Adventures in the Pointless Forest

Can't take me anywhere.

The other night we were playing charades at a party

-- an actual grown-up party for grown-ups! Jane came with us and slept in a back room, and incidentally, we have reached the stage where I am not at all sure that she is still welcome at any given event just because she was welcome there a few months ago, as she becomes less and less a portable baby and more and more a mobile yet distinctly non-adult person, though the hosts for this party were nice enough to mention explicitly that we should bring her and her sleeping tent, and I wonder just how much longer I can keep going with this aside and indeed with this sentence; I was thinking the answer was "surely not much longer now," but since I introduced that semi-colon to the proceedings, the possibilities have expanded considerably, although in any case, I've already made my point, which is that it is tricky to figure out when and how to navigate the transition from having identified the set of Events Where a Baby Is Welcome to identifying the much smaller set of Events Where a Toddler Is Welcome --

and Steve drew the word "buffalo."

He later explained that he was aiming for the scene in Dances With Wolves where Kevin Costner learns the word "tatanka," i.e. "buffalo."

So he pawed at the ground for a bit, and pranced around with two fingers representing his buffalo horns, indeed just like in the movie. It worked for the Sioux! But not for us. "Antlers?" "Horns?" "Deer?"

 

He pulled at his hair and indicated, rolling it up, that it was curly. "Ram?" S. guessed. Then he gave us a little more context. He indicated that he was on a train, shooting a rifle. Then he had horns and fell down dead. "Hunter? Matador?" Again. Horns! Curly hair! Man with rifle shooting! Falling down dead! Horns! Hair! Dead!

"Jew!" I shouted, because I am always appropriate.

We had to stop the game for several minutes while everyone collected themselves. And that is why I don't have to worry about whether Jane is getting too old to bring to festive events, after all, because no one will invite me to one ever again.

Part 2.

Jane's first... well, not word, because it isn't a word, but first wordlike entity, deployed clearly with reference to a specific and appropriate thing, would appear to be "nom".

"Nom nom nom!" she says of her food, or possibly "num num num," but obviously "nom nom nom" is more entertaining, so that's what we'll call it. We didn't really recognize how standardized and lexicalized away from generalized noises of food appreciation this performance of hers had become, until people we were sitting near at lunch today laughed and exclaimed over it. NOM NOM NOM!

And you'll be happy to know that we did eventually let her wear a party hat. Another way to look at this is that she allowed us to put a hat on her. Either way, there was a baby in a hat. Also there was a cupcake.

Option one: normal birthday snapshots.

Normalish, anyway.

Option two: Super art-directed film still Barry Sonnenfeld style.

Friends have pointed out that part of what makes the latter one look so perfectly full of artifice (and I confess that I love it as a photograph probably more than I should) is the perfect echo between the angle of the hat and the angle of the cupcake. What do you suppose is the plot of the movie in which this shot would appear, though? I can't decide.

 

Master class

Our new babysitter, who is crucially instrumental to our navigating this week of flip-flopping single parenthood, gave a very suitable, very feeling sigh as she tore herself away at the end of her stint on Monday. 

We were all squared up for money and saying "Goodbye, see you next time," and she lingered by the door like you do when you are sixteen and dating someone who you think is just dreamy, and you can't quite bear to tear yourself away and return to the cold dark world where you write "Mrs. Baby Janeypants" all over your notebook until you can see him again. Quite right.

I mean, it's ridiculous, of course. One cannot continually be having conversations that go "Your infant is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life." "Yes, I know just how you feel." Not only is it unlikely, it's unseemly.

She is a nice baby, though, and I do like to feel that she is appreciated. 

When she was tiny, we observed that being out and about with a newborn was rather like walking around with a mid-range celebrity, in the range of responses it elicited from passersby. We decided that the mid-range celebrity Jane was was James Franco. And so conversations like

STRANGER: Is that a baby?

US: It sure is.

