Movies: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in 12 Parts

This almost too intimate documentary is aptly titled: it's more a portrait of Philip than a study of Glass. We are shown a man playing with his children, cooking a big meal for a gathering of family friends, practicing Qigong, who then just happens to go into his study and write out a symphony. I exaggerate a bit; the filmmakers give a fair amount of attention to Philip's work, showing him working with Woody Allen on the score for Cassandra's Dream, opening new opera Waiting for the Barbarians, and reviewing symphonic orchestration with his conductor in the backseat of a taxicab. At the same time, though, we meet his young wife who intimates that their relationship isn't working out, and nearly breaks into tears.

Moments during which Philip discusses his work are for me the most interesting; he likens music to an underground river; it is always there, one only has to listen for it, find it. When he writes, he says, he is not creating something new so much as writing down something that is already there; when he hears his new symphony played for the first time, he listens to find whether it correlates with what he's already "heard." Almost equally interesting are the photos of Philip as a younger man, staging musical happenings in downtown warehouses in New York in the 1960s and 70s, where people came to listen, lying on the floor in a circle around the ensemble, which also played in a circle.

More divulging than "cameo" conversations with Chuck Close, Martin Scorsese, Errol Morris, Woody Allen, etc. (although these are certainly interesting) are the shots of Philip at home (both at his city house and country house); seeing the space in which he lives and works reminds us that he is a mere man. Watching him practice Qigong in a stretched out tank top and loose cotton pants, shameless before the camera, confirms this. All the while, though, his gorgeous music forms the soundtrack, reminding us that he is, in fact, much more.

Movies: Pineapple Express

Farce is killing comedy.

Don't get me wrong. I like good old fashioned over-the-top hysterical self-referentiality, and I do think it's funny, but between the self-centered stylings of Will Ferrell and the mockumental antics of Judd Apatow's posse (Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Bill Hader, Steve Carell, Jonah Hill, etc.) wit has gone by the wayside in favor of childish nonsense: slapstick and fart gags and gay gags and all other varietals of fat man in tighty-whitey underpants humor. And now, pot humor.

I readily admit to having an odd fascination with the stoner movie (odd because I have never touched the stuff myself). Certain favorites include the more explicit Harold and Kumar Go To Whitecastle and the less explicit Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures, the philosophical Dude Where's My Car?, along with the classics Friday and Dazed and Confused (I was less impressed with Half-Baked, although it has a pretty good soundtrack). And while would be absurd to say that Harold and Dude are less farcical than Pineapple Express, their relationship to farce is different. Whereas the first two are meritorious until interrupted by certain farcical moments (in Dude, it's the "hot alien chicks;" in Harold, it's the "battle shits"), Pineapple Express, like all those Will Ferrell-as-a-basketball-player, Will Ferrell-as-an-Anchorman, Will Ferrell-as-an-ice-skater, Will Ferrell-as-a-Step Brother, Will Ferrell-as-a-Nascar-driver, Steve Carell-as-a-40 Year Old Virgin, etc. movies, is completely rooted in farce, is nothing but farce, and contains basically zero minutes of genuine human behavior.

That said, there are certain stunning pot-humor moments, like when Seth Rogen puts his face into a bag of the infamous pineapple express marijuana and says it smells "like God's vagina," or like when he and James Franco together simultaneously light the three ends of a joint fashioned into a cross shape, which supposedly delivers a stronger hit. Musical details are also on-point; at one moment, Rogen stops his car at a red light, listening to Electric Avenue, and a car pulls up next to him with two Hispanic stoners also jamming to the same song. But every actor/actress besides Franco and Rogen are infuriatingly plastic, from Rogen's high school girlfriend (the typical, flat Apatow blonde) to the villainous drug lord out to kill them to the female cop (a disappointing Rosie Perez) who's in cahoots with him.

The movie actually starts out strong; Rogen and Franco pal around, stoned, in Franco's apartment (where he has two televisions going at once, one of which is sitting up on a third). But it gets progressively worse, devolving deeper and deeper into farce and culminating in a half hour long fight scene in the drug lord's hideout. The violence is tremendous but rubbery, like a bad Cops reenactment. That, I imagine, is why it makes the audience laugh, but for some reason, I've never found that sort of thing funny (never could I stand, for example, Warner Brothers cartoons, as a child or an adult, and the characters here take their beatings with disturbingly similar resilience).

