Out Walking #4

Out walking because the chickens of straight male responsibility are coming home to roost. I'm to be a groomsman twice over. Before being fitted for tuxedos (one shawl collar, one standard lapel), I'm trying to get that 28 inch waist back. The measuring tape at Men's Wearhouse shows no mercy.

I step off the N Judah when the drowsing hobo's urine has made its way to my left foot--Irving and something way out there. The sea feels near on these short, descending blocks--grey-green and hazy like Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series. When I take my sunglasses off it's still not brilliant.

A Sunday afternoon ghost town of ghost-colored homes. The only sound a pickaxe on concrete, a laborer I can only pick out by the glinting arc of his tool, swinging like an oil pump metronome. A mailman dressed like confederate soldier blows by toting an actual satchel. I refrain from calling out "Saturday delivery!" not because I'm a decent person but because you never know which mailpeople might be ex-military.

The Outer Sunset is less metropolitan than downtown San Francisco but more Californian--a neutral stucco rainbow and 80s Volvos from cream to mustard, rusted around the wheel wells. The neighborhood is the color of a weimaraner and I expect to see one. Even the surf shop is brown.

The blocks between me and sea are wonderfully short--I sail through the 30s. I pass, not without regret, an old couple tottering towards the ocean in teal and royal blue sports clothes. They pause and share a smile as if in amazement that the other is still there beside them.

Walking for the train in SOMA, I'd heard through the Frank Ocean on my headphones the hectoring of a Jesus enthusiast, t-shirt patriot and suspected itinerant. He was screaming at two handsomely-stubbled men in Levi's that fit so well I suspected they were not off the shelf. To his harangues they merely clasped hands and strode away on their longer legs.

It's a tough time for bigots in San Francisco but I hope the man demanding repentance in stained sweatpants could take some solace in the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act. 

I take the headphones off in case the sound of the waves is soon to join the smell of salt. A couple of blocks from the Great Highway, there's a housepainter on break. He'll go back to turning a house from taupe to cream when he's done smoking his cigarette. The tobacco he picks from his tongue is shaped like the flecks just visible on his white jumpsuit. I wonder if he's considered that his Thermos is the perfect green--the color of hipster Tiffany's.

A paradox of Ocean Beach is that approaching it always makes me want to put on more clothes. It's not San Diego or L.A. or the swelter downtown today. This is the place William Finnegan surfed, not so far from Mavericks, the latest species of word being co-opted to irrelevance by Apple.

The Pacific high on the horizon brings me back to Richard Diebenkorn (a friend, who was just married, tied in twine, once helped me be saying, "I've heard it pronounced DEE-benkorn"). Ocean Park sounds less redundant than Ocean Beach and has that pleasant contradiction in the name, even if it is Santa Monican. The quiet splash of the paintings glimpsed together is like undone Prufrock poems and long strolls down the seaside, eyes weak from the sun. I'm sure what draws me to the paintings is the correctness of the colors together with a more organized landscape. There are fewer right angles at the real beach and I prefer to look at my portrait-style magnet. 

Another of my friends getting married this fall described running over the sand to ask for his future bride's hand. I thought it would be a bad plan for speed but a good one for the kneeling. I like that kind of effort--sprinting over an obstacle course into the future--but worry about my heart rate. Shocking that someone could find such consolation in another person instead of art.

At the first sidewinders of sand today the accoutrements of California beach life begin to gather: Winnebagos, ice plants, inexpertly controlled kites, women whose legs aren't what they once were. The sun's been sucked in hazy whirlpool, twists of #cloudporn over a sea like lichen. On clear days Ocean Beach has an austerity that lends itself to greater, #grassporn photo ops.

After one such afternoon at the end of America I went back into the city with my friend and the woman who is going to be his bride. Strolling from their hotel down through Chinatown the street was suddenly ruined by some feral children spitting firecrackers (possibly, but not probably, to celebrate the fact that firecracker is such a wonderful word).

