Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (2 of 2)

But—I lose my way in this section.  In the first part of the book, I could barely keep straight the film director, his household, and the expatriate Americans Phil hung around with in Italy.  In the last part, I’m completely lost.  Boyfriends, potential boyfriends, work associates—all these people weaving in and out of focus during parties and other social engagements…I can’t track them all.  Maybe I could, with another reading.  I’ve read this book twice now, and I’ve enjoyed it twice; but something bothers me about it; I can’t quite put my finger on it.

It seems I lose the forest for the trees.  I remember individual trees from the first reading.  I remember, for example, some of the more spectacular events from Phil’s magazine job.  I remember some of Phil’s more spectacular romantic episodes.  Last night, soaking in a hot tub and expecting to read five or ten pages before going to bed, I sailed right on through to the ending, though it was after midnight.  I remembered reading the book the first time—and being confused then; not at the actual ending, but at the events leading up to it, a series of romantic disappointments and blunders.

The book itself ends on a memorable note.  First, like Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty, this story ends with a more or less first-hand account of the Stonewall Riots (“Insurrection?”)  in 1969—the birth of the modern American Gay Rights Movement.  Phil is there, walking through Greenwich Village with a friend—but high on LSD and both of them feeling that they must be hallucinating the police and the riot vans.  The next morning, they realize it was no hallucination.  And out they go, to participate in history.

But in a coda to the main narrative, the book jumps forward over a decade to the disappearance of a man once interested in Phil, the death of another friend due to AIDS—and the general bitter melancholy of those times.  What else has happened to Phil over this decade?  We don’t know.

I understand that Men Who Loved Me is actually the middle book of a trilogy.  By chance it is the book available at my local library.  It would be interesting to read the entire set and see how it compares to Edmund White’s autobiographical novels.  Both Picano and White were members of the Violet Quill gay writing group of the early 1980s.  They’re both well-educated and cultured; they’re about the same age and both grew up in the conservative times when it wasn’t safe to be open about being gay; when you could be imprisoned or committed for it, in fact.

Whatever we think of their writing style or the characters they describe, we still owe them.  They had the courage and persistence to figure out how to write positively about being gay when there were precious few models for that sort of thing.  They forged the path out of necessity.

Review: "The Jane Street Girls" (1 of 2)

This is the large concluding section of Felice Picano’s “Memoir in the Form of a Novel,” Men Who Loved Me.  It describes the life of the narrator “Phil” in the New York of the 1960s, when gays were building their own community in Greenwich Village but weren’t necessarily aware of what they were doing.  In the first large section of the book (“The Most Golden Bulgari”), the narrator described his decision to go to Italy and “become homosexual,” his affair with a Yugoslavian film director in Rome, and his abrupt return to the United States.  A brief interlude links these two main sections of the book.

Returning now to New York, Phil manages to find, within just a few days, both a new job and a new boyfriend, both quite substantial.  The boyfriend lasts for something beyond eight months; the job makes Phil into a highly paid and respected magazine editor.

I continually wonder, reading this section, to what extent Picano is slumming, to what extent he has been pampered.  He’s gotten a good college education, he somehow (though he’s been working as a social worker) got himself off to Italy, he immediately lands a good job almost immediately upon returning to the States.  From whence comes this stunning luck?

At the same time, like the Beat writers, he seems to spend a surprising amount of time socializing and partying.  He takes a fair quantity of drugs (to be fair, I wouldn’t call it “excessive;” if he does it often, and gets considerably “buzzed,” he almost never suffers physically from it; and it those days hallucinogens like LSD were still legal).  And—is he gay?  As before, he begs the question with remarks like “since I seemed destined to become gay”…

In addition to his playwright boyfriend, he assembles a large number of gay Greenwich Village friends.  It’s difficult to tell exactly how “swishy” these acquaintances were; they were not, it appears, queens in anything but behavior.  They don’t seem to have gone in for cross-dressing; they simply went in, some of them, for rather hefty camp.  In these days “before Stonewall,” one definitely watched one’s step amongst the public at large; but these folks were definitely at ease with one another.  The Bohemian atmosphere of Greenwich Village is well-described; we’re treated to not one but two “lease-break parties” (parties featuring behavior guaranteed to get you thrown out of the apartment you desperately wanted to leave but couldn’t because of the lease provisions).

