PATTI SMITH/TAVIS SMILEY

Worth watching the whole thing.

BULLYING

My twelve-year-old has been the victim of bullying for quite a while. Most of it I didn't know about. What I did know about I addressed as best I could. But last week it got worse and it was time to go to the top of the school system for some results. Which we got, thankfully. It has been dealt with in the short term, including suspensions etc. Hopefully the measures taken and ongoing will result in it not recurring. We'll see.

But one of the amazing things to come out of it is how many people I know, virtually everyone, who spent a good portion of their elementary and/or middle school and/or high school years being bullied to the point of serious trauma, or at least deeply felt and scarring fear.

Something isn't right about our schooling obviously. I already knew about the pedagogical failures—third graders with hours of homework and backaches from so many book to carry home; an overload of methods for teaching the same thing (basic math for instance) in an attempt to include all possible approaches that might help an individual student but ends up overwhelming many; introducing subjects and methods too early in child development (my sixth-grader has already had some subjects I wasn't exposed to until 9th or 10th grade, e.g. learning the periodic table and the names of the elements and their atomic make up etc. or geometry or algebra etc.) in a way that is called "spiraling" which means an introduction to something for a week than an introduction to something else the next week etc. and then in the next year picking up from these bits and pieces by adding more bits and pieces etc., until they're either capable of taking it all in and mastering it or completely confused and at a loss (which seems to be the case more often with the boys, which may help explain the continuing rise in the drop out rate for boys of all ethnicities and why a higher percentage of females graduate college now etc.)...I could go on.

But the main point I meant to make was how debilitating this experience has been for everyone, emotionally and otherwise, including I'm sure for some of the parents of some of the those doing the bullying. Fortunately, it hasn't broken by boy's spirit, but why should he even have to have his spirit tested in this way in a supposedly safe environment?

Here's an article that popped up today in a kind of synchronicity.

TEMPLE GRANDIN

I've met and worked with and partied with, and more, a lot of movie and literary and artworld and political and etc. "stars"—and among them I have found people who just transcend all those categories and hit me with an almost spiritual force. As though they somehow embody what is most human about humanity at its best.

I know a lot of people who aren't "stars" in any conventional media way but who are nonetheless so exceptional in their vocations or avocations or life choices or any number of things that they too stand out among the rest of us and embody what is best about our species.

There's a point I'm leading up to that begins with watching Clare Danes in the role of TEMPLE GRANDIN, the autistic woman who became a genius designer of humane cattle slaughtering environments (if that isn't a contradiction, she feels it isn't) and an example of what some autistics could achieve, and lectures on the topic, in fact is a professor and expert on both subjects.

Danes gives an amazing performance, as she always has since I first saw her on MY SO-CALLED LIFE as a young actress. I had the great gift of reading with her in that Hollywood themed benefit for The Bowery Poetry Club last Spring and getting a chance to at least exchange compliments at the party afterward (I can't believe I didn't spend more time talking to her, but I have always been surprisingly shy when it comes to some people).

TEMPLE GRANDIN is an HBO movie I watched tonight, and at times found difficult to watch and had to cut away. That seems to still be part of the impact of my brain surgery, finding it difficult to watch certain films because they make me too anxious. I always had a touch of that. For instance I almost never watch episodic TV, but especially so-called "sit-coms" because inevitably there comes a moment when this genre demands a scene which makes me feel so embarrassed for the participants in the scene—not just the actors but the characters they're playing—that I have to get up and move around, often out of the room.

And even as a child I could not take horror films and missed most of the classic ones until I caught them at revival houses or on TV and could watch them as a film buff rather than as the reality they are. But even then I still couldn't watch nor did I want to watch most of them. Just a handful.

The few contemporary ones I've watched in theaters because someone talked me into it, I've become so agitated during the film it would disturb others and afterwards I often couldn't control my rage. I thought at the time that this was simply a proper response to such manifestations of evil, no matter how artfully done, but I realize since the operation, it's the way I'm wired, as they say.