As an inveterate flincher at all loud noises, this made my walk unpleasant and no amount of crossing the street and doleful looks shook the kids from our periphery. And then they started rolling smoke bombs at us--it was like a living nightmare or, worse, a Christopher Nolan film.

My friend stepped into the middle of Stockton, cocked his fist at them and dispensed with a very baleful: "HEY!" The urchins scurried back across the street. Such unvarnished masculinity made me want to shape up, to fly right.

Sometimes I worry that there are crucial inaccuracies in my factual writing. But then I think of James Salter: "Certain things I remember exactly as they were. They are merely discolored a bit by time, like coins in the pocket of a forgotten suit. Most of the details, though, have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. One alters the past to form the future."

The pennies out here have a green cast, matching the ghostly quality of the fingers that hold them. Or so I assume--who carries change any more?

I follow a hawk away from the shore toward a bus stop, wishing that raptors were better breeders. They could terrorize San Franciscan skies, ripping the throats from sea gulls and pigeons till the gutters ran red with the blood of lesser birds.  

The Safeway across the street has the unlit sign and peeling siding familiar to me as a retired courtesy clerk. Do today's sullen teens still ruin their cuticles opening bales of paper bags? I remember that I made $5.25 an hour, worked mostly 3 PM to midnight and that my time in the eucalyptus and ennui at the Ralph's grocery on de la Vina is already half a life ago. It tastes like a mouthful of salt water.

After a school year of bagging and cart corralling, I took a senior trip to San Francisco for a flurry of consumerism capped by the $77 I spent on a double lobster tail dinner at Scoma's. I've never paid for an entree as expensive again--two days work for dinner--but it was the turn of the century and Fisherman's Wharf...I think of it as my Wolf of Wall Street period. As I strain to complete this circle, it's time to reveal that the two friends with whom I broke sourdough that night are soon to be married (though not to each other).

Stepping aboard an inexplicably crowded bus makes me think this is only a six-mile walk home. Alongside Golden Gate Park the stops are clotted with small children struggling to hold ice cream and plant seedlings and stuffed white alligators. I feel our excitement turning to crankiness all down the throbbing hull of the 5 Fulton.

30 minutes toward forever later, I step off in a humid huff and sit for a moment in Yerba Buena Park. From nowhere, a hummingbird jerks forward and steadies itself at arms-length, eye level. There's no color at her throat. My first thought is that it's a government drone. America in 2013.

Close to the Sea

James Salter put out a book called All That Is. He was profiled in The New Yorker, reviewed in Harper's and, better than all that, he made me cry (with a little help from Lydia Davis).

His sales figures are the final proof that the American reading public is imbecilic. Nick Paumgarten gives the hard numbers: 3,000 copies of A Sport and a Pastime (and a $3,000 advance!) and 8,000 copies of Light Years. Partially out of disgust that two of the best books of the century were so overlooked, Salter says he wanted to get away from the "great-writer-of-sentences" thing. Outside of James Franco's continued existence it's hard to think of a more depressing facet of the literary world. Perhaps Salter will break through with a makeup Pulitzer or National Book Award and I'll be able to pretend it's been given for his earlier work (much the same way I pretend Jennifer Lawrence won an Oscar for Winter's Bone and Cary Grant received statues for any of a dozen films).

More than A Sport and a Pastime or Light Years, All That Is is chapters, self-contained and often timestamped (in his work written in the 60s you have to guess the year by the make of the cars, in the new book he tells us when Kennedy was shot). With a more fragmented approach, Salter has joined his contemporaries in the novel form--even in the best new books, I'm reading flashing chapters of greatness. There's Jonathan Dee's opening to The Privileges or Jennifer Egan's "Safari" chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad.

So All That Is resembles the stories in Dusk and Last Night more than his other novels but it's okay--Salter has written some of his most gorgeous things in short fiction. He's written "Am Strande von Tanger" (how is it that I can read whatever I want from The Paris Review without logging in and nothing from The New Yorker?). The closing paragraph is as good as it gets, the audacious description of Nico is fresh each time:

"She has small breasts and large nipples. Also, as she herself says, a rather large behind. Her father has three secretaries. Hamburg is close to the sea."

