How to Marry a Millionaire

Friday morning I had a meeting here in the City before making the pilgrimage to Oakland, and since the meeting was downtown, I stopped in at one of my favorite (and few remaining) bookstores--Alexander Book Company. On the remainder cart was a book that I had been looking for on the Kindle for some time, but could not find available--"Blonde" by Joyce Carol Oates. Oates wrote the book as a novel of the imagined inner torments of Marilyn Monroe, biography-style. I had previously tried the book in Missouri, but I was little more tender-hearted then--I couldn't make it through the beginning chapters where Norma Jeane's mother loses her mind. At one point I actually took out the bookmark, closed the book, and gave it to the library.

I figured I'd never be able to handle reading that book--and besides, in those days I thought Marilyn was a bimbo. A friend of mine had tried to introduce me to classic Marilyn comedies with "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," "The Seven Year Itch," and, my friend's personal favorite, "How to Marry a Millionaire," and I thought they were acceptable cinema but I also felt they didn't warrant me watching them more than once.

Six years and four lessons in extramarital city-girl whoredom later, I feel as though I am strangely (and sadly) drawn to Marilyn's story and to the movie "How to Marry a Millionaire." I can read the book now without cringing, even though I'm aware that her life was a constant and ugly car wreck. I just pull of the delight of the lyricism that Oates brings, and I just watch with a kind eye.

Was it not a kind eye before? Were the characters just crazy Californians before? Was it because the story was so disintegrating? It's hard to say. Maybe, too, that I was thinking, "Oates, why do you have to make this so depressing?" Now I read it and stay suspended with it, instead of letting it drag me under. Now I read it and see my own humanity...the point, I suppose, of any art.

It's not that it got prettier. It's that I can handle the scene.

I spent yesterday afternoon in this book, and then drifted to booting up the computer and watching screen tests, interviews, and even painful footage from the final years. Since I'd never had much of an interest in Marilyn before, this was the first time I'd seen quite a bit of the clips, including the clip of Marilyn singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK. Since I had never seen it before, I thought it might be funny and entertaining...I went from being amused at the gentleman introducing her (she was late to the stage and he was trying to stretch for time) to being horrified at her performance. It didn't help having watched the Edward R. Murrow "Person to Person" interview prior to the JFK birthday clip. The Marilyn of Murrow was younger, fresher, and more articulate--a before and after snapshot compared to the JFK song. In the JFK clip (if you haven't seen it and have a queasy stomach I don't recommend watching) Marilyn stumbles to the podium, shed her wrap and gave it to the man who introduced her, and found the mic by tapping on it. Then she grabbed as though hanging on to a life-support system.

Ironically, in "How to Marry a Millionaire" Marilyn's character would have done the same thing--but only because she was portraying a woman who was tremendously nearsighted. In the birthday reception clip she was actually a woman who was tremendously stoned.

"Blonde" suggests at several points that a scene that is played out in the movies can be comedic in the movies and a nightmare in real life. Less than a decade separated "How to Marry a Millionaire" from the JFK reception, and the same scene is played by the same woman--the first one is funny, and the second one was hard to watch all the way through. At the reception she adjusts the mic, creaking it up and down with a lot of noise roughly, and then stands before it. She gives a shot at the opening lines of the song and is surprised to find no notes emerge. So the orchestra keeps with the introduction and she tries again.

And therein enters in the bimbo.

The movies I watched in Missouri were starring a brilliant woman playing bimbos. The footage I saw yesterday afternoon was a bimbo trying to be a brilliant comic. As she wrapped up the music I found myself fervently praying that the rumors of JFK sleeping with her were just rumors--because if he had in fact slept with her I was going to lose complete respect for him as a man. Correction: if he had slept with THAT, not "her." I think at that point there was no "her" left--she was no longer present. And would he want to sleep with her because he wanted Marilyn Monroe? He couldn't brag about it, for heaven's sake. Looking at her state at that time, why would he want to brag on it? Even worse...why would he be attracted to that? She wasn't just the body to men who met her...she states of Arthur Miller at one point in her career that "he wouldn't have married me if I were nothing but a dumb blonde." (That's not from the book but from an internet source.) It was the toxic combination of body and personality, and from the performance I don't see much personality left.

Maybe JFK was expecting the girl from "How to Marry a Millionaire." I know I was. That's why the change was so shocking. Still, I understand the change.

And in reading "Blonde," I am honing that understanding.

Oscar the Grouch

I spent the early hours of the morning this morning copying the list of Academy Award Nominees to my Netflix que. I'm one of those neurotic people who doesn't have much time for herself, and my theory is that when I get to watch a movie or read a book they better be good ones, dammit, because otherwise it's a waste of time.

So I pull my movie recommendations and reading lists from awards.

Pause for the sound of crickets.

It probably makes me a snob, but it also lends to some sort of obligation--if the suggestions are coming from academy-based lists, shouldn't they be good? But I once tried to read "Anna Karenina" from Oprah book club list and couldn't handle it.

