Failed Letter of Recommendation: Let it Be (The Movie)

For some reason, Matt Domino writes an essay about the Beatles documentary "Let it Be."

My Top Ten Albums of 2014 (And Other Years)

Matt Domino lists his ten (and a few more) albums from 2014 (and a few other years).

The Normcore of Paul McCartney

Your guide to Paul McCartney's perfectly normal legacy in the 1970's.

The Alternate Life of Jimi Hendrix, Part 2

In Part 2 of this now apparently ongoing series, we continue the story of what would have happened had Jimi Hendrix lived.

Nilsson Week: Domino and Stern Discuss Nilsson, Part 1

 This entire week will be devoted to the legendary singer and songwriter Harry Nilsson who holds a special place in this blog's heart. Today, we bring you Part 1 of a two-part conversation about Nilsson between Matt Domino and David Stern.

World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011, (1971-1980)

We continue with the seventh installment of the World's Coolest Dude list, which covers the years 1961-1970.

World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011, (1961-1970)

We continue with the sixth installment of the World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011 list, which covers the years 1961-1970.

Top 20 Friendships of All-Time Part 2

It's Thursday, my Puddlers, and I'm back to provide you with Part 2 of the Top Twenty Friendships of All-Time. You can look at Part 1 of the list by clicking here.

Before we begin there are a few honorable mentions that did not make it on this list: Artie and Larry Sanders, Bart Simpson and Millhouse, Laverne and Shirley, Rory Gilmore and Paris Gellar (for the evolution), Bruce Springsteen and his guitar, Michael Jordan and Charles Oakley, Zach Morris and Jesse Spano, Zach Morris and Skreech. Those are only a few of the honorable mentions and you can feel free to contact me with some of the friendships that you think are tragically missing from this list. I'd be glad to hear and entertain your arguments.

One more note before we begin: Dirk Nowitzki is playing out of his mind right now. If you are a marginal fan of basketball, you need to watch what Dirk is doing on a nightly basis. He is making impossible shots seem easy. His fadeaway is unguardable and his one-legged jumper has become the only other trademark move of this current era besides the Rondo fake/scoop layup. It has been absolute treat to watch Dirk play over the past month and I can only hope he continues to play at this level in the Finals, because it will only make it that much better and competitive.

Now, we continue with the Top 20 Friendships of All-Time:

10. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid -  This may have been the first “buddy” movie of all-time. I say that unofficially, but I am fairly confident in my assessment. Some may say that the relationship between Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was more a “here and sidekick” relationship, but I see it as more of an evolutionary Don Quixote and Sancho Panza dynamic. Cassidy’s time in the world is up, but he refuses to believe it. The Kid is more of an equal to Cassidy than Sancho Panza was to Quixote, but he doesn’t know any better about the world changing so they continue on in their outlaw adventures in the face of their unknown pursuers—continuing a delusion about their own existences.  So there’s that and also the fact that they both like the same woman but manage to not fight over her. And something has to be said about dying side by side with your friend in Bolivia in a gunfight when you are completely outnumbered by Bolivian soldiers. Finally, they are both so handsome and cool. I definitely think that I have more of a Cassidy (read Newman) vibe—impossibly good looking and distinguished.

9. Aaliyah and Missy Elliott – Their friendship was perhaps the most prominent female friendship in modern R&B, although it only lasted a short time. They were both cutting edge artists who worked together as well as with Timbaland at the turn of the millennium. There’s actually not much more I can say about this friendship other than the fact that they both made some revolutionary music about ten years ago and that Missy paid tribute to Aaliyah after she died like any true friend would. What? What else do you want from me? I’ve expounded about plenty of fictional and real friendships so far and there was bound to be one that was a little shorter than the rest, right?

8. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel – Their friendship is like a fine wine: aged, stored in a musty cellar over time, has a slightly bitter taste at the back of the tongue but with a slightly sweet, full-bodied finish. Simon and Garfunkel first met each other in elementary school in Forest Hills, Queens and started singing together at a very young age. They split up after high school, but reconnected a few years later and created some of the most memorable music and harmonies of all-time. Can you imagine creating an enduring and complex work of art like Bookends or Bridge Over Troubled Water with your childhood friend? Imagine you are Paul Simon and you have just written “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and you know your friend and singing partner so well that you understand he will master the song more than you ever could. Sure they fought and broke up, but it gave us “The Only Living Boy in New York.” And they had perhaps the most famous friend reunion ever at their 1981 Central Park concert, which was complete with rain and a record audience. Sounds like a Top 10 friendship to me.

7. Martina Navratilova and Chrissy Evert – This was a classic sports friendship. By that I mean that the excellence of these two women at tennis and their exhaustive competition completely overshadowed the fact that they were actually great friends. Also, their respective images caused people to confuse their personalities. Chrissy Evert with her blonde hair and turn of the 1980’s good looks was seen as the delicate and graceful champion. Meanwhile, Navratilova, with her gawky, slightly masculine appearance and eastern European bark, was seen as the hyper competitive aggressor. Well, that and she started to dominate Evert and every other women’s tennis player in the era. In reality, Evert was far more competitive and outspoken while Navratilova was humble and mild mannered. The public’s misconception and focus on their rivalry only brought these two women closer together as friends.

6. Thelma and Louise – No friendship list would be complete without Louise Elizabeth Sawyer and Thelma Yvonne Dickinson. First of all, these two just get credit in general for basically setting the tone for early 90’s women’s looks and fashion—Geena Davis especially since she was one of the archetypal babes of the 1988-1993 era. In the more specific, you have to like this friendship because of the way that these two women bonded over their trapped lives and were able to take a stab at some kind of freedom or liberation even if it got away from them. Their relationship is the go-to relationship for female outlaws and perhaps female buddy movies in general. There is nothing that says friendship or loyalty more than killing a guy who is trying to rape your friend and then going on a road trip to stay on the lamb and avoid the feds. Plus they have the iconic image of driving the 1966 Thunderbird Convertible off the cliff as they hold hands. All women should be so lucky to be friends like Thelma and Louise were.

5. Larry Bird and Magic Johnson – This is perhaps the greatest sports friendship of all time and one of the best overall sports stories, as I have previously written about. There were countless themes and factors that tried to stand in the way of the friendship between Magic and Bird: race, natural rivalry, NBA lineage rivalry, and personality. However, these two not only channeled all of those things into some of the most compelling athletics ever, but also into a lasting friendship. Larry and Magic were not friends for much of their NBA careers. It wasn’t until the late 80’s that they began to actually speak to each other. However, it was the usually reserved Bird that publicly showed his love if Magic when he expressed such great concern and sorrow over Magic’s contraction of HIV in 1991. These two friends not only had a legendary impact on the game of basketball, they also had an impact on each other’s lives. Two polar opposites who combined to drive and inspire the other.

4. Doc Brown and Marty McFly – No one in Hill Valley ever questioned the friendship between a 17 year old 80’s rocker and an eccentric old man scientist. The reason was because the friendship between Marty McFly and Doc Brown was so great. These two not only set the bar for time travel, but they also made the Delorean one of the most iconic cars of all time. Their sense of adventure and scientific curiosity often put the balance of the universe and our very existence in jeopardy, but everything seemed to work out. Sure Marty caused Doc to let a “Great Scott!” from time to time or Doc’s scientific jargon left Marty baffled—overall these two understood each other. How else do you explain the intuition of Doc flying the Delorean up the side of Biff Towers in the alternate 1985 to allow Marty to jump off the roof onto the hood of the Delorean so he could smack middle-aged alternate Biff in the face with the Delorean door in order to escape from being shot and go back to 1955 to correct the space-time continuum? All of us can only wish that we had the ability to read our friends’ minds that well. I’d argue that the adventures of Doc Brown and Marty McFly have not been surpassed in the past 25 years. Were this old man and this young 1980’s teen great friends? You’re damn right they were.

