Eliza Frank

Looks Like an Inside Job

2010-06-30T16:25:00.002-04:00

"Astoria Piano Vandalized" reads the headline of the Western Queens Gazette which, in case you have mislaid your copy, details the destruction of a piano which was placed in Athens Square Park by the nonprofit group Sing for Hope. As a summertime public art project which has become a kind of New York tradition (the cows, the Gates, the waterfalls), Sing for Hope has placed sixty pianos in public places around the five boroughs. “Play Me, I’m Yours!” the pianos invite.

One piano was placed in Athens Square Park in Astoria, home of the Steinway piano factory, the last active piano factory in New York City, which in the 19th century numbered 171. The last factory to close was the Sohmer factory, on Vernon Boulevard in Astoria, which closed in 1982, spent some time as an office furniture warehouse, and was declared an historic landmark in March, 2007, and has been in the process of being converted into condos for the past couple of years delayed, I can only surmise, by the credit crunch of the recession. If you have visited Socrates Sculpture Park, you have seen the former Sohmer factory with its landmark mansard-roofed clock tower. Sohmers are not Steinways, but they are nothing to sneeze at. When Irving Berlin wrote, “I Love a Piano,” he write it on a Sohmer.

Here is a photo and an excerpt from the fascinating (especially if you are a geek about the history of neighborhoods) report from the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

Why do I know all this? A few weeks before that factory was declared an historic landmark, I found a Sohmer piano put out on the street for Saturday large trash pickup. I have written about it here and am also developing it into a larger piece because, how can I put this, I just love pianos. I still have the Sohmer I rescued from the street, even though the soundboard is ruined and several of the keys don’t work at all. I have not come up with the $8,000 I need to have it fully restored to its former glory. But I can’t let go.

“The badly vandalized piano at Athens Square Park, 30th Street and 30th Avenue,” reads the article in the Western Queens Gazette, “had all of its keys and part of its inner gears removed.”

Indeed. The vandalism is quite specific and specialized. The piano was not smashed, axed, beat up, beat in, set on fire or otherwise generally molested. But its keys and part of its inner gears were removed. This particular neighborhood is full of retired tuners and technicians. The violated piano was a Kimball, a Chicago-based manufacturer. The vandal carefully removed the keys from their supporting nails and left the frame. But why, as Keith Morrison on Dateline NBC would ask, why would anyone do that?

Parting, Sweet Sorrow, Etc.

2010-06-26T12:56:00.000-04:00

I just finished our last workshop in Dinty Moore's Literary Nonfiction class at the Kenyon Summer Writers Conference. An exceptionally kind and talented group of us. My new friend Nina and I walked over to get sandwiches from the deli to take on the plane with us and already the vibe in beautiful downtown Gambier and across the campus had modulated from that of a literary conference to that of an Episcopalian retreat. The Episcopalians are everywhere. Specifically, they are down the hall from the computer lab where I am writing this blog post, singing hymns, as good Protestant folk ought.

But where are the mimes? There ought to be mimes. Actually, they are here, but nobody has seen them yet. Or heard them. (OK, that was a cheap shot.) We had heard that a teenage troupe was in the week before, and mourned not seeing them. Then a few days later, we saw a sign "Mime Parking." Photo op! I suspect they are being kept busy in one of the three theaters on the Kenyon campus. That's right. 1600 students. Three theaters.

So, an end to my glorious week without blackberry, cell phone (my choice), television (except for the occasional updates on the World Cup and the marathon tennis match, courtesy of the bar at the Village Inn), newspaper (except again glances at the headlines of the New York Times online)or anything but sitting in workshop, reading work, being sent forth to do new work, and listening to readings. I predict re-entry will be saddening.

Emotionally Draining, Physically Exhausting, Please Don't Let It End

2010-06-23T14:04:00.000-04:00

Kenyon Day 4.

Quite a heady time here in the brutal central Ohio heat. I had planned on using the fantastic-looking pool here, but Kenyon seems to make its money by renting out its lovely dorms and buildings to a variety of groups throughout the summer. Last week was Job's Daughters and a group of teenage mimes. This week it is writers and teenage swim camp. I have not seen the teenage swimmers swim, although I have heard from an eyewitness that they are profiles in endurance. On dry land, they stand in a herds, feeding, eyes glazed either because it is early in the morning (at breakfast) and they are teenagers, or because they have spent all day swimming (at dinner) and are exhausted. I had hoped to use the pool, but there are only slivers of availability.

So yesterday I went on a trail hike. The assignment was to describe myself at a moment in time and my goal here at Kenyon was to generate work that was not about me as a child. "Describe myself at a specific moment in time," and I wanted to be 1) an adult and 2) happy. It took a hell of a lot of trail hiking to come up with something and by the time I got back to Mouse Cottage, as I have dubbed my over-air-conditioned dwelling which I share with two roommates and a noctural rodent, I had time only to shower, change and shuffle slowly, sore-muscled, off to the dining hall, where the teenager swimmers were huddled around the soft serve ice cream machine, silently pumping and nudging each other aside.

In this morning's session, two people cried when they read their pieces. I cry when they cry. I cry at anything. I haven't cried reading my own pieces aloud but I experience a different, marvelous confluence of nervous sensations: my hands shake, my palms sweat, and my voice trembles. Lovely. Can't wait for my public reading Friday night!

Back to Mouse Cottage now, to change into my trail clothes.

Kenyon Summer Writers Conference

2010-06-21T13:33:00.000-04:00

I am here at Day 2 of the Kenyon Summer Writers Conference, which is noteworthy only because I have never been to a writer's conference, even though I have wanted to go for twenty years (and yeah, by the way, where do these recent college grads come up with the $ for this?), because I haven't had a full week off from my job for three years, and because I am happier than I have been in so long that I can't remember.

Our instructor in Literary Nonfiction is Dinty W. Moore, the editor of the online publication Brevity. Our first handout contains this wonderful quote from Reynolds Price:

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo Sapiens -- second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.

My Astoria

2010-05-19T23:01:00.015-04:00

I have recently acquired a pen pal in St. Louis, my home town, who was under the mistaken impression that I live in L.A., due probably to my recent interview for the Women and Hollywood blog. He wrote from a gloomy day in St. Louis, grumbling that he didn’t even want to hear about how the weather was where I was (L.A., he presumed) and complaining about the weeds taking over the zoysia grass. I’m sure zoysia is common worldwide, but I don’t hear a lot of talk about it in these parts. This is probably because I live in New York City, where talk of lawn care in general is thin on the ground. But the word “zoysia” immediately evoked my South St. Louis grandparents and their too-perfect lawn.

“I don’t live in L.A.!” I wrote back to him. “I live in Astoria, Queens.”

He wrote back that although he had grown up in Brooklyn (back when there were still Brooklyn Dodgers) he knew little of Astoria except for having traveled through it to visit a relative.

Well, that was Astoria, originally. A place to travel through. F. Scott Fitzgerald describes it thus, in the 20’s, before Astoria was transformed by the great wave of Greek immigrants in the 50’s. Back then, it was just a dismal backstage boneyard feeding the roaring 20’s maw of Manhattan:

This is a valley of ashes-a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of gray cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-gray men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.