STRANGER: She seems so happy!

US: Yeah, she really likes being held.

could become

Is that James Franco?

It sure is.

He seems so happy!

Yeah, James Franco really likes being held.

Since then, you may have noticed, James Franco has gotten exponentially more famous. He's America's Sweetheart and Bjork all rolled into one, and suddenly we find ourselves with a special attachment to the zeitgeist's rising star. 

We can't help but think of his adventures and accomplishments as reflecting somehow on Jane, because we are simple. She's playing a multimedia artist named "Franco" on General Hospital! She's hosting the Oscars! And now, I learn, there's this.

"Master Class: Editing James Franco...with James Franco" will be offered by Columbia College Hollywood. Unfortunately, not just anybody can sign up for the course. Only 12 of the best editing students at the private film school will be selected to participate.

Once they're in the class, students will be tasked with creating "a 30 minute documentary film from videographic footage from Mr. Franco’s own unorthodox career." Essentially, it'll be a film about James Franco made from behind the scenes footage of James Franco.

Yes, it is nice to feel she's appreciated. It is.

Action packed.

It's Jane's half birthday! We have already obtained some cake to eat on her behalf.

She herself has recently had the opportunity to scarf both roast zucchini and bits of tamale, both of which she approves of very heartily. She was less interested in the potatoes that came with my brunch last Sunday, but then I didn't think they were very delicious, either. (There is a theme uniting these foods—can you spot it?)

So that would seem to mean that it is September of 2010. And yet apparently it is 1999, because I am currently in mourning over the fact that there will never be a second season (series) of Ultraviolet. It holds up surprisingly well.

Idris Elba remains very handsome.

The characters are a good and plausible mixture of clever and not, dispassionate and self interested, savvy and gullible, brainy and lummoxy, laudable and infuriating, with a pleasing balance across genders.

The phones, it must be admitted, are very large.

But the representation of what computers can do is shockingly realistic, especially for the era. I never saw anything remotely as real as this in anything that I was watching in 1998.

(That one features a nice underplayed eyeroll just before it, right after someone else says, snidely, "Good luck, by the way. He wiped everything.")

The metaphysics are well thought out and hang together neatly.

And they never actually say the word "vampire".

I even like the music. (Dammit! I see that an "Extended Version Of Ultraviolet Theme Music" was one of the special features on the DVD. If only I had realized before we sent it back to Netflix.)

Revisionist.

Antonia has me thinking about how to write about the things I don't write about. The big one, of course, is stories that aren't mine to tell. It turns out that life is littered with these, and that in fact many of one's own stories are only lesser adjuncts to someone else's more important and private ones. Leaving these out can feel disingenuous, but what can you do? Imagine if I were feeling utterly wretched because, say (NOT REAL EXAMPLES):

Our best friend had stopped talking to us because his wife claimed to have fallen in love with Steve, or

Steve's brother had racked up horrible gambling debts and his parents were bankrupting themselves to pay them off, or

We were disinvited from Christmas dinner because my niece had a terrible wasting disease and it made my sister too unhappy to see us and our happy, healthy baby.

There is no such person as our best friend's wife, Steve's brother, or my sister, but things like this sometimes happen. When they do, it would be impossible for me to write about it here. I would feel like an ass dropping cryptic little allusions, even. So there the things sit, in invisible lumps between posts about young adult novels and gardening, or whatever.

Happy things, too. It seems presumptuous to treat the innocent people in my everyday life as blog material. Steve and Jane less so, poor suckers, but still. I generally don't write in much detail about my work life, either. What the fuck do I write about? This is why it's nice to have what are called "outside interests," I believe.

We watched High Plains Drifter last week. I like how clearly it is the product of having watched High Noon and thought, "This is great, but wouldn't it be greater if everyone were way more repugnant?"

"And if the town were punished with a lot more than the sheriff's scorn and being shown up by Grace Kelly?"

