WEEKLY BERNIE QUOTE

STEVE JOBS

STEVE JOBS the film is almost completely contrived, with the majority of scenes a product mostly of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin's imagination. But they are based on real characters and real events and because Danny Boyle's directing is mostly terrific, and most of the cast is superb, and Sorkin knows how to write dialogue and pacing for scripts, the movie works as engaging and satisfying drama.

Michael Fassbender totally holds your attention (or at least did mine) as a believable version of Steve Jobs, and Kate Winslet as his marketing exec does the same, though her supposed Polish accent slips and slides. Seth Rogen as Steve Wozniak, Jobs's original partner, who was the technical genius of the duo, serves Sorkin's plot points well, though in scenes that mostly never happened, but he misses the childlike sweetness and almost naiveté of Woxniak as he comes across in TV appearances.

The real surprises for me, acting-wise, were two veterans of BOARDWALK EMPIRE, Katherine Waterston as the mother of Job's daughter Lisa, and Michael Stuhlberg (who I sometimes confuse with Joaquin Pheonix) as one of Jobs's main techie subordinates. If you want the real story, there are documentaries and biographies and various sources on the Internet, but if you want a really good movie and don't mind being manipulated by the talents of Sorkin and Boyle, STEVE JOBS was well worth watching.

MAUREEN O'HARA R.I.P.

One of my all-time favorite movie stars, she lived a long, full, productive life that she often made clear she was grateful for, and made it to 95. The gif above is from THE QUIET MAN, which, despite it's outdated mores (pretty sexist, even if it's intended to be comic, and even though she didn't mind and claimed to enjoy the humor of it and held her own against John Wayne's title character) still works.

And the reason it works is not just the chemistry between her and Wayne (that also worked in several other movies they made together) but because she was such an amazingly strong yet gorgeous movie actor and screen presence (her star charisma jumped out from the screen in one of her earliest triumphs, playing the gypsy girl to Charles Laughton's THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME).

She was everything she appeared to be, glamorous yet down-to-earth, strong and independent (she made the tabloids back in the 1950s for being caught getting too intimate in the back of a movie theater with her date) yet capable of great sweetness and vulnerability, not just in her roles but in life, a great artist and yet humble in the sense of not denying her star stature but not denying her good fortune and common humanity either.

One of the people I'd most like to have met in my Hollywood years, but unfortunately never did. Yet like many of us I feel like I've always known her and always will.

FOOTNOTE TO CURRENT EVENTS

DON BACHARDY PORTRAIT OF YOURS TRULY

[at his and Christopher Isherwood's home in Santa Monica canyon c.1982 (the glum look is just from holding that pose for hours)]

CREATIVITY FEEDS MY SOUL (E.G. MALCOLM MARSDEN, CARRIE CANTOR, ELAINE EQUI AND VINCENT KATZ)

If I don't write every day, I feel like a piece of my life is missing. It was the same for playing piano for most of my life. If I'm not making music or poetry, or some kind of writing or art, then the next best thing, and sometimes even the better thing, is to be digging the artistry of others.

Like a couple of nights ago I went to hear some music in the Jersey town where I grew up. It was in a brand new building with condos upstairs and a bakery/soup and sandwich place on the ground floor, where I had seen on the Internet Malcolm Marsden—a friend of two cousins of mine—was playing music. These cousins (the sons of two first cousins I grew up with who are now gone) play music around Jersey and in Manhattan pretty regularly, but those gigs are usually too difficult for me to make. So since this gig was nearby and easy for my post-op brain to get to without too much anxiety (a condition of the post-op state these days) I figured I'd go support Malcolm and in that way be supporting my cousins network of fellow musicians.

It was a brightly lit noisy place (coffee machines, ice machines, customers, etc.) but he brought amps and mics and the sound was perfect. Me and my friend Rachel sat at the table nearest the mics and I was delighted when he started with what he said was a warmup song but he killed his version of "Lucky Old Sun" (afterward pointing out he got it from what he declared the best version, Jerry lee Lewis's, which I'd never heard, remembering only the Frankie Lane one, which is another thing I dig, being turned on to stuff I was unaware of that turns out to be new sources of nourishment for my soul).

He played several more tunes, some his own, some covers, from country to rockabilly (a great take on Elvis's "Return to Sender") to rock'n'roll, then called up another singer/songwriter, Carrie Cantor and they kept the songs coming, solos and duos, with Cantor doing her own songs and covers of Joni Mitchell and others. Highlights for me were their duo version of the Zombies' "Time of the Season" and their closing song, a duo version of The Beatles' "Dear Prudence."

It was a local gig with a tip box but no less entertaining and fulfilling for me than any other time I've sat through a set by a committed artist doing their thing.

And then tonight I got to check out the new location of the old Saint Mark's bookshop—that I remember from the 1960s on St. Mark's Place and then for the last many years around the corner on Third Avenue but now has relocated (feckin' landlords) to a small space on East 3rd Street near Avenue A—when I went to hear poets and old friends (both of mine and each other) Elaine Equi and Vincent Katz read from their new books: SENTENCES AND RAIN and SWIMMING HOME.

And once again I had the privilege of being in the presence of committed artists doing their thing and sharing it. Elaine opening with a series of unlikely poems that mostly come at you unexpectedly, surprising you with deeper resonances to what initially seem created with a very light touch. Her artistry reminds me of the kind of light touch Bill Evans had, as though he was hardly hitting the keys on a piano, and yet the notes lingered in deeply fulfilling ways.

Vincent's work, to continue with the jazz references, is more like Albert Ayler's approach to mixing the obvious with the abstract in ways that transported me to city street scenes from my younger days in mid-20th-century Manhattan then back to some futuristic wordplay from our technological present...or something like that. It's late and I'm tired from the evening in the city so this is the extent of my late night possibility for clarity.

"OVERWHELMED" (A LATE NIGHT MINI-RANT)

I was talking to a friend yesterday who had spent two years at a cool college and then had to leave. She was explaining how she just now, almost a decade after that, has payed off the entire amount those two years cost. But because she didn't qualify for a government student loan and had to take out a private loan, she now has to pay the interest that accumulated over that almost decade and that amount equals the original cost of the two years of college so will take another almost decade.

I've been hearing, and using, the word "overwhelmed" a lot lately, and a lot of that comes from this ridiculous "American corporate vicious capitalism" we have to deal with that makes us the only advanced country on earth that doesn't have universal health care, free college educations, paid family leave etc. while being distracted by the bread and circuses of social media and their hypnotic devices used to make us feel the pressure of "keeping in touch" and "keeping up."

"American capitalism" right now has evolved into a rapacious exploiter and abuser of all of us. And like some of my Irish relatives and friends would say: feck that.