DRIVING FORCE

"All the world's a stage," wrote William Shakespeare, merrily tapping his foot in pentameters as if to the rhythm of life. Nowadays we've commuted the individual life to a sentence of greater good: all the nouns and adjectives working together to push the action forward, "moving" as the constant verb. The show must go on. It's a compelling notion, especially applied to individual fulfillment in America, where even life is biggie-sized to be larger than itself. We are obsessed with entertainment and new technology ushers wave after wave of venues for us to present ourselves as entertainers, from reality TV shows to blog sites, and there are no small parts, only Danny DeVito....

FRIED GREEN TOMATOES was filmed in Juliette. Lovely town. About nearly erased by kudzu before the movie in 1991. I visit every year because my great great grandfather begat ten children in that town, and the begotten of the begotten be getting together for a picnic that’s happened every year for more than a century.

The summer we arrived in 1991, just after the movie filming, pulled up at the church and looked over in the cemetery. Couldn’t that many people have died in the past year! There weren’t even that many people in Juliette. At least twice as many more gravestones popped up in twelve month’s time. They were fake. They were Styrofoam. My, what funny pictures we had from that year’s family reunion: little old aunts lifting great monuments above their heads, snickering smiles on their faces that would hold up the world. We got to keep them, the fake tombstones, take as many as we liked. We loaded up our trunks and then went to redecorate our friends’ yards when we got home. You can’t stop death, but you can have some fun with it.

Juliette might have faded into the kudzu entirely after the movie came and went. Oh they opened the “Whistle Stop Café,” and it drew a two hour wait for lunch, longer if you want the sheriff’s booth, the place where he ate the barbecue. But you can spit from one end of the town to the other and still overshoot the downtown district. Then Atlanta hosted the 1996 Olympics. The interstate twenty minutes outside of Juliette got six-laned from the Macon by-pass to Peach Capital. Then Juliette became bedroom community proper, houses sprang up like they’d seeded the fields in two-by-fours. Juliette maintained its inner city’s core, but the exterior is pastureland of McMansions. It’s still a good two hours south of Atlanta by interstate, but that ain’t nothing to a city with the “highest annual per-capita gasoline costs in the country” (THE NEW YORKER, April 16, 2007). And what’s there to explain that kind of travel time, severe addiction to books on tape?

We live in these triangles. We depend on motion for our very object of being. We don't live where we work, we don't work where we eat, and we don't eat where we live. Something like that. We are alive only when in motion, constant motion, lateral motion sometimes, we just have to be going somewhere, making a discernible path, even if it is down.

What happened to the efficiency of the one room house? Now we've got to have many rooms. Square footage is the index of home value, stretching out hallways as a grand indicator of wealth. And so we have to drive from one room to the next in our mansion of life, as if the greater our commute, the more opulent our life. But the wealth is making us miserable. We spend all our time rambling through our mansion jam-packed with isolation. The communication devices--cell phones and e-mail--become props to our loneliness; we rely on their potential instead of using them as tools of human interaction. Life becomes the collection of errands we run on the way to our own funeral.

“Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste...” sans driving.

FREEDOM RINGS

The public library is supposed to be a quiet place, perhaps so quiet you cannot hear that freedom rings off the hook inside. Of course it’s not truly free. You own the collections by virtue of your taxes, but these materials—books, music, and movies—are an extension to the shelves of your home, only these items are catalogued in a findable fashion and someone else has to dust them. Furthermore, if you want something specific, you can call ahead and they’ll pull it for you and have it waiting at the check out desk like will call.

This prime service is especially appealing to me in my current poverty enriched life. In other words, I’m harvesting my assets, I’m paying my way into fashionable coffee shops with rolled coins. I’m so poor, I keep meat in the meat drawer of the refrigerator. Who keeps meat in the meat drawer? That’s supposed to be for cold beverages, but I can’t afford those. I’ve got to maximize my resources; the public library is top of that list. Of the plastic cards in my wallet, my library card is the only one I have memorized. It won’t buy me shoes, but neither will my other cards right now. In addition to the obvious collection offerings, there’s free wireless, sans the cost of coffee, and even free computers for when my laptop is repossessed. I can go to the public library and have the resources of a king. Freedom rings!

