Purple Noon: Damn It, Matthew!

Just last week I made a lot of people who were not predisposed to love it watch The Talented Mr. Ripley.  Eventually they were rapt, because it is such a very good old-fashioned movie, in all its unsubtlety.

The chief asset of the film and the story as constructed is simple:  Tom Ripley is gay.

That's not strikingly clear in the Patricia Highsmith novel and is only tantalizing in (the brilliant in its own way) Purple Noon.  But here Tom is gay and the story is so much the better for it. You'd assume that Anthony Minghella (doing his best work) and Matt Damon (doing his best work) worked it out together.  But maybe not.

Damon's on a run that seems aimed at proving his ostensible liberal middle class Boston boy personality is a charm offensive shielding dumbass jock attitudes about race and sexuality circa 2015.

#gaylimebathingsuit

If Weathermen Were Better

It’s so beautiful I can’t think.  Only walking and looking and listening to music make sense, and yet not enough sense to convey what is happening in Alexandria now.  If weathermen were better, I’d plan my year around a single day like this and use it perfectly. I’d hire a personal chef to serve me espresso and sublime scrambled eggs in the shade of a tree and I’d read something droll there.  Droll and old-fashioned and spirit-lifting: the opposite of the news.

I would play tennis, and my forehand would hit the corners and I would barely break a sweat.

I’d meet you for lunch at that French place in Georgetown I just read about, and then we’d walk by the water.  No, much better than that: We’d drive up to Great Falls, Maryland side, and I would do something I haven’t done since I was 25: jump off a cliff into the Potomac.  You should jump too.

My chef is also my driver, and he’ll take us anywhere we want to go.  We should want to go to Annapolis or Middleburg, but we don’t.  We should want to look at art but we don’t.  (For one thing, there’s no such thing as indoors today.)  Instead I want to show you a couple of places that haven’t changed since 1982.  I can’t show you Mr. Henry’s or Au Pied de Cochon, but I can buy you a drink at Martin’s – outdoor table, please.  I can show you Dumbarton Oaks and Meridian Hill and the route I used to run along Rock Creek Parkway, with a loop through the zoo. 

I can show you the marina where Dad kept his boat and I played in the caterpillar tree.

But I’m not thinking big enough.  My chef/driver is a class-A sailor and ready to take us on a dusk sprint past monuments.  I’ve got two bottles of wine, a tremendously expensive Chablis and a $12 bottle of Salice Salentino.  France and Italy past the Kennedy Center and Lauinger Library, where it used to be that the best view was in the smoking lounge that was blown off, so to speak, for the benches by the reading room.  We looked inward rather than outwards at the wider world; we weren't yet 21.

There was always an end of summer day like this in Washington, and always an end of summer day like this in New York.  One of these days fell on the eleventh, when my friend Michou called from Amsterdam, waking me up and telling me to turn on the TV.  For three or four or five days, all the days were as beautiful as this, but I had to show identification to come back to my apartment on Jane Street.

If, by chance, I had wandered away to the river or met a friend for a glass of wine or taken a a German guy who couldn’t get back home to Nora’s show at Fez.

Good lord, Robert:  Stop writing!  Go out!  Or just keep the door flung open.

Fall Book Preview: The First Five

In the spirit of New York Magazine, The New York Times and all enthusiastic list-makers Pro and Am, here are some of the leaves that will be scattered around my bed this autumn. If I read them in order, I’ll go from England to LA to three NYC boroughs back in the day, ending up where I truly belong in fall: deep in the woods of Victorian England.

[On the Move – Oliver Sachs]
I picked this out for a friend's birthday because I knew he'd appreciate the mix of medicine and motorcycles – and figured that he'd lend it to me when he was done. (Admit it: you've done the same.) No time right now to feel sad about Sachs's death; I'm too eager to learn about his life.

AAA Rating (Autumn Appropriate Assessment): 1 Leaf
Approximately a quarter of his days were spent this time of year.

[A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith]
All I know about this famous book, more or less, is what I've gathered from the movie poster or book cover or image I made up in my mind of a sad girl in pigtails sitting on a city stoop. But I hear that it's terrific and even if it's not, I am all in on evocations of Olden Days in Brooklyn.

AAA Rating: 2 Leaves
It has tree in the title.

[Kitty Genovese: The Murder, The Bystanders, The Crime That Changed America – Kevin Cook]
I've been obsessed (from a healthy distance) with this event since I saw a fictionalized TV movie account in the '70s. Remarkable to learn after all these years that the defining narrative of 38 scared/apathetic neighbors was fabricated by Times reporters.

AAA Rating: 1 Leaf
Because fall is the time for true-life crime.

[Another Country – James Baldwin]
I am embarrassed never to have read this, especially given Greenwich Village, jazz and France in all their '60s glory (cigarette smoke, bad plumbing, perfect clothes). Harlem! Also, Baldwin lived on Horatio, and I love reading writers who lived on my streets almost as much as I love reading about the streets themselves.

AAA Rating: 3 Leaves
Based on the jazz alone...

[The Woodlanders – Thomas Hardy]
The best Hardy that most have missed, with all of Happy Tom's keynotes: nature as an emotional force, romantic melodrama at its somehow subtle extreme, utter fearlessness about the grand gesture (man-trap dead ahead!). This will be a re-read, but I've forgotten everything since that initial encounter ca. 1989 and expect to be stunned anew.