And since the brain surgery, the kinds of movies that I can't watch has only increased. And I identify it to some extent with the kinds of responses some autistics have to certain stimuli, especially since right after the operation I could hardly stand much stimuli at all. And even now, twelve weeks later, the limits to what I can take are much more circumscribed than before.

So having already felt enormous sympathy and empathy for the real Temple Grandin since the first time I heard about her in an NPR special what seems like many years ago, I felt even more understanding for her as played by Danes in this HBO special. In fact I shed quite a few tears throughout the movie but especially at the end when she stands up and articulates to the parents of autistic children what it feels like to be one of those children.

There's a lovely performance by Julia Ormond as her mother (which seemed generationally incorrect because I still think of Ormond as the sensitive young actress who first impressed me and she's still as beautiful). Most of the other performances I dug too. There were some plot devices that could have been done better and things I might have liked to have seen done differently. But the courage of Danes' performance and the quality of it was so mesmerizing and rewarding, I felt no one could have done it better.

She and Grandin are those kinds of people, the ones I was writing about at the start, that make you think, or at least me think, oh man, this is the best humanity can aspire to in this situation under these circumstances facing these challenges with these givens. Two amazing women.

TWELVE WEEKS SINCE BRAIN SURGERY

So much progress in so many ways.

I've been reading a thick book of prose, a few pages or more a night before bed (the Thelonious Monk bio).

Still only writing the blog and some e mails, no real return to writing anything more lengthy, but have been able to do some minor editing on early chapters of my giant endless memoir.

Back at the gym a few times a week doing my old workout routine.

So basically seeming to others pretty much my old self in many ways. But also not.

I feel changed, and not just spiritually or experientially more evolved etc. but literally like a different man. Because my thinking and the ways I articulate it are different. Not entirely. Not even mostly. But enough for me to notice and observe it as it's happening and think, hmmmm, that's a little different.

When I'm at a loss for words, or my brain turns entirely off on wherever I was going or the word I was trying to remember or use, I go blank and there's a pause, not something I used to have a lot if at all in my conversations or monologues.

When I just can't think of the word I mean and I substitute another I end up sounding different, using words I might not have chosen to use before, and the same with my writing these posts or even comments. I hear or read myself speaking or writing and think, hmmmm, that's not the way I would have put that before but it sounds kind of interesting, interestingly different and yet still me.

The compulsion to make lists in my head all the time especially when falling asleep still hasn't returned (you may have noticed) and the sound the shower makes when the water goes over the spot where the titanium plate I still find new and odd and interesting. I still get a little more tired than I used to before the operation.

But my delight in books is back and I notice some differences in that as well. Yesterday I picked up Beckett's THE COMPLETE SHORT PROSE and opened to "Texts For Nothing" number 3 and began reading. Beckett is one of my favorite writers, someone I read and reread with great delight and intense interest most of my adult life until a few years ago. And then, suddenly, I began to find his writing almost tedious. At least the prose. Maybe not so much tedious as turgid.

[See, like the use of "turgid" there. Not exactly a term you would think of in relation to Beckett's writing. If anything, he's the opposite. But I couldn't think of the word I meant and "turgid" does seem to apply to the quality I was trying to describe in terms of what I was feeling his writing had become in my mind pre-operation...]

I lost interest in reading him, unlike my other favorites. I could pick up and reread any passage in any of their books and instantly find a kind of comfort and inspiration still. But that hadn't been the case with Beckett for a few years. Then yesterday when I began reading "Texts For Nothing 3" the words popped out like they did the first time I read his prose and I felt like I was in the presence of this character who was as familiar as my Irish peasant grandfather, but also writing that was as original and brilliant and coherent and subversive and effective as any I've ever read.

Man it made me happy. It was like falling in love with an old flame you hadn't known you still felt that way about. Just a total charge. And I read every word of that section with delight and enormous satisfaction as I felt like my brain got every nuance and tic and underlying significance of the word play and layered meanings.

But other events of recent days taxed my brain in its attempt to analyze something that happened and make a decision about how to deal with it in ways that might effect my little guy and others in lasting ways. Fortunately when I felt I had exhausted every angle and still couldn't make a decision and just wanted to put my brain to sleep because it felt so tired of THINKING, I remembered to ask for guidance and just then the phone rang and the solution was given to me.

