March 15, 2014

Happy Ides of March.

Winter is still upon us. I took this pic a week ago. This is my view of Lake Michigan, at the turn-around of my walk, on Thursday, March 6th. The lake was 91% frozen. Boats couldn’t navigate easily. I long for spring like it’s an absent friend who used to keep in touch by phone but now has gone AWOL. After a winter like this, spring feels like a goal - touchdown poles in the distance. I want to be sprinting towards this goal, but instead I’m trudging along, breathing heavily, my feet slowed down by slushy muck.

But then it warmed up a bit. Still snowed, but we’ve had intermittant 40 degree days. Yesterday the lake looked like this:

Dear God people, I think spring really is coming.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So. What happened in February? I went to New York for a couple of days. I met with some good friends, I met with my book editor (for If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother) and told her about my progress on the book I’m currently writing. I interviewed my friend Cindy Chupack at the 92nd St. Y about her recently published (and hilarious) book: “The Longest Date, Life as a Wife.” I miss New York. I could live there again. I really could.

Let’s talk about movies first. I watched the Academy Awards - well, I fell asleep half way through. But viewed the most important parts, I suppose. I’d just driven back from Yellow Springs, Ohio, with Jill Soblue, Dave Carpenter, and Mulan. We did a Jill & Julia show in Dayton the night before, on March 1st. The highway was littered with cars who’d had accidents because of ice and snow. We even witnessed a couple of accidents - scary. unpredictable. In fact, I had one of the most frightening incidents while driving. As we approached a toll booth in Indiana, it became apparent that my brakes were not engaging the wheel with the road. We slid. I looked for a place to crash. I noticed that another car, presumably having found itself in the same predicament, crashed straight into a toll booth (one with no toll operator, thankfully.) But for us, my anti-lock breaks engaged and shook the car and we came to a stop just short of the wall that I’d chosen as the reasonable place for us to crash. EEEEEEK.

Anyhoo, I was tired after we returned the next day - seven hours of driving on equally icey roads. We all watched The Academy Awards in a sort of coma. I was disappointed that 12 Years a Slave won for best picture. I thought Ellen Degeneres was a good host. OMG, I am falling asleep right now - just thinking about the Academy Awards. Yawn. I loved Bette Midler’s dress. That was a good dress… A pretty, pretty, striped - flattering, I thought.

Bigger yawn.

Okidoki! Back to the land of being alert.

Wait! The most delightful thing to happen on Academy Awards night was that Jill’s song, a cover of “Don’t Let Us Get Sick” (written by Warren Zevon) was the song used at the end of “Girls”! She had no idea. A total surprise. And it was perfectly used as well.

What movies did I watch last month? Well, I’ll tell you.

Movies watched February, 2014

1.) The Decologue, Episode #5, 1989, directed by Krzysztof Kieslowski

2.) The Godfather, 1972, directed by Francis Ford Coppola

3.) Ninotchka, 1939, directed by Ernst Lubitsch

4.) Life Itself, 2014, directed by Steve James

5.) Only Angels Have Wings, 1939, directed by Howard Hawks

6.) Band of Outsiders, 1964, directed by Jean-Luc Godard

7.) Lost in Translation, 2003, directed by Sofia Coppola

8.) Captain Phillips, 2013, directed by Paul Greengrass

9.) All is Lost, 2013, directed by J.C. Chandor

10.) To Have and Have Not, 1942, directed by Howard Hawks

I was surprised, Captain Phillips was masterful. Tom Hanks was terrific and he should’ve been nominated for an Academy Award. I thought the entire movie was thrilling and lead up to a climactic last five minutes, where Captain Phillips is experiencing the immediate impact of post-traumatic-stress, in what felt like real-time. A visceral, real experience onscreen. An aspect of traumatic events almost never included in action movies! I thought the whole film was worth it for those last five minutes, and the entire picture was beautiful, agonizing, painful, suspenseful. The best action movie I’ve seen in years.