Perhaps it's better to "waste time" with a good-looking trailer or cover.

Docter's Appointment

Let me just say this--it's rare when I get to meet a famous person. I usually just brush by them or spot them. Here's a running list of whom I've glimpsed:

• Kenny Rogers
• Al Gore
• Danny Glover
• Sean Penn
• Andy Williams

(Strange, they are all men. The women, I've met. E.g., Natalie Goldberg.)

And now we can add Pete Docter to the list.

For those of you who don't know Pete, you may know his creations better--he was the director of "Up" and "Monsters Inc," as well as working hip deep in other Pixar productions. This past Thursday I was invited to a business breakfast with a collection of other business leaders in Oakland and San Leandro who have worked with the Alameda County Food Bank, and our speaker was Pete Doctor. When you first get a glimpse of Pete, you note how tall he is, and then you notice his relaxed sense of humor. He talked to us using a presentation staged on his Mac, sort of hiding behind the projector (he says himself that he is introverted), and he explained the teamwork and processes of putting a movie together at Pixar. What stood out to me most was his stressing to TRY ANYTHING, which was comforting. This isn't working? Try anything. This could be better? Try anything. The company that I work for has a lot of what is called "standard work" in place, so to hear this was refreshing.

The other statement that stood out for me was the theme that Pete stated they were shooting for in "Up," and that's the idea of there is more adventure in relationships than in travel/dares/extreme sports/etc. I noticed before in a blog post from years ago that Californians seem to be real physical daredevils, but emotionally I hadn't seen them take a lot of risks. (Coincidentally, last week's homily at church talked about how less of a scary investment it is to avoid kindness. This wasn't an endorsement by the minister, just an observation, which is true.) Docter, an introvert and a Midwesterner, perhaps observed the lack of emotional risk too when he developed "Up" to present to crew at Pixar.

By the way, the "tiny mailman" in "Up?" Based on a real kid named, shockingly, Russell. Docter's son has a friend named Russell who looks just like this kid, and he described him as the kid who "blasts through the front door and says, "I'm here Mr. Docter--didya miss me?" "And that," said Docter, "is how I met Russell."

Take a risk, dear reader. Blast into a relationship. :)

It's The Strangest Thing

About four or five years back I told a story on my blog (when it was Yahoo! 360) in a series of flashbacks and flashforwards in the years of the life of my mother. A crystal ball, Windexed and rubbed free of paper towel dust.

I'm trying that again tonight.

Growing up my imagination was somewhat gray, with occasional sparks in science. I read a whole lot as a kid, but nothing provacative until I was about 14 or 15, and that was a biography of Clark Gable, probably unauthorized, sneaked from the grown-ups' section of the Bryan Public Library, top floor. Art was photography by Ansel Adams or other picture books. Writing was poems, written in the tradition of Shel Silverstein, with goofs. I bordered on some sort of weird cusp in my senior year when my journalism instructor put me on independent study with Dorothy Parker's work, but she seemed dark, lost. People in Northwest Ohio don't know who Dorothy Parker is. I don't know how gauge miles just by looking up the road, but people in Northwest Ohio know how to do that. Folks from the plains can do that.

My mother understood something about me that no one else has ever grasped--I have times of quiet and staring into a story in my head. I hit on weird and back off. I watch art films and don't share them with friends because I don't know what the level of weird threshold is.

Tonight I revisited that slice of weird. Not that I enjoy the lifestyle that I saw tonight in an independent film, but the movie was so well-written, that I'm glad I didn't miss it. And I don't know how to endorse it without readers saying, "What is WRONG with you?"

The movie was "Fur," starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr. It is a fictional biography of a portion of the photographer Diane Arbus's life. I saw a journalistic piece on Arbus not too long ago on CBS Sunday Morning, and added this movie to the Netflix que when I found out that there was a movie with stars of this caliber. Keep in mind that I didn't see this movie because I enjoy Arbus's subjects, which, in case you aren't familiar with her work, consists of portraits of dwarfs, amputees, sexual performers of all kinds, and the cast-offs of society. They are good pictures but they aren't my cup of tea...they tend to creep me a little, which from the film I'm guessing was Arbus's point.

But I'm not judging Arbus.

I've been to my own brand of weird, Diane, and I understand being alone.

Cheated. Lucky. Genius...It Is Written.

If you were to play the television game show "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire," you would be able to remove the inaccurate aspects of the title above in description of the movie "Slumdog Millionaire." Hint: use the 50/50 lifeline. When you do we will remove "Cheated" and "Lucky" and you will be left with the right answers. This film is Genius, It Is Written. VERY WELL written. And those words in my post title? They open the film.

I would give it all of the awards that it received, too. And keep in mind that I normally don't go much for Indian culture--just the food, and that's about it. (But then, I don't like wrestling or boxing, and that didn't stop me from seeing "The Wrestler" or "Million Dollar Baby.") There's a bit of a hurdle at the beginning of the movie--about three scenes in short succession where I sort of got queasy, so you might not want to see this on a full stomach. Percentage-wise, though, there are as about as many scenes of "Eeewww" as "The Wrestler." Kind of disappointed with the need to shock, but one of the gross-out scenes has to stay in there (the other two might have been modified just a little bit, for heaven's sake). It's a scene of trickery involving the two brothers, and results in a swimming pool style cannonball that doesn't really land in a swimming pool. That one will haunt me for a while.

