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Like a party favor, a thought pops into my head: My daughter coming home from school. She is, what, twelve or eleven. I don’t know. She wants to be with me, and I’m working, watching Talfan’s Dysgu i gi Bach Gachu backward. It is one of the most significant films in all of Welsh cinema, and that is saying something. There are those who believe there is no important Cinema of Wales, but they are, as always, dead wrong. Dyfodwg, Powys, Iwan, Gwilym, Gruffudd, Fardd, Gwilym (no relation), Cadwaladr, Clymneb, Dylfedmed, Prydudd, Gwilym (no relation), and Clydarfrg to name just a few essential directors. And I have been waiting all day for the chance to watch Talfan’s masterwork in reverse. My daughter at eleven is barely competent in Gymraeg so will most likely not understand even a word of it backward. I know she will be bored. And then I will feel responsible for her boredom, which will not allow me to properly enjoy the film. I tell her Daddy has to work, which makes me so terribly guilty, especially when I see the look in her eyes, hopeless, unloved, abandoned. This is not the case, of course. It is simply that I need to do my work. A child of eleven cannot understand how, as an adult, one’s very identity hinges on one’s work, how one would likely dissolve into a fog of nothingness without it. I need to ignore her so I can continue to exist for her. She stares out the window at the rainy day. Esme…
unbelievable
"I’ll have a whisker,” I say.
“Whisker?”
“Whiskey?”
“Scotch, rye…?”
Now he is impatient to get back to Tsai.
“Um, rye,” I say, because I heard somewhere it is a thing now.
“Brand?”
“You choose,” I say and immediately feel it comes across as coquettish, something a girl might say to him.
He sizes me up.
“You look like a Crown Royal man,” he says.
It’s astounding how quickly I can go from feeling like a girl to feeling like a big boy, but his calling me a man did just that, which oddly makes me feel like a girl. I am proud. And humiliated. I want him to like me. I would be his buddy; I would be his girl. We could be buddies with benefits.
Amazing. That is indeed forty. It is as if Apatow had a camera in my house when I was that age. Even though I know I did not get the scene verbatim, it’s a testament to the power of the writing (and the performances of Ruddmann, as I have dubbed Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, so organic and believable are they as a couple!) that I still find myself simultaneously laughing and crying as I recall the scene. The raw human emotionality is palpable. But, no, it is not as well-formed a memory as the Abbott and Costello murder plot scene from a movie I have seen only once, and that viewing in Nameless Ape mode. I weep some more. And then I laugh, because the humanity Apatow shows us is also very funny. This is where his gift lies, his ability to reveal to us the tragedy and comedy that is our lives.
lol
BACK AT THE laundromat, I offer to volunteer my time for free every other Sunday, starting for the first two weeks with every Sunday, so as to cover all bases. I explain to the manager that I just enjoy doing laundry. I sell it to her as a win-win situation for us both. She takes this in, nods, pulls out her iPhone, photographs me, then lets me know that I am banned from ever again entering this establishment, that my photograph will be hung on the wall to alert all employees of this development.
I am horrified. My very face has been turned into its own scarlet letter for all the city’s launderers to mock and detest. My secret life laid bare. And, after all, who amongst us doesn’t have a secret life? I am certain that if the rock we call Manhattan were to be overturned, myriad creepy-crawly secret lives would be discovered. I am certain that if— But then it occurs to me: This is perhaps the perfect solution to my issue. Tsai will no doubt see my visage on the laundromat wall. She will understand I have been humiliated in my attempt to secure employment there. I ask the manager if I can see the shot and that if it is flattering, perhaps we could take another one directly under the fluorescents, which tend to be harsh and emphasize my sallow complexion and medically enlarged nose. She tells me she is going to call the police, so I leave. I have not gotten everything I had hoped for, but I have gotten something. For now, there is nothing left to do but wait.
The specialty shoe division has been created to sell specialty shoes, specifically clown shoes, elevator shoes, animal face slippers, and unpaired shoes for the one-footed. For “one-foots,” I propose a service I call “shoe buddies,” in which a single-footed customer could search our database to locate an other-footed customer of similar size and fashion sense to go “halfsies” with. Allen says I’m a genius, perhaps, and that time will tell.
Of course, immediately following this, my co-worker Henrietta proposes “sock buddies,” which is, when all is said and done, still my idea just dressed in a hat. [...]
Wait. Something is coming to me. A conversation with Ingo one night during our dinner break of ramen and reconstituted evaporated milk.