3. Neal Cassidy and Jack Kerouac – With all due respect to Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, the friendship between Jack and Neal has been the most influential friendship on my life, which is something that thousands of men can say. Kerouac and Cassidy set the blueprint for the modern male friendship. They were young, good-looking, all-American, adventurous, maintained a prolonged friendship, shared the other’s wife/girl at the time, and devoted an intense attention to each other that people often mistook for homosexuality. The friendship between Neal and Jack represented what all guys want, a buddy to take road trips with; to smoke cigarettes and drink bad coffee with; to drive maniacally across the country and pick up women, but to also marvel at the natural beauty of the world as well as the simple holiness of a stretch of road or the seats in a diner or vanilla ice cream on apple pie. You have the trope of the book smart introvert who longs to be a freewheeling, street-smart, naturally masculine con artist in play. The writer who loved women but is awkward and clumsy around them confessing his soul, while the other is an expert driver who seems to fall into a girl in every town and makes them all fall in love with him. In a moment of fervor (I won’t say what substance was fueling me) I once turned to my friend Chris Redder on the way to a keg party in out senior year of high school and said, “You’re the Neal to my Jack.” And we ambled along in his white Jeep in the fading twilight of one of those high school springs that you can never get back. The keg party was good that night—we owned it. Any guy lives to be able to say that phrase about a friend. You may not be able to get those twilights back, but you can cherish the enduring friendship and mythology.

2. Oprah Winfrey and Gayle King – This is a timely friendship due to the fact that Oprah’s show just went off the air after 25 years and there is not much I can really add to what this friendship symbolizes. Oprah is the most powerful woman in the world and one of the most, if not the most powerful media presence in the world. Gayle King is her best friend as well as an intelligent editor, radio show host and general advice giver. The two have been friends for over 30 years and have a close bond and attention to each other that people often mistake for homosexuality, which, as we covered in the previous entry, is the sign of an iconic friendship. In the modern era, when people refer to being good friends, they use Oprah and Gayle as the example. And that’s not just between my friends and I, women usually do it as well. Basically, when you say Oprah and Gayle, everyone—even a majority of men—knows you are talking about two great friends. To me, that factor alone has to put them in the Top 3.

1. John Lennon and Paul McCartney – Some people may scoff at this one since John and Paul were collaborators and band mates more than they were actually friends. However, they started off as teenage boys in Liverpool and they started off as friends. As I’ve covered before, the Beatles are such a unique phenomenon that it’s hard to delve into their mythology time and time again. However, I love the Beatles and I love both Paul McCartney and John Lennon in such great amounts that we have to dive in. Paul and John were close friends just as the Beatles were as a band. However, through their friendship and partnership some of the most enduring tropes were developed for collaboration, the most notable of course being that John was the smart one who wrote more complex, confessional lyrics and harder edged songs, while Paul was more whimsical and tended to write songs about funny characters and could toss off a simple melody with ease. Anyone who has had a creative friend or a friend in general tends to think of where they fit in the John and Paul dynamic, whether you are working on a musical project or any other artistic endeavor or if you are just reacting some event in your life. You take a minute to wonder, “Am I John or Paul in this scenario?” Their partnership driving the Beatles for most of their time as band almost singlehandedly changed the pop-culture of the entire world. Their partnership has left an indelible mark not only on music in general, but also humanity. We all know that they had a falling out that lasted pretty much until John was assassinated, but the true grief and devastation that Paul felt after John died was the emotion born out of being friends with, knowing and loving someone for a long, long time. That was at the heart of the Lennon/McCartney partnership and for that reason they get the number one ranking on yet another perfect list that you can’t really argue with.

A Laugh a Minute With John Lennon

**I'll give credit to anyone who can tell me where the title of this blog originates from in Beatles lore.

We can all thank our parents for a variety of things. We can thank them for our good looks, our bad looks, our low self esteem, our sense of confidence and many, many annoying moments that are somehow brought to an equilibrium with the endearing ones that come to mind when you are far away from them. What I can always thank my parents for is the strange attention I have towards what is actually funny.  My parents are not particularly “funny” people. They have moments of comic genius, sure, but moments do not make a person funny—it requires a greater prolonged commitment and torture.  However, what my parents constantly reminded me of (and continue to remind me of) is the fact that I should write comedy.  When it became quite clear I would only want to write and would do whatever it took to write, my parents were naturally worried.  They didn’t want me becoming a completely serious (self-serious?) destitute. So, they would remind me that I was in fact funny and could write funny things.  We would watch Saturday Night Live, various Late Shows or a funny movie and they would say, “You could write something like that.”  For so many years, I took their encouragement as the greatest form of insult they could possibly toss at me, knowingly or not. It should have been clear to my parents of all people that I was the heir apparent to the most serious of artists; that my vision burned stronger, my heart beat more wildly; my desire for independence was so fervent that I could do nothing but create sprawling works of intense brilliance.  Yet, it is after years of being with friends who are varying degrees of funny, making jokes at the expense of adults and other bystanders and paying attention to works of comedy that exhibit the many perspectives of what is funny, that I realize how important it was that my parents repeated their mantra.  I don’t think I am capable of creating anything that is truly funny or that could be enjoyed any group of people beside myself—I simply don’t have that kind of talent or patience for finding the joke.  However, with my own sense of humor, I believe that I have learned to enjoy deeply what things are funny.  And, sometimes simply enjoying a thing or virtue is one of the hardest defeats we have to admit in life.