Of course I’m in the company of the other royalty: the Earl of Indigence and Lady Turret. The Earl of Indigence doesn’t bother me because he’s asleep. He may not smell good, but I can move away from that. Lady Turret, however, tends to seek me out. I don’t know how she can find me every time I step outside my house, but she’s not limited to any branch of our public library either and has come to settle beside me at Barnes & Noble in my more affluent days. She starts with apologies under her breath, head down, as if she were speaking to her breastbone, then she moves to racial slurs, marked with increasing volume to her profanity. The goode library has issued a decree discretely stating they will expel her and any behavior of her ilk from the kingdom of books using the force of the sheriff’s department. Yes, yes, I quite agree. It is a shame to banish royalty, but such behavior cannot be condoned among the subjects. It is the unavoidable symptom, no doubt, of the complicated bloodlines of royal families here and abroad, I mean look at Prince Charles. He may be very public school, but he is not for our public libraries. Prince Harry is our British currency, Prince Harry Potter.

In addition to stimulating my intellectual growth, I rely on the library for entertainment. Blockbuster may have obliterated late fees and Netflix will deliver to your mailbox, but movies at the library are already paid for. Why not use them? True, the selection may not be as cavernous as the size of the local flea market. I understand that the best selection of DVD’s in our county lies in the most rural of our library branches. I’ve found that most of the movies are skewed towards the 1980’s, the era when video tapes first became available for private public use. (Does that make any sense?) I’ve checked out such classics as ARTHUR, LADYHAWKE, and CROCODILE DUNDEE in a sort of rewind of my life, when rental of such films felt like a vast liberty.

The age of VCR’s ushered in a freedom of movie-watching where you didn’t have to rely on movie houses to re-release titles to the big screen, or wait for HBO to play a movie nine million times over the course of a week, all of which occasions were inconvenient to you and then you had to wrack your brain to figure out how to set the VCR to record at the appropriate time and channel. Now with VCRs and rental movies, you had control of the movie with the power of “pause,” “play,” “stop,” “rewind,” and “fast forward.” These are terms synonymous with “pee,” “sleep,” “snack,” “quick before you’re fined,” and “don’t let the kids see that!” Yes, the very act of watching a movie of your own choosing at your own pace is a freedom unto itself. Add it to the service of the public library and you can hear the stars and stripes flapping in applause.

Ahem. Getting back to this form of eighties entertainment, generously afforded me by my local public library.

ARTHUR (1981) – Dudley Moore, Liza Minnelli—yes! Yes!—the butler who won an Oscar for his droll delivery of “I’ll alert the media.” It’s all as I remembered it. And as I remembered it so well, I went straight to sleep.

LADYHAWKE (1985) – Rutger Hauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Matthew Broderick (before he made the mistake of trying to grow up on screen and play a heterosexual). In my memory, this movie works, I mean really works—you have a cool dude, slick, good with weapons and fighting, and severely flawed with romance; a fop; and an ephemeral princess, light as air who could rise to the sun on the wing of a thermal. Hello slow. Made slower still by a warped, sappy soundtrack and the visual decay of the tape that renders light and dark as film and not as dramatic effect. I had been looking for this movie. I had wanted to watch it. I thought the kids would like it—the castles, the hawk, the wolf. I screened it, watched the whole thing through, didn’t pass out with disgust or drink, but when it was over, I returned the tape and decided I never needed to see that movie again. It was better the way I remembered it.

CROCODILE DUNDEE II (1988) – (I had to watch them out of order because the first one was checked out.) “Don’t need a gun; I’ve got a Donk,” is the best line of the second CROCODILE DUNDEE movie. Beyond Donk’s cameo appearance (Donk is the outback ruffian Dundee kisses in the first movie to make him spill his beer)…beyond Donk’s cameo, CROCODILE DUNDEE II is not worth watching, even if you did borrow it for free from the public library.