The last few minutes of the movie take place in a diner, where over a table full of greasy breakfast food, the three guys (Rogen, Franco, and their sidekick, played by a very obnoxious Danny McBride) recount their adventure ("Remember when you did this and that?! That was awesome, man!"—"And how about x, y, and z?! Yeah, crazy!") in the way that writer Rogen knows his audience will go out and do. Here is a good example of hyper-self-consciousness being used for cleverness rather than stupidity. Ultimately, though, it's not enough to redeem the movie.

Books: Forty Stories, by Donald Barthleme

Here is a slippery author upon whom I cannot get a grip. One story, like Jaws, like Visitors, like 110 West Sixty-First Street, like Sakrete is beautiful—ever-so-slightly strange, off-kilter, nagging—but beautiful: emotionally valid, tender, human, wistful, hopeful, triste. Then, the stories before and after it, post-postmodern thought experiments, are basically unreadable, unless one has the kind of book-bulldozing OCD that I have. These are stories like On the Deck, The Genius, the infamous Porcupines at the University and At the Tolstoy Museum. They are structured as interviews, dotted with Qs and As, or dashes to mark new speakers, or they are broken into bits by illustrations—not Vonnegut cartoons, but inscrutable black Malevich boxes, Escher-like floor plans, or they go on and on and on, describing a disjointed tableau, and then stop abruptly, without ever engaging us in any part of it. Only one such experiment, Sentence (a six page story that consists completely of one unfinished sentence), actually works, because the narrator has a personable voice, offers a human connection; the others are a bog thicker than any Beckett, Joyce, and Pynchon could have created, even working together on an Exquisite Corpse. And yet, I will soon find myself reading his Sixty Stories, his Dead Father, his Paradise. Not because there is something wrong with me, but because, somewhere, buried in this mess, are moments of brilliance.

Books: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

It takes a person as cold and callous as myself to read this book, "written" painstakingly by the single blinking eye of an otherwise completely paralyzed man—imprisoned by "locked-in" syndrome—and admit, in writing, on the internet, that I found it disappointing. If only I had read this pamphlet-sized elegy before seeing the stunning film based upon it, I might have had a different experience, something similar to the measured exuberance of the critics quoted on the front and back covers, but, having already been exposed to Schnabel's sundrenched, dreamy vision, the simple straight text on the page could do nothing for me but recall pale shadows of that vision. How Schnabel could transcend these still marks and create what he did seems, hideously, far more fascinating than how Bauby could, with the power of one trembling eyelid, transpose these sentences onto the page.

I am a horrible person, a complete objectivist. But I am judging art, not men.

Movies: Du rififi chez les hommes (Rififi)

If your mouth isn't big enough to fit all ten fingers in up to the knuckle, it will be by the end of this spectacularly suspenseful kickoff to Film Forum's French Crime Wave festival. Rififi is a jewel heist movie that offers up the traditional morals of the 1950s noir: Crime doesn't pay and Never trust a dame, but director Jules Dassin draws out a lengthy, technical middle that tailspins into a drunken, pre-psychedelic, nerve-frying ending to deepen our investment in the plot to a degree that a movie, particularly a gimmick-ridden noir, rarely does.

Le Stéphanois (basically the best name for a French criminal ever) has just gotten out of jail at the film's opening, and has reunited with his old friends who, despite being thieves, are very likable family men (not unlike Clooney's Oceans Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen crew). The group of four (le Stéphanois, his younger buddy Jo (the father of his godson), Mario Ferrati (basically the most delightful caricature of an Italian man ever), and his safe-cracking buddy César imported from Milan just for the job) decide to steal the jewels from the (not very impressive, by contemporary American standards) Mappin & Webb, a corner shop above which the owner makes his home in a sumptuous apartment. Their plan, which they follow precisely, involves breaking into the old man's home while he's on a weekend hunting trip, and cutting a hole in the floor through which they can drop into the store. The best moment of ingenuity is when they use an inverted umbrella to catch the falling bits of masonry whilst cutting (any piece that hit the floor would create a vibration that would trip the alarm), and their silencing the alarm's ringing bell with the viscous foam of a fire extinguisher is equally delightful in its embrasure of the analog.