I eventually want to write a book about humor (just as I want to write the definitive book on Dwayne Wade), but the easiest way for me to present my ideas here is to start with a sketch by the 1990s’s comedy group, the State.  The comedians in the State and all of their subsequent works have been perhaps the most profound impact on my idea of what is funny (especially acting-wise).  Very often, this involves the most juvenile or simple joke and even more frequently, it involves the most absurd.  The State sketch I want to refer to is called “The Restaurant Sketch.” In this particular sketch, we are shown the comedian David Wain in a restaurant.  He speaks to a waiter, played by Ken Marino, in a normal voice, but the waiter acts as though he is shouting, as do the other restaurant goers. Marino comes back to the table with a megaphone and begins reciting the specials in order to combat Wain’s supposed yelling.  At this point, Wain turns to the camera and explains that the scene is funny because he is not actually yelling.  Wain explains that anything that isn’t true is funny and anything that is true isn’t funny.  He gives a few examples of this logic, like the waiter saying one of the specials is, “fish sautéed in paper clips, seasoned with garden tools.”  The waiter explains that they don’t serve it, which makes it by nature something funny to say.  Wain then turns to the diner behind him (played by the always amazing Michael Showalter) and tells the man to ask him what he had for breakfast.  Wain replies, “eggs,” and the man immediately laughs.  We are told this is funny because Wain actually had waffles for breakfast, not eggs.  Wain then tells the man to ask him the same question about his breakfast. This time, Wain replies that he had “waffles” and the man looks disgusted and disappointed because “waffles” aren’t funny since Wain actually had eggs.  Then, Wain welcomes in a person dressed in a chicken costume who is wearing a priest’s collar and who opens a book and says, “Please open your hymnals,” as though he were a priest.  This is funny because it is a chicken acting like a priest inside a restaurant.  However, Wain reveals this isn’t funny because he is actually in a church and the backdrop immediately changes to a church, so what was actually funny was anything that was in reference to a restaurant. Yet, Wain further reveals that even the church references were funny because they were actually in his bedroom the whole time and he promptly crawls into bed, “with the knowledge that this has all been very funny.”  He then says, “Good Morning,” curls up in bed as all the actors in the different scenes laugh behind him since he said “good morning,” when he was going to bed. Clearly, this entire sketch features the State exhibiting all facets of their craft: stupidity, pointlessness, puerility, absurdity and yet still something influential.  What this whole sketch points out is that it can be very pointless to try to boil down or define what is funny, because literally everything that isn’t true isn’t funny, though an obvious example like Wain stating the opposite of what he had for breakfast, a very normal breakfast like eggs, is made funny because of the absurdity of the simplicity of this “formula.” What makes this sketch more than trivial is that fact that we do often find something that isn’t true, that isn’t normal funny.  An infant thinks its funny when you hide your face and then pop it out because it seemed to be gone, but then, it wasn’t! As we grow we still find things that aren’t true funny.  A comic will exaggerate a situation or perhaps make it up because it is funny. How often have you, someone who is not a comic, told a small lie and found a listener engaged or gullible? Once they have that hook in your story, how many times have you dragged it out, built upon it, in order to present a scenario that slowly dawns on your listener as being ridiculous? I’ve irritated plenty of girls doing just that.  A comedian like Louis CK, tells the story of his wife giving him “the world’s saddest hand job.”  The story is so exaggerated that we as a listener are left to wonder if it is even true.  A great comedian will make that territory a bit murkier and we are left with an impression that the story may just be true and may just be that funny. The State and one of the comedy groups that it begat, Stella, are very much based on this idea that the absurd or the untrue are at the heart of what’s funny, even if its obvious.  One of my favorite State sketches is a sketch simply called “And,” where a man who works at a magazine finds out that his coworker doesn’t know the word “and.”  This sort of situation is clearly “not true” and, in all likelihood, impossible, which makes it funny.

(Abbott and Costello always got in trouble with Mr. Fields or Mike the Cop.)

This sort of humor can be traced all the way back to Abbott & Costello, who eventually begat the comedy of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld, or the comedy of Seinfeld.  The jokes here come from mundane situations that are slightly to majorly exaggerated—there is always an element of “untruth.”  Abbott & Costello episodes mostly center on the duo avoiding their landlord so they don’t have to pay the rent.  Let’s look at a few episode synopses to get a better picture of what I am referring to about this brand of comedy:

Barber Lou - Lou tries to give Bud a rubdown following instructions from a radio show, but he's tuned into a program explaining how to paint a car at home.

Pest Exterminators - Bud and Lou are pest exterminators who are mistaken for psychiatrists when they attend to Mrs. Featherton's "aunts".

Lou's Birthday Party - Lou throws a birthday party for himself, but nearly poisons his guests when he puts ant paste on his hors d'oeurves instead of antipasto. Bud throws him out and Lou consoles himself by ordering a giant decorated cake.

Each of these episodes is based around a pretty ordinary occurrence (Giving a “rubdown” years ago was part of a barber’s routine. Today, obviously it is a joke Tobias would have fallen into on Arrested Development, which we’ll get to.) that turns absurd.  The Abbott & Costello Show and the comedy of Abbott & Costello in their stage routines were both based on the comedy of errors that made something simple become absurd, something not “true” to life.  Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David have both openly admitted that Abbott & Costello influenced them.  You can easily break any Seinfeld episode down to an entertaining synopses such as the ones above (Jerry, Elaine and George get soup but Elaine antagonizes the owner of the store who is known as the “Soup Nazi”; Jerry and George take a limo from the airport that isn’t theirs but have to pretend to be Nazis, while Elaine and Kramer try to go to a basketball game).  There is the same exact formula: people living in an apartment building, in a self-contained universe interact with all the characters in that universe in situations that seem like normal day-to-day situations but are enhanced by absurdity.  Instead of Mr. Fields the landlord, in Seinfeld we have Newman, who Jerry is trying to avoid.  There is “Crazy” Joe Davola instead of Mike the Cop.  Seinfeld has The Maestro, Puddy or Mr. Costanza, while The Abbott & Costello Show had Stinky, the guy who wore a Lord Fauntleroy suit.  Their world resembles ours, but it isn’t ours, it isn’t true. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld are hailed as being keen observers of the mundane, about revealing some kind of truth about people in general, through the situations they present in their shows.  However, there is a certain exaggeration of their respective shows and their self-contained worlds that leaves the viewer feeling a sense of exasperation, a sense of “Oh, come on!”  Seinfeld is less guilty of this than Curb Your Enthusiasm, but you already knew that.

("Look at banner, Michael!")

Arrested Development is a finer example of a show with an exaggerated, self-contained take of the everyday.  The world of Arrested Development is placed in the world of a wealthy family in California, but it is the dynamic of the family and Michael Bluth’s need to escape, yet still remain close to them that makes it seem so real to us. The “truth” of this situation is pulled away when we are introduced to characters such as GOB, Tobias, Buster, George Sr., Lindsay and Lucille.  What I mean to say is that these characters aren’t real; there is not real depth to them, which makes them funny.  There is nothing funnier than the Season 3 joke of George Sr. using a man as a “surrogate” of his presence in the other room of his apartment while he watches the baseball game in his room only a few feet away, especially when the Surrogate repeats his refrain of “Don’t come in here, I’m watching the game. Don’t come in here,” as the family opens the door to reveal George Sr. saying those words himself until he finally resigns, “I told you I was watching the game.”  What Arrested Development does to transcend this mere “falseness” is to build such a tightly referential world that at every turn, you are faced with some detail that reminds you of another part of the Arrested Development universe.  Season 2’s themes of hand (Buster loses his hand to a seal, has a hand chair in his room) and of seals (there is news of a seal attack on TV early in the season, Lucille’s name, Lucille “Lucille 2” Ostero’s name, Buster winning a seal in the claw game) are probably the most tightly constructed jokes in the history of TV or maybe in the history of comedy in general.  However, you can also say that about the running “Franklin” joke from Season 2 to Season 3, where Franklin, GOB’s black puppet, actually ends up being a pimp for the family prostitute — the pimp’s nickname is Mr. F, which was early used to describe Michael’s retarded girlfriend, Rita, and involved a similarly intricately wound joke on the identity of Mr. F, which ended up being Rita (Mentally Retarded Female).  Why go into all this detail about the jokes of Arrested Development when you can just rehash them with your own friends and have a lot more fun?  Because I want to prove the point that while the State were right in poking fun at the fact that you can easily break down what is “funny” and “not funny” to things that are “true” and “not true,” it can become confusing when you are simply enjoying the intricate jokes that a show like Arrested Development structures for you.

