People Getting Divorced

Someone Left The Cake Out In The Rain

I don't know the precise title of the poem, or the precise year in which it was written, but there's an old piece by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, which opens with the following words: People getting divorced / driving around with their things in their car...

My first encounter with Mr. Ferlinghetti was highly unanticipated - in my lowly high school, located in a suburb of Charlotte, the library included a handful of examples of beat writing: a general anthology, and two of Ferlinghetti's collections. This was quite the discovery - at the time, a nefarious 11th grade English teacher (anachronisms like schoolmarm and spinster lady would be perfectly approriate for this wiry and severe woman) was lobbing dreadful Victorians into an unenthused audience (myself included) of Breakfast Club contemporaries.

Roundabout what felt like the thousandth week of assorted Brontes and moors and cloaked ciphers named Heathcliff, the fundamental joy of reading was spiralling into its' death throes. I wandered through the library foremost because I was a nerd, and the library was quite the sanctuary, where my outré, green-haired friends and I could commiserate freely without suffering the unwanted intrusions of chain-smoking juveniles with disabling fixations on shop class and Molly Hatchet's Greatest Hits.

But after a certain point in time, Steven King's latest just wasn't managing to carry the same old expected appeal. In wandering about the library, I'd taken to reading record guides (a crash course in essential obscurities to search for after school, careening with the aforementioned green-haired no-gooders back and forth across sprawly Charlotte, pinging from one deeply strange, hole-in-the-wall record shop to another), and film guides as well. Then, after an assault of poetry - late-Victorian, of course - an angry reaction, response to the insinuation that poetry had presumably died a horrendous death at a point in some proximity to (a) the Harlem renaissance, or (b) the 1929 stock market crash - I set upon a silent, undeclared quest to find decent poetry which might be marginally closer to contemporary life than runes, glyphs and windswept moors. The discovery of Ferlinghetti came about very soon afterwards.

People getting divorced remains vividly in mind - more than perhaps any of Mr. Ferlighetti's many artful creations. Those opening lines - an absurd mix of freedom and dread, gloom and glory, liberation and lugubrious afternoons with lawyers - contain infinite contradictions, ironies - these are words with adamantine detail and precision, and I was keenly interested in their suggestiveness. There is a cinematic image, a certain great departure from Mr. Ferlighetti's probable intentions which immediately occurred to me, and I've never forgotten it: this image of exceptionally cool, affluent thirtysomethings - very hip, in the tackiest of possible ways: the kind of folks who seek out Eurotrash wives, blow 60 grand on chintzy decor, and then forget to turn off Wheel Of Fortune while screwing - in a mechanized fashion utterly undeserving of gentler, more euphemistic language.

And so - this paragon, this studio-tanned example of a great, groovy new class of cool - cooler than you, or I - is suddenly freed; flying down the 8-lane 101 southbound through Silicon Valley in a convertible European sports car, motorik autobahn fantasies freely and perhaps sensually indulged, a recently discovered, youngish lover - the kind of potentially expensive ladyfriend once referred to in a hit Randy Newman song as a "big nasty redhead" at his side, a stray wet kiss after a sly joke and shifted gears. And he is gliding, all speed and style, swiftly away from a cabernet Calistoga weekend (chatty, cokey, cosmopolitan as the slow fingertip caresses of languid, transluscent summer sunsets give way to the chill of a California night's suggestive multiplicity of options), tires' sigh soft harmonics on flat, anthracite-dark asphalt - the fault-cleaved Santa Cruz range a low and fading silhouette to the right - past million dollar split-levels and nubby ranchettes nestled in tinderbox eucalyptus groves, the white-on-emerald sign for the matter-of-fact (yet vaguely triumphant-sounding) Semiconductor Boulevard hovering above industrial park rooftops on the left. Onward and farther south still, towards the prinicpality of Mountain View, the brain trusts of Menlo Park and Palo Alto, with the valley-filling sprawl of San Jose spreading beyond them beneath onyx skies, a glorious August eve in the Golden State, illuminated by the pink-white eclipse light of buzzing iodine street lamps, the fading heat of sunshine radiating from pavements and freeways into the evening's languid tectonics. Those constraints of marriage - a God-given legalism, now besmirched by popular culture and the unshackling of bra-burners and cocksuckers and miscellaneous other shacker-uppers - have eroded and slowly morphed into calibrated arrangements, subsidiary clauses, negotiated rights of first refusal. But no bother - our golden protagonist is free, fabulous and forty: wind in the hair, jingle-jangly pocket change (plus a fat little brown-tipped roach) in the ashtray, ammonia-scented blueprints of Le Corbusier's worst nightmare still rolled and rubber banded in the back seat. The aftershave, the wallet, the shoes, the seamless and enveloping production job of The Long Run (all the debutantes in Houston, baby, couldn't hold a candle to the plastic surgery disaster that is you) rising from discreetly nestled speakers - all coalsece within this remarkable and handsome vehicle to form a definitive, absolute atmosphere. Aglow, and the great love of the world swoons, coasts and glides into the infinity of darkened skies speckled with a million worlds awaiting their conquest.

Within the temperate embrace of a West Coast dry season, we have arrived at what it's all about - we all know what it is (whatever we would like for it to be). This is ambient, in the extreme - an artificial atmosphere, zero-gravity, liberation, with our fundaments of oxygen and nitrogen transformed, oxidized into a phenomenal cumulus of dollars, simulacra become the almighty himself, rising and floating with you, upwards and free. Breathe deeply, comrades and co-conspirators. Make a wish, make two or three or eight - that sweet honey sunshine will never, ever end.