Once you get past the filth and squalor, though, the movie turns beautiful--and remarkably pure. I'm trying to figure out the last time I saw a leading character with this much raw innocence...maybe Dakota Fanning. But this is a different kind of innocence, like the children in "Schindler's List." Children who live at wits' end and then everything falls into place for them.

By the way, the dance scene during the end credits? PRICELESS.

Definitely worth the Oscars.

Fight Club

Keep in mind that when I woke up this morning I was tremendously crushed that there was no rain. For three winters that I have lived in the City proper now, I have looked forward to each rainy season as a perfect excuse to take a few months' break from exploring the City and to either camp in the apartment tapping away on the keys or make camp in an old and freshly re-painted cafe with my fountain pens and journals, looking out a streaming world beyond the plate-glass backward letters of the cafe windows. For three winters I have been disappointed and discombobulated in this respect.

You see, I hail from the Midwest, where most mothers, particularly the rural ones, often admonished their kids on sunny days to "go outside while it's nice." For those readers in the coastal land I live in now, rain/snow/hail/ice happens year-round in the Midwest, a constant threat of spoiling a good day of vitamin D. For those of us in the Golden State, though, rain comes all at once, well-organized that way, and very convenient for hybernators such as myself.

Until we hit a three year drought. Thanks, global warmers.

So today was a compromise--first, climb Moraga while the weather is nice. Second, go see "The Wrestler."

Yeah, I can see you wrinkling your eyebrows on that one. Jo, WHY IN GOD'S NAME DO YOU, OF ALL PEOPLE, WANT TO SEE "THE WRESTLER?"

• I heard it was good.


• I heard Springsteen sang a song in it.


• It's up for Academy Awards. (Hey, I don't care for hip-hop or pimps and loved "Hustle & Flow," which won an Academy for best song.)


• I had a crush on Mickey Rourke in earlier years. Can't remember which movie right now, but it was early Rourke.


• I heard Springsteen sang a song in it. Oh.

It would probably be safe to say that I don't like wrestling, at all, as a sport. (As a sexual position is a different matter...ahem.) This movie didn't sugar-coat the gruesome aspects either. The match that brings on Randy "The Ram" Robinson's heart attack (Randy is played by Rourke) is probably the ugliest violence I have seen since the opening Normandy scenes of "Saving Private Ryan"--no one is missing body parts, but they should be (not to mention the fact that two men should have a pretty healthy bout of tetanus from that scene), and after the match the scene stays grisly while Randy fights the nausea that comes with the heart attack. Barring the gore, though, the scene (as well as the whole movie) is shot with exquisite balance. The camera dances back and forth from the fight to the objects being removed from Randy's body, as though the fight is offering a lame explanation for the staples, barbs, pushpins, and glass fragments extracted from Randy with tweezers. The entire aftermath shows Randy fighting the nausea as the medics work on him, and you don't blame him, but it turns out these props are par for the course, and the nausea has nothing to do with the foreign, inexplicable objects in him. It's an incredible piece of cinema.

The entire movie, though, as I have said before, is pretty incredible. It's about 30% fighting and about 70% life, by the way, in case you're gauging whether it's worth it. Scenes with costar Marisa Tomei, as Cassidy/Pam the stripper, are ringed with 1980's love of culture, as though a strange new poet popped up as a dancing wrestler. (If you love '80's metal, you will need the soundtrack to this movie. Randy and Cassidy agree that the music of the '90's "fuckin' sucked.") Randy gives Cassidy a lap dance in an afternoon bar scene, and both are fully clothed, and the dance makes the big bear of Rourke damn near cuddly. Randy also does some great dancing with his daughter Stephanie, played by Evan Rachel Wood. (I found her distracting through her scenes, though..."where have I scene this chick?" Got home and found out I had seen her in "The Upside of Anger" and an "West Wing" episode.)

*****

In contrast to this work of art by Rourke et al, I offer up some link of real life fighting, which is the passing of Jose Torres this past week at the age of 72 in Puerto Rico. As I said, I don't follow fighting of any kind much, and even though Torres was a light/heavyweight champion of the world, I didn't know him from that. Torres was familiar to me because of his literary ties.

You heard me.

Torres was close friends with authors Pete Hamill (who gave him his first book in English) and Norman Mailer (who traded boxing tips from Torres in exchange for editing Torres's writings). Torres also wrote books about other famous boxers, like Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson. This past week on the radio program "Fresh Air," Teri Gross replayed an interview with Torres from 1989, and asked Torres about his interview with Mike Tyson and Tyson's claim of sleeping with 24 women in one night. Torres remarked that he shrugged when Tyson told him, as though it was no big deal, and joked with Tyson that most of Tyson's orgasms must last longer than Tyson's fights. Tyson didn't find that funny. Torres and Gross did though, and I have to admit that I got a pretty good laugh from that myself.

