contempt is the mirror of envy in the one envied

Being around others so smart

they can improvise a new language on the fly and talk circles around you.

to a friend

your friendship has been constant over the years, as in a constant depth of about 2 inches

For those of you who don't know me

My name is X. Those of you who do know my real name


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I react to obstacles and impediments for motivation - anger and indignation the fuel

however when they are eliminated there is no longer motivation.  that needs to change now.

something about the excruciating unfitness

of the human race to solve this climate problem.  seen through the unfitness of one individual who is blindsided by a problem he can't get a handle on or even assess properly.  empathetic treatment.

Movie: Light Keeps Me Company

Interesting to see Nykvist and his work and interactions with Bergman etc, but what a crass exploitative frame on it. This Siddhartha bullshit while he is staged wandering around aimlessly, endlessly. An embarassment despite the many luminaries interviewed in admiration.


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praising others' genius

has a bright side - piety, admiration
and a dark side - excuse for non-achievement onesself

Anger is cancer

Like meets like, undifferentiated cells killing the host.


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Smart novelists

I think the best novelists are perhaps necessarily not the smartest ones. It's the ones who find pleasure in representing what's a challenge to make beautiful. I don't believe Tolstoy was a genius, as in all-around smart guy. I feel he recognized he had a genius FOR a certain kind of expression and this helped him tackle some of the preoccupations (with theories of history etc) that he was less genius at. Novelists for example like Iris Murdoch, William T. Vollman, maybe Richard Powers, strike me as so innately and broadly intelligent that their work is arid in some basic way: it wants to be a philosophical treatise, an encyclopedic history etc, instead of a story told with some representational acumen as a way for the author to see and make communion with an imagined readership, which is what those with this limited gift accomplish, writing books that live.


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art = eloquence about something loved

could be the meanest, roughest subject, but this holds true I think

Tgiving

Hart given foxtail and alligator skirt; tossing doll twice into chandelier; Sevi doing puzzles. Twice walking perimeter of wet meadow; fox sighting; relaxed feast w Esty burns Adrien G&G

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Idea: bear

Talking at dinner party with friends about a bear, and the friends don't know what bear means.


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Silly Billy

Book: Ethan Frome

A powerful page-turner with such a vivid premise.  The ending to me is a caricaturish violation, a real letdown.  If that's any indication of Wharton's strengths as a writer I wouldn't bother with the longer works.

Book: Essays by Wallace Shawn

Striking in the way it makes you think about the war, about the bubble of the elites.  Committed to truthfulness, engagingly written.  Turned me on to Mark Strand.  Ends on kind of a week note about Shawn's sex writing, about which we're supposed to be familiar?  As to being understood and acceptance, it does come back to me that I simply failed to stay awake during the Designated Mourner--couldn't make it through that.  Still, Shawn is one of a kind--you feel as if you know him and count him among the most valued friends.

Movie: Little Dieter Needs to Fly

finally saw this--magnificent.

Albert Finney

struck me after watching Miller's Crossing again, first time in probably a decade,  Finney at that age would have been perfect for Beecher.  Who else today is like him?

Seeking Water, Seeking Shelter

Dutch meal at Old First, rabbit, spoon bread etc, Kids loved it

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Test

Ok




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the more you ARE something

the more you AREN'T something else...reified one way, open to error and attack

the fragile thing about the good person

the pathos of worrying for them that they will be harmed or go wrong or be disillusioned.  

something like

every great artist must create the taste by which he will appreciated

Movie idea: Fossil Collector

Mary Anning, 1810, scoured beaches with her brother after parents died looking for fossils to support the family.  found the first ichthyosaur

Movie: Everybody getting smaller

-

but the protagonist.  outmoded, resource hog.  omega man

Selfish people want the world to die with them

That is  to what I chalk up much of the complacency re: global warming.

In Williamsburg, heard Sinead

Was eating lunch in a Williamsburg sandwich shop called Pops and heard Sinead O'Connor's "Mandinka" playing.  Took me back 20 years, to the summer I lived in mom and dad's tiny apt at the Alexandria.  Editing there, that brief fling with Melissa that I had to end after one real night the next morning.  Getting an "arancini" rice ball across the street after getting caught in the rain...

