What have I been doing this summer? I’ll tell you what I have not been doing, writing blog posts.
You may have noticed a considerable decline in posts since I received my degree well over a year ago. There is a very good reason for this, I have been writing other things. I’ve just changed; when I think of an idea for a post, I am suddenly struck with an urge to do something, anything else.
So?
This weekend, Labor Day Weekend, the official close of the season, we are lounging in A-Town with the out-laws, staying cool, sampling the scorpion pepper roasted garlic sauce the younger whipped up just before we drove him back to school a few weeks ago (it’s really hot and it’s really good).
After a year away, it was really nice having him home for the summer, getting to spend time with him and with his boyfriend. In late July we all went to Maine where I think I have finally embraced my destiny as the Old Man on the Porch. We were there for two weeks this year, longer than I have stayed in decades, playing host to my brother and his family from England, our friend Sarah and – oh my – a dog!
We came to home to find that one of our cats was ailing; the cats are both fourteen years old, and Puffball has had a variety of difficulties, with his kidneys, with his thyroid. But now it was much more serious, a blood cancer, and we said goodbye to him last week.
Fifteen years ago I lost a dear pet, the eighteen year old Rosencrantz. We met when I was twenty-three, living in an apartment off Coventry, he died when I was forty, with a house and two living children. Losing him was losing my young adulthood. We got Puffy when the kids were five and seven, now they are both away at school. So it goes.
But these are endings. We began the season with a celebration of our twenty-five years married, and also our thirty years as a couple. The wife surprised me with a couple extra events, tickets to see the Guardians, an excessive dinner at the Marble Room.
We’ve probably attended (and also watched, and listened to) more Guardians games this summer than any time previous. I’ve also seen a couple of films at the Cinematheque. Usually I might see one a year, now I am a member. I saw The People’s Joker in July, last weekend we saw the recently reedited (?) Caligula. I’ve put their calendar on the wall in the kitchen, there’s a lot of funky things to check out this fall.
Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue
I have also spent a lot more time at the Cedar-Lee, our local independent theatre. Two of the several movies I caught this summer were Ghostlight and Sing Sing, which are moving, each in their own way, and they are part of a genre without a name, a story through which someone who has never acted before is drawn into an amateur theatrical and it transforms their life.
But! Speaking of the kitchen, ever since I bought this place (thirty-one years next month) I have wanted to redo the floor of the kitchen. Something else always came first – including getting new counters and cabinets and ceiling for the kitchen over fifteen years ago. We finally had the floor leveled, guys put in Marmoleum and I finished by painting the baseboards and trim around the doors. Another life goal accomplished!
Meet the floor.
What I’d like to be able to share is some great summer theater news, but there’s nothing to report, not really. Not much. I had the chance to take in a rehearsal of the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival production of King Lear before we left town. We also took in some high-camp hilarity at the Hanna with a performance of Golden Girls - The Laughs Continue.
The Toothpaste Millionaire revival at BorderLight went over well, though I was out of town for the festival this year. I had a reading for a new script I’m working on back in May, and that is something I have plans to rework through the rest of the year.
And that's really the thing, you know? Work. Happy Labor Day. Get back to work.
Local comics legend Derf (see: The City) composed a cartoon memoir of his high school years in the late 1970s and his association with serial murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer.
That book, My Friend Dahmer has gone on to international acclaim, been translated into a several languages, and on Friday a motion-picture adaptation starring Ross Lynch as Dahmer goes into general release.
Derf has been and will be accused of cashing in on a horrific tragedy, but that charge can more reasonably be made of previous made-for-TV films which capitalized on the gruesome and inhuman acts performed by Dahmer during the years of his crimes. This story has as much to do with the psychology of a would-be-but-not-yet killer as with the world which fostered his desires and compulsions, and provided the opportunity to make his fantasies come to fruition.
As one of the more self-pitying members of Generation X, I have loudly and at length whined about the disastrous effect the 1970s had on its children, when media was skewed entirely toward the interests of rising Baby Boomers. Our television programs and films churned out tales of easy sex, transient relationships, and graphic violence, while popular music dwelt on maudlin thoughts and liberal mores, and no one was looking after the kids.
From "My Friend Dahmer" the graphic novel by Derf
Two months ago I surprised the wife for her birthday by taking her to a sold-out, pre-release screening at the Cleveland Cinematheque. I am excited for Derf, and hope My Friend Dahmer, the film, receives the attention I believe it deserves.
The film captures that late 70s mood without fetishizing it, as so many contemporary films do. The suburban torpor of a nation in decline, and the effect that has on its citizens, especially the young people is on full display.
Derf has often suggested that his book is an indictment of the adults who failed in their responsibility, providing no oversight, and in this way allowing a neglected, alienated monster to come to life. Dahmer may have been destined, either through fate or natural design, to become a murderous sociopath. But why did no one see the signs?
The screenwriter and director Marc Meyers made the decision not to employ a narrator. Derf comments on the proceedings in his novel through the use of captions, and in this way he himself leads us through the narrative. We are never alone with Jeffrey Dahmer. Without narration, Dahmer's increasing isolation from humanity (portrayed hauntingly by Lynch) is ours to witness in isolation.