The question that Gross asked Torres that blew me away, however, was this one: "What was the worst punch you ever took?"

And Torres started his reply with, "The best punch I ever took was..." Oh, I'm sure he heard her. Oh, I'm sure he understood her. The whole interview was like that--what's bad, worn leather flipped over to reveal its soft, supple suede side. Randy "The Ram" Robinson tries on the same thing in the last match of the movie. He takes the mic from the announcer and tells us all that this looks bad, and he royally fucked up a lot of things, but he's still here. Look at him, he's still here. Seemed to work for Torres in 1989, The Ram in this film, and Rourke in Hollywood. Bless their failing/war-torn hearts.

Curious Cases

WAY too many books, both virtual and conventional, on the stack next to my bed...

• Fitzgerald's version of "Benjamin Button"


• Gregory Maguire's "A Lion Among Men"


• "Lolita"


• "Reading Lolita In Tehran"


• A book of Christmas stories


• "A Christmas Carol"


• "Invitation To a Beheading"


• A two-week-old copy of the New Yorker

Sniff...need...to...wait...'til...vacation...

Where We Used To Stand

Two years ago at Christmastime I was unemployed and living with a different roommate--one who was, to say the least, hellish. The weather was dry and warm, and I thought it to be remarkable that there was one very important thing that I could do here that I couldn't do back in the States, which was to walk a bridge in December without slipping and falling on ice.

The bridge, in this case, was my Lady by the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge. She pokes her crown up over the trees of the Park from my view on the hill here, and she was a key motivator for love at my first Christmas in California. My boss had let me out early the Friday before Christmas in 2004 (my boss at that time being Gary), and I took mass transit to Fisherman's Wharf and just gazed at the great Bridge. I had a crush on it since I saw the movie "Mother" back in Missouri--I had gasped at the great sweeping shot of filming the Bridge at sunset.

Keep in mind that I grew up about 10 hours from a bridge in Michigan that looked about like the GG only not red and FIVE MILES LONG, and yet, the Golden Gate still has my heart. With a horrid roommate, no job, an absent lover, and a long-lost brother two years ago it took on other connotations as well--the other thing that the Golden Gate Bridge is known for--as the number one destination in the world for those who want to end their own life. I didn't necessarily want to end my life at that time, but I did have a plan for getting a book done that seemed to touch on that as a wrap-up.

I'm not in that place now, but a couple of weeks back on a podcast I heard the director of the documentary "The Bridge" talk about his film, and I found myself wanting to see it. I watched this morning--not in fascination, not in horror, but I found in myself an understanding and empathy toward the people who did take that road. If the purpose of art IS to understand, this film worked. I heard the word "disillusioned" a lot. I could relate.

Just a quick head's up--you have be pretty strong to watch this film and not get sick to your stomach...I had to cleanse it out of my system with a meaningless romantic comedy with Sandra Bullock afterward.

Where I used to stand, until I walked away.

Harvey

If you want a big slice of San Francisco this holiday season, I heartily recommend "Milk," the movie whose reviews are popping up in all of the on-line news sources. All critics seem to love it, and it is what I would call flawless, running from the assassination of City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone to the life to Harvey Milk as he leaves New York and changes the world via San Francisco to the assassination of City Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone.

If you don't know about the premise of the movie, all you have to know is that Harvey Milk was the first openly gay politician elected to public office in the United States. His heyday was the late seventies, after feeling useless to society as a closeted gay insurance salesman/banking employee in New York in the early seventies. He came to San Francisco TO BE openly gay, but the remarkable history lesson here is that San Francisco wasn't always open to the gay culture--the area that Milk settled in, the Castro, was once the center of the Irish Catholic conservative population of the City. But Milk worked hard to make life richer for everyone in San Francisco--for teamsters, blacks, the elderly, children, etc, and people started to see him as a voice of reason in a time when religious conservatives like Anita Bryant were making no sense at all.

Gus Van Sant, director of "Good Will Hunting," directed "Milk" and interlaces actual gay rights footage with footage he shoots in San Francisco and Orange County. It's hard to tell where his movie begins and the original footage ends, particularly in the fact that several of Milk's friends are in the movie as characters other than themselves. I was also relieved to see Emile Hirsch with meat back on his bones...after my brief stint with "Into the Wild" nightmares he was nearly baby-faced in this movie. The biggest surprise, of course, is Penn himself--watching "Mystic River" over four years ago I would have NEVER imagined him ever playing a gay man, but there he is, and armed with lines like the following:

Dan White (played by Josh Brolin): "Think about it, Harvey. Can two men procreate?"

Harvey Milk (played by Penn): "Not yet, Dan. But God knows we try!"

