Moving Notice

Hey kids :) So, as you may have noticed, I've been absent from the blogging world for a while. I'm coming back, but at a new address. If you're interested, my random thoughts, ideas, hopes and dreams will be found at wyldertravels.blogspot.com. Cheers!

Just a Pretty Picture I took this Summer

And then edited super artistically in Picnik. The internet has really made being artistic way easier than it should be. Art in the age of technological reproducibility and all that jazz.

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Also, I've recently become reobsessed with the film Wings of Desire, especially the Handke poem from the beginning, "Lied vom Kindsein". Perhaps I shall prepare a translation for you all to enjoy.

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Coconut's been on my mind quite a bit as well of late. I have all this coconut lotion, coconut cream pie is a constant craving, and fresh coconut like they sell in Italy on the street sounds divine.

Something to Talk About

So there are a few things I'm really excited about today, and I thought I'd share:

1) Doc Watson. He's a new Pandora discovery - blues/folk/country guitar and vocals that blow my mind. I've created a new station for him and I'm sure the rest of the office thinks I'm nuts since I've always claimed to hate country, but when I say I hate country, I mean Taylor Swift/Reba/Garth Brooks country, not Johhny Cash/Earl Scruggs/Norman Blake country, which is totally awesome.

Here's a good example of what I mean (and yes, I'm aware how very few of my friends/readers are likely to enjoy this):



2) http://www.theselby.com/ I came across this website on Gwyneth Paltrow's blog a while ago, and I recently rediscovered how great it is. Mr. Todd Selby is a photographer and his blog contains, among other things, photo shoots of the homes of artists. I'm a bit in love with the post "jamie isaia - photographer, and anthony malat - clothing designer at their home". It's like a mixture of Goethe's Weimar home and Anthropologie, which is a sort of weird mixture, but turns out weird mixtures are fantastic.

3) A great pair of boots I saw in this month's Real Simple that I will probably end up buying since I really need a pair of black boots:

Thanks for that, Real Simple.

4) Edamame. I just can't get enough of it. Especially since Costco sells giant frozen bags of it that just require microwaving.

5) Last and most importantly: Urban Exploration Expeditions! I've got a big one planned for next week, which will be fully documented and receive its own post. It's based on Geneva Road, and will include various taverns, industrial art, and the Harley Davidson cafe. Booyah.

Classic Film Friday: The Apartment

New tradition I've just decided on: Classic Film Friday posts about my favorite films! How exciting is that!

This week, I'll be monologuing on The Apartment (Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, dir. Billy Wilder, 1960).

Plot: Lemmon works at a large NY office building - his bosses (including and most importantly MacMurray, in a rare but tremendous departure from his usual nice guy persona) use his apartment as a kind of lovers' get away, generally with members from the secretary pool. Lemmon has to sit outside his house in whatever the weather, waiting for the shenanigans to be over. He has vague hopes that his services as a pseudo pimp/cheap motel proprietor will be rewarded by a promotion at some point. Enter the complication: MacLaine is an elevator operator in the office building, Lemmon's crush, and MacMurray's long-suffering lady love. MacLaine really is in love with the scummy, cheating, two-faced MacMurray, and, realizing he'll never leave his wife, she tries to commit suicide in poor Lemmon's apartment. I won't give away the rest, but the last iconic line is, "Shut up and deal."

Thoughts: Fresh off the success of Some Like it Hot, this little gem of Wilder's won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, and in my opinion, totally deserved it. It is one of my favorite films and has been since the first time I saw it about a decade ago. I was on some weird Shirley MacLaine kick after I found out she was the sister of Warren Beatty (one of the greatest crushes of my teenage years thanks to Splendor in the Grass and Bonny and Clyde - even now in his 70s, his smile gives me butterflies) and I'd always loved Jack Lemmon, so this film was a match made in heaven for me. Their parallel prostitution in the emerging corporate culture of America displays a remarkable amount of equality between the sexes, especially considering it was made at the tail end of a decade where gender roles were being stringently redefined into his and hers worlds of home and not home. As mentioned above, MacMurray is cast against type, which seemed to be a bit of a habit with Wilder. His other film with MacMurray, Double Indemnity, has Fred playing a murderous, adulterous, duplicitous insurance agent. Bogart plays one of his softest characters ever in Wilder's Sabrina. His films play with conventions, they look at the world and say, "This is the way you think things are", and then shows you that they simply aren't. Cross dressing, gender equality, the tearing down of class boundaries. Not that I should be surprised at his genius - he is, after all, Austrian and therefore automatically at the top of my list.

Lemmon, in another one of Wilder's twists, is surprisingly not funny in this film. Well, that's not exactly true. He is funny, in fact, there are moments when he's very funny, but he's not his usual slap stick, manic laughter, crazed sort of funny (see the clips from the Tony Curtis post if you don't know what I mean). There's a sly, sardonic sort of humor at work here. He's equal parts pathetic, hopeful, human, and humorous and it's a great mix for him. It may be my favorite of his roles, though Grumpy Old Men is pretty high up there as well. MacLaine's portrayal of the ultimate corporate cliche - the woman who falls for her boss and convinces herself he loves her back - brings a level of humanity to that type that transcends the cliche and shows just how real and painful that situation would be. I had a writing teacher who told us once, "Only the specifics are universal." That's what I think of when I think of her performance in this, and really all of her films. She always plays an individual, even, or perhaps especially when she's playing a cliche.