CROCODILE DUNDEE (1986) - Actress Linda Kozlowski is beautiful and she uses her beauty to distract the viewer from danger in a brilliantly arranged scene: she slips her shoes off at water’s edge, then her skirt. She’s wearing a one-piece, black butt-floss that generously reveals a flank of buttock. Dundee is watching, unbeknown to her, silently consuming her beauty with his eyes. He shifts for a better view and bonks his head, a nice comic touch that shows us his vulnerability to her. She kneels to refill her canteen

RAAAAAaaaaaaa!

The crocodile strikes from beneath the placid water. My kid backed up a clear six feet from the television set. My stomach still aches from laughing at the child. Yeah, that’s good stuff. But once she asks Dundee back to New York with her, the hunter is trapped. The tension goes lax. Yes, they still have to overcome her engagement, and there’s a legion of petty pratfalls of the country mouse with room service and a bidet, and a couple of encounters with gender non-specific characters. But Mick Dundee doesn’t have much chance to use his charms. He delivers his lines from his snare and we’re just waiting for her to walk over and bite his head off. Once the flirtation is through, there’s nothing fueling the forward momentum. Of course off-screen Paul Hogan and Linda Kozlowski fall in love, get married, and ruin the third movie. Congratulations and best wishes. Here’s hoping your real life is better than your reel life.

ASTRONAUT FARMER (2006) – You’re right, you’re right, this movie is not as old as BEN HUR, nor as contemporary as the latest Prince Harry Potter. Nevertheless, ASTRONAUT FARMER was shown on the big screen of our neighborhood public library, no admission fee, with popcorn and soft drinks free. It was an evening screening. The Earl of Indigence and Lady Turret were not in attendance. I could view in peace.

Okay, so I was late the first five minutes. I had to get the kids set up on the floor and pour soda for a girl with a broken hand and a broken foot who’d been in a car accident the day before. So I missed the plot set up. Big deal. A NASA cast off engineer builds a rocket in his barn and has to rely on his family to realize his dream-come-true-flight-crew. They have to ransom the farm to buy rocket fuel, and that’s all you really need to know. The rest unspools through characterization in scenes so authentic you feel like you’re sitting in a chair at the Farmer’s kitchen table. Billy Bob Thornton makes a home-baked space mission as realistic as the launch of a minor blog site into a universe of popularity.

Let freedom ring.

UGLY JANE

UGLY JANE

Harvey Nigel Bains is the worst catch in all of coupling history, but he is nevertheless the fated object l’amour of Jane Edwards at the Bayview Retirement Home on British comedy’s WAITING FOR GOD. Harvey’s sleazy, underhanded ways only drive Jane’s desperate defense of him in all things, despite his open rejection of her (“Jane, you’re touching me!”) while she plays the inroads to get him to be the man she wants him to be.

Harvey, played by Daniel Hill, is dark, fit, and handsome. He is not gorgeous. He is neither particularly tall nor astoundingly muscled and probably wouldn’t warrant a general casting call in America, but he is a decently handsome man.

Jane, however, though an extremely sympathetic character, looks like she would have been drowned at birth had she been born anywhere near the West Coast of the United States. Ugly Betty’s got nothing on Jane. Actress Janine Duvitski capitalizes on her appearance to heighten the pathetic nature of her role.

WAITING FOR GOD is not a crossover show that has been translated into American like COUPLING or THE OFFICE, nor do I think it will be because of content—the subject matter is a nursing home, with old people, and wrinkles and flabs. And plus nobody could play the indomitable Diana Trent in quite the brawny path Stephanie Cole has set out. And no one in America is willing to cast talent over looks these days. “Talent is sexy,” Burt Reynolds said when he recruited Sally Fields to play opposite him in SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. Talent is sexy and the Brits are unafraid to cast a young woman who has wide hips or an actor with over-large teeth. They cast people who know how to use their looks instead of people who only know how to look beautiful. Dear, pathetic Jane is only believable because Janine Duvitski can act, and that is an ability of true beauty.