A place, in other words, no decent Princeton grad like the narrator of "The Great Gatsby," would be caught dead stopping in, even for gas, traveling between his “bond business” on Wall Street and the great West Egg of Long Island to Gatsby’s mansion. How awful, to have to witness the "obscure operations" of the working class from your Ivy League gaze.

And popular culture has been no kinder. The people of Queens are depicted in the movies as buffoonish ethnics, the defeated lower middle class, slamming crockery and stepping on their vowels, or a curiously unethnic, untough and un-accented Hollywood baby-faced Spiderman.

What I had been about to tell my pen pal about Astoria was that I chose it, or it chose me, for a variety of practical reasons – its persistent lack of cool keeps the prices down, its proximity to Manhattan repeatedly startles visitors from other boroughs, and primarily, its sense of déjà vu. “It is like South St. Louis,” I would have written him, “except substitute Greeks for Germans, and I don’t know which is more xenophobic.”

Well, I do know which is more xenophobic. For one thing, the Germans are colder towards everyone, even their own kin, while the Greeks are more clannish.

Also, "xenophobia” is their word -- “xenos” from the Greek meaning foreigner and “phobos” from the Greek meaning fear. I have lived in the same neighborhood for 15 years and only recently has the butcher or the tailor at the dry cleaner given me a reluctant nod in response to my “Good morning.” Even my saying it in Greek elicited no kinship: “kalimera” brought nothing but smirks or blank faces. “You Greek?” they ask. “No, actually I’m from –” I start to reply, but already the shades are drawn and the front door lock has clicked.

It would also be helpful to remember here that the word “barbarian”, now understood to mean an uncivilized person, means, in Greek, “one who does not speak Greek.” It was thought, according to noted Classics professor Elizabeth Vandiver, to derive from the Ancient Greeks’ mockery of the languages of other tribes: “Bar bar bar,” they would say to the mongrel tribe leaders, much as we say “blah blah blah” to indicate the speech of those whose interests and patience do not match our own.

What I would have told my St. Louis pen pal is that the pre-war buildings and the tidy gardens of Astoria remind me of South St. Louis. I bought my apartment because I loved the pre-war building, about which I have written here. The building has lovely arch doorways, and beautiful landscaping (though no zoysia) to which several of my neighbors contribute the whole of their weekends. My neighbors and I are not as close as I would like. But I realize that in NewYork City, even in the “ashes” of its glitter, that lack of neighborliness is a luxury problem. My building is diligently tended to, scrupulously clean, generically attractive, as the lobby of an “extended care facility” might be attractive, full of unused couches and artificial flowers. No, my building is not cool. But it is lovely.

But my grandmother would have been pleased. I would say “delighted” but “delighted” was never her style. I was able to buy the apartment in the first place because of a small inheritance from her and her frugal,reserved lifestyle. When I stepped into my then-empty apartment as a prospective buyer, I felt that my grandmother’s dishes would fit into the kitchen. I felt that she would have approved although, had she been there, she would have had no one to talk to, Germans and Greeks being what they are.

Recently, the Wall Street Journal was the latest to "discover" Astoria
as a “gentrifying” and “hip” emerging new nabe. We have been down this road before. Roomy apartments! Young hip filmmakers! Close to Manhattan! Up and coming! Have a baklava!

But on second thought, you know what? Stay away

Women and Hollywood

2010-04-17T13:56:00.001-04:00

I’m not the kind of feminist who says “I’m not a feminist, but …” – thereby disclaiming all the mannish and confrontational aspects of accepting the label “feminist” while embracing all of the legislative equalizers and social freedoms so hard won by those strident, shrill, bluestockings from whom we must keep our distance, lest we … actually, I don’t know the “lest” part. “I’m not a feminist, but …” says a young Hollywood actress … but?

But I’d like to see women portrayed on screen as the complex individuals they are in role life? But I’d like not to have to audition in a bikini? But I’d like not to have to respond to auditions which read “Must have a lean dancer body. Must have real breasts. Do not submit if you have implants.” But I’d like to have economic autonomy over my own life? But I’d like to speak my mind and still wear lipstick?

Yeah, I don’t get the “I’m not a feminist, but …”

I am a feminist.

However, I am the kind of feminist who lets other feminists do my dirty work for me.

One of those feminists who does my dirty work for me is Melissa Silverstein, over at Women and Hollywood.

I’m not just saying this because she recently, graciously gave me a place as a guest blogger on her site to discuss my friend Hilari Scarl’s film "See What I'm Saying"

But that was nice.

If you subscribe to my blog, consider subscribing to hers. Far-reaching, tireless, opinionated, rigorously focused. And feminist.

Stephen King, Stephen King, You're Afraid of Everything

2010-02-24T21:44:00.001-05:00

This made me laugh:

http://kenyonreview.org/blog/?p=7992#more-7992

The Stakes Are High, the World is Bleak

2010-02-21T16:21:00.004-05:00

I may be late to the party here, or maybe early, caught, as I am, between news of the movie and the publication of the book, which came out four years ago.

The film Winter’s Bone was last month screened at Sundance, where it won the Grand Jury prize, and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Skimming the news from Sundance on the internet, I saw that Winter’s Bone is about an intrepid teenage girl who struggles to keep her family together after the disappearance of their father.

Odd, I thought. How did that happen? My script Wildflowers of the West is about an intrepid teenage girl who struggles to keep her family together after the death of her father. And there is no market for such a thing, no, none, none at all. What was I thinking?

During my trip to the Austin Film Festival, I barely could spit out the logline (which I felt I had really, really boiled down, boiled down to caramel) before something shiny apparently moved behind my head and my listener was gone. In one case, we were going around a table telling a producer about our projects, and I followed a guy who said, “My script is like ‘E.T. meets Toy Story.’” “My two favorite movies!” cried the producer. “Send it to me!” She then turned her perfect teeth on me, and I got as far as “an intrepid teenage girl …” before the light went out of her eyes.

“Who is your audience?” snapped another woman at the festival, when we casually exchanged loglines. She sounded quite irritated, as though “intrepid teenage girl” was the most repellent phrase she’d ever heard. We were standing in line to see “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.”

Based on the novel. Aye, there’s the rub. Winter’s Bone was indeed a novel first. I have spent the weekend reading it and it is one hell of a novel.

The heroine, Ree Dolly, is more than intrepid; she is one of the fiercest and bravest young women I’ve ever encountered in fiction. An Ozark teenager, she has been raising her two younger brothers single-handedly since her mother went crazy (“Mom’s morning pills turned her into a cat, a breathing thing that sat near heat and occasionally made a sound.”) and her father’s primary occupation is cooking meth, which is a kind of family tradition. Her father, gone missing yet again, has put up the house and land for his bail bond. Unless Ree finds him, she, her mother and brothers will be “livin’ in the fields like fuckin’ dogs, man.”

This was published as a Young Adult novel. Don’t ask me how, although that explains how I missed it. I never did understand the YA market, not when my novel was published as a YA, and not since. My own novel is indeed Anne of Green Gables compared to Winter’s Bone¸which our old high school librarian wouldn’t have gotten through three pages of before declaring it unsuitable. The language is filthy. Drugs are everywhere. Sex too is everywhere but far less pleasurable. Love is a slap in the face or a good hard pinch that at least shows you care. Ree's "grand hope" for her brothers is that "these boys would not be dead to wonder by age twelve, dulled to life, empty of kindness, boiling with mean." And then, there are the bad guys.