All is Lost was such a dissapointment. I’m not a sailor, but it seemed like the main character, played by Robert Redford, was having made-up problems. His character didn’t seem fleshed out. Worst of all, his character had no sense of humor about his situation. Even in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” the main character laughs at the end - seeing his predicament is hopeless, and that he’s going to die. Redford’s character is serious about each calamity. If those things were happening to me, there would be a moment where I would laugh myself silly. I think that would be a common, human, relatable thing to do. But not in this film. Also, there are no shots of the sky. If I were stranded on a boat and knew it was the end, I would be spending my time looking up at the sky and just taking it all in: my existence, my luck at ever being alive, etc. But no, no shots of the sky? Weird.

I hadn’t seen The Godfather in years. It was my first time to see it when I was over forty years old. Wow. It haunted me, got under my skin. I plan on watching II and III sometime next month. Al Pacino is so beautiful. Every actor is perfectly cast.

Speaking of the Coppola front, I also watched Lost in Translation. I had not seen that in ten years at least. When I saw it the first time, I related to the Scarlett Johansson character. This time, I related more to the Bill Murray character. That film was even better than I remembered.

Surprisingly, Band of Outsiders - while I still have high esteem for that film, it fell a little in my estimation as I watched it this time around. (Probably for the first time in fifteen years.) It was more slap-dash than I remembered it. A thrown together film in many ways. The best sequences seem to hang out of time and don’t integrate the film together like I thought it did. Jean-Luc Godard is probably my least favorite of the French New Wave directors. Yes, it’s great when the three of them (Odile, Arthur & Franz) run through the Louvre, and of course their dance in the diner is great. I dunno. I still like it. Not a fave. I got a Criterion Collection release of Godard’s 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her. I’ll watch that soon.

Only Angels Have Wings - god. That movie just gets better every year I get older. Cary Grant, I think he’s my favorite leading man. Except I also love Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda. Oh! How to pick? But wow, what a film with a sense of place. That bar in South America where they’re all holed up, hanging out, and trying to deliver the mail seems so real - it’s so deep in my psyche, it’s like a real place. If I got Alzheimers I would probably talk about that bar in Barrancca (a fictional town near the Andes) like it was real and want to talk to Dutchy - the bartender played by the late, great Sig Ruman. Also, I noticed how Howard Hawks reuses good lines in more than one film. Both Jean Arthur and Lauren Bacall (in To Have and Have Not) say, “I’m hard to get, all you have to do is ask me.” The dance that Lauren Bacall does at the very end of the movie, as she makes her way towards Humphrey Bogart is SO FRIGGIN GREAT.

The Decologue Episode #5. This month, March, I’ve been exlusively watching Kieslowski, so I will comment on The Decologue and the rest of his films next month.

Books I read in February, 2014

1.) “A Cruel and Shocking Act: A Secret History of the Kennedy Assasination” written by Philip Shenon

2.) “Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much” written by Sendhil Mullainathan and Edlar Shafir

3.) “The River Swimmer” written by Jim Harrison

4.) “Notes on a Life” written by Eleanor Coppola

5.) “Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World” written by Sam Sommers

6.) “The Five Elements of Effective Thinking” written by Edward B. Burger and Michael Starbird

Lets start with the last two books listed, which I listened to after downloading them from Audible.com. These were just perfect walking books. I head out for an hour or two, I’m in the elements, and I’m listening and thinking. Perfect way to spend an afternoon. “Situations Matter” is mostly just this: situations matter more than you think. People think they (and others) are governed predominantly by personality. But actually personality has much less to do with things. The particular situation the person finds themselves in has a much greater influence on how they behave. This truth should lead us to much greater empathy for others. Here’s a takeaway idea from this book: We should avoid making statements about how people “are” so frequently. For example: He is crazy. She is high-strung. He is stupid. She is snobby. Y’know, that sort of thing. It’s better to empathize by thinking of their situation, rather than their personality. Consider how one might react or behave in that situation. Not if you were them. As them. It’s a subtle, but profound difference when trying to understand someone’s behavior.

