QUICK UPDATE

If I just heard the news correctly, the stock market just had its best September in sixty years! Even if I misheard and it was sixteen, still! I'm sure Obama is going to get credit for this from all those who have been blaming him for the bad economic news, right?

TONY CURTIS R.I.P.

I never met the man [though I met his first wife Janet Leigh and knew their daughter Jamie], but like a lot of young males in the early '50s (really starting in the late '40s as the images below show) were impacted by his image on screen. And it was all about his hair.

Elvis admitted that what we called back then, if I remember correctly, "the Tony Curtis roll" was what he was going for in his hairstyle that went on to influence even more young males. But it was Curtis who started the trend.

No self-respecting juvenile delinquent ("j.d." was the common term) or wannabe "j.d." would want to be seen without that little twist of hair right above the middle of your forehead, which dramatically contrasted with the slicked back or "greasy" long (for the times) side hair that gave rise to the term "greasers" etc.

It may seem trivial to focus on the hairstyle of a man who was a Hollywood legend, as they say, and despite the guffaws at his Bronx accent in Roman epics (SPARTACUS et. al.) was in fact a terrific movie star actor who played an incredibly wide range of characters for one who was known mostly as a pretty face at the time.

But for men of a certain era, it was all about the hair, getting just the right twist in front and amount of grease to slick back the sides so that even a punch in the jaw wouldn't jar it. And no matter how much critics or more sophisticated adults made fun of the man, he was a hero, a role model, a class statement saying, like it or not I'm cooler than anyone looking down their nose at me, and we all knew it.

Here's the evolution of "the roll" (or as we'd say to the barbder in our little tough guy voice "gimme a Tony Curtis"):

condolences to his family, friends, and fans

MICHAEL GIZZI R.I.P.

The charismatic, ruggedly handsome yet elegantly graceful and refined presence that was the poet Michael Gizzi has left us. He had his struggles and overcame most of them with the grace mentioned already, because it seemed to be so much a part of his person and persona from my angle.

He was a New England poet with one metaphoric and poetic foot in the New York School and one in the "L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E" poetry school, though he might have disagreed with that. But to my mind he evoked the poet Bill Berkson—who was at the heart of the first generation New York School poets, collaborating with Frank O'Hara for instance—not just because of their similar well-groomed almost old fashioned kind of attractiveness, but also the cryptic snippets of imagery and philosophical and real-world personal data that had the kind of surface tension that at first glance seems totally impersonal but resonates with a deeper completely personal take on their time passing through.

He was a teacher as well as a tree surgeon, as I remember it, and was associated with a lot of other New England and Berkshire artists and poets in particular, but he was a total original to my mind. He will be missed.

PS: Here's a poem I just found on the web that I think displays what I'm trying to describe above (I hope the lines breaks work):

[PPS: and a link to a brief but great interview with Michael]

CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT

The father in exile stripped of his sundial borrows the equator for a belt.

All his life his life had yet to start, coming of age was the end.

You think about genetics, would think, well,

maybe a whole other life is possible. Maybe noon would rather be midnight.

The humble Hellebore becomes a rock star thanks to intelligent design. Coziness

cradles him like rage. “He hid under his bed when he lived with his mother!”

One branch of the family is antiseptic, another a lecture on prickers.

Everything else is made up.

BLUSTER AND FAUX SENSITIVITY, THE RIGHT COMBO

I'm too tired unfortunately tonight to write what's been on my mind all day. But in brief, it's the combination of bluster (I'm shocked, shocked! etc.) and fake sensitivity (I'm hurt, deeply! etc.) while pretending to be so only for others, not selfishly (oh no) that marks for me one of the trump cards played by rightwingers who manipulate the media, who then fall for it all the time.

Nixon pretended to be a "man of the people" one of "the silent majority" representing the aggrieved regular working folk who were being taken advantage of by "East Coast Liberals" (i.e. The Kennedys and any other well-educated wealthy person who dedicated their lives to helping those less fortunate) and those making it necessary (i.e. the less fortunate, urban poor and later hippies et.al.) to restore "law & order" (i.e. repression of those who feel aggrieved who aren't white, Republican, etc.).