There are shows like Arrested Development, Seinfeld, The Abbott & Costello Show, The State, Stella, and even The Chris Elliot Show that revel in degrees of the absurd and pull off comedy that is truly enlightening (I’m not mentioning Monty Python because I don’t like Monty Python, although Cleese will always be the man in some way or another).  While Arrested Development and Seinfeld are much more polished, there is something in the acting of Stella or the State that has always appealed to me.  These comedians are clearly not good actors, but over time they developed an aesthetic of acting, something that is right-of-smartass that has become engrained and immediately accessible by my brain.  Its an attitude of “the world spins and continues around me, but I have the ability to separate from it, slow it down, and make a stupid face while trying to interact with people who are serious.”  There is nothing more juvenile than that sensibility, but it is something that can instill a great deal of invincibility in you. When I look to comedy, I look for “good” acting like that—which I can wrap my mind around—and also an absurdity that I can then take into the real world to make me better equipped to deal with assholes and people who are impatient or miserable.  What those shows like Arrested Development or moreso Stella taught me was the element of timing.  Comedy is airspace.  The air in any moment is made to insert comedy into.  You wait for pockets of timing, you listen to what others are saying and then you jump onto it, you repeat phrases, you listen to the spaces in the air and repeat a phrase in a way that is new to the people around you so it becomes funny—it is “not true” because it is not said the same way as something that was just perhaps said.  The next time you are with friends, try to notice this as you stand in a circle at a party or sit at a table for some dinner.  You all stand in relation to each other, you all have words to direct at each other in some angle or another and, in the spaces of those relationships, those intersections, you fit the jokes in. There is a rise of laughter and you slip in a perverted or dark phrase underneath the din; someone says a phrase, but you turn it so that it rhymes in a way.  That is elemental, but it is comedy.  Something as stupid as this party trick will work: next time you have a party, play a super popular song like “Hey Ya” or “Fuck You” two or three times in a row.  The first time, everybody is excited.  The second time you have some people still digging it and maybe it was a mistake it came on again.  The third time, people see that it’s a bit so you’ve drawn attention.  Then, you let three to four other songs play.  The rhythm of the party has resumed. People feel drunk, they chatter, they fall in love briefly or get hard-ons.  Then, you play “Hey Ya” or “Fuck You” one more time. And, that’s the joke.

(The Larry/David Duchovny storyline was a classic ongoing joke on The Larry Sanders Show.)

What this all leads to is the comedy that, to me, stands apart from anything else that’s funny and that is The Larry Sanders Show.  Sanders and Seinfeld were the twin pinnacles of comedy in the 1990’s and represent a sort of Stones/Beatles dynamic.  I don’t know which is which. Seinfeld was so wildly popular and critically accepted that you could call it the Beatles, while Sanders was darker and also critically acclaimed.  However, Sanders consistently surprised you like the Beatles and surprised you at such a high level.  When I watch The Larry Sanders Show, it reminds me of listening to the Beatles because I look for the little nuances. I look to see how Hank reacted in a certain scene the way I listen to why Ringo played the drums so curiously in that one little part on “Hello Goodbye” (both probably happy accidents) and I listen for nuances in Artie’s ass-kissing of Larry just the way I listen for that out-of-nowhere piano hook towards the end of “Dear Prudence” that I never heard before.  To basically spell it out and get my fawning out in the open, Garry Shandling’s brand of comedy on The Larry Sanders Show is the brand that I subscribe to more than any other. The characters seem to grow organically as the seasons go on.  Hank becomes so much of a pompous, stubborn and ignorant ass that you are surprised and delighted in a scene where Larry and Hank are in Hank’s car after Larry returns from his hiatus in Montana.  Hank has been a mess while Larry and the show have been on hiatus. Hank is smoking in his car and listening to heavy metal (two things his character hasn’t done) and Larry asks him to come back to the show.  Hank, who is hurt, gets this incredulous look in his eye and goes to mouth the phrase “You pulled the wool over my eyes.” Jeffrey Tambor’s acting shows that the character wants to use and say this phrase, but then ends up saying “You really pulled the rug out from me.”  It’s a heartbreaking and genius piece of comedy.  It might not make you laugh out loud, but it is funny precisely because it is true!  One of the peak moments of the show is the episode "Arthur After Hours" where we follow Artie, Larry’s rock-solid, ass-kissing, show-biz chiseled, producer after he gets mad at Larry when Larry makes him bump his friend off the show.  Artie is sick of being disrespected and taken for granted and we watch him get drunk in the studio and the office after everyone leaves. Artie loves the show and he loves show business, all of this we know because we know his character so well; we know his character so well after only about two or three episodes—the catchphrase of The Larry Sanders Show could just be Garry Shandling saying, “Artie?” in a helpless, panicked voice.  So it is funny and yet touching to watch him go through the paces of venting his anger and even coming to a sense of drunken brotherhood with a Russian janitor. Artie says at one point, “we’re brothers, you and me, because we both clean up messes.” And that is something so poignant Matthew Weiner would have written it on Mad Men.  Then, as Artie and the Russian janitor hug, Artie knocks the bottle of scotch they have been sharing to the floor, smashing the bottle.  He says to the janitor, “It’s alright, I’ll get the mop and you’ll clean it up.” He immediately breaks their bond and resumes the show hierarchy he was so upset about and he and the janitor begin to fight as the janitor says, “fuck you.”  The next day, Artie, with a band-aid on his forehead from his fight, returns to work the same as ever.  If you haven’t seen the show, there is no point in going on about jokes and episodes. What is important is the fact that this show treats sadness, darkness and comedy in equal lights.  Many may say that the British Office does the same thing. I have seen that show and it doesn’t make me feel the same levels of comedic glee while at the same time bringing me to a point of darkness and strangeness that The Larry Sanders Show does.  Shandling has said that the show is all about the characters and he pulled it off. You know each character, however small, in full, by the time you have finished only one season.  That makes it that much more enriching and thrilling when they do something unexpected or different or bad or good in a later episode. Its one of the strangest phenomena I can think of in any form of comedy I’ve watched.

In the end, The Larry Sanders Show makes me feel human, while Stella, The State, and to a lesser degree Arrested Development make me feel a false sense of juvenile invincibility that his hidden behind humor.  And the art that I’ve been the most thankful for, the art I have thrown myself most fully at, has been the art that reminds me I am human and that it is OK that I am that way (see Levin in Anna Karenina or Ulysses as a whole). Since comedy may the art that I love in some ways more than writing itself, I see it as only fitting that I grow into the type of sense of humor Garry Shandling and The Larry Sanders Show can offer.  And now you can thank my parents for making you sit and waste your time reading through all of this.

Christmas in July (or August)

“Mad Men, you've done it again.”

That’s all I could utter after last night’s episode (Season 4, Episode 2 “Christmas Comes But Once A Year”) of Mad Men.  To be fair, I usually say that after every episode because I am an unabashed lover of the show.  However, last night’s episode really deserved that comment.  The episode had the perfect blend of all the elements of Mad Men that we love: darkness, style, office dynamics, surrealism, witty banter and quips, and multiple levels of themes that intertwine each character and relationship on the show.  We got equal doses of Roger Sterling wit, Don Draper sadness and philosophy, Joan flexing her professional muscles, Peggy’s inner conflict, the strangeness of Glen, the curiosity of Sally Draper and more darkness of Don Draper.