Penn delivers that line with such understated coyness that you have to laugh as a conspirator...and not with any discomfort. I expected Penn's performance to be roughly on par with what Richard Dreyfuss was trying to get away from when his character got the part of Richard III in "The Goodbye Girl," but Penn doesn't struggle. He just is. And he doesn't deliver with power to the masses. He steps before them, states a recruiter's prayer, and then delivers a tremendous amount of hope to everyone, not just the gay population.

As the movie wrapped up, all of us in the theatre were crying quietly, except for the guy sitting two seats away from me. He was sobbing, inspired.

The Really Really Bad Makes the Good Better

After loading larger than life stuff into semis all day, I got on the 6 at 1st Street and rode through Market and all of the Christmas baubles...

My favorites were the elegant hotels.

Happy Holidays, continued...

Advent

1. Reading "A Christmas Carol" on the Kindle
2. Listening to the Barenaked Ladies in a duet with Sarah McLachlan singing "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" on the iPod.
3. Shrek's Christmas movie on the TV.

Yep.

'Tis the season. ;)

LeatherTramp

Been having some pretty consistant nightmares that smack of the movie "Into the Wild" for the last two weeks, but strangely I was without them in San Diego. My brother and I were quiet together--we ate, we talked about how California is different from what we expected, we talked of disappointments, we studied marine life, and then I told MS of my dreams.

"Hmm," he said, "have you ever read the book? It's different from the movie."

I had told MS not only of my dreams but of the meanings of my dreams that my roommate and I had found on the internet.
Starvation = some emotional void in my life
A large dog that I have dies at the end of the nightmare = I'm about to lose a best friend
Since my brother is my best friend that's way more than frightening.

Still, he played me the soundtrack (Eddie Vedder--GOOD STUFF) to the movie and I started to read the book. It was stunning. There was lots of commentary from others the author had talked to that McCandless was "a nut," "arrogant," "stupid," "incompetent," etc. These were much the same comments I heard concerning the adventurers of the movie/book "Touching the Void." WHY DO YOU DO THAT????

But I understand why Chris did it. I can't put it to words yet, and maybe I'm prejudiced, but bring on the nightmares. I want to fly. If a dog I desperately love but have never met dies every night, then he must. I know why I dream this way.

I too am touching a void. The quest now is to fill it, healthy.

Funny How Things Turn Out...

Read tonight that the screenwriter for the movie "Milk" is a Mormon.

Biggest proponents of Prop 8 in California: Mormons.

Film distribution venue of "Milk": Cinemark.

Cinemark is owned by a...Mormon.

The owner of Cinemark made a rather large donation this fall to the passage of...Prop 8.

I'd look for patterns in the chaos, but I strongly doubt I'd find them.

Selah.

Na Na Na Na Na, Shame On You--Or, The Taliban and Fixation With Twins

Listening to the Indigo Girls a lot today. And no, I'm not morphing into lesbian. This town would be a whole lot easier if I could, but Jo does nothing easy, as we know.

Speaking of gay issues...no, I'll put that gun on the mantle and come back to it...

*****

Continuing with my bouquet of museum visits to new exhibits this month, I journeyed to San Francisco's Civic Center/United Nations Plaza area. If you are from this part of the world, you don't need me to tell you this is a borderline dodgy area--the Civic Center sits right on the cusp of SF's infamous Tenderloin district, a nest of mostly drug dealers and users, psychotics, and thugs. (Western Addition and Hunter's Point are two other points of interest for these kinds of groups, but I won't take you on a tour of the neighborhoods. That's another post.) I call the Tenderloin the "Claw-Hammer District" because I once got between a man running from another man who was swinging a claw hammer and ready to murder the runner. Both men brushed my sleeve in the chase. (Remarkably, Civic Center is where the governing of this fine City all goes down--you would think the law would be a little tighter there, but no...)

Occasionally, though, I get brave and visit the Library or the Asian Art Museum. Today it was both. The Asian Art Museum was running an exhibition on Afghanistan.

Yes, Afghanistan. And yes, I WANTED to see it.

As I have mentioned in previous posts concerning the "One City One Book" series sponsored by the San Francisco Library, I have been trying to learn more about Afghanistan. A gray land of waste was my previous impression. But at the Asian Art Museum there are brilliant colors in droplets everywhere in two wings. The Afghan National Museum in Kabul is loaning out pieces obtained in archeological digs from the 1930's and 1940's for people around the world to visit, and they aren't solely doing it to be benevolent--the last thirty-some years of Afghan culture has been ragged, at best. Between the Russians and the Taliban, Afghan artifacts and historical art have been damaged or completely ruined beyond measure (see the photos, above, of before and after of one of the Buddhas at Bamyan--that's a 57-meter cavity leftover from demoltion of the biggest one, like the kind you get from not going to the dentist, all thanks to the Taliban in March of 2001. How ironic that they destroyed the TWO Buddhas and then came over here and destroyed TWO towers the same year). The museum itself in Kabul has been bombed, looted, etc since the Russian invasion, and the pieces that I saw today were salvaged.