“Find the Significant!”

When South Bay Writers was planning its last writing conference (which was put off because the economy wouldn’t support it, back in 2010) we thought we would build the conference around the theme “Why Do You Write?”  Not a bad idea—and I’ve been asking myself ever since, “Why do you write?”  I suppose different writers would give different answers to that question.

  

Some people might write to share ideas and experiences.  We’ve had some peak experience; or we’ve had an idea that seems to be important and possibly even original.  No one else seems to have noticed it, so we’d like to spread it around.

Or something has happened to us, and we think a friend or a relative might be interested in it.  Or we think it’s something important that other people ought to know.  We want to tell them; we try to explain.

Maybe we hope to improve the world—society, the nation—again, we try to explain.

Or, more mundanely, we want to become rich, we want to become famous.  We think we can cook up something entertaining, something enjoyable—and lure people into paying to enjoy it.  We’re hoping to make money.

We may write to give ourselves excitement; or we may chase adventure in hopes of writing about it and capturing the excitement for people who, for whatever reason, prefer to remain at home reading rather than first-hand-experiencing.

Maybe our writing is therapeutic, cathartic.  Somehow, it helps us get something unhealthy out of our system.  Perhaps after we’re done, we’ll arrive at a sense of feeling healed and whole; and never feel the need to write again.

Maybe we want to leave our family and friends with something to remember us by, after we’re gone; a consolation, after our death.

Maybe we simply want to understand ourselves better, or life better, or people better.

So many possibilities!  Lately I look at possible projects and wonder:  Which one do I choose? 

In spite of propensity to fictionalize, I dwell on past and possible future experiences:  For example, the holidays coming up.  I think of how I will interact with friends and family during the coming holiday season.  I think of places I’ve lived or visited; my experiences there; how to describes these things to other people I know.  I think of movies or books or music that mean something to me, and wonder whether it is possible to convey the significance these things hold for me.  I think of traumas I’ve suffered, and I think “What is significant?  Find the Significant—in the Past, in Art, wherever.  Find the Significant and convey it.  Do it—somehow! Do it!”

Review: "Looper"

I usually avoid dystopian films and films that involve time travel.  But my family wanted to see this one so I went along to see Looper.  I noticed a few clichés, a few plot contrivances, but I was pleasantly surprised.  I even found the ending redemptive (but I won’t tell you what it is!).

The thing with time travel stories is…well:  To begin with, causality.   Going back in time, you inevitably change something.  Nowadays, knowing about the “Butterfly Effect”…well; the “new future” created becomes downright unpredictable, because of Chaos Theory.  The Future You that has traveled back to change the past is now itself changed –and in unpredictable ways!  You are not the person you were, you probably can’t even imagine the person you now are!

But that’s all Speculative Physics.

So the premise of Looper is that an aging man from the future (Old Joe, played by Bruce Willis) is sent back to the time of his early manhood.  He’s supposed to be killed by his younger self (Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt), but isn’t.  Instead the younger and older “selves” set off to kill someone who becomes a monster (you can say, a “Hitler,”) in future times and is a danger to both of them.

There’s a lot of killing; the younger self is being paid to kill off the condemned of the future.  This is a dystopian film, so society—now and in the future—involves a lot of squalor, joyless kicks/sex/drugs, exploitation, misery, and killing—not my favorite things to watch.

But (might I contrast this with Inception?) there is humanity in this film—which is why I liked it.  There is more than killing and plot twists.  I sympathize with the main characters.  I care about Joe.  I care about the woman (Sara, played by Emily Blunt) he meets in his quest to find the future monster.  And I care about her child (Sid, played by Pierce Gagnon).

And I liked the ending (which I’m not revealing).  I liked it because it involved more than just killing off one more “evil” character—it involved something different, more thoughtful, more humane, more compassionate.

So—in spite of not liking dystopian, time-travel films, I liked Looper.  And I recommend it.

“Opening Up” (From the South Bay Polys newsletter)

I was flirting or teasing once online with a friend I had known for some years, who I admired and respected very much.  We’d somehow gotten onto the subject of orgasms, and I’d asked her when I was going to hear hers.  We’d met through our poly group; she and her husband had both attended our meetings for part of a year, then drifted away.

