Head of state

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The boy wanted to see if the President's hair felt like his own...

How do you like them apples?

From the Good Will Hunting screenplay introduction by Gus Van Sant:

"We drove across the country."

"How long did it take you?" I asked.

"Fifty-five...?" Ben speculated.

"Fifty-seven hours," Matt said as a matter of fact.

"But the reason that we drive is we don't like to fly."

"Terrified of flying."

"We drive across the country about every two weeks."

"That's what is seems like."

Ben drives and Matt doesn't -- even when they are staying in L.A., Ben often ends up driving Matt around like the character in Good Will Hunting named Chuckie who drives Will. (Note that at the end of the film Good Will Hunting, Matt is driving the picture car and you can see how it's hard for him to steer a straight course.)

"When we say that we drove across the country, we mean that I drive and Matt rides along," Ben informs me.

"Fifty-five hours is fast, too," I say.

"Fifty-seven..."

"I mean..."

"Still fast though..."

"We're just trying to get to a meeting we have tomorrow at Fox and since we can't fly, we do this straight-through thing."

"Not a lot of sight-seeing," Matt says.

But Matt still doesn't take a turn at the wheel; he just makes up stories with Ben to keep him from falling asleep.

"A lot of Good Will was written on such cross-country road trips. We tell each other stories while in a particular character, usually to make each other laugh or to make sure that Ben doesn't fall asleep at the wheel."

"The stories have to be good or I start to nod off."

"So it sort of ups the ante as far as the story quality goes. When we get into an improv that we both like, that we both think is going well and dialogue we are relatively excited by, I will open up the glove compartment where I keep my notebook and write down a few notes that we will use later to recall the entire improvisation," Matt says.

"When we do finally stop the car I'll unpack a laptop computer and we'll write down the new pages by reinventing it," Ben says.

"We also write by fax," Matt says.

"Fax?" I ask them.

"We were often apart because of acting commitments, so when I was filming in Alpine, Texas, and spending a lot of time indoors trying to get out of the Texas heat I would write pages and send them off to Ben by fax. Ben was doing his film in Leadville, Colorado, and he would pick up the fax I sent to his production office, and work on the new pages and then send them back to me in Alpine."

"And let it be said," Ben adds, "that when we are doing this, most of the time we are trying to make ourselves laugh. We are going for a shared reactions. We're going for a good time."

"Or we cry. We might make ourselves cry, too," Matt says.

"Yes, and also a lot of the time we'll have a few beers while we are writing. We're just hanging out with each other trying to entertain ourselves."

"When we happen to be staying in the same hotel we'll write on the weekends or on our days off. Part of the reason we worked on this script so much was that we often had huge amounts of time off in strange cities and there was absolutely no choice but to keep yourself occupied or go crazy from the boredom, so we would write together to keep from going insane," Matt says.

I was witness to one of their many hotel room rewrites. There was a good deal of procrastination when during my particular visit. This could have been because they had been through so many rewrites before that they were tired of rewriting. There have been about ten rewrites in all. The first meeting that I had with them, we took a sight-seeing trip around West Memphis, Arkansas. Days later when things really got down to the wire and it seemed that we were just goofing off and hanging out and watching hotel movies and really not getting anything done at all, that's when Ben and Matt would fly into action and create something almost spontaneously with Matt standing in the middle of the hotel room demonstratively gesturing and editing ideas by drawing dotted lines in the air with his hands, with Ben writing down dialogue on his laptop computer. Ben not only does the driving but he also does the typing.

Two best friends driving across deserts, faxing each other between remote locations, and hanging out in hotels trying to make each other laugh and cry over a three-year period is how they managed to put this amazing screenplay together.

Ever since I read this in fifth grade, I've wanted to drive across the country with my best friend, keeping my notebook in the glove compartment to keep track of our burgeoning screenplay. It might take a little longer than fifty-seven hours, but, God will(hunt)ing, it seems I'm finally livin' the dream!

Prep school sure does prepare you

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Yesterday in the mail I received an unexpected package.

My cuckoo bananas high school Nuclear Proliferation teacher, the finest penpal I've ever had -- whose name is so completely ridiculous that, "a short story fiction editor would say, 'Sorry, This name sounds implausible'" -- had sent me a quart of motor oil.

Mobil Clean 5000 5W-30 performance motor oil, "proven protection for 5,000 miles, guaranteed," to be exact.
A sign of senility, or a sign of the new economy?