Apparently Daniel Woodrell, who lives in the Ozarks, coined the phrase, or perhaps invented the genre of “country noir.” He has written eight novels, another one of which,Woe to Live On was made into the film Ride with the Devil. In this, the lead character is an intrepid teenage … boy.

He writes about teenagers for the same reason I do. The stakes are high, the world is bleak.

I am now going to buy everything he has written. And so should you.

Here is his author's page on Amazon. And here is an interview with him in The Southeast Review.

Every Time I See You Falling

2010-02-17T17:40:00.000-05:00

I have to admit, I used to like to watch the Winter Olympics, but now I can barely glance at a television screen without wincing. Speed skating, which was being broadcast in a restaurant where I had dinner Saturday night strikes me, as I remarked to my companion, as “a lot of fun to do, but dull as hell to watch.” Even before the awful luge death, I had planned to avoid the endless coverage, all the slipping and sliding and spills, never mind those overwrought, overproduced mini-documentaries on the gold contender, “Svetlana was born with the blood … of a champion.”

I never wanted to be a figure skater. I have weak ankles and no athletic traits. Also, I hate the cold and hate getting up early, and in those mini-documentaries, stories are always told about the mother of the figure skater getting up at 3:00 to drive Brianna to the skating rink four hours away. It is always the mother of the American women skaters who do this, by the way, partly because Europe is presumably more compact (that is, the rinks are closer and perhaps accessible by train?) but also because Brianna, as an American, has an indefatigable work ethic, while Svetlana was just born that way. (Someone needs to tell the sneering partisans in the broadcast booth that it’s okay to stop hating the Russians now.)

I’m enough of a fogey to state that I liked it better when it was figure skating, before it became a skate-jumping tournament. Also, I can no longer stand to watch some poor kid sacrifice a lifetime of training to the momentary slip in a triple triple lutz thirty seconds into the program. Every time I see them fall, I change the channel.

The Nasty Gidgets, Part II

2010-02-06T11:37:00.003-05:00

My dear friend Linda, a/k/a “the hippest chick in Utah,” has annoyed me greatly. She is, as devoted followers of this blog will remember, a music critic for The Standard-Examiner, and the occasional weekend dj on KRCL (See The Nasty Gidgets, Part I). As I outlined in that earlier post, she also writes and produces a podcasty thing connected with the paper, called “The Beat Beat.” Those brief pensants on musical topics -- the music of Haiti (made me cry), a salute to the late, undersung Ellie Greenwich ("she put the words the to Wall of Sound") -- are knowledgeable, inviting and bite-sized.

These little 'casts hook you, indeed. And herein lies the annoyance. Her most recent Beat Beat outlines songs we would gladly never hear again, one of which, for her, is Led Zeppelin's “Stairway to Heaven.”

Well, it is for me, too. I mean, my God. If you had grown up, as Linda and I did, as the hippest chicks in Kirkwood, Missouri (in an underground, unacknowledged, downtrodden, beleagued, wise before our time, why are we here in the basement listening to records on a Saturday night sort of way) getting high on vinyl and despairing at the garden-variety musical taste of our classmates and neighbors, then you, too, would have hated “Stairway to Heaven.” It had all the ersatz, faux-Renaissance, “we come off as quite deep if you’re stoned” and “wot ya think, guys, a flute might be cool here” crappity-crap of 70’s British rock BUT WAS, TO BOOT, always voted #1 in the best songs round-ups of local FM radio stations. (To which Linda and I would listen, as touchingly anxious as an Oscar contender, as though we had some stake in it, hoping for recognition for our favorites).

So, yes, I agree that “Stairway to Heaven” should be included on my list of music I would gladly never hear again for the rest of my life (along with the entire oeuvre of Aaron Copland, Celine Dion and a certain New Yorker whose initials are BJ).

But did Linda, in her audio report, have to quote the lines:

"If there's a bustle in your hedgerow, don't be alarmed now, it's just a sprinkling for the May queen ..."

and then play them as sung by Robert Plant, and then question their meaning? Now I have an earworm (from the German Ohrwurm, meaning a goddamn musical phrase -- usually involving a flute -- that you can’t get out of your head)?

The meaning of these innocuous lyrics is not mystical, or Tolkien-like, or a reference to World War II, as some devotees (who need to move on with their lives) have avowed. The infamous “bustle in your hedgerow” mystery means only, “If the wind is rustling the bushes, it doesn't mean something scary is in there, like a possum or a really large possibly rabid raccoon, it just means spring is on the way.” I have this on the greatest authority. My own.

But what I also have is an earworm.

To Harsh the Mellow

2009-12-31T17:13:00.002-05:00

A lot of things have harshed my mellow this holiday season, including a bronchial flu whose tenacity makes me question the purpose of the flu shot I submitted to last month, a demanding workload during the so-called “quiet week” between Christmas and New Year’s, and the fact that the youngest member of my department, a colleague I’ll call Maria, maintains a serene ignorance of the phrase “harsh my mellow.”

“Dude, you are harshing my mellow,” I emailed an associate who had sent me a last-minute, complicated rush request late in the afternoon. I cc’d Maria, who called me.

“What does that mean?” Maria asked.

“This will take hours!”

“No, what’s `harsh mellow’? Is it like `marshmallow’?”

“No,” I said.

“Is it like `man, you’re killing my buzz’?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Old people are so funny,” she laughed and hung up.

Adorable.

I am accustomed to making no sense to Maria; it’s a generational thing and a cultural thing, and by “cultural” I don’t mean that I spout poetry or cite the Triumvirate of Ancient Rome as a viable management stop-gap compromise (although I have done these things) but that I was raised in the suburban (but so recently rural) Midwest by bookish parents who were both only children, and Maria is the product of a thriving ex-pat Cuban community in New Jersey, with dozens of attendant cousins and uncles and aunts, none of whom, apparently, ever declared that it was advisable to “make hay while the sun shines,” recommended that “many hands make light work,” or praised something by saying “you can’t beat that with a stick.” Proclamations such as these tend to cause Maria to tilt her head quizzically, sending her hair into the kind of wavy raven cascade that romance novel cover illustrators can only dream of.

I don’t mean to stereotype, but I have never personally met a Cuban who was not out-of-the-ordinary attractive. Maria is more than that; she has the kind of velvety allure that inspires men from every strata of the law firm caste system to invent reasons to drift by her well-hidden desk. She does not encourage this and would frown at my mentioning it (if she knew that I had a website, which ha! she does not) and has in fact navigated her brief professional life with such aplomb that I soon left off condescending to her for her unfamiliarity with my obscure sayings, in favor of seeking her approval of them. She has become a kind of litmus test. If she doesn't get it, it's probably not easily gotten. While I don’t mind being regarded as an eccentric – I have earned that – I do dislike being thought a freak. Thus, Maria is my freak-o-meter.

But, “dude, you’re harshing my mellow”? Why would she not know that and yet know “man, you’re killing my buzz”?