She answered, “That’s something you’ll never hear.”  I’d suspected as much—but I’d wanted to hear her actually say it.  Part of me was disappointed, part of me was pleased she’d finally come out with it.  Her response clarified the limits on our flirtation.

So that was important for her—or maybe for her husband:  That no one else hear her come.  And yet—she had participated in other intimate activities with other people.  She engaged in BDSM with others.  I don’t know whether that involved explicit sex or not.  In any case, certain activities were restricted to her and her husband.  This hadn’t always been true; they had engaged in swinging at one time.  Then they had become interested in polyamory.

But polyamory was not to their liking somehow.  Perhaps it was jealousy; perhaps they simply didn’t want to share their intimacy; and I don’t mean simply sex; they’d shared sex with the swingers, after all.  Perhaps they just couldn’t—or didn’t care to—open up emotionally to other people.  Perhaps they felt they couldn’t be open about being open.  Who knows?  Perhaps they each felt violated somehow.

Whereas—in my case, I had come to several relevant realizations in my life.  One milestone was when it dawned on me that I liked people; I was interested in them.  And no matter how close I was to a particular person, I was still always going to find other people interesting too.

Maybe more significant was my realization that I actually was rather afraid of people.  I didn’t know why I was afraid, but I was afraid to get close to them.  But I wanted to get close to them.  I hadn’t always realized this.  I’d grown up pretty aloof and condescending towards others.  Now I admitted I found people interesting and I did want to know them better and get closer; but I never would unless I could overcome my fear and lower the shields I held up to keep them at bay; and if I dropped those shields, I might want to become much closer;

So.  But not everyone can do this; and not everyone wants to.  Other folks have other priorities and needs.  These are my needs and preferences.

Review: "William S. Burroughs, Commissioner of Sewers" (2 of 2)

But this film about the Commissioner of Sewers…it isn’t really enlightening.  Like Old Bull Lee in On The Road, I feel a have to “make a complaint.”  I suppose my main complaint is that the film is incoherent.  It seems as if it’s simply thirteen or fourteen short clips randomly lined up and pinned together.  It’s possible of course that this is meant as an artistic statement:  What better way to honor William S. Burroughs than by adapting the Cut-Up Method to documentary with what seems a random series of film clips?  However, the next problem is the quality, both visual and audial, of those film clips.  Most of the film is old and grainy (or new and grainy).  The images are blurred.  The sound is blurred.  I can’t always understand what the subjects are saying.  Throw in Burroughs’ distinctive declamatory style (well, that’s one way of describing it!) and you’ve got a good muddle of slop.

And what is he saying?  He talks about life after death, extra-terrestrials etc.  Maybe it makes sense.  Kerouac insists that Burroughs was a teacher who had every right to teach because he had spent his live learning.  “We all sat at his feet.”  But does the teaching make sense, even in a nonsensical way?  I’m not persuaded.

I guess I just preferred the film I had watched right before this:  William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, which was considerably more coherent and interesting (and featured a slew of people influenced by Burroughs, including Iggy Pop and John Waters.  Burroughs really was an influential artist).  When all is said and done, I do find Burroughs a fascinating person; he just also gives me a bit of the creeps.  I could guess that quite a few acquaintances of his felt the same way.  I could in fact imagine that some people in the Beat circle found Burroughs fascinating because of his elements of creepiness.  Fascination with the grotesque is an element of the Beat sensibility, drawn from the Gothic and the French Decadence.

Incidentally, the film title is drawn from the answer Burroughs gave to the question “When did you finally decide you didn’t want to become President of the United States?” which was printed coincidentally next to a newspaper interview with Ronald Reagan when Reagan was Governor of California.  Burroughs confessed that he had never wanted to become President of the United States—although he had once considered applying to become Commissioner of Sewers wherever he was living at the time.

The question remains:  Why was this man so influential?  But avant garde artists often turn out in retrospect to be tremendously influential—for reasons that aren’t particularly clear.  Why was Van Gogh influential after his death, after selling only one painting during his lifetime?  Artistic vision can be an extremely tricky business.