No more a shambling bone tower

lucubrations

The somebody else

Will take care of it attitude among artists. I'm the reward and
incentive for others to make the world work.

Greedy books of the past

vision of fingers grabbing out from books in bookshelves in bookstore.  the greed of authors past trying to buttonhole you.  brought to mind the blake quote "eternity is in love with the productions of time"

Drama is better than tv drama

Because human life ends; tv series don't

Art can always be made

Don't you believe that it can't.  It always can be.  The moment is renewed and you're standing there gawking--yes it was true all along.

hard to fathom it but

you have to be celebrated for what you uniquely have become.  owing to the world, sure, but not a copy of others owed.

one of the tedious qualities

of Updike is this sense of a recipe, chunks of narrative all filled with their elements, above all rich descriptive passages that sometimes wag the dog.  Perhaps like Joyce Carol Oates it's too much reliant on knowing the ending first and writing backward, so that the writing of the novel may be a kind of coloring book finishing out for the author.  More alive and stronger might be not knowing where things are going in some real sense, surrendering to instinct and the enormity of the project and letting it release something wonderful.  A kind of breakthrough like that achieved by Bellow after Dangling Man and the other one until he hit stride with the infinite possibilities of Augie March.  It may be Updike arrived too in this way, I'll have to read more.

First Updike

After a few months of listening to the audiobook of "Rabbit, Run" while washing dishes, finally finished tonight.  About halfway through I started to understand the accomplishment.  Very good.  And such an influence I see so many other places, "The Graduate", all the work of Tom Perotta (sub-par in comparison) etc.  So Updike was good after all, not just prolific.  I will now read more of the rest, I'm sure.  Too bad I waited for his death to get me over the strange resistance I always had to him.  To be fair the distaste came from that feverish week when I bought the cassette tapes of "Rabbit at Rest" (I believe it was) thinking I could fast forward and get Updike, but unfortunately a 104+ temperature had me delirious and drenching the sheets day after night after day, and I always stuck that nauseating audiobook with its interminable suburban set pieces and characters glowering over my illness with a grudge joined to that nightmarish week.  That was early in the time of Jane living with me at 215 Garfield, so must have been 90 or 91.  So, a setback, but there you have it.

on news of an old friend having kids

she thought of some obscene growth he let happen and left to pollute the world...that's what kids were to her, offspring of old lovers she felt only anger toward anymore

Apple Map of Brooklyn

View Apple Trees in Brooklyn in a larger map

a soulless person

is one who you either don't understand or understand too well

Shaggy to Smooth

History as the progression from shaggy local to universal smooth.  How could a mediaeval man have perceived a quasar - immensity smooth ball with tolerances of millimeters.

Communion

Hart is a communer with joy, a connector instinctively.  Withholding isn't natural to him.

true observers

Guy's idealized version of his family, astute unraveling of mysteries out of clues witnessed of people they see at airport.  Kids passionate sleuths.  The reality slothful and otherwise.

Movie: The Pick-up Artist

Finally saw after 20 some years.  Interesting they shot in Coney Island same year I shot Pearls Before Swine.  Lame movie.  Toback is all panache, but can't pull off the drama of a Scorsese and can't passionately pursue a story without getting sidetracked with his own brilliance.  Molly Ringwald, what horrible casting, and pretty much at the limits of her powers (as opposed to heights).  Even Robert Downey Jr. seemed kind of plain and without his subsequent manic inspiration.  Fingers was better, if even a bit overreaching, at least had some genuine balls to it.  This seems like an attempt to pander and get acceptable, but horribly mawkish results.  weak all around.  Toback may be an auteur but there's not a lot of brilliance on the screen.

the thicket of cliches

how much writing will I need to do to get a view through it, standing on my hindlegs in the savannah grasses

have passed through the journeyman phase and the lure of writing for money.  so now to it, and what remains of it.

re: Grandfather

not seeing family is a way of not acknowledging that times passes and will end.

