MORE QUOTES FROM THE MIGHTY BERNIE (OR WHY ISN'T THIS MAN PRESIDENT?) (THE ANSWER, OF COURSE, IS BLOWIN' IN THE WIND)

GOTTA CHECK THIS OUT

If you haven't seen this, it's righteous, especially notice how the protestors disperse or maybe more accurately...dissolve...

THE CLOCK

Watched this movie for the umpteenth time tonight. It was made in 1944 toward the end of World War Two and reflects the world I'd been born into a few years before, which is probably why I'm so sentimental about it. It's hokey and corny and full of typical 1940s Hollywood bits, some even almost a little hysterical, in the not-funny way. And the old Hollywood gimmicks for reproducing Manhattan are sometimes pretty lame from the vantage of 2014, yet the set for the old Penn Station not only makes me miss that iconic structure no longer with us even more than I do, but it also makes me miss old Hollywood sets that could reproduce something so vast and complicated so perfectly

But THE CLOCK is also extremely poignant and romantic, and Vincent Minnelli adds his unique perspective to camera movements and angles and framing. And for my money it may be the best, or at least at times most subtle, acting Judy Garland ever did. After THE CLOCK, she and Minnelli married, so it's also one of the movies she looks her best in (along with another collaboration between her and Minnelli, MEET ME IN SAINT LOUIS). And Robert Wagner hadn't started doing creepy characters yet, was still the iconic WWII innocent-on-his-way-to-war, and did it perfectly.

When I first arrived in Hollywood, I met all kinds of people who predicted movie stardom for me, and one was a well known and highly successful producer who my then wife knew. We spent an afternoon at his comfortable Malibu home that had a pool in it even though it was on the beach (I discovered this wasn't uncommon there) and as he and his wife sat outside the pool watching me and my wife in it, they started talking about how much I reminded them of Robert Walker.

Walker was long dead and mostly forgotten. But not by me, even though I was younger than this couple. I've been, like most of us, told I looked like various famous people, and sometimes it stoked my ego (Brando and Eastwood), and sometimes it pissed me off (Dennis Hopper and Alan Alda) but being told I reminded these Hollywood pros of Robert Walker just made me feel totally fulfilled. Like I didn't ever have to do anything again, because someone had compared me to Robert Walker.

If you know THE CLOCK, or watch it, you probably won't get why. He was a skinny, seemingly perpetually naive, boyish young man, or played that type anyway. Not the image I and others had of me. Except for the skinny part.  But as a kid I'd always felt like we had something in common, something I was totally grateful to share even if only secretly in my soul, and now here was this experienced, successful, smart Hollywood movie producer who seemed to know what he was talking about and shared that with me like equals (he told me I should do what he did and make one movie for the studio, then one for me, then one for them, etc.) saying I evoked the spirit and presence of a man who'd been his friend and I'd admired and identified with as a boy, Robert Walker.

Walker and Garland both have what some might see as cheesy moments in THE CLOCK, but they also each have some stunningly realistic moments of what new love looks and behaves and reacts like, as realistic as anything the "New Hollywood" guys came up with decades later. And it still works for me.

A (VERY SHORT) LIST!

As I've written about many times before, in 2009 I had a brain operation that took some time to recover from (I couldn't read at all at first, and then only out loud, and then only certain things etc.) but within a year I was back to what everyone else saw as "normal" for me. But the way my brain worked had changed in some significant ways that wasn't obvious to anyone not inside it.

One of the major changes, which I've shared many times before, is that I compulsively made lists since was a child, sometimes written down or included in poems or as the structure of a poem or some other writing, but also just in my head when walking around or falling sleep or to help me fall asleep or back asleep etc. And when I started this blog I often would post a list every few days. It was the biggest category in the blog archive.

If I met you for the first time at a dinner party or whatever, I'd probably pretty quickly ask you to name your current five favorite books, or movies, or records, or top ten, or whatever. It felt important to me to do this, to constantly reorder the world by stamping my rankings on it, and I was curious about how they compared to yours.

But from the first moment I woke up in the recovery room after the brain operation, that urge was completely gone. And to the extent that I couldn't even force it. Where I'd lay in bed before the operation and challenge my list making compulsion by creating requirements. like an alphabet list of favorite books with five word titles from A to Z or one word movie titles, etc. post-surgery even after deciding I would make a list in my mind of just my ten top favorite movies, say, I would lose all interest after one or two.

So, it's pretty much been that way ever since. I've made a few lists since but depended on the Internet or my book shelves or whatever to suggest titles, whereas before it was all in my brain. And I was able to do that only a few times and with much effort and energy and time involved.

Another list device I would use before the operation was triplets or trinities, listing things by threes as three was always a significant and even mystical number in my Irish Catholic upbringing, as in "Jesus, Mary and Joseph" or "The Father, The Son and The Holy Ghost" (though that has long since been changed to Holy Spirit in Catholicism), or the shamrock that symbolizes The Trinity as well as Ireland, and so on.

Well, last night I actually was laying in bed and thought I'd try a list and decided to pick favorite soundtrack albums from movies, and for the first time since the operation, four and a half years ago, I didn't lose interest after the first or second choice. I made it to three. Then I lost interest or motivation or any ideas. But it seemed significant to me that I made it to three, like maybe something in my brain had shifted enough to make that possible.