It is this emotional connection -- not sympathy, which is feeling, but empathy, which is understanding -- that makes the final scene of the film so chilling. I won't spoil it for you. It's enough to say that in any other film, it would be moment of triumph, and of celebration. Our main character finally knows who he is.
The other night the Cinematheque was showing all three of Richard Linklater’s Before films - Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013).
When it was first released in 1995, I did not see Before Sunrise and probably and would never have thought again about it, if not for the fact that my brother once asked if I had seen it and telling me how much he had enjoyed it.
Before Sunrise (1995)
Indeed, if I had seen that first part, at the time, I do not believe I would have enjoyed it. I had never been any kind of fan of Ethan Hawke. I was amused by Hamlet (2000), I entirely despised Reality Bites (1994). The guy is my age and supposed to be this important Gen X indie character but he always has always struck me as just a much softer Matt Dillon, and a bit self-serious.
When I imagine watching the movie on first release, as a twenty-seven year-old, when his character (Jesse) lays down the “jump ahead ten, twenty years, and you’re married” gambit to lure Julie Delpy (Celine) off a train to walk the streets of Vienna for one night, I would have bristled at its far-too cleverness. The movie asks, "Don’t you wish you had the stones to say things like that to pretty girls?"
Of course, I know plenty of guys who do deliver monologues like that to pretty girls to try to get what they want. Those guys should know these pretty girls always tell me about these hilariously precious attempts over coffee -- and about the sprawling, defensive emails that arrive the morning after, and we laugh. It’s fun.
Actually, yes. I am one of those guys. Or I used to be. One of those guys who would say those things. Sometimes it worked, especially on one night in July, 1994, and if it hadn't, I would not have been sitting next to my wife at the Cinematheque last Sunday night.
She and I had originally planned to see all three, but her work and my need to continue certain important house projects brought us to the sound conclusion that we should see the first on the big screen, and if we liked it, we would check out the other two at some future date.
As the credits rolled for Sunrise I turned to my wife and said, "We're going to stay for the second one, right?"
Before Sunset (2004)
What seemed bizarre, and as I said, contrived about the “jump ahead ten, twenty years” speech in Sunrise is that we know now that there are now three films (to date) which chronicle a single relationship between two people which spans (to date) almost twenty years. Director Linklater could not have known, making this inexpensive, independent romantic slacker film, that any or all of the artists involved would be available or interested in producing a sequel. Name another earnest, romantic, low-budget movie with a sequel.
Nineteen years ago I couldn’t have imagined sitting where I was, either.
We ran into friends at the theater, between the first and second movies, who assured us the third one (Before Midnight) is actually the best of the three, which I found incomprehensible. My expectations for the second were now high, if only because I had just found the first so well-made film, and so moving. I was actually giddy with anticipation to watch Sunset. But how could this second film be ... different?
The fact that a duology (let along a trilogy) had never even been planned, that the director and actors came together to write another movie about the same characters at a different stage in their lives, made it about what is rather than what was. Sunrise, the fluid meandering of one long night, as two twenty-somethings get to know each other, and the places that evening's wandering takes them (palm readings, poetry for spare change) became in Sunset the frantic, desperate chattering of two people in their thirties trying to recapture something they had, uncertain as to whether they could.
It wasn’t until Monday that it struck me that the entirety of Sunset is in real time. From the bookstore to a café to a boat to a car to home, without a break. An inexorable, 80-minute progression to where they wanted to be but could never have gotten to nine years earlier.
One of the traps the second film avoids entirely is any drama about Hawke’s character being married with children. I was wondering when he would bring it up, his wedding ring is certainly conspicuous. But she already knows. She’s read about him, he’s a published author, that’s how she found him. It’s a fact of life, they’ve been apart nine years. What was supposed to happen?
Before Midnight (2013)
But that walk up the staircase, and then settling into her apartment. Making tea, listening to music, slowing down, he knew he wasn't leaving. I was reminded of when my first marriage was falling apart, when I was already seeing the woman I am now married to. We had fooled around, it was frantic, my wife knew about that. She hadn’t said no.
Then we began arranging visits. Because I wanted to know what it was like to be normal with this new person. I told my (then) wife I was planning to get back to New York, to spend time there doing things with our mutual friend.
“You want to try it out,” she said. She knew. She was absolutely right.
We left after Sunset. We had to. A babysitter was watching our kids, my wife had papers to grade, I had grocery shopping to do. It felt like a such a betrayal, stopping here, leaving Celine and Jesse behind, when we knew there was more to the story, the hardest part -- the part where they are our ages. I mean, the ages we are right now.
She and I meandered around the Case campus, trying to find a place to eat. We walked and talked. I was giddy after the first film, after the second I just ached.
But I was relieved. So much frantic longing, which I am glad to say is in my past. I hadn’t waited, I took the leap back then and while it wasn’t easy. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t nice. But it is impossible to say that it was wrong.