Hart in tub sings Saturday Night

in homage to Sevi, who is on a flight to France at the moment, reprises her song (to the tune of Sat night, Cat Stevens...)

Saturday Night and I ATE everybody

Saturday Night and I ate everBODy

Saturday Night and I'm doin the Cha-Cha

Walkin in a Winter Wonderland...

Waxman-Markey #2

Jeremiad #2: Just about any lapse in law, any delay in justice, any error in judgment can later be remedied. But here we are up against something very nearly past fixing. Feedback loops that portend runaway climate change will not be reined in on a human timescale. Climate disequilibrium isn't about rocking the boat, it's about capsizing. And we are already about 10 years late to respond. This is about agriculture failing where it once thrived; about disease and famine outbreaking pervasively; about angry politicians unable to represent even angrier constitutients in a physical world that stops cooperating with expectations. It's about the threat of a great levelling, about the pruning away of society's richness, about the privatization of dwindling resources, even about private armies and warlordism turning commonplace as societies lose the means to protect and so sacrifice the values of equity, cohesion and liberty. Please tell reps to support Waxman-Markey now. The congressmen are begging for public support for this. It comes up for a vote within 2 weeks. All about it: http://www.grist.org/article/2009-06-03-waxman-markey-bill-breakdown/

unoriginal

It doesn't matter that it's been said or thought before any more than it matters that others breathed before.  the point is in the act of origination, no matter how often it happens.  a bit of the eternal delight.

crying as a kind of bleeding

and that's why there has to be an end to grief

a character representing the real world

in  a tough ass sort of way, tries to scare Tilton into shame for being precious.  all religion a luxury says this guy.

one asks questions

without question marks.  The other's ever declarative sentence ends with one?

to me my own

here we go again

Some one mentioned the heavy rain coming

and we all got quiet with looks of consternation. some kind of piety
toward the idea of helplessness gave a nod to. strange, there in the
hallway of the public school...

expectation

He held on, stubborn that the thing would appear in the mailbox one
day. Til he started to get old and sick and realized ain't nothing
was coming in the mail lessin he sent it to himself. So he yanked out
a ream and chuffed the head off a dusty pencil, thwacked and shook the
bubbles out of his fountain pen obsessively like it was themometer or
hypodermic. this was it. shit time.

the privilege

The privilege of expressing yourself fully as an artist is the same as the privilege of avoiding getting slain by cancer.  Vigilance and unremitting work.

praise be to those who

do what they are good at

role of the adult

to keep adult anxiety, if not invisible, then clearly on a shelf too high for children to reach, and therefore clearly for them to ignore or feel no obligation toward remedying.  adults who put it on the low shelf are kind of despicable.

Movie: The Foot Fist Way

Rented and watched this after hearing Elvis Mitchell on THE TREATMENT refer to as groundbreaking in comedy.  Found it mediocre and flailing, only a few nice bits with McBride.  trashy like John Waters, belligerently assinine like that guy's films who did Clerks.  it's a niche all right, a niche for dumbasses.

Movie: The Reader

imitation of a movie. felt like the pastiche that Winslet played in
"Extras" felt sorry for Kate, so gorgeous, such an astute actress, so
ill-used. as usual, can never stand Ralph Fiennes in anything.

facebook is goblin market

inasmuch as all social interaction has an element of goblin market

I was on oven door of crude aspiration

Zipped, that he wasn't...

Zipped, that he wasn't zip it wires from the aisles.
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the DaVinci code

is Dostoyevski for dummies.  the movie, a drawn out noirish turd

sunset provision

a man trapped a snapper
wading into a bog
the wind buffs the bright green
shaggy leaves laughing
their heads off
look down from high branches
wrinkle your eyes
and be amused

drs in the day

the walls are low brick stubs

where mds paced back and forth

all thought and subtlety

wearing grooves.

