Rain, sleep-inducing humidity, Thurb! training imperatives combined to keep us off the country road this past weekend. We’d planned a ride north with the hound for apple-picking and cider-sampling, the wide-open spaces of upstate New York. (Why do I keep thinking Fresh Kills but it’s Something-Kills or –Kill, not a landfill site, but maybe that partially explains why we stayed put. Inertia, ironically enough, is a powerful force, isn’t it?)
Maybe it’s my time of life. Now that I’m closer to sixty than fifty. Are you still middle-aged at 60? And this curmudgeon-y self isn’t about transference, that I’m upset about aging things: aches and pains, indigestion, sleeping problems. Fact is, I’m in great shape. Except for a half-hour of morning stiffness, I start each day more like a typical twentysomething than a typical fiftysomething.
No, I’ve just lived a long time now, and thus, have formed with some claim to merit a good number of opinions. All too often the practice of what I’ve come to know fails to meet the standards of not just excellence, but of mediocrity. What’s more, society’s norms that I grew up with are the stuff of bad Hollywood movies, case in point, “Contagion” star Laurence Fishburne explaining the origin of the handshake to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention janitor’s son, who is programmatically respectful of his elders. (Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a Leslie Nielsen cockpit scene with a similarly polite kid .¤.¤.) Not so here, the boy receiving the off-the-queue life-saving nasal vaccine from LF, told by Pops to do his homework, and off he goes, uncomplainingly leaving the men alone to talk. This scene prompted belly laughs from the hoodwinked crowd at the Brooklyn Academy of Music cinema on Saturday afternoon (Sept. 24) because if anything lays bare the mediocrity of this movie it’s the depiction of an Ozzie and Harriet nation in our post-millennial malaise, social realism of the most reviled retro order.
Hmmm, I’m beginning to wonder about this curmudgeonism. If it’s not about aches and pains, perhaps it’s the kind of thing that erupts from the phenomenon of underemployment, or in the case of someone with creative ambitions the notion that time – we’re talking near six decades of it – has passed you by, and that while you have accomplished much, there is oodles more you feel that with each passing day the odds worsen, making whatever that better-day outcome may be less and less and less likely to happen, so while for the most part you are content and a pleasure to be around, there are times that you feel cross, go off on someone or something with pent-up vehemence that is out of line with the offence or the perceived offence, leading to at worst a whisper campaign against you, or at least a wide-berthing at home and at the office.
(By the way, this current phase I’ll feeling is making me feel the pain of the dog, Thurber, who until very recently has been prone to inexplicable outbursts. His has been diagnosed by dog whisperers as fear. Which, actually, now that you mention it, has me feeling even more in sync with Ole UnReliable, who without warning will suddenly lunge at a workman carrying a can of paint, a toddler in water wings, a gangly skateboarding teen, a colony of rug rats on scooters. Thurb, the equal opportunity lunge-meister .¤.¤.)
Of course, better to bubble over in a way that makes a good point, rather than to just draw attention to yourself. Goodness knows that when it comes to drawing attention to yourself as a primary communicative goal, the TV shouters and dinner table narcissists reign in our ridiculous age, and yes, Roz (see last week’s post), the blogger, too, as depicted by Jude Law in that horrible aforementioned movie, “Contagion,” the bete noire of the worst of the lying self-promoting obsession (Note to director Steven Soderbergh: Just what price does LF pay for the special favor he doles out to his Chicago honey? That he squirrels away a life-saving vaccine to Tiny Tim [aka the CDC janitor’s son]). And all is forgiven? Did you hear that? It’s the sound of Dickens rolling in his grave.
And just what is going on here that reviewers at BOTH the New York Times and The New Yorker fairly glowed; the Times: Soderbergh doesn’t milk your tears as things fall apart, but a passion that can feel like cold rage is inscribed in his images of men and women isolated in the frame, in the blurred point of view of the dying and in the insistent stillness of a visual style that seems like an exhortation to look. And TNY: It doesn’t take much contact to become infected in Soderbergh’s brilliant movie about a pandemic that spreads quickly and, in a few months, kills millions of people.
Sheesh, readers have cancelled their subscriptions for less, haven’t they? Shouldn’t they? (Sorry about this last wee burst of curmudgeon-i-ness. I’m working on it.)
Next: Running for Your Life: The Relativity of Size
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