In the first episode of this season, we saw Don Draper had fallen from the excitement, confidence and thrill of starting his own agency.  We saw his alienation from his family, his unsure position as the figurehead of the company and as a presence within his own industry.  We saw him hire a prostitute to slap him.  Although that first episode seemed to have ended on a high note, here we are back on a low note. Instead of hiring a prostitue, in this episde Don makes an innocent girl, his secretary Allison, feel like a prostitute.  While Don is engaging in this dynamic, Sterling is made into a prostitute by Lee Garner Jr. at the Christmas party when he has to dress up like Santa and have the staff sit on his lap.  And finally, Peggy prostitues herself out to her lame duck boyfriend.  She gives up the virginity she pretends to have, which as John Lennon once inferred is always present in the beginning of a new relationship, there is always a sense of virginity.  Peggy gave that sense up, that virtue she seemed to be holding onto out of an uncertainty of her boyfriend’s strength or viability, she gave up a position of strength (withholding sex) because she was afraid of being alone.  And we see her at the end of the episode, after having sex with her boyfriend who seems confident and happy in the ignorant thought that he took her virginity, looking incredibly disappointed and disillusioned.  She has been used, except she has used herself for a cheap thrill, for the easy answer of being with someone, being with anyone.  Obviously this episode predates the Stephen Stills song, “Love the One You’re With,” but that is where that logic takes you – to the look on Peggy Olsen’s face at the end of “Christmas Comes But Once A Year.”

On a strange and different note, Sally Draper is used in a way in this epsiode.  The way that Glen befriends her as a means of testing to see if the Draper/Francis family is home in order to trash the house is a strange way of using her as a person. Now, there is definitely an element to Glen that can be seen as likable. He related to the pain that Sally is going through and he has been inserted into the show at various points (Season 1 and Season 2) as a sory of barometer and measuring stick for Betty Draper and her core personality and values. And at this point, Glen sees Betty Draper for the child she is and her inability to recognize that about herself.  She calls his mother in Season 2 when he runs away from home and thus he sees her as betraying him and betraying herself.  And now he resents her.  He is acting as an older guide to Sally and perhaps he even does have a crush on her.  Yet, the way he acted and used his phone calls to her as the way of knowing when to break into the house, suggests something more sinister.  I don’t mean to talk about these child characters in light of some of the terms above, but it just shows the different levels and shades of a theme that this show incorporates within its various storylines.

Of course, the main act of prostitution comes between Don and his secretary Allison. Over the last season and a half, we have seen Allison become a more prominent character. She first appeared in the show when Cosgrove chased her around the office in “Nixon vs. Kennedy” in Season 1 and tried to guess what color her underwear was (it was blue).  She is a reliable secretary for Don and towards the end of the last season you got a real sense of a certain professional chemistry between them that may have bordered on an actual attraction. It seemed to come more from her character as the actress gives off a terrific beam of a smile, a smile that showed a woman eager to please.  The more they interacted, the more Don seemed to reciprocate, whether from a professional appreciation or because he couldn’t resist the cute, natural looking girl with long brown hair that sat at his desk (sort of how he described how he imagined Ms. Farrell as a young girl).  However, you never thought that Don would sleep with her because it seemed like his policy to never do so.  But this is not the same Don Draper.  This Don Draper drinks too much, he doesn’t eat.  He is trying to throw himself into something but nothing is sticking. The employees are talking behind his back not in a reverential or fearful way, but in the tone of pity.  In this episode, Don does not sleep with his neighbor Phoebe who was clearly interested in him.  He couldn’t because he was too drunk and too weak from working and not eating.  He had no focus.  All he could do was try to pull her in once she tried to take care of him.  But all he did was remind Phoebe of her father who she told him was a drunk.  I read a theory that Don has been attracted to woman who are motherly and intelligent. The intelligent side would hold true for Ms. Farrell, Rachel Mencken, Bobbi Barrett (businesswise), and Midge.  However, only Ms. Farrell and Rachel Mencken (slightly) have been at all motherly.  Obviously this is the first time this Phoebe character  has been on the show so it is hard to tell, but she may fit that role. 

We were also introduced to Faye Miller who works in marketing and is trying to teach SCDP about psychology in advertising.  She seems to be that professional and intelligent foil when she confronts Don in his office for walking out on his presentation. Again, Don tries to finesse her into sleeping with him or at least going out with him, but he is not able to.  Instead he gets to hear a bit of the philosophy of Mad Men spoken to him through the character of Faye Miller when she says, "In a nutshell, it all comes down to what I want versus what's expected of me."  Don is slightly surprised at how poignant this statement is and you can see the thought to sleeping with her leave his face.  He resigns that this is a different type of woman.  Someone who may understand what it is all about.

With two options denied, Don finds himself, tired, drunk and locked out of his apartment.  He has to rely on Allison to bring him his keys.  And when she comes to deliver the keys, to let him in and “tuck him in” as Phoebe had  done a night or so before, he makes a move on her.  You can see Allison’s surprise and then the desire suddenly appear.  I read a good analysis of this scene where Allison always wanted this to happen, but her initial denial is because not only did some part of her think it would end badly, but the way it was happening was not the way she imagined it would happen.  But she gives in to what she wants and you can see the pleased and surprised look on her face afterward, while Don knows that he made a mistake.  And the next day he has to face the conflict of what he wants, which would be to have closed the office door and told Allison that he was sorry for what had happened, that it was wrong and he shouldn’t have done it. Instead, he does what is expected of him, he acts like it never happened, speaks in code (“I have taken advantage of your kindess one too many times”) and then gives her the bonus money.  The range of emotions on Allison’s face is remarkable and it is once of the pantheon scenes in all of Mad Men thus far.  The shame and guilt on Don’s face and first the beaming happiness on Allison’s face, then the warmth, the care, the concern, then confusion, then resignation and hurt.  While many think she was typing her resignation letter at the end, I think that she was doing what was expected of her – working – and giving up on perhaps what she actually wanted – Don in some capacity.  She will be around on this show, especially this season where Don is not able to escape his actions and the darkness of the world that he has created.

And I’ve already used up this much space without mentioning the return of Freddy Rumsen and the conflicts he and Peggy are going to encounter.  Not to mention how Pete is going to have an impact on this season with Peggy, with Freddy and otherwise.  Or, how SCDP are going to have to get rid of Lucky Strike or take care of Lee Garner Jr. in some way in order to move forward as a company.  Things are hitting on all cylinders already after only two episodes.  Some characters have not gotten their moment to shine yet, but Mad Men always delivers.

I do not know if Don will sink deeper into this dark path or if the next episode will unveil a path to some kind of redemption or slightly higher ground, but I like where we are going so far.  For Mad Men, this is as action packed as you can get – we are at a very high level of basketball here.

Twenty Years Ago Today?

When I was in tenth grade, I resumed taking lessons from a math tutor.  I had originally used the tutor before I went to middle school in order to prepare me for the supposed leap in the difficulty of the work.  My tutor was a kind woman who had been a high school math teacher for years.  She taught in a different, tougher, school district of mine so she had honed a firm but warm teaching style.  She had children that went through my own school district as well, though they were quite a few years older than I was.  In any event, I had grown quite fond of her as a maternal figure (my mother was a terrific mother, but no matter how good our mothers and fathers are, we are always looking for similar figures out in the world) and felt quite happy to resume my lessons with her in preparation for taking the New York State Math Regents Part II, since it had become painfully obvious that at age 15 my mind was already extremely bored with math and would simply not pay attention to it.