drs on rounds

with pads

no more walls

ceilings gone

weeds caved them

the chitter of locusts

who care less

an aztec

mystery to curl

like a cherry stem

Alex Revell

Every morning when we came into class, first class of the day, Mr.
Revell had already been there for an hour. The blackboards, front and
side, were completely covered in sentences written in his tidy cursive
script. These were our sentences, taken from the last writing
assignment. You scanned them anxiously to see if your sentence was
among them, and if so, whether it was on the board because it
contained some kind of instructive mistake, or because it was a
particularly shining example of great prose. The mixture of dread and
pride always brought up the adrenaline upon entering that room--better
than the acid coffee on offer in the dining hall (do they still offer
that, I expect not). And the fact that the analysis of the sentences
would be left up to us, as a class, and only afterward commented on by
Mr. Revell. I think this was the single most effective (and dramatic)
pedagogic tool I have ever experienced in all my education (including
college and graduate school). Revell was a canny, down-to-earth
presence. Not a whiff of pretense about the man. Yet as solid and
incisive as he was, he was also ultimately warm and forgiving. I'll
never forget my boneheaded failure to interpret "When in eternal lines
to time thou growest" from a Shakespearean sonnet in the culminating
test of the semester, and how he corrected, yet gave it insignificant
weight in the grade. We all have these lacunae that can be quite
embarrassing, particularly as we are learning, which he understood.
Ever grateful for the privilege of learning from him and in feeling
that in him I had a very wise and supportive friend.

Kraz

Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)

Friends, family rue Katrina's toll on actor found dead by river

   Mark Schleifstein

Staff writer

Published: September 19, 2006

The image many remember of local actor Mark Krasnoff is as the "eloquently anguished" composer Antonio Salieri, railing against God for elevating rival Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to icon status in a unique puppet and human staging of the play "Amadeus." Or it may have been his portrayal, sans makeup, of the tragically disfigured John Merrick in "The Elephant Man," described by one reviewer as "a personal, achingly human" performance. But friends and family members say the multitalented Mr. Krasnoff, 43, fought his own internal demons during the past few months, as he watched friends and acquaintances either struggle with Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, or give up and leave New Orleans.

On Sunday, Mr. Krasnoff's body was discovered on a rocky area at the edge of the Mississippi River at the Fly, the riverfront park behind the Audubon Zoo, the victim of an apparent suicide, according to the Orleans Parish coroner's office.

"Mark was looking around at the things that were going on after Katrina, and he was so moved by losing so many friends who were gone, and it just got to him," said his uncle, Nat Krasnoff.

"He very much deteriorated as a direct impact of this hurricane," said longtime friend Paul Olinde.

"This is a man who loved the city, who loved the people, not only of the city but of the state," said fellow actor and radio talk show host John "Spud" McConnell. "He was a staunch defender of our dignity and he will be sorely missed."

Mr. Krasnoff was the son of Sandy Krasnoff, who headed Victims and Citizens Against Crime until his death in a car accident in 2003.

Mark Krasnoff was born in New Orleans but grew up in Ville Platte after his parents were divorced. There, he learned to speak Cajun French and how to cook Cajun favorites, such as the boudin that he sold to parade-goers during Carnival. Olinde, Mr. Krasnoff's roommate in the early 1980s when the two attended the University of Southwest Louisiana in Lafayette, said he majored in communications and minored in French. After graduating, Mr. Krasnoff moved to New York City, joining the famed Michael Chekov Institute to learn Russian acting techniques. He was so impressive that he was flown to Russia just before the fall of the Soviet Union to play a part in a Russian-language movie, Olinde said.

In 1992, Mr. Krasnoff returned to New Orleans, continuing to study acting, performing in local theater companies and local commercials, and fielding parts in movies. He won the Big Easy Entertainment Award for best male actor for his role in "The Elephant Man" in 1999.

"I thought him an extraordinary actor," said David Cuthbert, a playwright and stage reviewer for The Times-Picayune. "He appeared in a play I wrote, 'A More Congenial Climate,' at the Tennessee Williams Festival years ago. . . . He was one of the best actors in the state -- or anywhere else."

Playwright Jim Fitzmorris agreed, citing Mr. Krasnoff's roles in "Amadeus" and "The Elephant Man" as among the best performances by local actors on a New Orleans stage.