The latter is a 70's era piece of Cheech-and-Chong nonsense. The former, however, entered our lexicon in Shakespeare’s time, specifically in Act V of Hamlet when Ophelia declares, “Noble prince, whose thunderous countenance/Hath harshed the mellow of so many days.”

Okay, so. Dude, that's not true. I made that up. It's a lie. A complete and utter lie, albeit one in iambic pentameter (for which, yay!) Ophelia is already dead by Act V, as I’m sure you know.

According to Urban Dictionary, to “harsh a mellow” means “to be a killjoy. to ruin someone's happiness, whether they are drunk, or just really happy, with sad news or drama.” The delightful example they use is:

“Dude. Your house is on fire.”
“Damn. You totally harsh my mellow.”

According to World Wide Words, “It’s a development of US campus slang, in which in the 1980s harsh became a verb in the sense of “to mistreat”, “to be very unfair to”.

I think that’s what I like about it; that use of the word harsh, which is very Shakespearean, in that Shakespeare would so often take an adjective and make it a verb. (I would provide examples, but that would mark me as freakish.) Also, mellow is so much milder than buzz. To “kill” someone’s “buzz” is to point out that they have broken all the crockery and blinded the dog, or that their cool new free room and board situation is also known as "jail" or that the beat they're grooving to is the sound of the sheriff pounding a foreclosure notice on the front door.

To harsh someone’s mellow, on the other hand, connotes an unnecessarily brutal intrusion into a mildly productive and soothing activity, like abruptly calling into active military service someone who is peeling vegetables for a stew, or demanding emergency and exacting veterinarian services from someone serenely brushing a cat. Or ordering an up-to-the-minute “client alert” at 5 o’clock during a “quiet week.”

The Dead and the Weakening

2009-12-21T18:41:00.003-05:00

My neighbor Mrs. Melman died on Sunday. My neighbor Mr. Melman died on Tuesday. Mrs. Melman was just a hair short of 90 and Mr. Melman was in his 80s. While I was reading the flyers on the bulletin board next to the mailboxes announcing where the services would be held, the super came over and asked me what the story was. I could only think of E.M. Foerster, "The King died and then the Queen died is a story. The King died and the Queen died of grief is a plot."

“There was an ambulance in front of the building yesterday morning,” I said to the super.

"Oh no, that was the lady in 2W."

"Who?" I asked.

"Old Greek lady with white hair."

Which could describe half the women in the building, on the block, in the borough.

Which, additionally, meant three neighbors dead in the space of four days.

“All the old people in the building are dying,” I said to yet another neighbor, my friend Michael.

“That means we’re the old people now!” he replied cheerfully.

I have certainly let slip away the callousness of youth. The sight of the ambulance in front of the building used to send me to the phone to call one of the board members, “What unit?” in case one of my friends wanted to buy in. Now I ask, “What happened?” And so I found myself attending the building’s holiday party yesterday, an event I historically treated as a drive-by encounter, navigating through the old ladies and pausing only long enough to bestow holiday tips on the super and the porter.

I sat next to Michael, sipping bad red wine from a plastic cup, discussing with the neighbors (three of whom were named Rose, so that made it easy) the sweet tragedy of the Melmans (“he always said he would go when she did”), other impending tragedies (“Juan is in the hospital”), how nice the landscaping was and who was on the gardening committee (I am on no committee) and how superior our building was to all the other buildings in the neighborhood. As the party wound up, Michael, another friend and I were able to bound back up the stairs with relative vitality, but the vitality was only relative; we were only young compared to the old. We had not been engaging in the kind of cutting-edge patois that post-graduates thrive on, and I had been effectively snubbed by the wife of the hipster couple who work in graphic arts and ride a Vespa, while happily welcomed into the fold by the three Roses.

Strangely enough, this did not make me feel melancholy. Rather, it made me feel neighborly.

99% of Scripts Suck

2009-10-23T21:41:00.002-04:00

Here at the Austin Film Festival for a few days, for the Screenwriter's Conference. I was last here ten years ago, and was seriously discouraged enough to focus on putting together a kind of day career that would allow me to get me out of debt. Ten years ago, it seemed that every panelist or presenter said, "99% of the scripts I read suck." It was as though they had had a pre-conference meeting, because no one said, "The majority of the scripts I read are bad," or "Almost everything I read is sub-par." No, everyone said "99%" and everyone said "suck."

The larger problem, this year (although, the first panel I attended? "Suck" was uttered two minutes in) is that no one is buying anything. Producers, managers, agents and executives who have made time to attend can best be described as "cautiously realistic." No one is buying anything, and even if they were, they would be buying only comedies and thrillers. I finally snagged one agent long enough to say, "Talk about drama."

"Drama is tough."

"I know. So please validate this. If I wrote `The Lovely Bones' as an original spec screenplay, it would never get made. The only way it's getting made is because it's a literary property to begin with and they adapted it."

He agreed. I have long played with the idea of returning to my script "Wildflowers of the West" and writing it as a novel. I don't know how I will find time to do this, since I am at work on another novel, and the unfortunate focus I put on my day career has resulted in very limited hours for sleep, let alone living a creative life. I realize this is a luxury problem, when so many people, many of them my friends, are unemployed.

Austin in the meantime is the great city it has always been. I haven't been able to see many films; today, only a series of shorts in lieu of attending yet another panel to hear the advice "Believe in yourself." I was standing in line for "Precious" when I realized that I would be standing in line for another hour and a half for a film which would be opening in New York very soon, and I was better off spending time with an old friend who happened to be in town.

Off now to find some barbecue and attend at 10:15 screening of a film with a promising premise. Stay tuned.

Q 4 U: 2 B or no?

2009-09-18T15:21:00.001-04:00

Speak up or don’t speak up: that is the question.
Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The tweets and texts of the woman beside me
Through Acts I, II, III and IV of Hamlet,
Or to remind her of the no-texting rule
Announced at the commencement of the play.
The bright illumination of the screen
Distracts me. What has she to say which is greater
Than one hundred and twenty five dollars,
My ticket’s price; or the words of the Bard?
I should have gone to London to see this
Surely the West End crowd is more polite.
At last, I speak: “Could you please not do that?”
Receiving a mutinous glare, I add:
“It’s distracting!” Lo, cooperation!
In the final act, the drama exists
Only on the stage. The rest is silence.

Bright Star

2009-09-11T10:46:00.001-04:00

In a screenwriting class I took lo these many years ago, the importance of a film’s opening image was brought up. The instructor was male, most of the class was male, and the example he used was male iconography: “A gun in your face.” It was from a Clint Eastwood movie, one of those interchangeable Dirty Harry movies. An opening image, intoned the teacher, should immediately establish the themes and concerns of the movie. I’d have thought the words “Clint Eastwood” and “Dirty Harry” would suffice, but apparently, “a gun in your face” drives it home.

The opening image of Jane Campion’s film “Bright Star” about the love between John Keats and his neighbor Fanny Brawne, is an extreme close-up of a needle piercing a cloth, a close image, very close, so close that you can see the fibers of the cloth furring its surface. This, then, will be a film about intimacy and domesticity, about creativity and limitations. We see half of just one stitch, after all, not a dramatic sweep of a draped skirt, so we know we are in different territory than a typical costume drama, or “frock flick.”