In the new economy, you have to squirrel away your savings

This is the squirrel who watched the Sox/Tigers game on Tuesday night. Literally about 1/8th of the broadcast was devoted to his antics. He seemed sort of...glum. Maybe he just got laid off from Chrysler. That would actually be really sad.

No country for old men

Today marks five years since Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th President of the United States, left our shores for that great Berlin Wall of the beyond. May he rest in peace; may they have jelly beans where he's gone.

The worst thing about being sick in America, Ethel, is you are booted out of the parade. Americans have no use for the sick. Look at Reagan: he’s so healthy, he’s hardly human, he’s a hundred if he’s a day, he takes a slug in his chest and two days later he’s out west riding ponies in his PJ’s. I mean, who does that? That’s America. It’s just no country for the infirm.

(Roy Cohn to Ethel Rosenberg, “Angels In America, Part II: Perestroika,” by Tony Kushner).

If they don't win it's a shame

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In the new economy, Motown's making soul again. This season, General Motors informed Comerica Field (home to the Detroit Tigers) that they wouldn't be able to continue sponsoring the General Motors fountain behind center field, which sends up showers of water whenever the Tigers score a homerun.

No matter, said Tigers owner Mike Ilitch. We're going to keep your sign up there. In fact, we're going to put Chrysler and Ford up there, too.

The vice president of communications for the team said of Ilitch's decision:

It's a community decision, not a business decision. He cares about the city of Detroit. This is something he wanted to do. It's for the Big Three.

All three logos now adorn the fountain, with a sign beneath that says "The Detroit Tigers support our automakers."

Threadbare in the new economy

My dear friend BC sent me the following advice:

I have a solution for your thread conundrum. Buy white thread but use a Sharpie or marker to 'color' it black, blue, celadon, or orange. It works for me!

Now, homegirl's got a Fulbright under her belt, so these wise words are truly from a Wise Woman. Excellent idea, right? Hungary will be lucky to have her.

Take a picture, it'll last longer

Every life list has, I would imagine, a sub-list exclusively dedicated to things to do in New York. My friend EBM is about to pack up his New York life for an adventure in the great beyond, and told me he's been making "sad lists" of things to do for the first time, and things to do for the last time. After vegging at Veselka, poetically pacing around Coney Island, and seeing the site of the old World's Fair (which I forced upon him), what is left to do? The answer is, of course: so much (and we all know it).

One of my major goals has always been to walk the entire length of Manhattan. The length of the entire island, ("from the Battery to the top of Manhattan" sing the Beastie Boys in "An Open Letter to NYC") is about 13.5 miles. I will happily confess that I got this idea from an essay Adam Gopnik wrote about Richard Avedon in the book Richard Avedon, Evidence: 1944-1994 which begins:

On an April morning sometime in the middle of the nineteen eighties, in his sixty-fifth or sixty-sixth or sixty-seventh year, the American photographer Richard Avedon called up a friend and proposed that together they walk the length of Manhattan Island. This invitation, as with any Avedon project, was a compound of quick sensitivity (the friend's wife was out of town on what the friend thought was a pointlessly quixotic pilgrimage to her Scandinavian homeland, and he had been ostentatiously moping for a week); grandiose ambition, decently tempered by fine-print realism (by "the length of the island" Avedon didn't, it turned out, really mean to walk from Spuyten Duyvil to the Harbor, but just the length of Fifth Avenue from the Metropolitan Museum to Washington Square -- the navigable river of commerce and art on which most of his sixty-odd years had been spent; still, a solid eighty or ninety blocks); an endless and omnivorous appetite for the things of the world (there were three or four exhibitions of photography and painting that he hadn't seen, and he had had one of his assistants type out the details on a neat card, with two suggestions for lunch, one very high -- a caviar emporium -- and one very low -- a particularly appealing hot dog stand by the Seventy-second Street pond); and a love for -- no, more than a love, a belief, a faith in -- the ineluctable beauty and power of the new (walking Fifth Avenue in a single morning was something that he had never done before, and would now have the joy of doing for the first time).

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Because Gopnik's essay also references a photograph Avedon took of W.H. Auden standing on St. Mark's Place during a snowstorm in 1960, I've conflated both stories and now imagine Richard Avedon walking the length of Manhattan in a blizzard.

Another sixty-five year old, Thomas Keane, completed Avedon's goal -- and then some -- when, on December 15, 1952, he made the front page of the New York Times (below the fold) for "Walking In Every Street in Manhattan." Keane, a Navy Commander, spent four years trying to walk "every street, avenue, alley, square and court" on the island:

When visitors have only an hour in town, the commander recommends the walk from Christopher Street on the west, eastward along Eighth Street, as a stroll that offers the greatest variety for the eye and for the ear.