During his first few years in the city, money to tide him over between acting gigs came from a day job as a waiter at the Acme Oyster House in the French Quarter. More recently, he had started his own acting studio, offering a class for beginners and a studio program for some of the area's most experienced actors, his uncle said.

Over the years, Mr. Krasnoff garnered roles in more than 30 movies, many shot in New Orleans, including "Glory Road," "The Skeleton Key," "Runaway Jury" and "The Badge."

"He did low-budget and high-budget movies, but he gave you the same level of performance regardless of the pay or the level of the film or play," McConnell said. "He always gave 100 percent, always gave everything."

He had a longtime professional relationship with Montreal director Andre Forcier, with whom he co-wrote the script for the quirky 2004 film, "Acapulco Gold." In the film, Mr. Krasnoff co-starred as a producer looking into building a movie around an encounter in Acapulco with a man believed to be Elvis Presley in hiding.

During the past few months, Mr. Krasnoff had a small part as a police officer in "Solstice," a horror film directed in New Orleans by "Blair Witch Project" director Daniel Myrick.

Another recent role was in a comedy called "Flakes," about the owner of a store in New Orleans that sells only breakfast cereals, and his battle with a rival who opens a cereal store across the street.

Mr. Krasnoff is survived by his mother, Ruby Holmes of Belair Cove; a brother, Robert Holmes of Baton Rouge; a sister, Rouchelle Soileau of Ville Platte; two nephews and a niece.

A funeral for Mr. Krasnoff will be held Thursday at 3 p.m. at Belair Cove Chapel, off U.S. 167 East in Belair Cove, with burial following in the church cemetery. A wake will be held Wednesday from 9 a.m. to midnight and Thursday at 8 a.m. at Ardoin's Funeral Home, 709 West Main St., in Ville Platte. A rosary will be said at the funeral home Wednesday at 7 p.m.

. . . . . . .

Mark Schleifstein can be reached at mschleifstein@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3327. 

the people who feel condescended to

who act like they're holding their breath, politely, the whole time you're in their presence

Beware the spawn of brain...

Beware the spawn of brain.

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Okay, this is a very...

Okay, this is a very controlled blog post. It should work.
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growing up is especially hard

because you're continually faced with the spectre of the retard you were just a few years before.  at least once you mature and stop getting smarter, you can be appalled by other things.

Works.

Works.
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Testing

As the senses decline

Vanity compensates

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movie: happy go lucky

growing on me, as expected. more I think about it, it's largely about
humor as a survival mechanism. wonderful film. sally hawkins should
have been nominated and received the oscar. huge oversight, probably
because the audience didn't think she was acting, she was that good.

marionettes

Kept watch over the slack-jawed marionettes of 6am. A jerk here, a
twitch there, a see saw sigh

no doubt about it

all the mediocre pieces of shit out there will enrage you and conjure
forth your own mediocre piece of shitness if you give in to the
temptation to swipe and rail and rant and cuss...it's another face of
greed, this desire to stamp out the appalling competition for mental
space and achievement. it will happen, you must allow yourself to
coexist, and just might see the other face of reality, the flipside of
shittiness, if it's there at all, and it may be.

Smaller

Religion etc exercises in making world smaller

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same smile in every photograph

like she sees her role as that of nail or piece of joinery that must
shape itself just-so to engage the photograph.
gives nothing away, or rather the same exact thing away every time.
her wry commentary on herself in the age of mechanical reproduction?

biggest source of anger and avarice

the realization that you wasted the time you were given. time well
spent leaves no violent residue, or regret.

Movie: Slumdog Millionaire

After all the build-up, a disappointment, cliched and predictable.
Just a novelty being a Bolly-Holly hybrid. The unalloyed love story
carries it for sheer energy, but it has no real resonance beyond the
archetype. Goodies and baddies and kids running around trying to stay
alive. And for a gritty look at the life force animating the
underclass facing impossible odds, the Brazilian "City of God" is in a
whole other league. Makes you realize how real and genuine something
like Truffaut's Small Change was, saccharine as it may have been it
wasn't steamrollered by the same old hollywood template, as this one
was. Liked the dancing for the end credits, though--nice bollywood
touch.