“My stitching has more merit and admirers than both of your two scribblings put together,” Fanny tells John Keats and Charles Brown, as they rudely shoo her from the room so they can work on their poetry. “And I can make money from it.”

That one small scene encapsulates all the conflicting forces of the film: her utilitarian talent and his ethereal one, a woman’s “craft” versus a man’s “high art,” the rivalry among the poets Keats and Brown and the interloper Fanny; the lovers Fanny and Keats and the jealous, carping Brown, who yearns for fulfillment from poetry, Fanny, and Keats all and finds it in none, and all three of them against the fate of fortune. None of them has one.

The nip of poverty is a real wolf at the door in this film: if Keats were to marry Fanny, he would have to get a job and give up his poetry, if he were to marry Fanny as a poet, her family, already scraping by to maintain a respectable bourgeois façade, would have to support him. So instead of making love they yearn and make do. “Making do” is another theme of the film – not only does Fanny design and sew all of her own clothes, but nearly every character in the film is seen creating something, whether something as basic as a meal or as elaborate as an orchestra composed solely of human voices.

Not for the action junkie or even the impatient, “Bright Star” is an exquisite film. Characters leave a kitchen worthy of Vermeer to step into a meadow worthy of Renoir, and all this visual splendor is accompanied by a blessedly muted soundtrack. We don’t need a swell of string section to emphasize that a thing of beauty is a joy forever. Jane Campion has always been a filmmaker sure of her own eye; it’s nice to know she has faith in ours as well.

The Palmer Method

2009-09-08T22:30:00.006-04:00

I had dinner tonight with a friend, who I'll call Lola, which is so not even close to her name. She is highly educated (Ivy League law school, Ivy League college, and a "prep" so exclusive I never actually thought, growing up in Kirkwood, Missouri and reading short stories in The New Yorker, that I would ever actually meet one of that school's graduates). I asked after her son, who has just begun school in what would be called, in the U.S. (they live abroad), the third grade.

"Oh, that's when you learn cursive!" I pointed out happily, remembering the squat, wide, green signs of the alphabet displayed above the chalkboards in grades three and up and my yearning, when I was mere first-grader, to be in a "big kid" class where those swoops and swirls were mandated homework.

"Cursive is so unnecessary," she grumbled, "so obsolete!"

But --

"The whole point of cursive is that it was faster than printing," she went on. "Why, if everyone types now, do kids have to learn it at all?"

Was the whole point of cursive, I wondered, was that it was faster than printing? I hadn't realized that. But - but -- when they had to sharpen quills and dip them in ink -- did they not have to give more thoughtful consideration and craft, to their words, to their compositions? Was there not keener eloquence in their expression? Was there not a specific identity revealed in handwriting? If not, then why do we study original manuscripts? Why do we have handwriting experts to identify various lunatics? Why, in Twelfth Night , does Malvolio, coming across a forged letter, insist that it is the handwriting of his beloved mistress:

By my life, this is my lady's hand: these be her
very C's, her U's and her T's
and thus she makes her great P's.
It is in contempt of question her hand.

Now, I am not suggesting that Lola's young son be compelled to embrace, just now, this bit of dialogue. It is far too raunchy. The innuendo that Malvolio's lady's C, U (fill in the blank) T --makes great a P -- has not changed since Shakespeare's time. But the thought that a "hand" (handwriting) so exciting a lover should be lost? Replaced by texting? Too sad to contemplate. One of the most erotic things ever uttered to me was a boyfriend (a concert pianist) praising a letter I'd written to him, longhand, not even a love letter, but one "so beautifully expressed, so natural, so perfect, flawless! Like Mozart!" He mainly meant that I had crossed nothing out and that perhaps he was enchanted by the flow of my handwriting. Which, sigh. And ... awwww. Anyway, not something you get from an iPhone's XOXO.

"Well, why learn math, when there are calculators?" I countered to Lola. "Why learn anything at all, when there is Wikipedia?"

"I never write cursive," she grumbled, "I print. And my son hates his handwriting homework."

I hated my handwriting homework, too, but that was primarily because I wanted to be writing SOMETHING -- "My dog is white, except where his neck is grey" was my most pressing communication -- and not just making shapes, which shapes -- that is to say, which j's, k's and h's (which in my hand resemble each other) would come back with little red check marks and suggestions -- "make rounder," "close up." (My disinclination to hear criticism of my writing came early, as you can see.)

"And when I write, I like to edit," she continued. "I can't write a sentence without changing it five times. How can you just write?"

I thought of Alice Walker: "The poem that travels down the arm." I believe I even mimed it to her, the brain, the shoulder, the elbow, the hand.

"I just don't see the point," she shrugged. "And his report cards come back with all these comments."

And he could, I agreed, probably understand the concept of an apple from a single-serving container of applesauce from the grocery store, without ever having to venture into an orchard.

Wendy and the Lost Girls

2009-08-29T11:52:00.004-04:00

I wrote some time ago about my short story "Wendy and the Lost Girls," appearing in the anthology Nothing But Red. Recent events in the news compel me to produce it in its entirety here.

WENDY AND THE LOST GIRLS
By Elizabeth Bales Frank

Our number one dream is the one we call “The Milk Carton.” Maya dreamt it first and told us about it the next day in the cafeteria. That night, we all had it. You’re at the quick-store buying milk. Wendy’s photo is on the milk carton -- the famous photo, the one you by now know better than your own face, the one on the flyers you’ve been handing out every weekend. So many weekends now that you can’t remember what you did with your time before finding Wendy was your purpose. The carton provides the numbers on Wendy, what we used to call the “vital stats” and then, as the hope of vitality faded, the cold facts. Five feet, 98 pounds, hair sandy blonde, eyes -- with their cute downward-slanting corners and their amber flecks and their ability to refract prancing shifts of light -- “brown.”

After we had dreamed the dream enough times, we started to have variations: Susannah sees herself on the carton. Kimmy sees Wendy buying the milk, not in the grainy surveillance camera footage, but live, as though she’s hovering somewhere in the store, although even being there doesn’t focus the picture any – Wendy is still dulled and blurry. Tricia sees herself buying the milk, dropping the carton. It explodes, spewing blood.

The dream of the milk carton is the first united dream, silent, like an ancient movie. In it we hear nothing but our heartbeats, nothing but our breathing. Except when Kimmy dreams it. Then we hear a voice calling through a wave of crackle. Through white noise. Through the sound between stations.

Maya was the first, too, to dream “Wendy, Indifferent.”

In that one, you find Wendy, safe and whole. At the sight of her, your back arches like a cat stretching out of a nap. Your relief is electric. It hums like a string on an electric guitar and the reverb burns up your spine and sends hot spidery shivers across your scalp. All those sensations happen at once, as scary as a first kiss. Not the real first kiss, the clumsy pressing, but the one you wait for, the one that will awaken you. The one that will explain to you all the fuss about kisses, that will penetrate your shyness and spiral deep inside you where you never thought a kiss could reach. We’ve heard all about those kisses and in our dreams we feel that sensation, seeing Wendy, safe. In the early dreaming of the dreams, we fell out of bed with the excitement of her sighting, but by now we’ve learned to control the salty currents of relief. Our ability to control the impulse to give way too soon, we think, is what brings us the dreams in the first place. After all, everyone wants to see Wendy. But we’re the ones who do.