Like Dee in the Harper's review, I have a tendency to laugh at Salter's audacity. This paragraph makes me exhale a single "hah!" like a small dog's bark. It's the end of a long run from the third sentence of the story, the great avenues pointing towards the sea. It is a brilliant away goal at the Camp Nou that Cristiano Ronaldo does not care to have scored (he's a little sad). It gives me the pleasure you get from seeing a cliff diver jump from 50 feet in the air and barely ripple the water.

People talk about all the sex in Salter but the movement of the prose is most erotic. In All That Is Salter's great sentences are more measured--at 87 his speech is more breathless than his writing (listen to the quaver in "Break It Down"). The book is mostly Philip Bowman's adventures in publishing and attractive women, with more and less successful chapter-long detours into the lives of secondary characters (I would put the tawdry tales of his co-editor Eddins at the low end and the drunken dinner of Mrs. Armour at the high).

It's a blessing that Salter returns to "España" for a chapter. Bowman's countrywide mistressing begins in Madrid under bright skies, severe shadows and "sun dark workers" (his English lover, Enid, is blessed with one of Salter's classic (by which I mean terrible) character names). He finds more darkness in the Prado and in Lorca, whose banned book must be pulled from the back of a bookstore.

The writing is like black and white photography, sharp even in low light. The couple steps into a cobbled alley of policemen and ominous guitars--ominous for how much you'll love them--and gypsy handclaps like gunshots.

"The woman was singing with even greater intensity amid the relentless chords, the savage, tight beat of the heels, the silver, the black, the man's lean body bent like an S, the dogs trotting in darkness near the houses, the water running, the sound of trees."

Definitive Salter: the whole story--the whole country--in a sentence.

And, of course, a couple of paragraphs later Bowman fucks Enid like one of those running dogs. He says she is not breathing in her sleep, just as Nico wasn't breathing that morning in Barcelona 45 years earlier. "The word for naked in Spanish was desnudo. It was the same in any language, she remarked."

They make their way to Sevilla, Granada, following the paths of bullfighters and landing finally on a house where he might live with her, deeply shadowed under the total sun. But "with some women you are never sure," and a moment later Bowman's on a airplane back to New York, gliding over the white statuary and empty gravel paths of the Retiro.  

In much the same way I ran out of pages in All That Is. I fear James Salter's death, as so many people are here to bury him now. And then: "The destruction of the finest is natural, it confirms them."

Where Are You Going?

Terrence Malick has exhausted me. It's been difficult watching his last two films, hoping to see a masterpiece then trying to understand why I haven't.
 

Perhaps it is a lack of thrust. In his first four films--all great--consider this: in Badlands Kit and Holly go rampaging west; in Days of Heaven Bill and Abby and Linda flee west (and south); in The Thin Red Line Charlie Company steams so far west they reach the east, Guadalcanal; in The New World John Smith sails west until he finds this country.

Indeed, Kit and Bill and Pvt. Witt push on until they find death, and John Smith enters a void from which he could hardly expect to return. This reminds me of the fatalism in Liam Rector's "Song Years," they're "Going out west for, I suppose, hope." 

The Tree of Life's Jack (Sean Penn) and To the Wonder's Neil (Ben Affleck), on the other hand, sit in their empty homes and workspaces and brood. The camera circles them; the camera circles their cyclical memories. They are not really named (who can forget the way Sissy Spacek says "Kit"?). I'm almost sure Affleck's character is never called Neil on screen. As I said about The Tree of Life, I'm starting to see only the gestures, however breathless.

I've read that the last two films come from Malick's own life--his childhood in Waco, his first marriage to a Frenchwoman. With my writing I've always found autobiographical stories seem easier to tell but are harder to write. Malick used other texts and historical records to untangle and remake the Western, the Great War Film, the Historical Epic--but The Tree of Life and To the Wonder orbit around Texas and Oklahoma, with occasional excursions to outer space or Mont St. Michel.