Reagan was much more subtle at bluster & faux sensitivity, but he had minions to do it for him. When it looked like his whole administration was going to collapse as a result of the lies and chicanery of Irangate, that total disregard and frontal attack on everything the Constitution stands for (that the bluster and fake sensitivity is all about now supposedly) and his cohorts were attempting suicide and trying to not go to prison for life, Ollie North donned his Marine uniform, even though he was long gone from the service by then, and acted all fake sensitive about his "honor" while he had his assistant shredding documents that would have proven how much he and many in the Reagan administration could have given two farts for the Constitution.

Every veteran I knew at the time despised his cheap shot, but the Congressional committee he was testifying before almost genuflected to not seem anti-serviceman or anti-flag and honor etc. and the press did the same and the Reagan gang were pulled back from the brink and Ollie North became one of the right's heroes.

W. was a master at it. In the primary debates with John McCain on TV when confronted with his organizations flyers used in South Carolina accusing McCain of having a biracial child and causing the deaths of family members and all kinds of outrageous lies, Bush acted all affronted, like who could dare accuse him of ever stooping so low, the same guy who called friends turdball was suddenly beyond reproach and the press bought it etc.

 Palin's a master at it, Gingrich isn't but he can't stop himself anyway, and now we've got tons of tea party nominees who seem to be capable of not much more than that. The guy who's running for governor of New York, Palladino, and may well win, is a supreme example. It's okay for him to e mail cartoons using the "n" word and depicting the president as a pimp and the first lady as a prostitute, or hardcore extreme pornography and if anyone complains, hey, he's in the construction business, or as I heard one of his supporters today on the radio say, if you're too refined to get the joke too bad for you.

But if you question his anti-government stance considering he has made most of his money from the government (it's always the same with the right, their strongholds are always the places that get most of our tax money and contribute the least, who yell loudest about morals and yet have the highest rates of divorce and family crimes etc. etc. etc.), he gets all fake sensitive about negative attacks.

Clinton knew how to play hardball with these tactics because he was great at it himself ("I feel your pain" "I did not have" etc.) and maybe that's what the Democrats need.

Okay, not so brief, but nothing compared to what's rolling around in my head on this topic.

TIME FOR ANOTHER QUOTE

"The truth can be spoken only by someone who already lives inside it; not by someone who still lives in untruth and only sometime reaches out from untruth toward it."  —Ludwig Wittgenstein (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

CONCORD PARTY POST BRAIN-OP OBSERVATION

Took the train to Concord, Mass., with my soon to be 13-year-old to visit an old friend and celebrate his fiftieth birthday. It was a pretty big party, new friends he's met in his fairly new home, old friends from where he grew up in Lowell, Mass. (Kerouac's home town, whom my friend can not only quote at will from poems and novels of Kerouac's, but sounds dead on like him as they have the same regional accent) and family.

He comes from a big Irish-American clan like mine, so even his siblings I hadn't met or didn't know at all seemed familiar. It was a fun time, great party, but despite the fact I've been mostly okay now for a while in crowded rooms, after maybe the first twenty people arrived, I found myself having a difficult time with the sound of their conversations filling the kitchen and other rooms. I had to remove myself to the front steps for a little while.

Maybe fifty people or so showed up, and I had some terrific conversations, but I noticed that I had to have them out of the way, in a room where there was no one else, or a spot at the end of the kitchen where no one else was, etc. But, despite being tired from having gotten up early etc., I found once the dancing started, I was fine.

I think it's because the focus was all on the music and the rhythm and other folks were moving to the beat so the distractions were minimal even though the music was loud, etc. Just thought I'd note that I'm still not completely back to "normal" (for me) and still find it very interesting.

Also interesting was that it wore me out and today, writing this back in Jersey, I'm having much more trouble than usual typing, having to correct pretty much every other word, sometimes more than once. I suspect once I get a good night's sleep that will improve again.

HOWL: THE MOVIE

Last Spring I was invited to a screening of HOWL, the movie, but asked not to write about it on this blog until it came out in the Fall, in fact, today.