"And if Gary Cooper weren't Gary Cooper but instead an avenging revenant from Hell back to ruin the lives of everyone who had abandoned him*?"

"And if there were a gun-toting dwarf?"

The scene early on in the barbershop is amusing for how precisely Clint Eastwood's sweeping aside of the sheet around his neck reproduces his usual business with a serape:

It's a pity that the movie is apparently incapable of resisting the hoary old chestnut in which a woman being raped ends up hot for it. It would have made a lot more sense in the internal logic of the film itself, too, not to have gone there, but oh well, it was 1973, I suppose.

*Patricia Neal might argue that Gary Cooper himself was a revenant from Hell intent on ruining the lives of those around him, given his super-classy behavior during their long affair. It culminated in his forcing her to get an abortion, despite her Catholicism, lest she embarrass him by having his child. He was mighty handsome, though.

Even babies started small.

Me: My baby, who is hanging out on the floor next to me, just enacted a tiny proto-tragedy. She was happily gnawing on her hands. Gnaw gnaw gnaw.

Ben: Sounds good.

Me: She was delighting in this activity, full of joy - and then, suddenly, the very drool prompted to flow by her joyful gnawing had got up her nose, causing her to choke and her eyes to water. She was dismayed! betrayed!

Ben: Tragic!

Me: It was.

Ben: How did the drool end up in her nose?

Me: When you are a baby, your nose is very close to your mouth. And she is lying on her back, as she is too young to maintain another position.

Ben: Ah.

Me: Anyway, she's over it now. But at the moment, it was really quite poignant.

Ben: When one is young pleasure and pain are fleeting.

Me: Verily.

Ben: Werner Herzog narrates the life of Jane Cassandra.

Me: Yay! I wish he would. Not, I think, for too long at a stretch, though.

Ben: Maybe he's available for parties. He goes around collecting information from guests, then narrates their lives for five minutes or so.

Me: I would think that would be very popular.

Don't you?

+

To continue our discussion of academic dress, I have recently been informed that Finnish and Swedish doctorates come with a doctoral hat. Almost every word of the Wikipedia entry about this hat—which, by the way, is a special sort of silk top hat that lives in an equally special wooden box and apparently will run you five hundred euros—is fantastic.

"The hat is awarded in a solemn graduation ceremony." I'm sure it is! "A doctoral hat is personal and is usually not lent to others." No doubt! 

As M observed, "This entry: written by a doctoral hat maker."

Breaking news.

Sometimes Steve will burst into a conversation with something urgent to impart.

"HOLY SHIT!" he'll shout, regardless what I was in the middle of saying or doing, because he has just learned of something so galling, so infuriating, so amazing, that he must relay it right away.

And then, sometimes, because he has been reading Nixonland, it turns out that this breaking news is from 1968.

"Henry fucking Kissinger got the Vietnamese to scuttle peace negotiations by assuring them that the Republicans would give them a better deal after the election!"

"Can you believe this shit?"

Or from 1971. John Wayne gave an interview to Playboy in which he said he supported "white supremacy"! Or 1972. Hubert Humphrey got Lorne Greene from Battlestar Galactica to accuse McGovern of being anti-Israel?!

Today, I have something even more urgent and newsworthy to tell you.

It is this:

Gary Cooper was extremely handsome.

And funny! (We watched Bluebeard's Eighth Wife last night. Oh, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, how I love you both.) But, especially, handsome.

Now you know.

L'Air du Temps

Thank you for all the excellent book recommendations. Lots of them were reassuringly for books I already love, which makes it seem most likely that the ones I haven't read yet will be similarly pleasing. Kelljones should be specially satisfied with herself, for providing a mix of new suggestions with old ones so very beloved that we actually chose Jane's middle name in large part in honor of a favorite character from one. (That would be the narrator of I Capture the Castle.)

