could wake up a dead man. And of course she plays ugly with scruffy intensity. She gets to do both here, and we get to be voyeurs in the transition, as she goes from hung-over to seductive in careful steps. Her writer is a truly serious drunk, knocking back doubles and triples of Early Times but still able to put one foot in front of the other. On the way to seducing the guy she loved in high school, she carelessly falls in bed with a shmendrik any sf fan has to identify with – or at least identify – a bookish model-maker who hobbles along on crutches, having been beaten up and left for dead by hoodlums in high school.
His epiphany, slow and then sudden, is the movie’s elegant pivot: they are both still stuck in high school – he from trauma and she from a measure of success that didn’t continue into adulthood. When she sees it, or tries not to see it, she has a breakdown of cringing intensity. Worth seeing for both of them.
Joe
An interesting miscellany, the library sort of emptying out its attic for its hundredth anniversary. A lock of Mary Shelly’s hair, e.e. cummings’s typewriter, a primitive (1911) but beautiful movie of the Ballets Russes, letter from Picasso to Jean Cocteau, a macabre letter-opener that Charles Dickens had made from a favorite cat’s salvaged paw, Hemingway’s first draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (scribbled on a blank page of a John P. Marquand novel), Annie Proulx’s 4”X6” watercolor notebook (painting and writing, like my notebooks but with a little more painterly skill), a page of “The Waste Land” with Ezra Pound’s emendations, Malcolm X’s 1964 journal just before he was killed, Virginia Woolf’s walking stick (which her husband found floating in the river after she walked into it), a huge (“double elephant”) Audubon page, and a glass box with memorabilia of Jack Kerouac’s on-the-road kipple – a harmonica, corncob pipe, rolling papers, empty Valium bottle – and the one thing whose provenance I would like to see verified: a yellow see-through plastic Bic throw-away lighter.
(Bic’s site says they’ve been making lighters for 35 years. Kerouac died in 1969.)
On our way back from the library we made a traditional stop at the Pain Quotidien for a coffee and nibble. Gay did some phoning and we nailed down a free movie, a Paramount showing for Writers Guild members of the new Charlize Theron vehicle Young Adult.
I’m not wild for movies about writers, as I’ve said here before – they never seem to spend a lot of time scratching and staring at a blank piece of paper (or, as Joyce Carol Oates memorably said, “picking your nose and playing with the cat”), but Charleze Theron gets a lot of mileage out of this film’s unusual premise – she’s a YA novelist, prolific but blocked, and she goes back to her highschool hometown, ostensibly for inspiration. Then things get ugly. And beautiful.
When Theron wants to be beautiful she could wake up a dead man. And of course she plays ugly with scruffy intensity. She gets to do both here, and we get to be voyeurs in the transition, as she goes from hung-over to seductive in careful steps. Her writer is a truly serious drunk, knocking back doubles and triples of Early Times but still able to put one foot in front of the other. On the way to seducing the guy she loved in high school, she carelessly falls in bed with a shmendrik any sf fan has to identify with – or at least identify – a bookish model-maker who hobbles along on crutches, having been beaten up and left for dead by hoodlums in high school.
His epiphany, slow and then sudden, is the movie’s elegant pivot: they are both still stuck in high school – he from trauma and she from a measure of success that didn’t continue into adulthood. When she sees it, or tries not to see it, she has a breakdown of cringing intensity. Worth seeing for both of them.
Joe
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