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January 24, 2008Noir har har!Darken up!IT’S THAT SNEAKY TIME OF YEARin this bitter little world. Slink along a brick wall. Hide in a closet. Turn up the collar of your trench coat. Push the brim of your fedora back with a gun. Disappear into the fog. Size someone up through the bottom of your martini glass. Blow smoke in someone’s face. Chase someone up and down the stairways of San Francisco. Steal $40,000 from a gangster and beat it to Mexico. Follow someone…all the way to the Castro Theater where noir is back with a vengeance and it’s ten nights of double trouble. A hundred bucks buys you 20 movies and a guided tour of the dark side. www.NoirCity.com, Jan. 26-Feb 3. You may join me in the second row—if you have the moxie. Detective Dietz: You’re a dreamer, Ben.Ben Grace: A man’s only as big as his dream. Detective Dietz: They’re going to pull you out of the river someday. – “Slightly Scarlet” (1956) LOVE AT FIRST SIGHTsays the Apple ad. “Surprise your sweetheart with a pink I-Pod Nano. Put music, movies and TV shows in your sweetheart’s pocket. Now in a new color.” Pink. I remember Carrie Fisher wrote a book called Surrender the Pink. Maybe your sweetheart will trade her pink for yours. MY FUNNY PATHETIC VALENTINEI hate that song. It’s interminable and schmaltzy. You make me smile with my heart. Shaddup, fucker. You make me gag with my finger. It’s the cover story on this week’s Tell It to Someone Who Cares magazine. WHAT’S DIFFERENT?I have always loved living alone. I have never called my solitude loneliness. I call it peace of mind. It’s the giant sigh of relief I heave when I come in from The World and am on my own—no need to respond to, speak to, react to, approach, greet or please anyone. I have fantasized something different, but I have never wished for it. The fantasy usually involves my being someone other than myself. But something feels different, and I realized today, it’s not just the disenchantment with impossible San Francisco; I don’t love anyone. My heart has nothing to occupy itself with. If I’m not involved with anyone, there’s usually someone who at least captures my imagination, someone I wonder about, look forward to seeing or whose life I have an interest in. A lot of times Jack Kerouac steps in to fill this role—he fascinates me like no one but Yukio Mishima—but at present I am busy being embarrassed by the domestic details dropped by Edie Parker, Jack’s first wife, in her memoir You’ll be Okay, My Life with Jack Kerouac. It’s bringing me a little too close to the guy. I feel like I shouldn’t know he slept on his stomach, or fiddled with her ear lobes, or well, whatever. Discounting my manic, mushroom-fueled two-week time-and-place cougar crush and waste of womanly attention I lavished on someone completely immune to my charms, my heart remains empty. I’M SURE YOU’VE SUFFEREDthrough some relationship that caused you to blurt, “I wish I’d never met you!” Before you knew this guy, you were just fine, walking down the street, living your life, you needed for nothing, and then his entrance fouled everything up. Then the pain began. He set some sort of bar that real life couldn’t live up to. Now you’re miserable because this guy doesn’t love you the way you want him to. It may take you years to accept that. But when you do, a certain clarity comes over you. Your heart can ring like a bell. I’m in that space right now. My heart is ringing. I’m the gal swinging down the street, the smiling Kathleen Turner with her arms full of flowers at the end of “Romancing the Stone.” I recall a scene in “Indecent Proposal” where the heartbroken and humiliated Woody Harrelson reawakens to life when he notices the light passing through his architectural model, and remembers there’s more to life, and to him, than a woman who left him. There are ideas and passions and goals to pursue, work to be done. But when gigantic changes come along in your life and there is no one person who has a vested interest in helping you through them, well, something’s missing. An old-fashioned companion known by the old-fashioned word, helpmate. “It’s OK, babe. I’ll take care of it.” “Let me take a load to Goodwill for you.” “We’ll paint the place ourselves.” “I fixed that bathtub leak.” “What else do you need?” Alas, I’ve no one to call my own. There are only a few people who would care if I moved to Brooklyn, and I’m blessed with their friendships; I’d be sorry to leave them behind. But as for that ruby brooch, my heart, that I wear on my lapel, I would not be leaving it in San Francisco. “I’M IN LOVE WITH YOU!”said the short District Attorney to the willowy asst. DA Lara Flynn Boyle in “The Practice” after watching her perform in the courtroom. It was admiration, not romance. Have you ever been so enthralled by someone’s prowess at something that they acquire an aura of radiating excellence? When you’re so stunned by someone’s performance that you spontaneously exclaim, “I’m in love with you! You incredible phenomenon!” I fall in love all the time in that sense. Sergey Khatchatryan does that to me, Virgil Fox did that to me, Johnny Depp just did it to me at my command performance of “Sweeney Todd,” the 1:50 screening at the Kabuki that I alone attended, as I missed my friend’s voice mail canceling our date. Jaysus God I’m in love with that incredible phenomenon! Brian Boitano did that to me at the “Afflac Presents the Brian Boitano Skating Spectacular starring Barry Manilow” recently. (Barry Manilow, however, did not.) I’m a huge fan of Brian. They built an ice rink at AT and T Park for the occasion and I was on the field next to the rink. It was nothing but entertaining and Dorothy Hammil brought me to tears. She’s an old-style skater; that is, she skates beautifully on the ice on her skates. She doesn’t need dramatic jumps to inspire awe. Brian can be really corny with his material, but he is also one of the most soulful skaters of all time when he hits the right note. Thank you, Brian, for reminding me how great you are. I’M UNDER YOUR SPELLLove is a spell—but who casts it? It’s as if you’ve been possessed by some outside force that has commandeered your inside. When it finally loosens it grip, it’s like a banshee lifting itself from its stranglehold on your soul, floating off to its next assignment. Timothy Egan in his Opinion piece “Outposts,” in the 1/25 New York Times, relates that “Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” I can certainly relate my love history and attachment patterns to Einstein’s insanity. Love makes me crazy until I gradually regain sanity. But wherever you are in the timeline of love, may your heart be ringing like a bell.
The author’s heart is open for business.http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/760/myspacepicdj7.jpg ------------------------------------------------------------ In the company of men
You cast a spell on me. I wish I'd never met you! copyright Alexandra Jones 2008 |
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