This math tutor lived in a neighborhood that you wouldn’t call “across town,” but it was certainly across the train trestle and located about a mile or two from where my house was.  Her home sat on the hill above one of the other elementary schools that had fed into my former middle school (an elementary school whose back playing fields I would become quite acquainted with later on in high school when my friend moved to a house through the woods behind the school, where we would drag stolen kegs of beer from his basement and drink out underneath the stars and in the mist – but that is another image for another story and another album) and once or twice a week, my mother would drop me off at her cozy home that always carried the fading warmth of a dinner cooked, mixed with that faint, rich matronly smell of perfume that any woman over the age of fifty-five or sixty seems to carry.  The math teacher and I had known each other for a certain amount of years at this point and I was developing a dry sense of humor that had equal effects on adults as it did on people I went to school with, so we were able to joke around and, before you knew it, the hour lesson was over and I had my TI whatever packed up in my disintegrating Jansport backpack.

Now, at this time, my mother had started going back to school to become a teacher; I couldn’t drive yet; my younger sister had begun to participate in more after school activities; and my father continued to work late in order to properly run his business.  All of this led to the inevitable decision that I should walk home from my math lessons.  I had already been friends with a group of guys that took pride in walking long distances among the Three Villages that made up the town in which I lived; crossing busy roads; stealing cars; and engaging in the sort of intoxication that didn’t really seem to fit our years. So, this ability to walk myself home from my math lessons in the twilight of May fit in with everything else that was going on in my life.

The first time I left my lesson, my math tutor asked me if my mother was picking me up.  I told her no.

“Your mother?” she asked.  This of course came as a surprise because my mother was tenacious in her drive to live up to her matriarchal duties.

I nodded in the affirmative.  My father had to work late hours, she had to go to class and my sister needed to be picked up from her events and activities since she was younger.  I didn’t mind walking home and my mother knew this. She seemed to understand this sort of familial crossroads, being a mother of three herself, and patted me on the back as a firefly or three lit up in the grey light above the pavement of the cul-de-sac she lived in.  As I turned and placed the headphones of my Discman over my ears, she yelled something at me.  She was prone to yelling, of course in only a most endearing way.

“What?” I pulled off the headphones.

“Be careful with those things,” she said. “It’s a dangerous turn on the back way.  Cars won’t see you and you won’t hear them.”

“Ok,” I said, seriously.

“Don’t go the back way,” she said. “Go the longer way.”

I nodded my head and said I would.  Then I turned back and headed up the hill of her cul-de-sac and out into the remaining neighborhood as it turned that terrific color of gloaming that only hits its peak in May and June before the streetlight orange of July and August truly dominate one’s child or adolescent vision of the summer night.

Now, at this time I had been participating in certain extra-curricular activities with my friends at poolside, in side yards, on the beach and under bushes that were not necessarily smiled upon.  Under the guise of studying, we shouted European capitals and events for AP History while jumping into a pool amid a faint, sweet trail of smoke.  After one of these events, my friend had left a burnt copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in the stereo by my pool.  I had never really listened to the Beatles up until then, other than the culturally omniscient songs (I know they all are) such as “Yellow Submarine,” “Hey Jude,” “Revolution,” “Twist and Shout,” “Hello Goodbye,” “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” I had picked up their Blue Volume of hits from 1967-1970 and was beginning to digest that, but it wasn’t really a comprehensive listening experience.  So, when this album, with its legendary title written in red Sharpie, appeared in my stereo, I decided to place it in my Discman, where it would remain for the rest of that summer.

I walked through my math tutor’s neighborhood and looked at the wood-sided homes with their fresh white paint trim, their drooping wisterias and hyacinths and felt the itch of grass from the street while the searing guitar of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club” band filled my head and Paul screamed among the horns, fanfare and crowd noise.  At that time, I had no thorough love and devotion to the intricacies of Paul McCartney’s voice or its evolution from 1963 to 1973. I only knew that I loved the richness of the backing track; rich because of the variety of sounds, not because of the quality, which I now know was very inferior, however, then there were horns and guitar and harmonies and it sounded so far-away, so much a part of history that it grabbed my imagination. What grabbed my imagination, too, was the seamless segue of that title track into “A Little Help From My Friends.” There he was, Billy Shears, Ringo, taking this character and bringing him to life if only for a song.  And for a moment, it was like a story, and I loved stories. I loved concepts, I loved big ideas.  I, who had nearly destroyed his reputation in school by writing a one act play in iambic pentameter about a girl he had a crush on and distributing it to the entire school. This was important stuff.

And, as I came to the wide bend where one could continue straight and go the long way down Gnarled Hollow Road or go down the big hill and save some time by meeting up with the busier and curvier Old Town Road, I decided to go down the hill – because my math tutor had told me not to. Lights in the windows of homes, below the heavy leaf-lines of trees, became more prevalent.  The orange streetlights came on and so too did the evening sprinklers, projecting their spray out, wasteward, to the street where the water collected in streams and then pools, that turned some strange deep purple in the evening’s light. And I listened to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and thought about all of the terrific imagery and the psychedelic feeling of the song.  At that time I had already become familiar with the myths and histories of psychedelia and as I walked along listening to one of the “pinnacles” of psychedelic-pop, there was some feeling deep inside of myself that appreciated this walking, the feel of my feet on the gravel, the kick of the small pebbles along the off-white of the curb, more than those visions I had read some much about and pursued. 

At that time, my favorite song was “Lovely Rita,” and it was a remarkable song of the every day. A song that celebrated a meter maid of all people and how lovely and enchanting she was.  However, even in that everyday occurrence, something bizarre occurred and the narrator found himself sitting on the couch with a sister or two. In its coda, the song turned into a bizarre collage of moaning and panting, however, before it there had been soaring vocals and those helium-sounding harmonies that could only be described by my inexperienced mind as “Beatlesque.”  That song just sounded like The Beatles to me and it made sense.  It soared and it always came on just as I was reaching the bend by the train trestle, across the street from one of those small farms that had been obscured by the improvement of roads and the insertion of train tracks.  And the cars did fly past and it was night, and you could see the open space where they had inserted power-lines, that open space that used to be farm fields and something in me soared along with this “Lovely Rita.”

I read later that summer, after my initial springtime experiences with Sgt. Pepper, an article that Allen Ginsberg wrote after listening to the album.  He claimed it was an album that celebrated the everyday.  That it was not an album of the psychedelic experience, but an album that cherished those sensations that we can gain from moving about our day.  This should not have been a surprise from the band that created “Penny Lane.” Now, the argument could be that that was Paul McCartney and not John Lennon, the John Lennon that wrote “Strawberry Fields.”  However, although John claimed his songs were all throwaways on Sgt. Pepper even he was involved in the everyday.  “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” has ordinary objects that become fantastical hallucinations, “Good Morning, Good Morning” is about a person conducting their daily routine, going by their old school and realizing that nothing has changed.  “A Day in the Life” is probably the perfect example of being concerned with the everyday. It’s title says it all.  And it focuses on the everyday just as much as any novel or short story in the modernist tradition of literature.  The newspaper is the object that allows us to enter a gateway of kaleidoscopic hallucination of the mind, that turns ordinary things in our realm into the powerful signifiers of human history and emotion.  After Paul takes his turn waking up and dragging a comb across his head we are taken to what could be the pinnacle of pop music with the soaring “ahhhhhh” section before we are brought back into John Lennon’s narrator explaining the last item he saw in the news that day.  And as the final piano chord would sound, I’d still be about another mile from home and thinking of encountering those strange feelings of “Getting Better,” and the bittersweet heartbreak of “She’s Leaving Home,” where an ordinary family is broken up by a girl leaving home.  So, all I could do was to hit the stop button and then the play button so that the album would start in its entirety all over again and each little nuance, each vocal and melodic hook would become embedded in my brain as I passed town landmarks: my friend Dan’s house, the Country Corner Bar, the Setauket Automotive, the Se Port Deli, Fox’ Hardware Store, the Korean War Monument, the Field, Jay’s House, Rich’s House, the Rowe Tavern Sign, the Abandoned House.  All of these things and places were a part of my everyday and I’d see them bathed in the orange and purple swaths of the May or June evening, with the fireflies marking their territory in and around the dark space of the night. The crickets would sing and chirp when I’d pause the album to check my back, but of course no one was there, not even the ghosts that would later appear as I grew older and went to college and got drunker.  And by the time the album finished a second time, I was plodding my feet against the cement as I entered the cul-de-sac where I lived.  Sometimes the lights would be on, sometimes they would be off, but I’d always be coming home with the sound of music in my ear, that last piano chord.  Then’ I’d pull the headphones off my head and let my little puppy out into the yard to eat dirt and rocks and I’d smell the mulch around my mother’s flowerbeds and think of summer vacation.