Eddie Money

I Think I'm In Love. Cuz I Can't Get Enough.

So...I think all families have - by definition - a certain nebulous aspect: the outer limits are vague, and there are always mysterious step-aunts and proto-cousins a couple counties away, or in nominally familiar-sounding cities (Joliet? Las Cruces? Muncie?) in states unseen. They may or may not pop up at the occasional family reunion, or as some unannounced Thanksgiving surprise shrouded in sighs, whispers and the sort of ethereal intrigues delicately deflected from the ears of the youngest attendants (who develop - at a surprisingly early age - an uncanny knack for seeing through such machinations, without letting on that they do). The precise nature of the relationship is vague, held at a discreet distance, and the nature of that distance is likeley less grand than potentially grim. And as a child, it is expected that you will assume and understand - via some mysterious process of geneological osmosis - how this obscure familiar fits into the intricate and highly local scheme of things, and that you'll refrain from asking the sorts of questions that might cause the delicately finessed social dynamics of a simple holiday dinner to crack, craze or crystallize into a melancholy, spontaneous epidemic of malevolent bad vibes.

I had one of those vague variety of aunts, named Carrie, who passed away after years of declining health about 20 years ago. She lived in a semi-frightening and generally unmaintained housing project in Southwest Charlotte, and my mom and varied other relatives would drop by her barracks-style abode to take her shopping or to the doctor, offer some company, or otherwise assist.

So, one volcanically hot July afternoon my mom and I have dropped by to take Aunt Carrie to a doctor's appointment, and we'd gotten her cable TV - she loved her soap operas, and she was passionately riveted to the local newscasts that rarely informed as often as they frightened or titillated. As my mom is helping to get her ready, I'm in the front room flipping channels in wild quest for something, anything interesting, and I stumble across a great, yet heretofore uncommented-upon moment in rock history: Eddie Money's hit single (not especially well-remembered at this late date) I Think I'm In Love, in heavy rotation at the time on MTV. Eddie's being very impressive, bridge-and-tunnel rock at it's most strident, hookline drilled deep into the subconscious - and he's gyrating like a big, hairy, discombobulated mesocyclone looming over Kansas (perhaps the tropical-storm-force breeze, calibrated to tangle his coif in time to the song's rhythm, is forcing him to jiggle around like that), whilst filling us in on his urgent, heartfelt romantic proclivities. At some point during the middle of this calisthenic spectacle my Aunt Carrie, at last ready for her close-up, strolls a rickety old lady kind of stroll out into the living room. She stops suddenly and watches, mesmerized for all of about three seconds, before slowly pointing at the TV and laughing one of those quick, sudden and unexpected kind of laughs (gaspy and loud), exclaiming That man...is a fooool. And then she shook her head, and laughed quietly to herself most of the distance out to the car.

And with this nonchalant assessment, I shut of the TV, and held the door for Carrie, as we ventured off for an afternoon's adventures in the modern health care industry.

Satyajit Ray: Nayak

Nayak: Satyajit Ray and the demystification of celebrity
(India, 1965)

Nayak, which has recently received its' first ever DVD release in the United States, remains one of the more stylistically more daring entries in the long and fascinating cinematic career of Satyajit Ray. It isn't quite the knockout that some of his other films are, but it remains one of his more obscure works (unfortunately) to Western film aficionados, and there are more than enough intriguing experiments going on here to make it worth seeing.

At a basic level, Nayak presents a character study, of matinee idol Arindam Mukherjee (Bengali star Uttam Kumar) as he travels by train from Calcutta to Delhi. The casting choice of Kumar was a brilliant move on the part of Ray, who was interested in creating a film that would focus less upon a star's star-power, and more on a star's inner world. Ray was known for literary and intricate dramas, which were the antithesis of the sorts of more conventional films that Kumar had become known for, and Kumar's revelatory performance is an unexpected display of theatrical prowess, with great psychological implications revealed through drama, but also through the slightest of gestures or expressions.

Kumar is paired here with Sharmila Tagore. Tagore - along with Soumitra Chatterjee - appeared in many of Ray's films, and this is one of her finest performances; among other qualities, her character offers an image of a very specific sort of 60s cool, a stylishness that could perhaps rival that of Jean Seberg in Godard's Breathless. This noted, her character here - an initially reluctant journalist who approaches Mukherjee in a dining car for an interview - is predominantly striking for more cerebral qualities: her tough confidence, her independence and her persistence.

The interview and conversation between the two rapidly shifts away from expected star-meets-paparazzi territory into something more psychologically intrepid, with hopes and fears and any number of personal anxieties delved into. Ray's decision to build a narrative out of the unguarded moments of two individuals who would normally (for personal and professional reasons) be considerably less open is ambitious - a certain amount of 'demystification of celebrity' goes on, and I would guess that it had to make for difficult filming: how to cinematically visualize a story built entirely upon inner moments? Ray elects for a nonlinear approach, with an abundance of flashbacks, and a spectacular and surreal dream sequence (centered around Mukherjee's greatest fears). This approach is a bit disjointed, and the film has a certain difficulty in sustaining it's rhythm, but the film is also always visually very inventive and interesting, affording Ray the opportunity to delve into a variety of new-wave influences, which lends the film a brisk stylishness.

Gaining a first-ever official home video release in the US, one would hope that this portends further releases - Ray's most famous films have gone out of print in the US, and a handful of Ray's finest films - Kanchenjungha, the sublime Days And Nights In The Forest, and the magical Adventures Of Goopy And Bagha have never made an appearance on DVD in the US. As another of his key works, it's great to see Nayak finally getting a long-overdue release.