May 1, 2014

Mulan made these cupcakes for Easter. One of her career dreams is to have a cupcake food truck that’s painted pink. When you’re 14, the whole world is one big possibility.

When you’re 54, I find - life is… has… small possibilities. And yet. Possibilities.

Overall, with the exception of the inevitable dark moments, dreary and regret-filled, I am finding life better than ever before.

Now I must take a moment to laugh at myself for writing the last sentence.

I’m still so thrilled to just be home every day. I don’t miss performing on stage. I love it here in my office. I can’t believe how quiet I need my life to be in order to write. I’m astonished to find that I don’t thrive on chaos. I thought I needed desperation, deadlines, and general dread. Turns out that’s not true.

Okay, let’s talk about books. I read only two books - and truth-be-told, not even.

I was at The Book Stall (my favorite local independent book seller) I saw “My Life in Middlemarch” by Rebecca Mead. I’m an admirer of Mead’s, and had read her personal essay in the New Yorker, “Middlemarch and Me.” I was glad to see she’d gone ahead with an entire book on the topic. I’ve never read George Eliot. I don’t know why. I just never got to her.

So I got “My Life in Middlemarch” and then got a copy of “Middlemarch.” Then I got Juliet Stevenson’s recording of the audio book for “Middlemarch” on Audible. Then, I fell in love with Stevenson’s voice and performance, so I downloaded her reading “My Life in Middlemarch.”

It was a “Middlemarch” April. It’ll also be a “Middlemarch” May. Why didn’t I start “Middlemarch” in mid-March?

I slowly go along, I go back and read again, and I underline and highlight. I’m so deeply in love with “Middlemarch” and of course what I really mean is that I’m in love with George Eliot. Also, I’ve now got a writer-crush on Rebecca Mead, too. Sigh.

Then, as a consequence of me mentioning this in last month’s blog, I had a friend write in to tell me about the 1994 BBC mini-series of “Middlemarch.” He said it was goooood. I bought it off Amazon. It was good! I watched all six episodes over six days. I finished Mead’s book and then began to listen to the audio version of her book while I walked to the beach or cleaned up the kitchen.

Then I got Mulan intrigued. Last weekend we watched the first episode, and she was absolutely head-over-heels hooked. We immediately spent the entire day binge watching the whole mini-series. We’re both infatuated with the actor Rufus Sewell, who plays Will Ladislaw in the BBC series. Those eyes. Be still our hearts!

And yet, with the actual book of “Middlemarch” I’m only half way through and I feel like I’m reading it constantly! Well - it’s long. 900 pages. And it’s dense, each paragraph requires thought and some unscrambling. But I love how I’ve come at this book. From the mini-series, I know how it all ends up. But each day I discover so much more in the book - characters who are so much more complicated and interesting than they (necessarily) appear in the film. I know I am in the grips of love, but I have to say that I think this is my favorite book ever. And here’s the thing about George Eliot - she was middle-aged when she wrote this book - and, for example, Jane Austen was fairly young when she wrote her books. And you can really tell! Jane Austen is caustic and biting and witty. George Eliot is sneakily snarky but much more loving and deep-hearted. She sees the tragedy in people with much more compassion. And she’s writing about marriages and how they play themselves out.

I watched an Ozu movie this last month that I’d never seen before, it’s called “The Only Son.” It’s Ozu’s first sound film, made in 1936. I began to think about how much Yasojiro Ozu’s funny/tragic worldview is so much like Eliot’s.

Wow. There is so much enjoyment to be had in all this. Sometimes it takes my breath away at how much joy there is yet to discover - books, films, artwork - the whole lot of it. I’ll never do anything but scratch the surface, and yet it’s like there’s a big candy store out there, waiting for me to have the time and the inclination. I feel so glad that I am alive now, when all these things can be available to me - and in so many formats. I can listen, I can investigate online, I can read, I can watch.

Now that I’ve brought up watching, let’s move on to film.

Movies watched in April 2014.

1. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, 1986, directed by John Hughes

2. Pretty in Pink, 1986, directed by Howard Deutch (produced and written by John Hughes)

3. A Raisin in the Sun, 1961, directed by Daniel Petrie

4. The Only Son, 1936, directed by Yasojiro Ozu

5. Afternoon Delight, 2013, directed by Jill Soloway

6. Weird Science, 1985, directed by John Hughes

7. Rio Brav0, 1959, directed by Howard Hawks (twice)

8. Planes, Trains & Automobiles, 1987, directed by John Hughes

9. Middlemach, 1994, directed by Anothony Page (twice)

10. Make Way for Tomorrow, 1937, directed by Leo McCarey

11. Get Him to the Greek, 2010, directed by Nicholas Stoller

12. The Invisible War, 2012, directed by Kirby Dick

13. The Breakfast Club, 1985, directed by John Hughes

As you can see, I concentrated on John Hughes this month. I wanted Mulan to see all the teen films filmed in this area. And that means John Hughes mostly. We aren’t done. We have yet to see Mean Girls, which I’ve already seen but Mulan has not.