An offshoot of this, when thinking about people’s behavior and personalities, is a new tack I’ve taken when observing others. I’ve been thinking this: Everybody’s personality evolved over time - biologically and environmentally - to work in some ways. It might not seem like it because what you’re observing in them at that moment might be a time when the behavior is counter-productive. (Otherwise we probably wouldn’t be noticing it.) But what I’ve been trying to hold in my awareness is this: this behavior does work some of the time. It’s a rational choice some of the time. Otherwise the person wouldn’t behave that way.

“The Five Elements of Effective Thinking” was a nice reminder of how to think. Ha. But really. It’s true! The authors are math professors who’ve noticed certain patterns about how people approach learning. Some are much more successful than others. In the book, we learn about five basic ways to deepen your understanding and learn to gain a foothold on successful learning strategies. Things like: understanding a certain topic deeply before moving on to more complicated ideas. They have advice about how to think about questions, how to see the flow of information, how to accept change as a constant.

Jim Harrison is one of my favorite writers. This book, “The River Swimmer” is made up of two novellas. The first one is entitled, ” The Land of Unlikeness.” I liked it better than that second one, “The River Swimmer.” In fact, I think Harrison is at the height of his power in a story like “The Land of Unlikeness.” It’s about a 60ish professor of art going home to Michigan and starting to create art again, after years of study and criticism. He meets up with an old grade school flame, he transforms slowly. His daughter comes to visit. Ahhh… What a wonderful story.

“Notes on a Life” was one of those perfect timing memoirs. Eleanor, wife of Francis Ford Coppola, recounts - from her daily diaries - various episodes of the last twenty years. The book and screenplay I’m working on is about a woman who is in a similar place, trying to decide what to do next after child raising. I loved her point of view, her humility, her perceptive descriptions.

“Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much” had more ideas for me to chew on. My friend Jim Emerson recommended this book to me. I had been talking to him about how a technique of thinking about food - a way of thinking - has caused me to eat much less food. And this technique is so counter-intuitive. It’s this: When I think about abundance - in this case of food - that the world is full of food, food I will eat and enjoy - when I imagine no limits to the food available to me, I eat much less! The feeling of abundance makes me behave in a more conservative manner. But if I’m on a diet, if I feel like each bit is monitored, and there is only so much that I can have - if my focus is on that - then I am not only more obsessed with food, I ultimately eat more. Weird. But in a way it makes sense. In our ancestral environment, before we were modern and in cities and enjoyed the fruits of the agricultural revolution - we experienced many times of famine. Famine was common. I’ll be that those who obsessed over food and ate everything they could survived more than those that didn’t. I mean, duh! So when I go on a diet, that means I am putting myself in a mind-state that is old and familiar. But in the past, it wasn’t about restraint - it was about availability. But I mimic that state when I restrict.

Wait. The book, “Scarcity” actually doesn’t get into all this with food. I just got that from the book. The book is mostly about money scarcity. It created a lot more empathy in me for people who are struggling with very little money. I can see how they would make poor, impulsive decisions if their money was so uncertain and restricted. Anyway, it’s interesting. I recommend it.

“A Cruel and Shocking Act” was long, long, long. It’s all about the Warren Commission and the assassination of JFK. Surprisingly, I have never thought deeply about JFK’s murder and know very little beyond the basics. I thought the conspiracy theorists were nuts. But reading this book - well, now I think the are probably right! I mean, the CIA. Jesus. Actually, this book doesn’t hold them as responsible as others do. But reading this book sent me down a well of wanting to know more. I’m going to read David Talbot’s “Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years” next. In fact, David Talbot’s review of “A Cruel and Shocking Act” is what got me tossed into the whole JKF mysteries, even more than the book did. His review is here: JFK assassination: CIA and New York Times are still lying to us - Salon.com Wow. I honestly didn’t realize. How could I not have known how many unknowns there still are? I guess it all just seemed too complicated and convoluted to me, with too many crazy people yelling around the edges. But now my interest is piqued.

I’m off to the TED conference in Vancouver, B.C. this weekend and will be there all week. I’m doing the comedy round-up at the end of the conference again this year. I’m excited!