I've stopped being awestruck and started wondering what films were left on the editing table. His cuts are Fast and Furious even if his regular audience doesn't suffer from Battleship ADHD. I think back to the fluttering shot of a butterfly landing on Jessica Chastain's hand in The Tree of Life: five seconds of gorgeousness and then we snap back down the street, into the trees. I believe Matt Zoller Seitz tweeted something about Malick just rolling around in several hundred hours of film, from four or five different projects, and cutting together things he likes. I think it was a joke but a plausible one now (the credits indicate he used pieces of The Tree of Life in To the Wonder).

Malick's talent can still overwhelm--he's the greatest maker of match cuts. In To the Wonder I'm thinking of the quick transition from the thin rose in the trodden snow at the castle to the divoted, trampolining sand in the rising tide outside. I could make you scroll for minutes through stunning hi res images from this film and tell you how well they work together but the wisecracks come easily: "In his next film, will the characters be allowed to look at each other?"

We look at Olga Kurylenko even if Ben Affleck won't. Malick infuses her with a Parisian Pocahontas essence and releases her in suburbia, twirling down grocery store aisles composed by Gursky. She has some English but is so remote from Affleck that she fingerwrites her thoughts on his back, an invisible ink. She brings her daughter to live with Gentle Ben for unknown reasons--there's no backstory because it's inconceivable that these two people are together. Things are not perfect in her new, distressingly empty McMansion though we feel that everything could have been prevented if she'd been a better home decorator (in her defense: she is a highly skilled hair braider).

One of my favorite moments in the film is when a Kurylenko voiceover introduces us to Rachel McAdams. Malick has made the latter handsomely blonde for the film--her eyes are cornflower, her attire Carhartt. McAdams is allegedly a childhood friend of Affleck's (of the two she's held up significantly better) and they have a great first date in the buffalo, like a tease for Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom. McAdams says sexy things to Affleck like, "I want to be your wife," but she's picked up and discarded with attention you might pay to your weekly living room bouquet.

When Mr. Affleck looks back at this role (shielding his eyes from a mantelfull of Best Director Oscars, no doubt) he might wonder if it would have been better to be cut completely (as Michael Shannon was). Ben could have been the second unit cameraman he got to play in the smart phone photography of the opening section. His role is analogous to Sean Penn's in The Tree of Life, just watching along with us. Affleck is at his most noticeable during a love scene with Kurylenko--he wears a bicep tattoo so bad it distracts from her nudity. The longest statement he makes aloud is something pedantic about the shadow of the earth coloring the sunset, spoken to a 10-year-old French girl who doesn't understand him.

I was pleased that Malick did shoot at a Sonic Drive-In (twice!) and unsurprisingly Affleck doesn't quite know what to order--he's probably torn between All-American Dog or French Toast Sticks.

About Javier Bardem's small town priest (who might as well have been from Mars) I can hardly comment...he is beautifully ugly as always, and looks at ugly people shot beautifully.

Kit wants to see the end of the road, Bill wants to see farmland far away from a steel mill, Pvt. Witt wants to see a Melanesian utopia, Pocahontas and John Smith want to see rituals and landscapes no one in their culture have ever conceived. Affleck and Kurylenko and McAdams and Bardem want to seem themselves in a Terrence Malick film.

This is a phenomenon I've thought about more and more...I recently tweeted about Anne Carson's personal happiness leading to a precipitous dive in my engagement with her writing. And there's the case of Thomas McGuane, whose out-of-control youth gave us the wild and woolly novels The Sporting Club, The Bushwhacked Piano, Ninety-Two in the Shade and Panama. His sobriety has given us complacent novels and stories about the fishing and fucking of middle-aged Montana cattlemen.

And so Malick leaves us at the exterior steps to an Oklahoma motel instead of outside Mont Saint Michel. Oh well.

*

All this whingeing aside...I'm glad Malick is working. It is far more important that a legendary artist continue working than it is for me to like what he does. I hope that after this series of films he has one more new direction.