Meanwhile, le Stéphanois has a grudge to settle with a club-owner, Grutter, who's been dating his woman while he was inside. That grudge turns ugly when Grutter gets wind of le Stéphanois windfall (César, unable to resist the sensual charms of the club's resident chanteuse, gave her an enormous diamond ring he secretly pocketed during the heist, and the club-owner recognizes it, adding two and two for four, trussing up the Italian, and then killing Feratti, who won't disclose the jewels hiding spot). To get the goods, he kidnaps Jo's son for ransom, and Jo, sitting at home by the telephone, his wife in a faint, finally decides to take the suitcase of cash (the jewels have already been sold off to the fence) to the club-owner's villa, without knowing that le Stéphanois has already been there and rescued his son. When Jo arrives with the money, le Stéphanois is on his way back, but he's too late: the money has been turned over and Jo has been shot dead. Grutter shoots Le Stéphanois down too, and we chew our nails to the quick until we see him, le Stéphanois, stand up again, and shoot Grutter dead, grab the suitcase of money, and stumble back to the car. Here begins his mad drive, back to the cafe where he left his godson, and then back to Jo's house, with the boy and the money. He's bleeding and reeling and we're certain that he'll drive off the road. All the while, the boy, unawares of the emergency, is standing in the backseat of the convertible, wearing le Stéphanois' coat, waving a plastic gun that, at one moment of brilliant irony, he holds to le Stéphanois' head. Le Stéphanois collapses just as he pulls up to Jo's house, and the boy's mother runs out and snatches him up, leaving the dead Stéphanois and the suitcase of millions behind for the police to mull over.

That always gets me down—these poor criminals work so hard, and are so likeable (Ferrati who transfers good luck kisses via his fingertip onto everything from the jewels' secret hiding place to his girlfriend's sweatered nipple, Jo who sweats like a chiseled, homoerotic Vulcan as he bears the weight of the safe on his back when they ease it to the floor, even the old and tired Stéphanois, who seems to be living for little more than revenge, but only half-heartedly, without much bloodlust (though he does kill César for snitching out Ferrati's address. . . yet another noir moral: Always kill a rat). Always, always, I want them to win, to get their take, to keep it, to quit crime and live comfortably on the sum, but Hollywood never lets it happen. Even in France.

Books: And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, by Steve Barthelme

Is this really Mr. Barthelme's only book of short stories? Brother of the much more known Donald Barthelme, also a short story writer, Steve, even if far less prolific, writes stories that cut much closer to the quick than the effete, hyper-intellectual experiments of his brother. Adultery is a common theme, along with the relationship on the skids, as are loneliness and isolation. His stories, closer in tone to Raymond Carver's than his brothers, start in the middle and end and the end, with neither bangs nor whimpers, just a kind of quiet, slow burn, like a still-smoking cigarette butt on the pavement.

It was a surprise for me to see that this book received a pretty chilly review from the New York Times when it came out in 1987. Despite my strong affinity for the rampant post-modernism of 1980s literature (of which Donald Barthelme is a kind of hallmark), I do believe it's an equal if not greater achievement to write clean, direct, feeling prose about human emotions without tending toward the soppy, the sentimental, the melodramatic. Barthelme here manages to keep his cool without being detached, so that, in a story like Beach (my favorite of the bunch), a small incident illuminates a larger crisis, crystallizes our fears, needs, desires. A few stories do dabble in Donald-style experiment; The Friend, a stream-of-consciousness bit from the point of view of a rapist, fails, but Failing All Else, a description of a metaphoric dream featuring a beautiful woman, dancing bears, and cargo ship heavy with gold, told over a parade of desserts in a diner, outstrips most of the older brother's oddball narratives.

I wish he would write some more.