So here they are, my top three favorite movie soundtrack albums, and very anticlimactically I'm sure:

The Secret of Roan Inish
On The Waterfront
The Last Emperor

OK I'M GONNA GET IN A LOT OF TROUBLE FOR THIS AND MANY (WOMEN) MAY NOT FIND THIS FUNNY AT ALL, BUT IF YOU WATCH IT ALL THE WAY THROUGH I THINK IT GETS PRETTY HYSTERICAL (THOUGH MUCHO POLITICALLY INCORRECT ETC.)

JACK KEROUAC/ALLEN GINSBERG/THE LETTERS

If you're a fan of Jack Kerouac and/or Allen Ginsberg or have any interest in the historic changes they influenced not just in American literature but in American cultural and even world history, you'll probably dig this book. I did. And despite the fact that I've read everything published of and about Kerouac and probably ditto for Ginsberg, who I also knew, I still found myself surprised and delighted by unexpected revelations of character and intellect revealed in their correspondence.

I've read other letters of Ginsberg's and most of them are nothing like these (the book that collects Gary Synder's and Ginsberg's letters is almost stilted compared to this one), which cover the period from just after they met c. 1944 to the beginnings of their wider influence on American culture in 1963 (after which Kerouac receded from most contact with audiences and the media and even the scene he had helped create while Ginsberg became more engaged with all of the above).

In many spots in these letters, these men speak to each other not only like close friends but like what lovers might sound like. They may just be doing what used to be called "camping" but there's an intimacy sometimes that's more than that. Unfortunately, as with Kerouac's notebooks, there are many ellipses, and only a couple explained. In the case of his journals we know that most of the material removed had to do with Kerouac's sexual experiences with men or negative comments about someone in the Sampas family.

Sebastian Sampas was a Greek-American childhood friend of Kerouac's who turned Jack on to philosophers and writers and was an inspiration to Kerouac who always wrote but wasn't as self educated as Sebastion. But he died in WWII and in many ways Ginsberg took his place. Sebastion had a bunch of siblings including Stella, a shy sister, who had a big crush on Jack. She never married, taking care of her brothers etc. and when Jack withdrew from the world to a large degree and was slowly killing himself with alcohol, like many drunks he would call up old friends and even recent acquaintances in the middle of the night to talk (and probably not remember in the morning like many drunks).

After years of this most stopped taking his calls. But Stella would take them. Jack had made a promise on his deathbed to his father that he'd take care of his mother, but he knew he was drinking himself to death so he asked Stella to marry him and come live with him and his mother in Florida (she still lived in Lowell Mass. where Jack grew up) and she did, taking care of both of them until Jack died. One of the last letters Jack wrote was to his nephew, his sister's son, saying something like "and don't let any of my thousand Greek relatives get near my archives" or something like that.

His manuscripts and letters and ephemera of his life and writing was the most organized archive anyone had ever seen, the way I heard it, and he wanted it to go to somewhere that would let his fans and scholars and anyone be able to use it. He left it all to his mother but when she died she left it supposedly to Stella, though his mother's signature was questioned and other questions were raised, especially by Kerouac biographer Gerry Nicosia who wrote MEMORY BABE and tried to help Jan Kerouac, Jack's daughter, get the archives but was blocked because by then Stella had died and her family had Jack's archives. People at Viking needed the Sampas family because Kerouac's books began selling much more after he died, and people who were published by Viking or wanted to be, and even by Ginsberg (speculation was he wanted to get the Nobel for Literature and thought people at Viking could help including Jack's first biographer Ann Charters). Meanwhile the Sampas family began selling the archive off piecemeal, like Jack's raincoat to Johnny Depp for supposedly a million (or maybe that was a letter of Jack's)...

...anyway, point is, the material cut out of Jack's notebooks and letters and I assume the ones to Ginsberg in this book too were, like I said, probably often too sexually explicit about Jack's encounters with sex with men or too critical of the Sampas family etc. But despite that missing material, whatever it might be (and even if it's not about the things I think it probably is, whatever it is and even if it added another fifty or a hundred pages to the book, so what it's Allen f*cking Ginsberg and f*cking Jack Kerouac for f*ck's sake) this book is still a gas to read, it's like an autobiographical duet by the two most original word riffers of their time.

They show that Kerouac was always the original thinker and most insightful and intellectually rigorous and spiritually evolved, and clearly it was his influence that helped Ginsberg evolve intellectually, spiritually and especially as a poet. Kerouac could be verbally abusive obviously when drunk, especially in personal encounters, but in these letters his affection for Ginsberg is obvious and vice versa. It's really a love story in letters, and not just love for each other but for what they considered important writers and books and spiritual teachers and sex and opening up the possibilities so repressed and hidden in the society they grew up in. Yeah, I dug it.

[PS: I am not saying in any way that Kerouac was a repressed homosexual as some have contended, at most he was bisexual, or at least happy to be sexually gratified by whomever....]

YET ANOTHER FAVORITE OLD QUOTE

"Tenderness is the repose of passion."  —Joseph Joubert (from The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated by Paul Auster)