What's remarkable about the pieces is that they don't look like something you would find in Afghanistan...they look like someone crossed a Roman with a Chinese art dealer and the two of them had a whole variety of children. And why would they look like this? During the time of Alexander the Great the Romans were knee-deep in trade with China and Afghanistan for gems, spices, foodstuffs, silk, etc. And from that trans-continental travel we have wonderous pieces of glass, ivory...gold jewelry so delicate and soft that you know a heat wave would probably melt it off the wearer, ivory statues of women with perfectly buxom breasts and cat-like eyes, compartmentalized perfume vessels with slate-colored lids...

It's like whiskey and ice cream.

I've had that, though, and it's damn good.

*****

After the fine golds and ivory, I ventured into the cafe at the museum and had a brightly-colored and savory lamb curry dish and miniature cannoli that were the size of my pinky-finger--just the right portions and so BRIGHT in the curry with red curry and white rice and green beans (never would have thought of adding that, but it was brilliant) and green cilantro--and as I sat by the window and looked out at the courtyard I found myself thinking, "Let's do the library today. Let's do that, too." The Library is free and tomorrow is the last day for the Robert Sabuda exhibit in the lower level, so I might as well grab it while I am there. At the table next to me a group of three people were talking about their friends who were buying up guns because "with Barack and the Dems in Congress, who knows if you could own a gun by February." Strange conversation for San Francisco, let alone one to have in a building where the current exhibit is here because it's seeking asylum. I finished my meal and picked up my coat and tote bag and left quietly, moving toward the Library.

The library levels are a bit twisty, and not all levels can be easily travelled to from other levels by stairs. (The Main Branch of the San Francisco Library has elevators, but due to the number of homeless that camp there an over-powering, over-ripe smell usually permiates the close places in the building. The building and set-up are beautiful, but you can smell the homeless everywhere in it, especially on rainy days like today.) While I was looking for the Sabuda exhibit, another exhibit that is currently in the 6th floor gallery caught my eye--the peaceful years of Afghanistan. These were photographs of Afghanistan from 1970 to 1975. Okay, Jo, let's do that first. Then I'll find Sabuda.

After a quick and breathless climb up the stairs, I was greeted with another exhibit that I'll discuss in-depth in a moment (remember, my gun's on the mantle, so to speak) and spent some time with the 1970 people of Afghanistan. Some of it wasn't surprising (pictures of street barbers shaving their customers and causing pain because they are too poor to have good straight-edge blades), and some of it made me smile (the intact Buddhas in their glory, the children traveling to schools on lorries and winking). The photos were all black and white, and I imagined the colors wouldn't be all that different if the photos had been shot in Kodachrome, but a million colors of joy and pain shaded through the photos. Two destitute patrolmen embrace and grin for the camera. A proud owner of a new wool hat balances the headgear as though he is wearing a dozen eggs as a crown.

Afghanistan, I wish you a joy in the rubble, be it gray or marbled with rainbows.

*****

Speaking of rainbows.

So when you first arrive at the sixth floor of the SF Library, there is a glass-topped table and two walls of Harvey Milk memorabilia. I don't know if these items have always been there (they could be because Milk and then SF Mayor Moscone were shot and killed about two blocks from the exhibit in 1978, or the items might have been just put there recently due the debut of Sean Penn's movie Milk). As I said, I don't get to this branch of the library often. But since my understanding of Harvey Milk has been limited to the SFGate coverage of Penn shooting the movie earlier this year in the Castro district, I was fascinated. There were books about him, about Moscone, about their shooting by Dan White (played in the movie by Josh Brolin--I swear, between that and "W" this guy is shaping up to put a bigger stamp on the world than his Barbra Streisand-marrying dad)...letters from Milk to Moscone (apparently, Moscone didn't like Milk when Milk was elected the first openly gay--the literature of the time capitalizes it as Gay--politician elected in the state of California, but Moscone learned that Milk was on his side for a lot of important issues in the City), propaganda pieces Milk wrote to fire up the public about gay rights, etc. There are about hundred pictures of Milk in all of his humor and devotion to his cause and to the public at large on issues other than gay rights.

I walked away from that exhibit a little more than giddy with the added knowledge that wasn't taken from a Focus Features clip of Sean Penn.

This week Proposition 8--a ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in the state of California--passed. Narrowly. (The California voting system is something I will never understand as a Midwesterner, and I will never understand why we even have elected officials here: Californian voting rights are such that you can put any frickin' initiative that you want on the general election and if the people vote for it, it's in. No constitutionality withstanding. This is the reason we have a Governator, not a governor. This is also the reason the ballots are 7 pages long, if you count front and back. I'm not a fan of republics.) A lot of people in other states looked stunned to the Golden State--aren't you people supposed to be crazy anarchists who blaze new trails? I thought this too.

Wednesday morning I was full of questions that I wanted to ask people who voted for the ban. Questions like "Ideology aside, who does gay marriage hurt?" or, leaning on the funny to me, "What, you afraid they're going to breed if they marry?" or "Is marriage really perfected that heterosexuals have the expertise to keep gays from it?"

I can't wrap my head around limitations like this.