Anyway, I could go on, obviously, but suffice it to say I am so much better, or my brain is, but also—maybe not so much but definitely—different.

QUOTE FOR TODAY

"I have seen paper cut-outs that were finer art than piles of precious metals" —David Smith

[PS: Another Smith quote I dig but have never written down before (like the one above): "I never intend a day to pass without asserting my identity; my work records my existence."]

AN EDUCATION

Not unlike some classic Hollywood "women's movies," AN EDUCATION is a cautionary tale told by a young woman who makes some "wrong" choices. Based on a memoir by Lynn Barber with a screenplay by Nick Hornby, this film would almost seem slight, if it wasn't for the amazing performance by Carey Mulligan.

She's one of those rare radiant actors who can pull focus in almost any scene without it seeming intentional or self-indulgent. If she hasn't been compared to the young Audrey Hepburn for her performance in this flick, I'd be surprised. There's even a FUNNY FACE kind of fashion makeover that takes place in AN EDUCATION in which her character seems to be channeling Hepburn.

I can see why she's been nominated for so many awards, including a "Best Actress" Oscar. The movie supports her in some ways—the story is compelling, the other actors terrific (including some champions like Emma Thompson in a small and unforgiving role and Alfred Molina in a large but equally unforgiving role and one I could argue he was miscast for, but he's so good and fun to watch in the end it doesn't matter).

The direction is good, though there are moments, like with Molina as Mulligan's character's father, where some things seem a little too contrived or too clearly delineated. But the story is so finely tuned and rigorously blunt that it makes up for any directorial missteps, which could be laid to the fact that the director, Lone Schefrig is Danish, I believe, and this seems to be her first feature in English. (As far as I can find out.)

But in the end the memorable thing about this movie is Carey Mulligan, an actress in her early twenties, who plays this too-smart-perhaps-for-her-own-good ambitious teenager perfectly. It's like Ellen Page in JUNO, only AN EDUCATION is less Pollyannish, if also less charming. But not Mulligan, her charm shines through this role like an old fashioned Hollywood movie star, ala Myrna Loy or Greer Garson. Maybe she's too young and it's too soon to make those comparisons, but I'm betting she'll fulfill them given some decent movies and challenging roles, like the one she plays in AN EDUCATION.

NOW VOYAGER

Watched this the other night on TCM. I know I saw it decades ago in a revival house and thought I'd seen it other times on TV, but besides the famous final scene where Paul Henried lights two cigarettes and gives one to Bette Davis and they look out at the stars (as I remember it, though this time I saw they were actually looking at each other and we, the audience through the camera's point of view look out at the stars), and the earlier one where Davis is made up like the old maid she's playing—all hairy eyebrows and dumpy outfits in the first few scenes—the entire movie in between was like a revelation. I didn't remember a thing!

Don't know if that's because of the brain surgery I had over two months ago now, or if I wouldn't have remember anything about the movie but the opening and closing scenes anyway.

And watching what seemed like a movie I'd never seen before, one thing that struck me was how odd Bette Davis looked, even when the character she was playing was supposed to have been transformed into a great beauty. The Hollywood makeover worked in terms of contrast with her earlier look, but in some scenes Davis just looked odd, not oddly beautiful or uniquely beautiful, but strange, not someone you would expect to be starring in romantic movies.

It also struck me how emotionally manipulative the movie was, in the fashion of what were called "women's movies" back then. But along with the predictable tropes of that genre, I was also surprised by how unusual and original the story was in many ways. And deep. Yes, some of the conventions of the time that it incorporates might seem unrealistic now, but actually most of the plot points and turns in the story are deeply realistic I thought, within the bounds of the time and place the story is set in.

In the end, the tension between what was so familiar from old Hollywood flicks and what was so original in this one, including Davis's always eccentric and unique acting mannerisms and character embellishments made NOW VOYAGER almost surreal and as adventurous and unexpected at times as anything out there today.

And hey, the fact that the title comes from Walt Whitman is pretty cool too. I knew that.