Music: Hank Jones at Birdland

Oh Birdland, with your carpet-papered walls all aglow in neon pink fluorescence, your diners from Jersey smacking loudly over their suppers, your solicitous barkeep who memorized my name and warned me not to be a stranger, and your midtown cover charge: how could you do Hank Jones so wrong, and on his 90th birthday?

This is not about the cake—that was sweet if not a bit stagey (did you do that every show? Is it more for the audience than the man himself?)—but something much more important: the sound. You let Mr. Jones—with his tidy hands—his gentle fingers that plink the keys as neatly as a young slim cat licks a bit of cream off its nose—you let him go up there and play a piano poorly amplified, its top shut tight to keep all the sound inside, so that some guitarist half his age could play over him, drown him out with waves of mellow riffs much easier for the audience to grab hold of, to "rock out" to, than the precise, chilled, plink plink plink of the solo piano playing Monk (an aural delight too subtle, I'm sure, for the soup slurping audience to understand).

Those were, you know, the best moments of the show, the opening solo, and the moment in the middle when the quartet silenced themselves for a minute to let Hank play on his own. If you are going to call yourselves "The Jazz Corner of the World!" you're going to need to learn how to properly mic a piano. And you should also run some edits on your website: you mention that the original Birdland was "located on Broadway, a few blocks west of 52nd Street;" surely you know that nothing but more 52nd Street is west of 52nd Street (unless Birdland was in the Hudson): the street runs east-west. Mr. Parker would be none too pleased, I'm certain.

Movies: The Wackness

My own experience of hip hop in 1994 differs ever-so-slightly from The Wackness' Luke Shapiro, in that I was West Coast while he was East, I was finishing 6th grade while he was graduating from high school, and I barely knew what a blunt was, while he was not only smoking weed every day, but selling it out of an Italian ice cart, first with his girlfriend and then with his therapist (I had neither). Of course, Luke also isn't real, and I was, even more awkwardly so than his fumbling, liminal self. The Wackness won't let you forget that, either: Josh Peck's appropriately cringe-worthy stylings (he's Luke) meet mostly dead ends in his supporting cast, a group of type-cast frigid women, flailing men, nymphet-y girls, and assorted weirdos. Except, of course, for Ben Kingsley as Dr. Squires, a flailing man who flails with forlorn grace, trading Luke therapy sessions for dime bags, and slowly becoming the teen's friend.

The music is what makes the movie, but it's also connected with what makes the movie, dare I say, totally wack. Luke isn't the first, last, or only white boy to fall into hip hop and style himself without regard to racial distinction. However, there is absolutely no way, not even in the precocious concrete jungle of Manhattan (where Luke's crush-object Stephanie (the filly-legged Olivia Thrilby) could certainly have "done it hundreds of times," the "it" being sex, and she being barely legal) that an awkward, middle-class white boy like Luke Shapiro would gain the confidence of the armed and body-guarded Jamaican supplier who not only introduces him to the Notorious B.I.G. (who still defines 1994 for me), but also supplies him with obscenely hefty stacks of herb in a dark and smoky warehouse, which Luke then sells on the street, trying to save enough money to save his family's apartment after his father's business goes sour (spoiler: they get evicted anyway). It may seem unreal that Luke and Stephanie scamper off to the Hamptons for a weekend of sun-drenched, virginity-shattering (his, not hers) debauchery, or that Dr. Squires would sit around his multi-million home doing piles of drugs and tagging the furniture with a fat marker, but in New York, these things are possible, and as credible as the wealthy white teens' constant slurping at 40 oz bottles of malt liquor. But the scale of the drug sales is hard to swallow, making an otherwise tender, awkwardly honest film into just a fantasy, and an awfully whitewashed one at that.

Maybe I'm just like Luke, who, as Stephanie accuses, only sees the wackness, while she's concentrating on the dopeness. There's no doubt plenty of dopeness here—most of it sensory (off the hook classic jams, blown-out, impressionistic cinematography, subtle physical performances from Josh Peck and Ben Kingsley)—but it all gets stomped over by the wackness.