AAA Rating: 4 Leaves
The most autumnal book ever written!

In-Between Days: Summerall

I have a toe in marketing (if you’ve got an actual foothold, call me!) and have recently realized that the kind of marketing I know how to do (copywriting, social media, public relations and that most scintillatingly nebulous of concepts, branding) isn’t all that different from blogging.  (Which, come to think of it, may be why I find blogging so vaguely embarrassing.  But that’s a post for another time.)

Marketing is value neutral until you are marketing Marlboros or McDonald’s and not necessarily pandering or obvious, silly or shrill.  When it’s done right, marketing is simply an effort to understand what people want, to determine where their interests overlap with what you have to offer (say a six-pack of microbrew IPAs or a reminiscence of Old Town alleyways) and then to communicate to them compellingly, in a manner they’re likely to appreciate.  Yo, you into wicked hoppy beer?  Excuse me, but are you intrigued by the historical picaresque?

Working with a wine & beer store this week, I noticed customers asking, with barely contained excitement, if we had the pumpkin ale yet (Yo), even as others were stocking up on rosé (Excuse me).  I thought of it as the eager-to-move-forward vs. the not-ready-to-let-go and decided that RIGHT NOW is the perfect time for both camps, as August creeps forward to quietly kiss September on the cheek, or – employing a more sporting metaphor – summer slides into fall and they tangle in a dusty cloud of Summerall.

And thus are marketing concepts/blog posts born. 

So much to love about Summerall!  Eighties days stripped of humidity, seventies nights hinting at sixties.  Unblemished skies (props to Stoppard) and glinting Magnolias.  Sienna leaves telling fortunes on a chalky green tennis court.  Dichotomies.  Relishing warmth and escape from the heat; embracing cool with no fear of cold.  Being staggered by the interplay of copper and blue, evergreen and gold, bright light and dark shadow.  You can breathe now, can’t you?

An espresso drunk on a half-shaded stoop in the Far West Village as treetop shadows play across your face.  A glass of Albariño at an impromptu lunchtime meeting with an old friend, window glowing with golden light, Federer smoothly striking winners on the TV over the bar.  A final trip to the beach, backpack filled with the August drug of choice:  the print fall preview.  

(This, by the way, is the ultimate Summerall Classic Movie.)

You do look back, at least as far of Memorial Day:  You never did try that new food truck with killer lobster rolls and you missed the only unmissable outdoor concert.  But there were a couple of perfect weekends anyway.  And you do look forward:  You are going to read so many great books this fall, and you are going to cook like a maniac.  Well, like Ina Garten, but consistently.  The point is that you won’t just work and watch bad new TV shows and lose every Sunday to football.  You’re going to do better.

This is Summerall in action, from recap to reckoning to resolution.

Carnivale

This goes back to May, the start of a long hot summer that hasn't quite yet passed me by.  (I've been in it every second.)  It's not the best picture I took at the fair; it's just one with nice light.  But I'm determined to not be over-determined as I launch this caravan again.  Wild Posting, something I should have made a go of five years ago... here's your good old American second chance.

I look forward to attempting, with a hopeful minimum of embarrassment, some kind of take on the carnivals I encounter (we all tumble into) every day.

The Long Hot Summer

I probably prefer my version, hungover and lost and dizzy and wanting lemonade in that confusing part of Paris around l'Opera and the Galleries Lafayette, but the video has punting. Not enough punting in life, generally.

Robert - Regular Coffee - Today

In September 1984, after a lazy summer in Paris, I moved to New York, where I slept on the floor of my friend Glenn's Upper West Side studio and looked unsuccessfully for my first job. I was also unsuccessful finding strong Paris coffee; although there were places that served Cappuccino, they weren't necessarily on the Upper West Side and they weren't generally open first thing in the morning. Where you went instead was a diner, there was one on every other block of Broadway, and what you drank was "regular coffee." Hot coffee with milk, no sugar. Depending on the diner -- and probably the luck of your timing vis a vis the brew cycle -- the results ranged from surprisingly savorable to expectedly ordinary. But the stuff always worked.

I probably never gave it any thought, but if I had, I would have guessed that the iconic New York coffee cup was created by an association of Greek coffee shop owners. (Although "diner" is the preferred New York term, we used "diner" and "coffee shop" interchangeably.) It turns out that it was created by one not-Greek man, whose life is sketched out in a fascinating New York Times obituary today. Leslie Buck, Auschwitz survivor, U.S. immigrant, and young professional on the rise, made a really brilliant marketing decision for a company that was "keen to crack New York's hot-cup market." And, of course, designed the damn thing himself, despite a lack of any such training.

It's a classic New York story, and although my own came later and shares nothing in common with Mr. Buck's except the ubiquity of Greek diners and blue Anthora cups, it makes me nostalgic for my first days in the city. If I were there today, I'd buy a cup of diner coffee and remember: that first cool blue October Sunday when you'd wake with a hangover, stop by a diner for a regular coffee, then walk down the street sipping greedily, breathing in the newly fresh air and coming gradually alive, growing more and more excited by the possibilities of the beautiful day ahead.