Response from BJ

(Wanamaker)

Dear Kevin,

I am so very saddened about what you have told me regarding Undine. It
wasn't that long ago that I was entertaining my kids at the dinner
table with remembrances of my friend Enidu and her younger brothers
Kram and Nivek. We all wondered what became of you all.

I am just amazed that you and your mother remember me. I don't even
remember me from back then. In fact, I remember distressingly little
about anything to do with those years. I lived in a tiny house with my
mother, younger sister and a father who drank heavily and had a
volatile and unpredictable temper. I think I must have retreated into
my own little world and tried not to be noticed most of the time.
Consequently, I think a lot of things must also have escaped my notice.

I do remember that I was infatuated with Undine the moment I saw her,
which must have been the first day of third grade. She looked like a
princess to me. I wished fervently that I could be her friend, never
for a moment thinking that that was even a remote possibility. But
miraculously she wanted to be my friend, too and so we became.
Visiting your house was like entering a fairy tale to me. It was an
escape from my own life. I only remember a few details of our visits:
sleeping over on the floor of her bedroom downstairs, your dog
Duchess, eating lamb chops and blueberry muffins for dinner (still one
of my favorite combinations!), walking down the road to ramble through
some seemingly vast wooded area, making prank phone calls from Gary
Doolittle's kitchen, going along to one of her riding lessons(?),
going to your swim club, Trick or Treating together one Halloween...
But they're all just disparate memories that don't make a complete
story. I don't remember what we talked about. I think I was just happy
to be in her presence and never sought anything more.

I don't know when or why we drifted apart. As I recall, she was quite
popular. I think we started 7th grade in the same Jr. High but we
weren't in any classes together. Then you moved from Gulph Mills. I
know I spent one night in your new house and once she came with me to
a dance at the Jr. High. I think I missed her but maybe I just didn't
know how to maintain our relationship under changing circumstances.
The only other thing I remember was the last time I saw her. It must
have been August 1976. I really wanted to see her again before I left
for college at Penn State. I just got in the car one Friday evening
and drove to the house where I had last visited her. Alas, your family
had moved again, but the present owner kindly told me your new
address. I was able to find the house and she answered the door when I
knocked. You and Mark were watching TV. I think Undine and I talked
for a while in the kitchen. Your father came home and chatted for a
bit, then I left and drove back home.

No one else ever filled her place. In reality, I don't know whether
she even filled the place I constructed for her in my memory. I think
that might have been the impetus for trying to find her--to gain some
insight and perspective on what really happened, what life was really
like. Those questions may never get answered now. Instead there are
only more: How? Why? What if?

After Penn State, I went to graduate school and got a PhD in
Geophysics from Princeton, where I met my husband Bruce. I worked on
the research staff first at Cornell then at Lawrence Livermore
Laboratory in CA. Bruce was hired as a professor at the University of
Minnesota and we moved here in January 1991. I tried to continue my
research here for about ten years, then I dropped out of the science
community and started learning how to make and design different kinds
of textiles, which has been a life-long interest of mine. I don't know
whether it will lead anywhere, but I am just trying to enjoy the
process. I have two children--my daughter Irene, 13 and son Harrison,
8 1/2 (I started a little late). I'm so glad Undine had children of
her own.

You are so kind to take the time to write to me. It means a lot to me.
I would welcome the opportunity to stay in touch. Thank you for the
invitation to visit--I would like that very much. And please stop and
see us if your are ever in the neighborhood of Minneapolis. Please
give my regards to your mom. I hope you will write back if you have
the time and inclination.

Sincerely,
BJ

Letter to BJ

Hi Barbara,

Thanks for reconnecting. Someone told me that you had inquired after
Undine on a blog for Elm Court, where we used to live. I am Undine's
youngest brother Kevin. I remember you well from when the years when
we lived at Gulf Mills.

