3/18/23
Newsletter #279
The Crack of Dawn
I’ve noticed a recent pattern of speech that I thought was occurring with primarily younger women, but my friend Jane said it’s both women and men. The middle T is being dropped in the word “important,” so that it’s now pronounced, “Impor’ant.” Listen and you will hear it because even newscasters are saying it.
A common phrase that has become ubiquitous is, “I’m sorry.” I find that people are constantly apologizing. When people used to say, “Pardon me” or “Excuse me,” they now say “I’m sorry” instead. I recently tried watching the HBO remake of Ingmar Bergman’s, Scenes From a Marriage, with Jessica Chastain and Oliver Isaac. For such a simple story – a happily married couple watches their best friends go through a divorce, which causes them to get divorced – it’s incredible how badly they fucked it up. The other couple are now interracial, she’s bi, and they have an open marriage, which so complicates the issue the point was lost. But I swear, at the end of every other line of dialogue is, “I’m sorry.” Personally, I try to apologize as little as possible, and mean it when I do it.
When I was just in Hollywood I spent a fair amount of time sitting in the Ovation Plaza –located beside the Chinese Theater and the Ray Dolby Theater, where the Oscars were just telecast – watching tourists from all over the world walk by. Without the slightest bit of overstatement, every single one of them was on their phone. People of every race, color, sex, shape, and age, all on their phones. An entire family of six had gone to all of the trouble it took to fly from Asia to Hollywood to see the handprints and footprints in the Chinese Theater forecourt, and not a single one was paying the slightest bit of attention, all of them on their phones. As I’ve come to understand life in my sixty-four years, the most important thing you can do is to be present. Don’t regret the past, don’t worry about the future, be here now. If you’re on the phone, you’re not present – it’s that simple. I’ll go one step further: if you sit down and place your phone on the table in front of you, you’re not present. If you take a call or start texting while another person is stuck sitting there with you, you’re an impolite asshole. And just because everybody else is doing it doesn’t make you any less of an asshole.
In fact, and this is age-old wisdom, if everybody is doing it – herd mentality – it’s a bad idea. As my mother used to say, “If everybody was jumping off the Ambassador Bridge, would you do it too?” If everybody has their cell phone in their right hand all the time, then I certainly won’t. If you do, think about it.
Regarding this year’s Oscars, of which I watched twenty minutes, thank heaven they put all the categories back in. The entire point of that ceremony is to give awards and allow the winners to express their thanks. The second they decided to chase the winners off the stage with loud music, the whole show went to hell. I saw Ke Huy Quan win Best Supporting Actor, then honestly and truly lose it – that’s what the Oscars are about. I also saw Jamie Lee Curtis win Best Supporting Actress, and dedicate the award to her parents who were both nominated, but didn’t win. In case you were interested, Janet Leigh was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in 1960 for Psycho, and lost to Shirley Jones for Elmer Gantry (one of my favorites, for which Burt Lancaster – my favorite actor – won Best Actor); Tony Curtis was nominated for Best Actor in 1958 for The Defiant Ones, where he was handcuffed to Sidney Poitier. But he really should have been nominated the year before for The Sweet Small of Success, starring (and produced by) Burt Lancaster.
I generally don’t go in for “favorites” or top tens if I can avoid it, but someone bugged me bad enough maybe ten years ago regarding my favorite actor and actress, so I figured out a method. I counted how many good to great movies a number of actors were in. The winners were Burt Lancaster with nineteen and Katherine Hepburn with seventeen. Therefore, I say with mathematical assurance, Burt Lancaster is my favorite actor.
Finally, in pace requiescat (Latin for “Rest in peace”) to jazz saxophonist, Wayne Shorter, who lived to be 89. Wayne started his career in the unenviable position of replacing John Coltrane in Miles Davis’s band, and came out alive. Wayne then formed the band Weather Report with Joe Zawinul from Cannonball Adderly’s band (Zawinul wrote, Mercy, Mercy, Mercy). They cut ten albums, all of which I have managed to accumulate and am now listening to. Inarticulately put, Wayne Shorter just has a great sound. I watched a couple of performances of Weather Report last night on YouTube. What struck me with the ever-changing roster of musicians going through the band, including the incredible Jaco Pastorius on bass, is they’re really good at getting out of each other’s way.
I watched an interview with Wayne Shorter shot on the day he died. He’s perfectly lucid and discussing the importance of art. I think he was right.
And a jolly fucking good day to you, too.