I guess they were screening it so early in hopes of creating some kind of word-of-mouth build up of anticipation. But what it really led to was my memory of the film being a bit faded by now.

I can still highly recommend it for a few simple reasons.

First, it's the only film I know of based entirely on a single poem. That alone makes it worth seeing just for the exceptionalism of it.

In fact the structure of the movie is basically the reading of "Howl"—the poem that made Ginsberg famous and brought attention to the whole burgeoning "Beat" scene, i.e. Ginsberg and his friends—and it mostly works as a movie despite that enormous challenge.

The reading is interspersed with excerpts from later interviews with Ginsberg and with scenes of the 1957 "obscenity" trial of the book HOWL AND OTHER POEMS published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights. It was that "obscenity" charge and the trial that made the poem and poet just about household names at the time.

That's how the teenager I was at the time first heard of Ginsberg and "Howl." If I remember correctly, TIME magazine quoted some profanity-free lines from it, that were still powerfully unexpected and revelatory opening me and so many others up to possibilities for writing poetry we had never thought of, let alone viewing my life and the times I was living in drastically differently.

The movie has every word of the poem in it, Franco reading them as Gisnberg reading to a small audience of San Franciscans, including some of the more famous early cohorts in the whole "Beat" thing, as it became known, and he gets so much of it right, it's like performance art.

The trial scenes make for a more dramatic commentary on the poem and work for the most part as well, with John Hamm as the defense lawyer and David Striathorn as the prosecutor without a clue. It's a terrific snapshot of the times and the about to burst bubble of 1950s conformity and repression that eventually led to the "'sixties" and a few actors shine in their roles as the real people involved saying the real lines, verbatim as they say, from the trial. Jeff Daniels is, as always, a revelation, an amazingly underrated actor because so many of the characters he has played don't come across as seriously dramatic as the usual suspects.

I'd like to see John Hamm do Kerouac in a film that included Jack's influence on Ginsberg and the rest of the so-called "Beats" and on the poem "Howl" etc. Kerouac and Neal Cassady were weak points in the film, having no lines and the actors playing them seeming totally miscast to me.

I understand the directors' (Rob Epstein nd Jeffrey Freidman) probable desire to not pull focus from Ginsberg and his poem by including any of Kerouac's or Cassady's words from letters to Allen or from interviews, but casting the almost beautiful Franco as Ginsberg and a couple of nondescript actors as the ruggedly charismatic Cassady and movie-star handsome Kerouac seems disengenuous at best and deliberate at worst.

As for James Franco. I love Franco's film acting but doubted he could pull off playing Ginsberg, who I knew and was friendly with, since Franco is more handsome than James Dean (another iconic 1950s figure he's played) and even though Allen had deeply attractive, even beautiful you could say, eyes and knew how to use them, he was no matinee idol.

But Franco pulls it off. For the first minutes of the film I wondered if he could do it, even with the '50s style haircut and heavy black framed glasses and something behind his ears to make them stick out more and an obvious attempt to capture Ginsberg's voice and gestures, but then...

...I was hooked and Franco became, in more ways than mere imitation, the poet himself.

So it's also worth seeing this film if you love good film acting as I do, and even more so if you know something about acting. It's a tour de force award-deserving performance.

The one thing about the flick that I haven't read much about in all the reviews and articles that have come out about it since I saw it last Spring (guess those writers didn't get the "wait until September 24th" memo) is the animation part.

In order to make the reading of a very long poem palatable to a movie audience, many of the most famous lines of the poem are animated in a style that is relatively generic and becomes pretty repetitive after a while. Some of the correspondences between some lines and the animation work so well it's breathtaking.

But some become too repetitive and fall way short of the power of Ginsberg's images and emotion, while others just made me laugh with pleasure at the creativity of the juxtapositions. It's interesting that in the official trailer below, they don't include almost any of the animation at all, though it takes up what seemed like at least a third of the film.

But no matter what minor quibbles I might have, the main point I'd like to make is that this movie is a one-of-a-kind event. Don't miss it.