I am so sorry to confirm your apprehensions. Undine died in July of
2001. She had struggled a very long time with alcoholism, and at age
43 she died of liver failure. Undine had developed a problem with
alcohol pretty much ever since college at St. Lawrence University, but
our family was pretty obtuse about recognizing it until the late 90s,
when it became pretty apparent at a family reunion. Even so, in the
regrettable dysfunction of our dealing with it, we were not effective
in helping her confront, let alone overcome, her addiction until we
finally did a major intervention as a family in '98. This resulted in
her agreeing to go with me to undergo treatment and spend time in a
very therapeutic place called the Pavilion in Asheville, NC for a
month, at the end of which time we all went down to support her
resolve to stay sober and live as a recovered alcoholic. Undine had
one very good year following that, which I am thankful for, and got to
reconnect in meaningful ways with her then teenage daughters. Undine
had two identical twin girls in 1984 (Undine and Hilary) and a third
daughter in 1987 (Alyssa). They are all now wonderful young women,
remarkably open and positive. They would I'm sure, remind you of
Undine herself. I was especially glad that Alyssa got that extra year
with her mom, because of the three she was probably the hardest hit by
Undine's addiction, and spent the most alone time with her, often
taking care of her. In spite of an increasingly debilitating problem,
which had resulted in many harrowing episodes of emergency trips to
the hospital, detox, etc, Undine remained at core a very life-
affirming person and mother, with a wicked sense of humor and fierce
love for her daughters. Her relationship with her husband, Chris, was
more complicated and, in brief, was not one of support for overcoming
her addiction. They separated and she lived nearby. Unfortunately,
in one of the AA programs she had attended in the years before the
intervention, she had befriended a man who was an alcoholic. They
moved in together and for a time they supported each other in not
drinking, but then unfortunately enabled each other in drinking
again. After a month of relapsing she died.

In spite of the fact that she had a severe drinking problem for
virtually her entire adult life, Undine had an effect on others that
was remarkable. Nobody laughed harder nor judged people less. She
took real joy in the happiness of her children and friends, and was a
very empathetic listener to other's problems, even as she struggled to
suppress the consequences of her own. I know she regretted falling
victim to the power of alcohol and felt few could understand it; even
so she was never resigned to it, always feeling she would overcome it
in the end (a promise she made to me nearly every time I saw her). I
know she didn't want to die young and miss out on all she could see
unfold, especially in her daughters' lives.

Of all her childhood friends, you really do stand out in my memory.
Particularly your infectious laugh, which we often talked about. I
remember being quite tickled (maybe when I was 4 or 5) at eliciting
the prized B.J. Wanamaker laugh from my perch in the backseat when we
were driving you somewhere (probably home from visiting our house).
When I told my mom you had inquired after Undine she asked me to send
along her best. She is doing ok now, living in Boulder CO. Of
course she was devastated by Undine's death, and no one tried more
than my mom to help her, rescuing her countless times when she was at
her worst, looking into endless therapies and ideas, none of which
ultimately helped.

My parents divorced in the early 90s and both remarried, although my
mom's 2nd marriage lasted only a year, but she now has a very
supportive companion. My brother Mark had lived in Boulder (married,
two kids) but got called to work directing the Nature Conservancy in
CA and recently he took on work heading up a climate change initiative centered in SF. Me, I'm a documentary filmmaker
living in NYC, married and two young kids. If you ever swing by these
parts let us know; we'd love to see you. And if you ever want to get
in touch with Undine's daughters I can pass along their info. As I
mentioned, they are three wonderful spirited women and I have no doubt
they would enjoy hearing from someone who knew their mom so long ago.
I'm fairly certain no one who knew Undine from that time (other than
family) has ever talked to them about their mom.

It would be great to hear what you have been up to all these years,
whenever you find the time.

Movie: Curious Case of Benjamin Button

kind of hooey. a kernel of feeling that comes of a dramatizing a
genuinely intriguing thought/emotion experiment, but gimmicky
stereotyped and lacquered over and neither the screenwriter nor Brad
Pitt up to the task. and criminal the way they made up Cate Blanchett
to within an inch of her life, like a china doll for the young ballet
dancer period in her life, and like a suppurating turd on her
deathbed. and who the hell was it who played her daughter, the
quintessence of mod-gal, "i'm all about the information" television-
style acting. this film had a soul, but beleaguered by phony easy
solutions. and yet it may well net the oscars.