We learn to relax. We stay in the dream. There she is. Wendy. In the flesh. And we love her. We love Wendy. Maybe we didn’t before, but we do now. Before the disappearance, she was on the social fringe. New in school, shy, joining us late. Uncertain, with those pity-me eyes and her smile that tried too hard. Her nervous courtesy pricked us, reminded us that our mantle of cool wasn’t there as recently as yesterday and could vanish again as soon as tomorrow. Her bright redundant greetings oh hey hi what’s up good morning Maya Susannah Kimmy, how are you Trish you look great your hair oh my God those earrings are great, only pointed out that our current ease was temporary, something that, at any moment, could be taken away.

But whatever we thought of her before, Wendy is all that anyone thinks of now. We all love Wendy now. We love her because she was so loyal so fast to our stupid rules and traditions. We love her because she admired things about us that everyone else had stopped noticing. We love her because she was such a hungry audience for our puny talents. We love her because she isn’t here.

And we treasure her as you treasure anything you’ve lost. A kitten. A charm bracelet. A grandfather. A dad. Our daydreams about her once she’s gone dress her up so much that if she came back no one would recognize her. Wendy is ideal. Because she isn’t here to prove you wrong, Wendy is everything we need her to be.

So we find Wendy, safe and whole. And we’re ecstatic with relief – now we’ll get attention, too! We’ll be heroes, ‘cause we found her! It’s Wendy’s indifference after we dance around her, after we cover her with hugs – it’s then that we realize we’re in a dream. She doesn’t care that she’s been found. She doesn’t want to come home. She won’t even write a note to her mother (and in the dream, of course, we never have a pen.) In the dream, she’s gone over to some other side, a place where she’s free of our concern. She can barely tolerate the time it takes us to understand that she just doesn’t care.

Her indifference is regal. Wendy is a princess of the land in between the stations.

The sequel to “Wendy, Indifferent” is “Wendy, Rescued” although the rescue is still in progress when the alarm buzzes us awake. If , in a rare but exciting version of “Wendy, Rescued,” we get to drag her along with us, heading for home, hellbent for breakfast, something always prevents us from getting Wendy to her mother. And that’s what we used to want to see. We used to want it so much that it was the first dream that left our bed and nagged at us in waking time – we wanted to see Wendy back with her mother, the kneeling, the hug, the tears.

We’ve shared other dreams: Kimmy’s dreary documentary “Looking for Wendy,” Tricia’s thriller “Looking for Wendy While Being Stalked by Someone Unseen,” Susannah’s existential “Wendy, in a Parallel Universe, Thinks We’re Missing.”

It was Maya who suggested that we unite our dreams deliberately. We keep the visions to ourselves. We call each other at night and agree on the dream that will take us, together, to Wendy. We don’t tell the shrinks they send to the school to help us “deal with it.” We say nothing to our mothers. Comfort would only weaken us. It only takes one mother’s touch, one light on in the hall, one Let’s talk about it, honey to initiate the wave of static that loops around and feeds on itself until the transmission is broken and we’ve all lost Wendy for the rest of the night. And we can’t lose Wendy. She has things to tell us that no one else will admit.

The moment she wins us is the point in “Wendy, Indifferent” when she gives us that weary, grown-up smile, tired of our tirades about searching and worry and curfews. She won’t come back. She can’t. She is beyond our pleading and our dread. It is when realize that that we know that we want to be there, too.

Kimmy went first. She left a note that read: “Dear everyone, I had to go, I couldn’t resist it anymore.” After that, they rounded us up and grilled us for hours, which only proved her power. Who would have listened to us before? Just say “Wendy” now and see what happens. See how just saying her name invokes trembling and action, respect, legislation. No one ever hinted that a girl could have such stature. Nothing we can do can equal that. That’s something we learned together in the white noise.

Maya, steamed that she was not the first to go and exhausted from the official questioning, ordered “Kimmy” for that night’s viewing. It was a risky choice, since we hadn’t yet created “Kimmy” and all we wound up getting was a fog and the sound of two girls laughing. Tricia was found in the park later that night, barefoot in her nightgown, bruised and mute. They took her to the emergency room, then to the psych ward. We weren’t allowed to see her. We knew they gave her drugs because we couldn’t raise her on our frequency. Her voice grew fainter and fainter and eventually disappeared.

Susannah went next and went far, having learned from Tricia’s lesson. She went without a trace, no strand of hair, no fallen button, no idle witness to tell a story of an unmarked van. Susannah dove head first into the white noise. When we found her in the dreams, through the static, she said only, “Can you hear me? Can you hear me?” forgetting, we realized, Maya’s instructions that the next to go had to give detailed directions. It seems that our rules don’t apply out there.

We’re locked in at night now, kept home from school, questioned like suspects. It’s worse, we imagine, than anything that was done to Wendy before her martyrdom. Why question us so hard? You wouldn’t understand our answers. Even if we confided about our network, you wouldn’t believe us. You never do. Girls, Wendy told us, are prey: skittish, glossy, small. Our strength lies in camouflage or short bursts of speed, our ability to dodge. Our bodies, our lives, are soft, dispensable.

We disappear in your distraction – a glance away, we’re gone. You let it happen all the time. Listen to us? Wendy, lost in silence, is the only one you’ve ever heard.

The Nasty Gidgets, Part 1

2009-08-25T06:44:00.006-04:00

Every once in awhile, you need to get out of your comfort zone, and when that time comes, a good place to start is Eastern Colorado. I was out there last week; I flew into Denver, while my luggage went to Jackson Hole, and then I took a shuttle van up to Greeley, where my best friend Linda’s daughter was enrolling as a freshman at the University of Northern Colorado. She seemed to me a strange creature, long-legged, shy but serene-eyed, with the kind of long hair a romance writer would describe as “chestnut tresses,” when so recently she was a toddler splashing in the bathtub boisterously misquoting Pearl Jam, “Hearts and darts they fade, fade away …”

I tried to quell these thoughts, since Linda was all but drowning in them, and it was my job as aunt to try to distract mother and daughter from the grief of this milestone separation with whimsical pranks like filling the school-supply shopping cart at Target with notebooks depicting pink kittens and Zac Efron. Target, yes. And Sears and J.C. Penney and lunch at The Olive Garden.

“I’m in America now,” I reminded myself, as I walked across the parking lot of Wal-Mart, passing a car with a “Nobama” bumper sticker and then strolling by the weaponry section of that fine store on my way to procure a pair of flip-flops. (I had to buy the bare necessities to sustain myself – panties and pajamas, skin care products and a second pair of shoes since my suitcase was still MIA, not that I’m pointing any fingers, Frontier Airlines.) “Y’all still sell guns at Wal-Mart?” I heard a man ask and nearly pivoted to scold him. “Dude! You’re, like, only 50 miles from Columbine!” But I refrained. One thing I hear with disturbing frequency when I venture into America is, “This isn’t New York.” I hope I don’t conduct myself with the provincialism of the Upper West Sider who thinks fresh fruit and vegetables come from Zabar’s but I must confess I am put off by the long, long drives which apparently are not, when they are challenged, long at all. A thirty minute drive to go to dinner is nothing, and this was confirmed the next day when, with no small amount of sorrow and snuffling, Linda and I headed to her home in Ogden, Utah.