I had never seen any of the John Hughes movies before with the exception of Planes, Trains & Automobiles. They were better than I thought they would be. I really liked Sixteen Candles, but I saw that last month. Ferris Bueller I had never seen! But I laughed a lot while I watched it. God - Matthew Broderick is such a star - just bursting out of the movie with charisma. Pretty in Pink was okay - the ending clearly didn’t make any sense. On the extras on the DVD there’s an unintentionally hilarious interview with Molly Ringwald about why the ending was changed. She says she is not attracted to Jon Cryer over and over again. The interview cuts away to other people commenting on the film and then back to her and she is still talking about how unattracted she is to Jon Cryer. Omg. How horrifying. I guess Jon Cryer’s part was supposed to be played by Robert Downey Jr. You can see that this makes sense, Robert Downey Jr. has all the oddities that Cryer can convey, but he’s also quite sexy. But still! How must have Jon Cryer have felt? Hughes had to make up a different ending to the movie, where Ringwald ends up with Andrew McCarthy’s character. It makes absolutely no sense. But there you go. As my friend Jill Sobule said when I told her how awful I felt on Jon Cryer’s behalf, “Jon Cryer ended up rich and famous and don’t worry about him.” Yes, this is true. But still.

Mulan is reading “A Raisin in the Sun” at school so we watched the film. I had never seen it, and knew nothing of the plotline. Wow. I really REALLY DIDN’T LIKE IT. Why is it honorable that Walter Lee (played by Sidney Poitier) turn down the money from John Fiedler’s character, Mark Linder? Linder offers the family money not to move to the white neighborhood. Isn’t that the white people being stupid - to pay the black people not to be there? Wouldn’t the sane response be to take the money and buy another house in a white neighborhood and then collect again - exploiting the white people for being racist? Also, Walter Lee is terrible with money, he loses money the family needs, he loses money that would’ve gone to his sister’s medical school tuition, and yet there’s a big ol’ long speech at the end of the play, by Walter Lee’s mother (who we’re supposed to admire) about how they all need to give Walter Lee the “dignity” of trust or he will not be a “man.” Wha???? He is not trustworthy. The sister, who loses the most over her brother’s idiocy - she loses her medical school tuition, is chastened by her mother, and urged not to be upset with him, and to further trust in her brother with money matters!!!! I was horrified. Really, how could people think this was a good play? I saw that a revival is currently on Broadway, starring Denzel Washington. None of the reviews I read mentioned that the play is heinous and makes no sense. The NYTimes review mentioned that “it might not be a great play.” But that was it.

I dunno. I don’t get it.

Okay, I’ll calm down.

Best movie I saw last month: Make Way for Tomorrow. I got it because it was the inspiration for Yasojiro Ozu to write my favorie movie of all time, Tokyo Story. (Okay, at this moment, Tokyo Story and The Shop Around The Corner are my two all-time favs.) There are additional goodies on the Criterion Collection DVD of Make Way for Tomrrow too - Peter Bogdonovich has a filmed commentary and so does Gary Giddens, both of which are excellent. The film is so figgin sad, and so beautiful too. Two elderly people, married for 50 years, lose their house and have to go live with their children. They have five children and the kids split them up. They miss each other. The children (who are in their 50s) are busy with their own lives. It’s heart wrenching and gorgeous.

I can see how it was inspirational to Yasojiro Ozu.

The Invisible War is a must see documentary about rape in the military. Oh god. I thought about the women so much after the film was over. I even tried to find out who they were, I wanted to reach out and email them, something! So sad and terrifying and my god - the military, so terrible and misogynist. And yet these wonderful people, like these women in the film, are in it, trying to do their best. Uh. Uh.

Rio Bravo was such fun to watch, I had to watch it again with the commentary. There’s commentary by John Carpenter and Richard Schickel, which is rather disjointed - obviously recorded at different times and splotched together for the DVD. There’s a nice “Old Tucson” documentary, about where they shot Rio Bravo, as well as many other westerns - and many John Wayne/Howard Hawks collaborations. I have to visit it someday.

Get Him to the Greek - funny, funny. I like Jonah Hill and Russell Brand. I read both of Brand’s memoirs, “My Bookiwook” and “My Bookiwook 2.” He’s a wonderful writer. It could have been better - the movie I’m talking about here. It seemed to be slightly thrown together. But there were wonderful serendipitous moments of great hilarity.

Oh, and The Breakfast Club. I forgot! Okay, Judd Nelson was really good. And Emilio Estevez was too - actually everyone was perfectly cast. It’s astonishing what John Hughes was able to put out between 1985 and 1987. But then… what? Well, I haven’t seen She’s Having a Baby or Uncle Buck yet. I have more hope for Uncle Buck. I’m thinking - of late - about artists - mainly men, mainly I’m thinking about film directors here - some writer/directors - like John Hughes - and how they have incredible bursts of creative output and talent and then… fall off a cliff creatively. They start re-doing (often blatantly) what they’d done before, or totally lose sight of what was great about themselves to begin with. Maybe that’s an inevitable thing to happen - typical you might say. So that got me to thinking, who didn’t fall off a cliff creatively as they got older? Maybe that’s the more interesting question. Two people come to mind immediately: Agnes Varda and Michael Haneke.