That is what Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was for me then.  It was some slight signal that what I thought was experimental and psychedelic was really just the outskirts of the everyday. That album is a celebration of the life around us.  The funny sounds we can make, the strange occurrences that we read in the newspaper, found phrases, things that become fantastic, like a meter maid in her silly uniform, who in reality is a freak in the bed, as is her sister, her roommate.  They said that it ushered in the Summer of Love.  Perhaps that is true; because of it gives off a feeling of open-arms, embracing different levels of life.  For me, it opened up one of the better summers of my life. A summer I spent walking all over the place, spending time with girls, swimming and continuing my extra-curricular activities.  So, in a way, it did open up some kind of Summer of Love, whatever that means.  Perhaps there is no such thing as a Summer of Love, because those kinds of things are repeatable, they are really only about how you approach the everyday with open arms, the people you see on the street with a warm-feeling.  If that happens, then the rest is usually easy.

Now, I listen to Sgt. Pepper’s and it has been beautifully remastered along with the rest of the Beatles catalogue.  I have approached the album from a variety of mindsets, perspectives and points of life. I still love it in some strange way.  However, now with the bass so fluid, round and prominent and every overdub so clear and shining over the speakers of my living room or on my headphones I see something deeper.  My friend recently told me, when he heard the remastered Beatles, that he’d still prefer the old muddled versions. I understood his point, that he liked the sounds he’d known and grown up with, and respectfully called him an idiot.  I explained to him that you want to enjoy something in the best sound that you can, you want to enjoy these albums in the way that they, perhaps, were intended to sound in the moment: clear, full, complicated and rich with sound and music. In these new, rich, remastered versions, I listen to a song like “With a Little Help from My Friends” and the bass, the drums and the solid mid-tempo rhythm are so much more up front than they ever were; the song picks up a relevance that it never had before for me.  For, when I was younger, it signaled a greater idea and concept (which I found out was a failed endeavor). It also signaled a call to your friends.  That you could all band together and help each other out through the hard times.  And perhaps it all means that still – and part of me believes it.  Yet, I still can’t help but see it as another cry for help.  A self-reflective look at how far an individual has come in life and how much he or she is able to remain happy when they have to face themselves, or find themselves alone for even a second.  And sometimes not even your friends can assist you with that.  For, as much as the melodic bass and the overall Beatles feel of the song makes you tap your foot and bob your head along with the melody; makes you feel as though you are on some television program in 1967 and just as famous as the Beatles themselves, there is something more desperate and complicated there, something more Replacements than Beatles, or at least what we identify the Beatles as being.  These new remastered versions not only make the songs sound as they perhaps were always supposed to sound, they in many ways seem to reveal the true intent of the songs as well, especially a song like “With a Little Help From My Friends.”

Even if that isn’t the true meaning of “With A Little Help From My Friends,” my feelings about the album remain the same.  As I find myself in the peak of yet another summer, at the pinnacle of heat, I look back fondly at the May and June that it was borne out of and ahead to the late-August and September that it will inevitably fade into.  I think of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and what it meant as a Summer of Love at one point to a generation; what it meant as part of an idyllic summer to one guy; and what it meant to a band at one point who were questioning their own existence and their own enjoyment of what exactly what they were doing. How they ventured into the kaleidoscopic ability of the everyday, the enjoyment of the imagination in order to create an art.  Those kinds of things will never get old.  I will always appreciate those virtues; no matter what kind of antics I seem to take pride in.

Friends 2

I’m going to write about Rafael Nadal winning Wimbledon another evening during this brutally hot week.  For now, there are other things I need to address, but there is something elemental about his struggles and achievement in all of this – at least I suppose so.

As someone who has spent the majority of his youth trying to understand the  impossibility of friendship rather than comprehend the fathoms of love, I again found myself, the day after the Fourth of July, staring into the azure blue of the deep end of my childhood pool and cleaning dirt and mulch from the shimmering bottom.  This isn’t to say that I never enjoyed cleaning my pool – in fact I always have loved it in some strange way.  I’ve loved it because you can stand outside in the heat, away from your neighbors and listen to the radio in private.  You can become the shrieking heretic in “Sympathy for the Devil,” or the snide hipster of “Like a Rolling Stone,” and then when you’re done, you can jump in the pool, submerge the heat and the sounds of the radio, only to emerge once more, pleasantly surprised by the heat of the air and the slick feeling of your hair as you push it or flick it back on your head.  Then, if you choose to, you can get out and touch the soles of your feet to the bricks that your parents paid for to surround the pool.  Or, if you choose to, you can simply float.

Jay Gatsby was shot in a pool, but I was never anything like him, though I did think I could’ve made an admirable Nick Carraway.  What I always admired about the whole mess that led to Gatsby’s demise, besides the idea of creating an image of yourself and building an identity in America, was the illusive notion of friendship that Nick Carraway seemed to identify with the Gatsby.  This idea was recently resuscitated with an almost equal level of eloquence by Joseph O’Neill in his novel Netherland.  These are both novels about men who are lost and who are able to find out truths about themselves by making acquaintances with two different criminals.  Gatsby is by all means a high level bootlegger and gambler as we are led to believe, while Chuck Ramkissoon runs an intricate but low-level Caribbean “lottery” throughout New York City. These narrators, Nick Carraway and Hans, are both looking to make an identity for themselves in New York, and have lost touch or have chosen to the lose touch with the places they came from. For Nick, that is the Midwest, for Hans it is London and his native Netherlands. Hans actually has a wife that he is estranged from, where Nick Carraway looks for love with the distant, independent, and modern female tennis player (see, I told you Nadal was in here!) Jordan Baker.  Because their love lives are unreliable, they look to notions of friendship they find in unreliable males.  Both Hans and Nick are able to find the sensations of masculinity in male friendship in both Gatsby and Chuck Ramkissoon: feeling privileged to be in the other’s company, the sense of adventure of moving about in the world with the other, the sense of sharing a similar desolation, the ability to drink a beer in the sun and share a private moment.  However, each one is left grasping at what their friendship meant or could have done after their “friend” has been murdered in each story.  Nick Carraway tells us in the beginning of The Great Gatsby that he wants no more “privileged glimpses into the hearts of other men.”  That, in essence, is what male friendship boils down to.