In return, I would like to recommend a movie. Because I am a pain, it is a movie that is:

• 193 minutes long
• In French
• Not available at all on Region 1 DVD
• Totally deranged and high as a kite

And probably half of you have seen it already anyway.

Nonetheless! I persevere.

Steve first saw Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau at the Cinematheque about a year ago, some time when I was out of town. He enthused about it mightily and tried, at least, to tell me the entire plot. This is easier attempted than achieved, because because the movie is insane (i.e. totally deranged and high as a kite). It... resists summary. It is three hours of dream-logic and then dream-logic within the dream-logic. 

When we finally sat down to watch it together, Steve was worried that he'd oversold it, but no. I found it entirely awesome.

Céline and Julie are best friends, or maybe strangers who meet at the beginning of the movie, or perhaps lovers, or possibly the same person. They share an apartment and borrow one another's identities frequently. 

Also, they are naturally extremely high.

Céline, or is it Julie, knows of a house where something strange is going on: 7 bis, rue de Nadir aux Pommes.

After an hour and a half of lovely rambling deranged movie time, the girls establish a routine. Each morning, one goes to the house, disappears inside, and then is roughly disgorged back onto the streets of Paris to stagger into a taxi, remembering nothing, but with a piece of candy in her mouth.

The candy is magic! Or psychoactive, anyhow. Sucking it later transports you—in a hallucinatory, watching-a-movie way—to the melodrama unfolding inside the house.

And it is a melodrama, complete with cheap costumes, stilted acting, and over-the-top Jamesian plot.

Magical adventures ensue.

There are dinosaur eyes.

And no shortage of the previously mentioned complete derangement.

 

I have of course left out vast swathes of the movie (Julie's white-clad cousin! Céline's nightclub act! The backers from Beruit!), so you needn't worry that it's been spoiled for you in any way. It's 193 minutes long, after all. It's a big loose zany stoned mare's nest, but it never feels like a cheat, because there's no pretense that it's anything more or less than it is. 

"It has no moral," said the Honorable Venustiano Carranza (President of Mexico), "it is a Dada story."

Vita longa, comœdia brevis.

I am starting a tiny new thing! It is a running list of Things I Cried Over. Now at any time you can look in my sidebar to see the most recent excuses my body has seized upon as an occasion for lachrymal purging.

(This phenomenon is common enough that Steve and I have invented a notional radio show called "The Lachrymose Hour," featuring music by the likes of Smog, Antlers, and Cat Power.)

Here is the starting list:

1. The trailer for Whip It. Yes, the 2009 Drew-Barrymore-directed movie about lives transformed through the power of roller derby. "Be your own hero"! Also, Ellen Page has appallingly gorgeous skin.

2. Awkward swaddling. Dr. Harvey Karp's baby whispering secrets are brilliant and a major reason we are not dropping dead of sleep deprivation, but his approach to creating baby burritos and I do not get along. Fuck this, I am going back to my old method, which also doesn't actually prevent the baby from squirming her arms out from under the blanket but doesn't involve six false starts and a flood of tears. Maybe I'll revisit the superior technique next week.

3. A tender moment in Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals. What could be more sentimental than a Terry Pratchett book about football? And yet actually even when I am not engorged with prolactin I have been known to cry over many of his works. You should have seen me while I was reading Feet of Clay. God, I'm a simp.

I love good light reading that comes in vast quantities, so that once you get hooked you can go on reading and reading and reading more of the same. Right now that means Terry Pratchett and Angela Thirkell. Funny, charming, undemanding, not stupid. The surely horribly out of fashion Miss Read, a great favorite of my mother's mother, is also superb for this sort of thing.

Not that I am going to run out of Pratchett and Thirkell any time soon, that being sort of the point, but do you have any recommendations in this vein? Life is long and light fiction is short.

Pleased to meet you, hope you've guessed my name

"Why would troubadours be going to Bombay, in particular?"

"To film a Wes Anderson movie?"

"Oh! How prescient."