Dance: Keigwin + Company: Elements at the Joyce

Going to see a piece entitled Elements: Water, Fire, Earth, Air, one has a certain set of expectations. Going to a show put on by Keigwin + Company, one also has a set of expectations. These two sets do not exactly match up. But Larry Keigwin, with his invincible wit, eclectic ear for music, and playful relationship with movement manages to turn the crusty old trope on its head, creating four suites of dances that have the audience giggling for two straight hours.

The first and last suites, Water and Air, are the two more literally translated pieces (in Water, the dancers wear towels, and bathe and drink from bottles of Poland Spring; in Air, they dress as flight attendants and pilots, and dance with silver wheeling suitcases against a backdrop of bright blue sky dotted with puffy clouds). These are the crowd-pleasers, and they are, indeed, quite clever and amusing. The real dancing, though, happens during Fire (the weakest of the four) and Earth (an oblique relation to the element, in which the dancers take on the vamping attitudes of lizards in dances called Gecko, Chameleon, Dragon, and Iguana, dancing low to the ground, making faces and flicking their tongues).

Fire fails, mostly, due to its "straight" interpretation; rather than literalize the element in a pun, as he does with Air, or in a product, the way he does with Water, Keigwin dresses his dancers as actual flames for Fire, and the piece, particularly the first dance, Flicker, wanders into the territory of meeting, too easily, our expectations for an interpretation of the elements. It lacks evolution of thought. In Burn, though, dancer (and Associate Artistic Director) Nicole Wolcott does a stunning job "burning" to Patsy Cline; all dancers should be noted for their theatricality throughout, but hers is a face that can make a piece all on its own, even though her dancing is equally powerful. Keigwin makes one brief foray into hip hop as well during Fire, in Flame, (danced brilliantly by Samuel Roberts) to instant rap classic Walk it Out. Having been a hip hop dancer before I ever took a modern class, and noticing that Keigwin started his career as a back-up dancer for Downtown Julie Brown, I must commend him for going there, but I wish he would have gone farther and stayed longer. Further integration between the modern and hip hop moments of the dance would have made it stronger (modern timing works against or apart from the music, while hip hop works right on the beat; dancing modern dance to hip hop music only works if the choreography accords with the beat). I'd like to see him do an entire hip hop show.

While Earth is, by far, the sleeper favorite, I have the least to say about it (except that Dragon, danced by Liz Riga to Stormy Weather, is by far the weakest moment of the entire show, the song and mood of the choreography departing completely from both the earth and lizard themes, Ms. Riga's costume being a pink plaid abomination (when every other costume in the show is pitch-perfect), and the piece being, ultimately, just boring, which Keigwin really never ever is. I imagine that one of his other dancers, the doll-like, flexi-bendy Ying-Ying Shiau, or the emotive Nicole Wolcott, might just maybe make it work, but as performed, the piece drags. Otherwise, Earth is perfect, culminating in a four-person dance to Whip It that is somehow as vitalizing and fresh as that song itself is.

At the end of Air, a kind of encore, called Wind, is danced by the entire company to a stunning Philip Glass piece (Channels and Winds), in which dancers run on and off stage amongst raining pink balloons. This is not the first time I've seen the Philip Glass/balloon combination from Keigwin, but it works, gorgeously, and is the one bit of "serious" (that is, not funny) dance in the show. Earth, I think, will stay with me longer, but Wind is there for those more old-fashioned dance-goers, who expect leaps and jumps and big, free movement. And for that, it beats the hell out of the New York City Ballet.

Writing: Feline Defenestration

I haven’t done it yet but I’m about to do it even though I know I shouldn’t do it. I know she doesn’t want me to do it either because she’s all fur and claws, all wriggling and writhing desperation. Holding onto her is hard enough; she’s never gone in much for holding. She’s always all wriggling and writhing and fur and claws when you try to hold her, but not desperate like now. Now she knows that something bad is going to happen, and I know it too, and I know I shouldn’t do it, but I’m going to do it anyway.