This required driving across the width of southern Wyoming, which took an entire day and can best be summarized in haiku:

Sage, trailers, red rock
Great music with my best friend
Antelope do play

In Ogden, I reacquainted myself with Linda’s twin sons, who in my memory were last seen in a double stroller (I exaggerate) and are now happy, freckled thirteen-year-olds on skateboards. Thirteen was the age Linda and I were when we met; eighteen, like her daughter, when we went our separate ways to college (she to Arizona, and I to New York), so that makes five years of concentrated adolescent anguish, record-playing in the basement, picture-drawing, story-telling and synchronized sulking, on which we have built a lifetime of friendship.

But during that time we developed a rich and idiosyncratic patois, which, when as adults we intermittently reunite, causes outsiders to smile politely and back away slowly. Linda’s children have long since learned to tilt their heads at us, turn to one another, and engage in their own secret dialect, bemused but not confounded by the fact their mother and her friend have launched not into the customary exclusive language of adults (insurance, betrayals, medical procedures) but into a lexicon of silliness we ought to have long ago outgrown. Linda’s husband, an outdoorsman of infinite patience, sits by as long as he can stand it, nodding with recognition at the odd phrase in the startrek/starwars/beatles/Dylan/stones/springsteen/yourmom/
mydad/thatteacher dialect --the way a Parisian might cotton to the general meaning of a Cajun -- eventually gives up and politely remembers a neglected project in the garage, on the roof, or on the other side of town.

It is a truth universally unacknowledged, that a single woman in possession of a fortune of musical knowledge, must be in pursuit of a soul mate. In the buddy-movie, bromance Hollywood culture, women who are longtime friends are either sisters or college roommates (i.e., in either case, no choice was made) and what ties them together is first the pursuit of beauty and a man, and later the burden of aging, caretaking and abandonment. But, that ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby. Girls do, in fact, just want to have fun. We like stuff, too. Reading, writing, music. Running, downhill skiing, skating, orienteering. This kind of indulgence – the pursuit of personal interests -- might be the ultimate pornography, since it is never presented on television or in the movies. On the screen, women don’t bond over activities that merely engage them but do not nurture others. They are together only when cooking, sewing, or keeping a home.

Last Sunday, I was the guest co-host on Linda’s radio show “Sunday Sagebrush” on radio station KRCL, the voice of the Wasatch Front. In addition to being a volunteer dj on this Sunday show, Linda is the music feature writer for the local paper, the Standard-Examiner (http://www.standard.net), and has recently begun producing a weekly podcast called “The Beat Beat.” She yearns to dictate the musical taste of the whole of the free-thinking West, and when I joined her as a guest dj, we chortled in the realization of our lifelong dream (“I hate this song, I hate this song!”) to RULE THE AIRWAVES.

With “Americana, Roots and Blues” as the program’s designated category, we played Dave Alvin (she always opens with Dave Alvin), Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Raul Malo, Loretta Lynn, the Be Good Tanyas, Sam Baker, Clydesdale, Cory Chisel, Cracker, Neko Case, and Steve Earle, Steve Earle, Steve Earle. (You can find the whole playlist here: the whole playlist). We chatted about the song or artist’s significance, told stories of our girlhood and peered at shelves of CDs the way we had pored over what album to play next when we were 13, 14, 15 and on.

“You girls sound like you’re having fun,” one caller told Linda, as he requested Woody Guthrie’s “Bound for Glory.”

“You two were hilarious. A pair of 13 year olds!” offered Linda’s friend Dan Weldon, a marvelous locally-based musician (http://danweldon.com/) when he came to Linda’s house later that day to eat barbecued carne asada. “You sounded like Gidget goes on the radio.”

Our jaws dropped in simultaneous indignation. “Gidget! We did not! We spoke intelligently about the music!”

“We expressed opinions,” I pointed out to Dan, who I love. “We critiqued.”

“Well,” he said. “Maybe nasty Gidgets.”

To be continued …

Out on the Ridge Where the West Commences

2009-08-17T17:48:00.001-04:00

I will be away in the wild, wild west for the next week, but should you be glued to your computer on Sunday, August 23, from noon to 4 pm eastern time, tune in to

www.krcl.org

Click on “listen live” in the middle at the top of the page. I will be a guest on my friend Linda's Americana, Roots and Blues show, live from the Wasatch Range.

Have We Met?

2009-08-13T00:07:00.009-04:00

Saw a screening of "The Time Traveler's Wife" tonight.

A romantic drama with gorgeous leads and fabulous set design (I do really love it when people live in homes that looks like homes which people would live in -- let alone the characters in the film would live in, so kudos for that) and lovely cinematography.

But my problems with the film involve major spoilers, so if you object to that, then read no further.

The time traveler, Henry, disappears without rhyme or reason, so abruptly that his clothes crumple to the floor and he arrives at his next spot on the time-space continuum stark naked, at which point hijinks invariably ensue.

In fact, when he first meets his future wife Claire, she is a six year old child playing alone in a meadow and he is a naked grown man speaking to her from the bushes, hardly a promising premise for an epic love story. He repeatedly encounters her as a child, and as a teenager, but he is always an adult. He is always Eric Bana. "You took the heart and mind of a little girl," she says to him in their one serious fight, which elicits from him a puppy-eyed frown of sadness.

One personal frisson of pleasure for me: the song that they dance to at their wedding (on the meadow where they met) is a spooky-sad rendition of Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

Pedophilia, and all practicalities aside -- the movie is definitely going for magic realism, so questions about how he could obtain and keep a job, let alone a relationship, will remain questions -- the bottom line is that Henry being a time-traveler is a situation, not a story. His condition needs to have a purpose, a crux, a crisis. Without it, he's just a guy who gets around a lot.

Don't You Forget About Me

2009-08-08T08:45:00.006-04:00

This has been flying around the internet, so you have probably already seen, this nearly perfect tribute to John Hughes by Alison Byrne Fields:

http://wellknowwhenwegetthere.blogspot.com/2009/08/sincerely-john-hughes.html

It's received so many hits I can't get in there to ask permission, so, Alison, hope it's OK.

And yes, soon I'll get that hyperlink thing fixed.

I've had bit of help along the way myself, from pen pals, "mysterious benefactors," and their modern counterpart, cyber-friends, so it's good to see the good guys recognized.

Burn, Baby, Burn!

2009-08-05T22:57:00.004-04:00

It is not the purpose of this blog to solicit donations of any kind.

However.

A week ago, I had a couple of days off, so I wrote and cooked.

I made a tomato soup from scratch, including my own vegetable stock.

I reheated the soup in my microwave. I picked up the bowl with one oven mitt and one dishtowel. The bowl was so hot that I released it immediately.

The searing hot liquid, upon being dropped, splashed up and hit my thumb.

My thumb. Look at your thumb. That space between the first and second knuckle? Scalded. The next day, a blister with the diameter of a dime, and the height of four dimes stacked, was on my thumb.