“Most of us are invisible,” he said. “We live our lives unrecorded. When we die, it’s soon as if we have never lived. But we are not without consequence, because, of course, the world does not function without us. We have jobs. We support economies. We take care of children and the elderly. We are kind to someone. We murder. The existence of us, the unseen people, must be acknowledged, but the dilemma is that once acknowledged, we are no longer truly those same unseen people. Your Dardenne brothers, your De Sicas, your Satyajit Rays are honorable, talented filmmakers, decent and, I suspect, caring, but the work they do is wrongheaded. Once the Unseen are seen, they are no longer Unseen. These men have perpetuated a fiction. I have struggled with this issue, and my solution is to build and animate the world outside the view of my camera. These characters exist and are as carefully animated as those seen in the film. They are just forever out of view.”
love the gags about the food they eat
I SUSPECT HENRIETTA IS plotting to kill me. I can’t say that I blame her. I am the department favorite and, whereas I have many other irons in the fire, with my book on Ingo soon to be fully remembered, then written, then released, and then my plan to film a live-action remake of the film, this is it for Henrietta. I heard her confide to a colleague in the ladies’ room, while I was secreted in a stall, that she had wanted to work in shoes since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. She actually said “knee-high to a grasshopper.” I was astounded. Meanwhile, I had never even considered a job like this until I was halfway through a masturbation fantasy about being a salesman in a shoe store fitting Tsai into a pair of slightly too-tight red Mary Janes. Oh my Lord. Tsai! In all the distractions of the new division, I had almost forgotten about my reason for being here. It takes Henrietta and her friend so long to leave that I am ready to scream and charge from the stall. But I do not. I am in control.
can't stop laughing at this
Certainly Farrow is a filmmaker to watch. One sympathizes with her desire to separate herself from her father’s well-known surname, as well as his nose—for it seems apparent, if one compares earlier and more recent photos, Farrow has undergone cosmetic rhinoplasty. Still, one wonders if there will be some regret down the road. Of course she can always reapply her true surname but not her true nose. One understands the necessity of forging one’s own identity, but it must be said that herein lies the film’s major flaw, and it is a profound and ultimately fatal one. By making the father such an impossibly caricaturish buffoon, Farrow renders the conflict between the two inert. The film hinges on this conflict, for the relationship with her father is the most crucial one in the movie. If the filmmaker makes no attempt to show him as a complex human being with his own set of frustrations and indeed monumental artistic integrity, not to mention an unwavering love for his daughter, then the truth of this relationship is erased, leaving a gaping hole in the story. As a father to a daughter myself, I feel much sympathy for the struggles of any young person to forge an independent identity, but the film’s falseness is ultimately so egregious that I cannot in good conscience recommend it. I do think Ms. Farrow is a promising young director, and I look forward to her next outing. Two stars.
oh boy
In my first class, I almost got into a fistfight with Warren Beatty over the ranking of Godard’s Weekend. It was at that point the only film I’d ever seen and, therefore, I put it at number one. Beatty put it at seven because he didn’t understand it. He insisted the film was a critique of fascism, which is about as insightful as saying that Network is a critique of Peter Finch. I told him as much. A shoving match ensued. Beatty is a big man, but his muscles felt oddly gelatinous. I thought maybe he had some sort of condition and I should be gentle with him. However, my passion won out, and I knocked him out with an elbow to his jaw, which left an indentation as if his face had been made out of wet clay. It was an indentation that remained for a week, eventually popping back out during class with a sort of sucking sound. I expected to be expelled at the very least and likely jailed, but when Beatty came to, he seemed a somewhat changed man, at least in regard to Weekend. He said his evaluation of the film had been shallow and admitted he had never really watched it all the way through. And then a miraculous thing happened: He looked me in the eye and said, “Teach me.” And I did.
We went to the cinema and watched Weekend together. I explained what Godard was doing and why. Beatty was an eager student. He admitted he had spent so much time womanizing that his movie-viewing skills had suffered. I said, “Let’s remedy that.” We became close (he will deny we ever met, due to a falling out we had over a young Diane Keaton, but we were very close, even sharing an apartment for three semesters). Cimino was a tougher nut to crack, although we did vacation in Aruba over one spring break and had a grand time. So began my education in film. After all, is not teaching the best way to learn?
“You know I hate the Circus/Magic convention. Let me do the Great American Children’s Shoe Show Extravaganza of Anaheim and get Tom to do this one.”
“Tom’s getting married that week.”
“Oh, fuck. Right.” I pause. Then: “Y’know, I’ve been meaning to mention this for some time now, but I don’t think it’s fair that just because Tom is a member of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints he gets to have so many days off for weddings.”
“We’re not going up against the Fourteenth Amendment just so you can get out of clown convention duty.”
“But polygamy is illegal, Jeff, so—”
“Listen, we’re between a rock and a hard place here, and we’re not going to set ourselves up as a test case for the constitutionality of federal polygamy laws just so you can get out of your mandatory clown convention duty. You know Tom is just itching for that fight.”