Lower Your Debt, rob@wrongturnjournal.com Sunday, August 31, 2003

Hello to our new affiliates in Staten Island and Denver. To sum up last night's ramblings: Art is beauty, truth is eternal and "The Man With the Golden Arm" is a hateful piece of shit. Today, endings and beginnings.

No more Waugh! I finished up "Sword of Honour" where I'd started it--on a light rail to Bayonne. Many, many stunning moments; some passages so surprising and sad I had to put the book down to digest them. But he leaves us with a smile and even a bit of hope. That old softie.

Some standout passages:

He walked to the old town, where he found a dilapidated romanesque church where a priest was hearing confessions. Guy waited, took his turn and at length said: "Father, I wish to die."

"Yes. How many times?"

"Almost all the time."

The obscure figure behind the grill leant nearer. "What was it you wished to do?"

"To die."

"Yes. You have attempted suicide?"

"No."

"Of what, then, are you accusing yourself? To wish to die is quite usual today. It may even be a very good disposition. You do not accuse yourself of despair?"

"No, Father; presumption. I am not fit to die."

"There is no sin there. This is a mere scruple. Make an act of contrition for all the unrepented sins of your past life."

After the absolution he said: "You are a foreigner?"

"Yes."

"Can you spare a few cigarettes?"

Then there's this exchange:

"He want to know," explained Bakic, "English-American anti-fascist songs. He want words and music so the girls can learn them."

"I don't know any," said Guy.

"He want to know what songs you teach your soldiers?"

"We don't teach them any. Sometimes they sing about drink, 'Roll out the barrel' and 'Show me the way to go home.'"

"He says not those songs. We are having such songs also under the fascists. All stopped now. He says Commissar orders American songs to honour American general."

"American songs are all about love."

"He says love is not anti-fascist."

There's more great stuff I want to share, but I also want to tell some stories of my own and, dammit, typing is hard. So back to Dante's wood...

After spending a week too wiped out to even consider it, I caught "Robin Hood" at the Film Forum this afternoon. Stood in line in front of cranky folks of a certain age. One of them kept checking the door to see if the staff had unlocked it; then, one minute before the scheduled opening time, rapped on the glass and barked, "COME ON!" I tried to coax a sympathetic shrug out of the people behind me, but they weren't going for it.

A lot of kids in the theater, a lot of teenaged sons and fortysomething papas. I wished for a moment I'd brought my own father to see it, then realized what poor company I would have been. I wanted to read before the movie started and run for the Path when it was over.

And, boy, did it take its time being over. I was hot to see it largely because of a breathless review a friend wrote a long time ago: the dialogue's witty and literate, the action never lets up, and so forth. I had seen it a dozen times as a kid, and again in college, and loved it every time. (For some reason the line "He won't be so insolent when his neck is stretched" stuck with me all those years.)

This time...maybe I was tired, maybe I was still tasting gall from a lousy week, but the whole thing seemed garish and flat at the same time. There's no story as such, just a bunch of set pieces very loosely strung together; the acting is astonishingly bad, dear old Claude Rains in particular; and the action just doesn't arrive. It's all hints and pantomime; it doesn't feel exciting, it doesn't feel dangerous.

Worst yet, I found myself rooting for Basil Rathbone, Prince John's flunky. Errol Flynn is impossible to take seriously, and it's absolutely unthinkable that he's helping the downtrodden out of the goodness of his heart. He wants love; he wants attention; he wants a forest full of mirrors he can look into. Basil might be a bit of a tight-ass, and he bet on the wrong horse, but he's basically an upstanding guy. If Errol Flynn took the time to show Basil a collection of hard-up Saxons (instead of putting the make on Olivia deHaviland), I'm sure his noblesse oblige would've kicked in. Claude Rains is a genuinely bad guy; Basil, all he needs is some prompting. Besides, I have sympathy for him; according to a friend who ought to know, Basil was a much better fencer than Errol Flynn but kept having to throw fights because the Nazi son of a bitch was the one with the marquee name.

I came home dissatisfied, only to discover a couple of friendly elves had been at work. A gal pal, as the tabloids would say, came over and helped my wife reorganize. This is no small thing. Mi esposa has a wonderful eye for design (dare I say queer eye?) and has great ideas for turning our heap of miscellany into a home; but neither of us ever seem to have the energy to carry out our plans. I've refused to hire a cleaning service, which she wants, out of embarrassment--basically, the same reason I didn't want to see a doctor about my morbid obesity until I'd lost a few pounds.

Hence the gal pal. A whirlwind! The kitchen was whiter than a Kubrick set, and it was cured of clutter; no more pots stacked on top of cabinets, no more muffin tins that voted for Ed Koch. They abandoned a generation of cutlery and actually cracked the wedding packages. They found the Stinky Thing that had haunted the toaster cabinet for weeks (a stick of ginger inky with rot). They made it all work.

And the living room! They moved couches, set our disused table by the window, swept up a cardigan's worth of cat hair. And the back-room office! Bookcases butt-bumped across the room, a futon scrapped, a plan resolved. That's right--our house has a plan now. Here's to rural electrification!

So we had dinner around our newly sited table, sat in our newly decluttered living room, and had a great chat. (Gal pal's husband, a dear old buddy of mine, had arrived earlier.) A lot of great stuff got said, mostly by the buddies, who are patient, kind and funny beyond anything I deserve. (My wife, of course, has accumulated enough good grace for a lifetime of this kind of treatment. I haven't done much since I gave up my bus seat, unprompted, at age eight.)

The thing that stuck with me: The gal pal, trying to snap me out of indulgent despondency, laid out the good things in my life. One of the items on her list was faith. I had never thought about it in those terms before, as something I have that people would want. A friend of mine once asked, since the Yankees are world-beaters and the Mets are world-beaten, who exactly are Mets fans? The best I could manage was, people from Queens and people with irrational loyalties. That, I guess, is how I've seen my faith. I don't know why I wear the orange and blue cap, but I know I'm never going to switch to pinstripes. Four World Series is wonderful; but they ain't worth one Mookie grounder.

What was it I said about Rosanne Cash? Dragging God down to her own dopey level? And I'm probably going to sleep through church tomorrow, too.

Thanks to the gal pal and boy wonder, for all their hard work today and everything else they said, which shall remain unblogged. Thanks to my wife, my little lares et penates. And go get 'em, Basil, wherever you are. This concludes our broadcast day.

@ 1:29:00 AM,

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