Pus, blood, scab, peel, pus, scab, peel, blood. Daily events in the past week. "Gross!" cried my work colleagues. "Gross! Eew! Keep it covered!"

Even with an area of injury of less than a square inch, I understood why burn victims are often put to sleep in hospitals. It fucking hurts. My wound, I understand, is nothing. But M****f***r, it's everything.

I made a donation to http://www.nyffburncenter.com/?gclid=CMyQxa-EjpwCFRJM5QodzWdpYg. "cause these guys are the real heroes.

How Not to Act Old

2009-08-05T08:38:00.003-04:00

I was having a very bad day at work (which is itself a trait of the old) when a fleet and kindly messenger arrived in my office and brightened my day with a copy of “How Not to Act Old,” by my new blogger friend Pamela Redmond Satran (she also has a blog, complete with instructional youtube videos, http://www.hownottoactold.com). The book seemed to fall open to the sins of which I am guilty: saying “awesome” (Chapter 2) and “what are you, twelve?” (Chapter 79) and counting out exact change (Chapter 146).

Other ways to camouflage the years? Don’t wear a watch (Chapter 3), dance to “Sexual Healing” (7), or leave voice mails (6). (If you don't say why you called, curiosity will compel a response; besides, you come off as busy and cool, rather than bossy and tiresome.) Talking is the greatest challenge. Don’t talk: too much (58, 177), negatively (75), like a parent (33, 46, 53, 135, 136) about your health (45, 61), to strangers (182), in an Andy Rooney-like rant (177), or, really, at all (77). “Young people use silence to mean all kinds of things … don’t get mad, just get silent.”

Reading is out (96), as is dieting (97), housework (62) (yay!) or being named “Bob or Pat” (95, which shows a progressive timeline of hip names, “Regular Old Name: Judy. 10 Years Younger: Jody. 30 Years Younger: Jolie.” Other examples: “Wayne … Blaine … Zane” and “Carol … Holly … Christmas.”)

Pamela Redmond Satran is seriously funny. And sadly, I can offer a few tips of my own, should she try a chapter on, say, “How Not to Act Old in New York”: Don’t say “Pan Am Building,” “The Triborough Bridge,” or “where Coliseum Books used to be.”

Got all that?

Thaynk Kyeeew (Chapter 172)
No problem (Chapter 65)

Cooking and a Kind Husband Are a Girl's Best Friend

2009-08-03T22:30:00.005-04:00

I saw "Julie and Julia," last night at a screening and was disappointed. Now that I have had time to marinate overnight, my disappointment has soured into annoyance.

Early in the film, and early on her path to becoming the world's most famous instructor of French cuisine, Julia Child laments having to convert metric measurements for an American audience. "Measurements are not important," her future co-author Simone Beck says. Julia Child replies. "I think they're very important."

I have to agree, and this is an ill-measured film. Before the lights go down, we are already more interested in the Julia Child story -- she's an icon, and therefore more interesting than a "cubicle worker" (more on that later), post-war Paris is more interesting than post-9/11 Queens, creating the first and most famous English-language book of French cooking is more interesting than re-creating it because your life bores you, and so on. What this movie needed to do was balance the Julia Child story by attempting to make the Julie Powell story even slightly interesting.

The movie that might have been made is the story of how these two women came into their own through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," but what we have instead are lopsided servings of the sweet and the bitter. Meryl Streep swoops and whoops as Child in Paris, most of the time delivering a typically Streep-brilliant performance but occasionally lapsing into what my friend over at Head Butler http://www.headbutler.com/ calls "Big Bird Goes to Cordon Bleu." There are tantalizing hints of a life as rich as beurre blanc -- the years in the OSS, the investigation by McCarthy, the loud gawky American at soignee embassy parties -- along with long and completely unnecessary sideplots, such as the one involving the sister (although it was nice to see Jane Lynch having so much fun). But Ephron gives us just a taste, makes us want the meal, and then switches us to the microwave.

I have read Child's book and I haven't read Powell's, but Ephron's job, in bringing the stories together, was to find a balance.

So, Powell. The publicity material presents her as a "cubicle drone" looking to find herself as she approaches the milestone of turning 30. The cubicle in which she drones belongs to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation, less than a year after September 11, 2001, and her job, fielding calls from survivors in need of health care, housing, and counseling, is presented as one of no meaning or importance, serving mainly to annoy her, to drive her into one of the many "meltdowns" she has throughout the film when things don't go her way. These hissy fits are meant to make her seem endearingly vulnerable but instead make her come across as petty and petulant. Long Island City, the working-class neighborhood in which she scorns to live, was particularly hard hit by the attacks of September 11, and even eleven months later was still bedecked with makeshift shrines to policemen and firemen.

I'm taking it too seriously, you say. It's a comedy. Well, here's my rule: use 9/11 as a plot point very judiciously, and use it as a backdrop at your own peril.

Regardless of how it unfolded in "real life," Ephron could have used the "drone job" to enhance the character of Julie: to show her setting forth on her adventure because life is short and you must make yourself happy, to show her cultivating cooking as a creative, nurturing act in response to the destruction she spends her nine-to-five time trying to mend.

But no, Julie launches a blog because all of her college friends have flashy positions and shiny gadgets and she was the promising one in college; she was going to be a writer; she has "thoughts." She does, in fact, have a lot going for her, which makes her all the more exasperating. She has, for one thing, a bewilderingly loving husband who endures her constant jibes that she has "nothing," her sulking when no one reads her blog and her tantrum over a ruined stew to such an extent that his final breaking point provides the only crisis in the B plot. Even Julie must finally overcome her self-absorption to recognize that her husband is a sweetheart.

That seems to be Powell's "lesson learned" and it's not enough. By that time I had lost the little interest I had in whether or not she succeeded in cooking her way through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" in 365 days and waited for the scenes of Child shepherding her cookbook to publication, although that, too, failed to compel because we all know how it turns out.

I had to content myself with trying to figure out where Julie Powell was as she whined her way through Queens. That place where she buys the lobster? That's my fish store.

If I Only Had a Nicholl

2009-07-29T10:44:00.001-04:00

Thanks to the miracle of the internet, rejection no longer comes in slim envelopes, but in tender emails. I just heard yesterday that my script “Wildflowers of the West” did not make the quarterfinals of the Nicholl Fellowship. The Nicholl Fellowship’s form rejection letters grow sweeter every year.

“ … we have to inform too many writers of scripts featuring compelling stories, intriguing characters and excellent craft that they have not advanced into the next round.”

That must indeed be difficult.

But what, my readers ask, is the Nicholl Fellowship?

Their website replies: The Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting is the world’s most esteemed screenwriting competition. Each year up to five $30,000 fellowships are awarded to authors who have previously earned less than $5,000 writing for film or television.

Then, my readers usually ask, does it have anything to do with Mike Nichols?

No. It does not.

Does it really matter?

Well, no. I mean, except in the sense that it is better to advance into the quarterfinals than to not advance. And it is better to ultimately win a $30,000 fellowship than to not. No one regards winning the Nicholl Fellowship as a sure-fire way to advance a screenwriting career. But among contests, it is the queen bee.

“P.S.” concludes the email “your script finished among the top 15% of all entries – one of the top 1000 scripts.”

P.S. Thanks.