She’s all twisty and squirmy; I’m holding her right on the ledge, thinking about it, thinking about should I do it and what’s going to happen and will she do it, and her claws are clinging like mad to the aluminum frame, making a desperate, panicky clicking sound, a scraping sound I can’t stand, and she’s clawing at my hands and turning round her neck and rolling her eyeballs around in their neat little sockets. I want to know what will happen. I want to know will she land on her feet. I stretch my neck out the window and feel the wind outside on my cheeks. My mom’s car is parked in the driveway down below.

The thing is, she looks really big and fat, but it’s all just fur. When you grab her, which isn’t easy, you feel how small she is, you feel her bones, all rattling and twisting, and her tiny heart pounding real fast. You put you hand around her neck and you feel how it’s so tiny, how tiny her head is, her skull. So tiny, under all that big fur, just a tiny little motor driving those claws, desperately scratching at the window frame while I hold her out in the wind, through the window, in mid-air. I shouldn’t do it, but I do. I want to know, will she land on her feet. I let go.

I don’t—I didn’t—I don’t know why—what did I—

The sun goes black a moment when I squinch my eyes and I do not see whether she did it. Everything is hot, and rushing, and tears, and what did I do, and I’m running down the stairs and I’m crying and I’m shouting “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry,” and my parents are downstairs and I see them. They look at me and I run to them and I blurt “I threw the cat out the window,” and my confession is immediate and my remorse is immediate and my forgiveness is immediate and my father is out the door to find her and my mother is hugging me and asking me what happened and what did I do and why did I do it.

I cannot tell her that I wanted to know would she land on her feet. I cannot tell her that at school we sing a song that has a chorus that goes “and he threw her out the window, the window, the second story window,” which is not about a cat but is instead a silly song, with nursery rhymes, where Mary Mary quite contrary’s garden gets thrown out the window, and Peter Peter pumpkin eater’s wife gets thrown out the window. I can’t tell her that I wanted to know would she land on her feet, and I didn’t even wait to see if she did. All I did was hear a loud noise, a heavy thud, a bad, sick sound, and close my eyes and cry. My arms are covered in scratches that are bleeding. My mom asks did she scratch me. I keep crying and nod my head. “Did you do it because she scratched you?” she asks, and I keep crying through my squinched up eyes and nod my head while my mom hugs me and holds my hot face in the tender, forgiving darkness of her silk blouse, ruined with my snotty tears.

My dad comes back into the house holding the cat, who’s wriggling all around, wide-eyed and fearful, who has blood dribbling down her nose, but is otherwise very much alive. My dad tells us that she had run four blocks away but that he had caught her, and he takes her into the kitchen, holding her under his arm, washing the blood away, his hand at the tap. She is okay. She is okay. My dad says that he thinks the car broke her fall. He doesn’t say whether she landed on her feet. I think that if she had landed on her feet, her nose would not be bleeding. I think that if she had landed on her nose she would not be alive. He holds her for awhile and tries to soothe her while my mother holds me the same way. I do not have to tell him why I did it. My mom tells him that I did it because she scratched me. It is implied that I know that what I did was wrong in all my tears and shouting. I am not punished. We do not talk about it ever.
The cat hates me now. The cat was never nice; her mother was an alley cat we adopted when we moved to the new house and my mom saw she was pregnant. All the kittens were born in the middle of the night while I was sleeping; she gave birth inside a suitcase lined with my My Little Pony blanket, which got ruined from blood and placenta and tiny mewling hairless things: five of them. At night, I would sleep on the couch while they would play, climbing on the drapes and tearing them with holes, and in the morning I would wake up with a whole puddle of black and white fur snuggling in my lap. My mom said we could keep one and would have to give the other four away. She gave away my favorite one. Their mom had been mean and taught them all to hunt, to scratch and claw and bite. I remember how she got sick when we started giving the kittens away. She looked and looked for the missing ones, and made low, long howling sound in her throat. She threw up everywhere. After that she hated my mom, and got even more mean until she got hit by a car one day and died. Now her daughter hates me, and runs away every time I come near. Even though she’s okay, even though she’s lived almost fifteen years now since then, she remembers to hate me. Even though she’s too dumb to remember anything else, like her own name, or the whistle my mom uses to try and call her, she remembers to hate me for what I did when I was seven, in the name of science, of experiment, curiosity. It didn’t kill the cat.