25 things - for facebook

1. is strongly ambivalent about living in either the country or the
city, but is decidedly against living in the suburbs. Is reminded of
his father's favorite questions: "Is it warmer in the summer or the
country?" and "Do you bring your lunch or drive to work?"

2. would love to have been a champion swimmer but when he tried out
for the team had to be rescued by the coach for displaying all the
fortitude of a waterlogged rat skimmed from the pool filter.

3. remembers his French teacher in high school as perhaps his favorite
mentor, albeit brief, and unknown to said teacher.

4. thinks back fondly and often on his very topsy-turvy year spent in
France 80-81.

5. still counts Badlands as his favorite film.

6. got lost in Paris streets for 2 hours age 13 in search of abrigots.

7. lived for a long time on the phrase "faire, et en faisant, se
faire" (Voltaire) but distanced himself from this after having done
several regrettable things.

8. thinks it a cruel indignity that Louis Kahn died in the men's room
at Penn Station.

9. still finds major inspiration in Mike Leigh, along with Cassavetes,
Herzog, Fellini and some others.

10. spent all summer 1985 reading plays nonstop in coffeehouses in
Seattle while living off his brother who worked briefly for an
accounting firm and quit after waking from his keyboard to see his
finger had filled the screen with zzzzs.

11. loves his wife and children with a greedy selfish chimpanzee
tribal love, and others too.

12. romantically challenged, came close to purposefully walking out
into traffic, age 22, and now thinks how very dumb that would have
been, especially for precluding #11 ever coming to pass.

13. thinks periodically about that thing Thoreau said about planning
mansions and building shacks.

14. steeped myself in the poem "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" to the
point where it felt like home for a good long while, then got cabin
fever.

15. loves Walt Whitman, Pablo Neruda.

16. considers the Adirondack Mountains the most sacred place in the
universe, yet would put wind turbines all over them if necessary
because I find these embody a necessary and beautiful idea. Can't
suffer the fools objecting to Cape Wind off Martha's Vineyard...

17. took a courier flight to Santiago Chile on a day's notice ~13 yrs
ago, joined by a friend. A week later nearly lost my life on Class 4
rapids on the Trancura River - felt like god's biggest fool til I
lived to tell about it.

18. loves Wendell Berry.

19. thinks often about what someone once described to me as the
"fertility fallacy", that you just can't keep ploughing the same field
and expect the spectacular yield you first got.

20. can't believe America was hoodwinked into buying petroleum waste
to fuel its cars when alcohol fuel ran Ford's first cars fine, was
plentiful, cheap and clean. Rockefeller bought Congress to pass
Prohbition to put Ford's ethanol preference out of business. It's
coming back, but not from made from corn, possibly the worst crop for
it. Its cycle of production and consumption nets negative C02, making
it cleaner than solar or wind, and no dang threat to food production!
Check out David Blume's work on this for the past 30 years. We're
starting an Ethanol Coop in Bklyn to ultimately support Community
Supported Energy and local farmers, and we have 2 million people lined
up for it. Ok, from ethanol back to the ethereal...

21. thinks often of Hart Crane's quote "There is the world dimensional
for those untwisted by the love of things irreconciliable."

22. thinks nearly as often of James Merrill's disquieting quote "That
least thing your self-love longs for, others instinctively withhold."

23. is a filmmaker. Thinks today that's about as differentiating as
saying "I love gold", or "I sweat when it's hot." Wonders about
someone who may have really loved gold, say in the Gold Rush, couldn't
part with it, not for love or money. like to think of myself as that
kind.

24. misses his sister Undine, gone at age 43 in 2001. loves his 3
nieces.

25. will send this on to 25 people because he feels bound to those who
sent it to him... and furthermore,

26. thinks 26 is more alive than 25, half a year, half a card deck,
all the letters, date of my birth. Mellifluous Greek against Roman/
Latin counting fingers base 10, demarcated and all contemplated up.
rather, the eyes create the world.