To conclude, here's a short clip for your edification and enjoyment (just a bit of context for it - this is the moment Lemmon realizes that MacLaine is MacMurray's (Mr. Sheldrake's) girl on the side; I love it because Lemmon has started to morph into an executive type, a type that gives promotions for sexual favors, but he suddenly gets hit in the face with the fact that the girl he adores is already giving those favors to somebody else, and that he's been complicit in that transaction - it's sad and very typical of the kind of emotional conflict so common in Wilder films):

The Forgotten Heart

I forgot to include this note from Juliet's wall in my first post but it's really pretty fantastic, so I thought I'd put it up now:

I'd like to say this about someone someday.

R.I.P, Old Friends

This morning, as I browsed my newly personalized iGoogle page (which includes Gmail, Google Reader, ToDo ,Weather, Google news, FoxNews, CNN, NYTimes, WSJ, NPR, and Wikipedia) I was assaulted on multiple fronts with the tragic news of the death of Tony Curtis and a picture of him cross dressing in Some Like it Hot.

I first fell for Mr. Curtis when I saw the film, The Great Race (Curtis, Jack Lemmon, Natalie Wood, dir. Blake Edwards, 1965). I was about ten, maybe twelve, and it's been a family favorite ever since. The pie fight, Curtis' gleaming smile, Jack Lemmon's manic laugh ("Up, Max, bring it up!!!), and a great Mercer/Mancini song somewhere in the middle. Tony wears white for the entire film, drives a white car from New York to Paris, seduces every woman he meets, and runs around a castle shirtless and fencing like some weird 1960s echo of Errol Flynn. Still, as stunning as Tony undoutably is, Jack Lemmon is really the comic star and therefore my favorite. Here's the pie fight - note his impeccable cleanliness until the very end:

Speaking of Lemmon and Curtis, the second film I saw Curtis in was Some Like it Hot (if you don't know the specifics of this one, take an intro to film course, people - this should be common knowledge). Curtis' fantastic parody of Cary Grant is spot on in his backward seduction of Marilyn Monroe. The cross-dressing antics of Lemmon and Curtis, the bizarre romance of Lemmon and his gentleman lover, and Marilyn at her curvy best. Favorite scene, you ask? Well, here you go:








Genius, genius, genius. Makes me laugh harder every time I watch it.

Growing up as I did immersed in old movies (I didn't see a PG movie til I was 9 - it was Little Women - and I really didn't see much made after 1975, except Disney, til I was in my late teens), actors like Tony Curtis were much more familiar to me than contemporary heartthrobs like Heath Ledger. I swooned with Ginger when she danced with Fred. I watched every Paul Newman movie I could find. I imitated Kathryn Hepburn's perfectly haughty New England demeanor (or her screwball, Bringing Up Baby-style shenanigans). Walter Matthau was like a slightly inappropriate uncle, Audrey Hepburn's style in How to Steal a Million informed my ideal of femininity, while Peter O'Toole's blue eyes and perpetually surprised brows still make my heart skip a beat. And - true confessions now - Jessica Fletcher, aka Angela Lansbury, is my ultimate hero and I have every intention of dressing exactly like her when I'm in my late 60s, early 70s. If I can also live in a small fishing village in Maine when I retire, write books, and be best friends with the local doctor, I won't be complaining, though I really hope my friends don't die quite as regularly as hers seem to. Honestly, that woman is a health hazard.

 Aren't they Divine?

I grew up in the past, is what I'm trying rather inelegantly to explain. And because of that, I've had to watch my favorite actors pass away with much greater frequency than the rest of my generation. Walter Matthau was the first. I was 15 and I put a picture of him above my bed to commemorate my mourning process. Poor Jack went next in 2001, fitting I suppose, that those grumpy old men didn't have to live long without each other (seriously, if you haven't seen Grumpy Old Men, watch it soon. It is awesome). Paul Newman was more recent, and also required a long period of mourning. And now Tony. I'll have to have some kind of private film festival in his honor this month, I suppose. Thank heaven for Netflix.

I really don't know how I'll survive the passing of Angela L. and Judi Dench. It may finally be too much for me.

Google and Juliet

It's true. It shames me to say it. But I have this new integrity goal, so I must be honest. I have re-immersed myself in the wonderful world of Google. I couldn't stop myself. And I came back with a vengeance - Gmail, blogger, Picassa, iGoogle, Google Reader, Google Calendar, Google Notebook. And it only took me an hour! An hour to completely personalize myself into Google template of life. I cannot believe myself.

  

Me (obviously) in the famous
 "Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Courtyard



On a brighter note, I love the new blogging template options! Way to go, guys! The background picture I chose is one I took at Juliet's House in Verona, Italy this summer (like the movie, I know, but it really was awesome). There's an archway leading into the courtyard, and the walls of the archway are covered with little scraps of every imaginable type of paper. Receipts, business cards, note paper, post cards, hearts, stickers, menus . . . and they're stuck to the wall with everything from band aids to chewing gum to bobby pins. Languages from across the world are scrawled in thousands of different handwriting samples. It was one of the most glorious, ridiculous, touching, amusing, and hopeful things I've ever seen. I giant love collage. Here are just a few of my favorites:

 

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love
And I'll no longer be a Capulet.



 

  

 

This one is perhaps the saddest, and maybe therefore my favorite.

I ADORED this place. I even left my own letter:



What is it with me and braids?
Who do I think I am, Heidi?



I won't tell you what I wrote, but I will tell you this - it definitely came true . . .