These similar tropes have been seen in the work of Jack Kerouac, whom I think in the 21st century should be madatory reading for elementary school boys instead of Treasure Island and that kind of book.  The Duluoz Legend of Keroauc’s mind’s eye represents the what should be the new “adventure book.”  Kids know about all the dirty things earlier now anyway, why should they not read about unbridled enthusiasm and driving across the country, climbing mountains, driving in cars, when they are young and are forced to be driven around by their parents.  No one wrote better about a fall day coming home from school and eating peanut butter crackers with milk than Kerouac anyway.  He was a maudlin and unapologetic nostaligist.  And, he often depicted the search for friendship in the cast of characters in one’s life better than most writers in any medium.  You may find him amateurish and by all means he certainly is, but even in the most amateur of technique, or brutish sensibilities, we can find the truths of the world.  The friendship between Kerouac and Neal Cassidy as it was fictionalized or marginalized by Kerouac’s work is something that should be admired as the representation of a relationship between two people in this world, two friends, two men trying to make sense of the years and whims that rose up within them and without them.

So, because of novels like these, I spent much of my youth looking for that kernel of truth in friendship, in male friendship that would answer me some kind of question.  What does it truly mean to be a friend to someone?  How does one get by when those friends have to travel and move on to do the different things with their lives?  What happens when our adventures end? Do our adventures ever end? Is it even possible to love somebody else?  These are the questions that the illusive search for friendship can raise up in your mind.  And I spent much time cleaning my pool and thinking about these types of things.  I found myself doing the same thing the day after this past Fourth of July because I had a variety of friends staying at my home from different levels of life: elementary school, junior high and high school, college, and post college.  Some of them knew each other very well, some of them knew me very well, some didn’t and vice versa.  Yet, we all got along and had a memorable time.  The kind of time that sticks to your memory and leaves the details there, so, that even if you are one who loses tracks of the details to distinct places and “times” easily, you would be able to recall the year, the light and perhaps who was even there.  And of course, when it was all over, when the beer and other litter had been dragged to the curb, I was there cleaning the pool, thinking about all that had happened and all of the fun that had ended.  The radio played and the mercury in the temperature inched closer and closer to 100 degrees – ambition echoed hollow In my gut and I just wanted to be finished with it all and be able to swim.  I wanted to run out into the shade and the swaying of the trees and the heat.  After that, I didn’t know what I wanted to happen – I just wanted that.

Then, a song I had been longing to hear came on the radio.  It was “Mother” by John Lennon, from Plastic Ono Band.  I, thinking of friends, of course thought of The Beatles and about how stories end and how we move on as I have written about before.  If you have listened to Plastic Ono Band it is all about moving on and how we do it in the different areas and through the different traumas of our lives.  I grew up loving the album, because when I was younger, I related to John Lennon more than any of The Beatles just like most kids do.  You gravitate towards John Lennon because he was the “smart one.”  All the Beatles were funny, but he had the quickest and most biting wit.  He made the bold statements.  He was the leader.  You don’t think about the finer shades that you do the longer you spend with the Beatles: “Paul was the most melodic,” “Paul was the most natural musician,” “George’s songwriting was held back just look at All Things Must Pass,” “I agree with George’s pragmaticism and spirituality more than with anything harsh that John had to say, or simple that Paul had to say.” When you are young, you love John Lennon, because that is what time has taught us about the Beatles.

And I loved John Lennon on Plastic Ono Band because he said all the bold things, because he screamed in his John Lennon way and because he made hooks out of the syllables in his verses in that singular John Lennon/Beatles/mostly John Lennon way (just listen to “Mother” when he says “Sooo, ayyyyyeee”).  However, I loved it the most because no matter what I was going through, I could listen to it and feel clean again.  It was like getting a haircut for your soul.  That image seems demeaning, but the sentiment is true.  Whenever you go for a haircut, you go for that feeling of newness, of freshness. “With this haircut, I’m going to do something. I’m going to impress someone. Something’s gonna be different.”  Whenever I put on Plastic Ono Band that is the intent that I have. From the refrain of “Mother” when Lennon says “So, I/I just have to tell you/Goodbye, goodbye” to the thrilling coda when he screams “Momma don’t go/Daddy come home” you know that he is losing the demons and  whatever yours may be, you can lose them to with his screams and with the hypnotic piano and drums. Then we get to “I Found Out” where John tells whoever is listening that “I’ve seen the junkets/I’ve been through it all/I’ve seen religion from Jesus to Paul/Don’t let them fool you with dope and cocaine/No one can harm you/Feel your own pain.” And of course he throws the double entendre in there with the loaded word “Paul,” making you think just a little bit harder about what he means because he is saying it with such conviction.  As the album veers from harsher commentary to the brooding slower numbers such as “Love,” “Working Class Hero,” and “Look At Me,” you get the ultimate sense of someone stripping themselves to the essentials.  There are no comments on what friendship is or what love is, besides to say that “Love is real/Real is love.”  This effect is refreshing since there is no overarching statement leading you in a direction.  Love is real, is merely an indicator of a feeling.  Because even John probably didn’t even know what it was that he was calling his love with Yoko Ono at that time.

Then, of course we get to “God,” which has always been one of my favorite songs of all time because it doesn’t let you get away with anything.  Now, many people may call this song merely self-important sermonizing, but I can’t stress how powerful I used to find this song and how necessary I still find it.  How often to you address a statement to God that could be addressed to the earth or to something more definite, when all you are doing is trying to measure out the amount of pain or confusion you are feeling?  How often to you place meaning on a false idol of any kind, God or anything else?  When John lists through the names of all the things he doesn’t believe in anymore, all the icons that he is tearing down, it is timeless in a careening way of never letting yourself get consumed in the things that you have consumed your time with.  It is an exercise in separation, in distance and in seeing something from a new perspective.  When punk music came around, they did the same thing, in a less eloquent and less conscious way.  They wanted to tear down icons because it looked cool, not because it trapped them.  This is all the stuff of James Joyce.  There should be no nets that trap you.  All our Elvis’, our Zimmermans, our Kennedys, and our Beatles need to be overthrown at every turn because they are wait rein is in to saying “we can’t.” Those images and icons, while showing us what is possible, also indicate to us that there is something that we can’t or shouldn’t do or that we aren’t capable of doing, but we are always more than capable.  So we have to get rid of what we’ve already known from time to time, we need to start over again to remember that there is only us in the end and that’s all that there ever was to begin with.  That is the haircut that allows us to see what we’ve been consumed with better than we’ve ever been able to see it before.  That allows us to understand what our love is; what the feelings of friendship we are longing to define are.

This was supposed to be a manual on cleaning pools, but now its about cleaning something else.  I guess what it’s all about is realizing that the Midwest of your youth never really existed, that no matter how many books you read, how many words you learn, you’ll never come upon that word known to all men, you’ll never truly understand how to describe the impossibility of friendship or the fathoms and blue shades of love.  All you can do is remember all of the things that brought you to a certain point and then try to forget them all, try to forget the way you saw them so that you can see them in the way that they really are.  Because in the end, its all about what you can accomplish and very often you can’t accomplish much without other people, but with them you can often lose yourself by forgetting what’s important or forgetting how you see them. So, you have to get a haircut from time to time – alter that identity and those identifications, if ever so slighlty, in order to keep chasing what you’ll never be able to fully capture.

Actually, this was a pitch for a new TV show called Friends 2.