But I do know this. 200 hundred years ago a black man was considered 3/5ths a person by God-fearing citizens of this country, and in March of 2001 the Taliban insisted that two statues of peace were representative of something repulsive to their beliefs and destroyed them.

And today I stood in my feminist jeans and sweater and purposefully mis-matched socks and gazed into the drops of gold from that former land of the Taliban and basked in the glow of a President-Elect who poses more hope for this country in his pinky finger than the guy from Texas who would have been fully enfranchised at our country's birth.

To paraphrase from Sean Penn's Milk:

NEVER BLEND IN.

Shine like gold and dress down the ivory.

Geek Love

Continuing to plow my way through the Netflix que, and thought I would anoint myself with a documentary.

I suck at games. I repeatedly lose at chess, and still love it, I enjoy Scrabble (and possess a travel version) and usually lose, I lost at Othello once and a friend of mine chalked it up to losing so the good-looking guy across the table wouldn't feel emasculated (no, I'm just that stupid and honestly lost), but I have never finished a NY Times crossword. And me lovin' the words like I do.

But I LOVED "Wordplay," a 2006 documentary about Will Shortz and the NY Times crossword and the folks who compete at the National Crossword Championship in Stamford, Connecticut every year. It's a room full of nerds of every shape and size and ethnicity and they solve seven puzzles in record time. Then the three top scorers go up on stage, don a set of headsets that knock out noise, and they solve giant whiteboard crosswords for the amusement of 500 of their peers.

Intermingled in their stories are the stories of the crossword in the lives of famous people like Jon Stewart, Bill Clinton, the Indigo Girls, and New York Yankee pitcher Mike Mussina. There are some dry moments when you watch someone solve a puzzle in real time--I know why they do this, but it's like watching paint dry--but the majority of the movie is like reading a rich and delightful short story. It won't keep you, but it's a great way to spend two hours.

A Year of Magical Thinking With Joan, Morning, California

If I had to pin the process down to one artistic saving grace in all of California, it would be Joan Didion. Joan lives and breathes in New York, and there's a reason. She lives and breathes in New York because she is from California.

I've been asked, by varying degrees of acquaintances, if I like California. It's a question I still get asked as though I just moved here, and I've been here the length of a bachelor's degree at a Midwest university. The fast and edgy answer has been this: I love living in California. I hate working in California.

Granted, some of the pain has spurned from living here, and not working. I look at the film reel and about die again, thinking of the scenes. To arrive back on the train and find the car gone, on Valentine's Day. To sleep only 15 minutes in the course of an entire night, because it was my first night sleeping with a man, of all people, while he slept like a baby. To watch my brother pull away in the moving van with Fresno stamped on the destination. To give away Bess and never see her again.

Living in California will strip you down.

Working in California will break you.

Monday and Tuesday night there may be a few entries in my blog throughout the course of the night, awake, again, this time because I have to inventory the entire showroom. Yes. I will be alone the entire night, both nights, in Oakland, which is the murder capital of the nation, and I will be armed with only a Stanley FUBAR. (If you don't know what a Stanley FUBAR is, write. I'll explain. The second picture at the top shows the number of murders in Oakland for the year as of March--I'm afraid to look at the current stats.) At the time of this writing I have a right leg in a permanent cramp (imagine having a continuous charlie horse) and a right arm with a strung pain between the wrist and the elbow. This condition, by the way, comes from building pallets of shipments of 5 pallets or more, multiple times throughout a day.

Working in California will break you.

If you get the opportunity to move here, I WOULDN'T IF I WERE YOU.

Okay, I take it back. There is redemption.

*****

In 2003, a year before I got all cocky and packed the Lumina and drove myself and my frightened cat out here, Joan Didion published the book "Where I Was From," an account of her home state of California and her reasoning for its mentality. "At what cost progress?" was Didion's biggest question of the state, one that excuses every action of itself by writing them off to a pioneer past, and sometimes you do what you gotta do.

Like the Donner party, for example.

Not that I plan on eating my coworkers or employees. When I first read "Where I Was From" I was recouperating from the night short on sleep. I read her on the train to Fresno, on time between jobs, between working in California. I was burnt out then, and went back to work anyway. I had had it with California. But Didion gave me hope. Not false faith, but real and sustained belief in where you end up, regardless of the cost. See, Didion has an issue with California. But she has a love of it too. And because she is a phenomenal writer beyond her words, she gives us California, unbiased, laying out the bad and good.

I am most grateful. I get it now, Joan. This is where I am from. Broken allows space for healing.

*****

I thought of Joan Didion this morning not because of "Where I Was From" but because of "Up Close and Personal."

Yes, the movie.

Didion and her late writer husband cowrote, among other things, "Up Close and Personal" and the 1976 adaptation of "A Star Is Born." "Up Close" is a candy-ass walk in the park compared to "A Star Is Born," which was so well acted that I loathed Kris Kristofferson for a long time after that movie. I didn't just think of any of this on my own this morning, however. Despite my exhaustion, I couldn't sleep this morning and browsed through Netflix and saw the movie. And there, in the midst of the opening credits, was the "Written by" of Joan and her husband.