His final walk was that final 13-mile stretch of Broadway from the tippy-top of the island to the Battery.

Fifty years later, Columbia librarian Caleb Smith set himself the same goal of walking every street in town. I just love his Sharpie-ed-out map of every street he traversed.

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Even if you never leave your own backyard, you should get to know every inch of what is available to you. Not a silly goal at all.

In the new economy, price of cereal grains skyrockets

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The Times reported on a planned Catcher in the Rye sequel today. Some cuckoo bananas dude named John David California (do we think he would be "J.D. California" on the title page?) planned to pen this foolish fancy, but good ol' J.D. "I Only Eat Macrobiotic Foods" Salinger whopped him with a major lawsuit, filed in the Federal District Court of Manhattan. This new installment would have, supposedly, featured "a 76-year-old character called Mr. C, who wanders the streets of New York after he escapes his nursing home, in a manner similar to Holden Caulfield's escape from an elite prep school." However, in the new economy, Mr. C has no health care, so, after slipping on the ice in Central Park while looking for ducks, he is unable to pay for a cast for his broken leg. And then he dies.

Cross the street and find a poet

Vicious, like I hit you on the head with this flower.

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RH likes the Lou Reed reference from one of my recent posts. He says, "If Lou Reed had any humanity, he would be proud of you -- he would be proud of me!"

While Lou Reed may resemble an over-the-hill heroin monkey, here is some proof of his humanity, and his true heart. In December of 1995, he wrote the below piece for the New York Times magazine section after the death of Sterling Morrison -- his best man (and band mate). In fourteen years, I've never forgotten Morrison's "leaves" imagery. You won't, either. (The above picture is of Sterl).

"Sterling Morrison: Velvet Warrior," December 21, 1995:

Sterling said the cancer was like leaves in the fall, a perfect Morrison description; he loved the English language. When asked if he had a guitar to play, he said yes, he did, but he had watched seven-- he'd counted-- seven layers of skin peel from his body, and that had made guitar playing and quite a few other things painful. This eye for detail was very much Sterling. In fact, it saved my life once. We were playing in an airplane hangar in Los Angeles in 1966. This was two years after we'd got out of college, where we'd first met, student friends and musician buddies. I was standing near a microphone when I heard Sterl call gently but firmly, "Don't move." I turned my head just in time to see smoke, one of my guitar strings vaporized by the ungrounded microphone it had just touched. I would have been ashes.

I arrived at his house by train from the city with depressing thoughts in my head and not one decent suggestion. I was struck by how big he was. Perhaps that was accentuated by the extreme gauntness of his once-muscular physique. He was bald with nothing but skin over bone. But his eyes. His eyes were as alert and clear as any eyes I've seen in this world. Not once did he complain. We spoke of music and old band mates. We talked baseball. We never spoke of what was going on.

Maureen, old friend and Velvet drummer, and Sterling's wife, Martha, had gone downstairs. Sterl lay in bed, seeming to drift off, and I wondered if I should leave. I walked to the side of the bed to say goodbye when he suddently stuck his hand out. "Help me up," he said. He was strong despite the illness, but then he'd always been the strongest one. When he had played his passionate solos, I had always seen him as a mythic Irish hero, flames shooting from his nostrils. We sat like that, him upright in bed, me sitting with my back to an open window, holding his hand. And all the questions I had were answered and all the past differences resolved. And in the extraordinary moments when men transcend their bodies and words are spoken at their own peril, in those moments that move beyond speech and picture, in these moments that only an artist can capture, I saw my friend Sterling: Sterl, the great guitar-playing, tug-boat-captaining, PhD.-ing professor, raconteur supreme, argumenatative, funny, brilliant; Sterl as the architect of this monumental effort, possessor of astonishing bravery and dignity. The warrior heart of the Velvet Underground.

I missed the train back to New York and sat on the cement pavement waiting for another. I very badly wanted a cigarette and a drink. My God, I thought, We'll never play guitar together again. No more Nico. No more Andy. No more Sterl.

On the day of the Mass, I was in Cleveland playing rock-and-roll, my answer to every crisis. As the chords to "Sweet Jane swelled up, I hoped somehow my friend heard them and got a laugh. After all, he was the first one who heard the song the night I wrote it, more than 25 years ago, in the summer, before the leaves fell in the fall.