Running for Your Life: CitizenFour CitizenFour CitizenFour

Do yourself a favor and see this movie. Think “Citizen Kane” or “Metropolis” or “Casablanca” with the thriller tempo of Wes Craven.

Better to see the scenes of fugitive Ed Snowden at the theater rather than at home. The bigger the screen the better, baby. Me, I gotta see it again just to admire the Snowden close-ups. What’s behind the headlines, you ask? CitizenFour does that tired line much better. Watching him, listening to him as the story unfolds, that is beyond words better than any of the headlines you can imagine. And I should know. I write headlines for a living.

Don’t wait. See it now. Think of it like a terrible accident in your neighborhood. Do you wait until someone gets a video of it, or comes back to tell you about it secondhand. No, you race out the door and go to the scene because it is happening now. Not next week, or next month. But now.

So go. Buy a ticket online or at the box office and see the movie of the millennium, CitizenFour.

Next: Running for Your Life: “Last of the Just” by Andre Schwarz-Bart

Running for Your Life: Fall. Because It Keeps You Going

On Marathon Sunday (Nov. 2) in New York City – with the singular menacing exception of Sandy Sunday in 2012 – brings running to the fore. On this day we are all runners.

This is the season that whilst running I will catch a leaf without any help but the wind, impossible to intuit, a jolt of luck, the real thing, that brings a leaf to me to be held aloft, never touching the ground, for placement on the very full of dry leaves tackboard on the wall behind my basement writing workspace.

Fall is the season, and I’ve never been able to understand why, that the second wind will come on a run. Not every time, mind you, but often enough that it qualifies as exceptional. In fall, I will more often than any other season feel that I can literally run forever, that on a six-miler, a ten-miler, a sixteen-miler, I will come up the street toward home and feel like a million bucks. No, better than that. Lots better than a million bucks.

Because it does, you know, keep you going. It’s hot, humid in July and the sweat is literally pouring, a two-miler, at times, feeling too much to bear; in early November, the chill in the air, the wind at your back and it’s all you can do to hold yourself down, to not fly like a bird.

Cool spring days have their merits, of course. But there is something about those first weeks of chill after summer’s ropy fog. The crystal blue skies, the wetness of the air, the lungs; it’s the lungs, the song they are singing that carries you along like nothing else.

Next: Running for Your Life: CitizenFour CitizenFour CitizenFour   

Running for Your Life: Love Those October Days

When it comes to running there is no month like October. Cool and wet, and when the sun comes out the light on the leaves: orange, my favorite, red, yellow (close second), and all the shades in between and beyond – burgundy ! – erupt like a van Gogh brushstroke, at least that is what counts for scenery in the park up the hill from where I live, and, yes, when I don’t run with my teeth-gnashing, drooling-mad hound Thurber, I’m on task as I run in this divine space, aiming to catch – not trap against my body – but catch in my hand one of those leaves as it falls to the ground, which I will take with me on the run, held aloft like some buried treasure relieved from its hole and on its way to its rightful place on the mantle of some medieval castle held in the family against the better judgment of the accountant but not the poet.

Next: Running for Your Life: Fall. Because It Keeps You Going

Running for Your Life: Knock on Wood Dept.

I was startled the other day, waking up with a sore throat. I can’t remember, literally, the last time I had the flu or a cold. The flu was probably my last flu shot, sometime in the previous century.

So what did I do? I drank a big glass of water with my morning coffee. Later, I ran hard, about an hour, or these days, a little over six miles. Usually I will sweat it out, the cold and flu, that is.

Still, I felt a little punk, as my mother would say. It was the weekend, so I could take it easy, and I did. Two days later (Oct. 19) I felt fine. No symptoms at all.

Running hard every other day like I do is the equivalent of having apple season three hundred and sixty-five days a year. Because if an apple a day keeps the doctor away, a run every other day does the same.

Next:  Love Those October Days

Running for Your Life: A Power Seething

Regular readers – well, actually, even irregular readers – of this blog will know that the posts here rest on three codas: running, writing and reading. There are certainly scads of the first category but not so much of the third. So, rejoice readers. This one’s for you.

The book, that is. By Julian Bell, the painter-author with the Grade A bloodlines.

It’s called “Van Gogh: A Power Seething,” a short, intense study of the massive, intense, all-too-short life of Vincent Van Gogh, heretofore to be known as my emotional anti-hero.

Even the most Philistine among us knows that Van Gogh is the painter who in a rage mutilated his ear. Never an ear bud to be stuck in his head.

Who knew, though, that Van Gogh could write. Bell, for one. And he has an ear for the Vincent Bon Mot.

A sampler:

• “One can’t present oneself as somebody who can be of benefit to others or who has an idea that’s bound to be profitable – no, on the contrary, it’s to be expected that it will end with a deficit and yet, yet, one feels a power seething inside one, one has a task to do and it must be done.”

• “His (Jean-Francois Millet’s) peasant seems to be painted with the soil he sows.”

• It was only through persistent attention to nature, through a reverence for “the true, the possible,” for “a few clods of earth,” that genuine achievement might arise.

• The best hope for the artist lay in concentrating on a mere “atom of chaos,” in concretely working “to define one single thing.”

• “Pride intoxicates like drink. When one is praise and has drunk one becomes sad.”

• The painter may be in hell, but painting is still heaven.

Next: Running for Your Life: Love Those October Days