What???

Joan Didion? Movies?

So there was some quality time Wiki Joan...and that's where I found Streisand and Kris. What staggered my mind was how both movies have the same premise--boy discovers girl on the way up and boy crashes and burns when girl makes it to the top. Interesting.

Maybe someone else had a sleepless night, too.

My sleepless morning gave me the gift of Joan back...in all her humanity.

I love California. But I wouldn't want to work there. Not on an empty heart, anyway.

;)

And Now the Purple Dusk of Twilight Time Steals Across the Meadows of My Heart

So, you're a writer without sweetheart in a big City and you've been watching about twelve weeks of movie recommendations, and you want to believe in fairy tales again.

You could watch "Enchanted."

Eh, not so much.

That's funny but it's not it.

You could watch "Stardust."

Mmmm....yeah.

The stardust melody...of love's...refrain...

Just the right amount of make believe.

Bento Box - Hot And Fresh From the Writers' Group

Dana Goodyear was commenting the other day on her New Yorker blog about how most bloggers' sites getting a bad rap because they seem to be just about what they had for lunch. Then she made a joke about this by pointing out a website called Just Bento--about what people pack in their lunches/bento boxes.

I had to smile at that one.

I was thinking of that tonight when we met for our writers' group. (Damn. It sounds like therapy. And while it does make me a whole person, it is freakin' work. We don't just sit around and tell writing horror stories all night. Most of the time is spent, well, writing.) Before we start on our "write-for-an-hour-no-lifting-the-pen" marathon, we go around the room and say our name and what we're writing. Not trying to write, WRITING. (I swear to God, not therapy. I already have that once a week. Not in the group form, but I'm smart enough to know the difference.) One of the writers gave her name and then, tight-lipped, stated that she was writing a blog entry.

Afterword she said she can't write blog entries. She stated that she didn't think she was that interesting or that she saw anything interesting.

Two film examples scream at me on that one:

• "Murphy's Romance"--"Don't you like yourself?" "Of course I like myself. I just don't expect it to be contagious."
• "Frida"--"If you want to paint you will paint because you can't help yourself."

I completely understand the possibility that no one may want to read what I sometimes consider drivel. I completely understand when people come home from work and pop open their laptops and check their Facebook or Blogger and find me that there is a very good possibility that they will roll their eyes: "Oh, for Pete's sake, she wrote about smokers at bus-stops again."

I don't care.

Some nights my entries bore the holy hell out of ME too, you know. And still I write. I write because I can't help myself. I write for the same reason a bird sings or a flower blooms. Don't listen or don't look, it doesn't matter--we'll still write, sing, bloom. I thought about that tonight as I got off the N train at 9th and Judah and walked up the east side of 9th in the dark. 9th slopes up like a ski ridge, up to Kirkham, up to Lawton, up to Moraga, up to Noriega, and up to Ortega before it starts to veer off around hilltops. When I climb to Kirkham and cross it, standing there at the dry cleaners, next to the blue mailbox, my breath catches to see yet another bike rider "do" 9th--where they never break and let gravity barrel them straight down the hill six blocks to the Park. This one was doing it in the dark, all speed, all faith. Someone will hit him and no one will hit him. He sails for the salad bowl of trees and grass and vines in the Park, the tops of the Golden Gate Bridge poking out of the top like pointy-eared cats stalking, or Japanese lanterns, or men on the march in the foxhole...

I see that scene every day.

It's what I want to write.

It's what I like to read.

And maybe someone else will want to read it too.

So if you place a pen, pencil, chalk, paint, laptop, or pricked finger within arm's reach of me, I'll write it.

I so entirely cannot help myself.

Post Script--

Writer's Forum...

Writer's Workshop...(dammit...we don't read anything...)

Writer's Class...(no tuition)

Writer's Time-Out...(sounds like we're getting punished)

Oh, for cryin' out loud, it's the same word in Spanish or French...

Writer's Cluster...(um, NO. Too Castro meets Folsom Street Fair...)

I give up.

For now... ;)

From the "Say It Ain't So" Department

Lost another favorite actor this morning--the wonderful and incomparable Paul Newman.

The article in the Times was a little off in trying to determine his age, too...look closely at the title and the second paragraph.

Usually the Times has it nailed better than the Chron, but the Chron had the same article on-line, minus the faux pas.

Regardless, my favorite Newman movie was "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid"--but I loved his other stuff as well. There was a little known film he was in with Bruce Willis a few years back, "Nobody's Fool," that I liked an awful lot, too.

And, who could ever forget..."Cool Hand Luke."

You just keep thinking, Butch.

Selah.

Bouquet of Newly Sharpened Pencils

I always liked that phrase in "You've Got Mail."

Thought I would change up ye olde blog a little for some autumnal celebration and to gain some refreshment.

Don't know what repainting the Titanic will do for the entries, but I'll do my best to re-vamp those as well.