i love spending the night at someone’s house, and just before we go to sleep, they say: “do you mind if i put on some white noise?”

and i say: “hell yeah, go ahead and crank that shit” lol

my friend and downstairs neighbor isabel

Last Saturday I boarded a plane at Dulles with a trunk full of all my movies and most of my books and a bunch of black clothes and flew seven hours to Amsterdam . . . it wasn’t an outright bad flight, but the vegetarian meal was high school cafeteria-level bland this time around, and the interior of the plane looked like it had not been updated since 1986, so the chairs were stiff as hell. I sprung for a duo seat so I only had to sit next to one other person, and she was all right. I think all told I slept an hour or so at best. I refuse to watch a movie on a plane because, for God’s sake, the screen is so small, and most of the stuff they got on there is so bad I want to die. So I read a little, stared out the window into the dark abyss of the Atlantic Ocean, despaired at about how much of a moron I am, and wondered at it all.

At one point I got weak and checked the flight map, always a bummer, and saw that we had only reached Greenland, which is about the halfway mark. And so I slumped my sad and tired head against the cold plastic wall and did my best to tune out in the dark. We were due to land in Amsterdam at seven in the morning with an hour layover there before the one-hour flight to Berlin. I always fly KLM because I dig the Dutch, and inevitably I always get routed to Schiphol Airport. Although honestly it’s a pretty nice airport . . . certainly nicer than essentially all of ours. And with my Austrian passport, all I do is scan it and walk right through the automatic robot gates. I don’t have to explain where I’ve been to anyone. Meanwhile, whenever I return to the US, the customs agents there regard me as though I am Osama Bin Laden. Such is my tale.

The sun had not come up by the time we landed. It was freezing on the jetway. I made my way through the labyrinthine silver hallways accented by Lego-yellow English text to get to my basement-floor gate. The sun rose by the time they began herding us onto the plane. For some reason, despite my buying the absolute cheapest scumbag ticket they had, AS IS MY WONT, I lucked out and ended up in boarding group two, so I was one of the first dozen or so people to board the plane. As I was the approaching the gate agent to scan my ticket, another one nearby said, “Sir, this is boarding group two only.” To which I said: “I am in boarding group two.” Did I appear so scuzzy that she assumed I belonged with the degenerates in group six or seven, where I normally find myself?? Well, I suppose she wasn’t wrong to regard me as such on account of I looked like a rained-on bag of vampire turds just then, so fair enough . . .

Before we took off, the pilot announced in English and then Dutch, a sort of clownish Sims language, that the plane had accumulated ice on the wings as we’d sat on the tarmac. And so we floored it to this empty spot near the runway and a little truck pulled up with a crane perch attached to it, and a dude with a slime gun de-iced the plane within about sixty seconds:

The same thing happened to me back in November when I was leaving Chicago for LA. I watched from my seat on the wing as the iceman cometh:

We almost didn’t make it off the ground that day. I saw in realtime through the Midway Airport website that they were cancelling flights left and right as the heavy snow continued to fall from heaven above. We were the last plane to hit the skies, and I remember being a little bummed about it on account of I wanted one more day, a snow day, in Chicago with Lolita the dog and Gayle, my friend who is a professional clown:

ANYWAY

On the half-full flight to Berlin last week, I shared a row with this hot Berlin-looking girl who reminded me of a girl I used to like long ago. There was no one in the middle seat, so it was just us. She had beautiful curly black hair. When we were de-boarding, she was in front of me, but detoured into a row near the cockpit to fix her bag. I figured everyone can use a compliment at eight in the morning, and so just before stepping off the plane I told her as much, that her hair was beautiful, and she smiled at me and said thank you. It was so quick that I could not determine her accent, which I am usually good at. And then I was gone from her like the morning mist . . .

Back home I unpacked a bunch of movies I’m gonna have a real good time with until Berlin thaws in a few weeks:

I collapsed on my couch and slept till it was dark out. I checked my phone and saw the temperature and the phase of the moon and Wikipedia’s photo of the day, which was particularly good that day:

. . . and so saying, I went out on my balcony at four in the morning and saw the waning gibbous hovering way the hell over the building across the way. I thought: “Hell yeah!!!”

Tonight I watched Paul Schrader’s FIRST REFORMED and had my mind blown wide open. It is one of the best things I’ve seen in a while. Midway through I paused it to make coffee, and I realized it had made me feel a little despair. I thought about what Ishmael had said:

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that. For all men tragically great are made so through a certain morbidness.

Thought I: “Yeah dude . . .”

Later, THE PEN OF MASTER-AUTHOR PAUL SCHRADER filled me with a hope I had not felt in a long time. Its radiant light shined down upon me, and I was glad. But I won’t spoil anything.

Now the sun is coming up. Hier kommt die Sonne. AND SO I SAY NOW UNTO YOU, WHOEVER YOU ARE AND WHEREVER YOU ARE:

And I wonder, as always . . .

things i found in my phone

yes

even without the context of the rest of the chapter, this passage essentially sums up at least half of my many experiences visiting and fleeing LA to get back to oakland lol

Recently I have been rewatching some of Woody Allen’s stuff, most of which I had not seen in some time. If nothing else, I remembered liking LOVE AND DEATH and BLUE JASMINE. But after rewatching ANNIE HALL for the first time in like a decade . . . I gotta say, I completely agree with everything my hero Orson Welles once said about the guy:

ORSON WELLES: I hate Woody Allen physically, I dislike that kind of man.

HENRY JAGLOM: I’ve never understood why. Have you met him?

ORSON WELLES: Oh, yes. I can hardly bear to talk to him. He has the Chaplin disease. That particular combination of arrogance and timidity sets my teeth on edge.

HENRY JAGLOM: He’s not arrogant; he’s shy.

ORSON WELLES: He is arrogant! Like all people with timid personalities, his arrogance is unlimited. Anybody who speaks quietly and shrivels up in company is unbelievably arrogant. He acts shy, but he’s not. He’s scared. He hates himself, and he loves himself, a very tense situation. It’s people like me who have to carry on and pretend to be modest. To me it’s the most embarrassing thing in the world—a man who presents himself at his worst to get laughs, in order to free himself from his hang-ups. Everything he does on the screen is therapeutic.

Allegations aside, I too have this sort of primordial revulsion to him physically, and I can’t stand the way he talks and carries himself. It is true that there is a mock-bashful arrogance to him as Orson pointed out. And without even particularly looking for it, I couldn’t help but notice that there are a fair amount of jokes (?) involving children and I know you know what I’m talking about.

My friend Jess put it best in her review of HANNAH AND HER SISTERS, which is actually a pretty good movie:

Yeah, how about that!

It’s a shame because I’m all about a prolific director making low-budget films with their friends the way Bergman used to . . . films that feel like little paperback novels! And heaven help me, I love movies set in New York in the 70s / 80s. And I even like some of Woody Allen’s stuff. Dude is good at the thing he does. But whenever he’s on screen with his stupid little haircut and glasses, stuttering and stammering and dropping these snide little one-liners, my skin starts to crawl. The guy is a flat-out creep.

An aside: While we’re here, I may as well drop Orson’s thoughts on Ingmar Bergman:

ORSON WELLES: I don’t condemn that very northern, very Protestant world of artists like Bergman; it’s just not where I live. The Sweden I like to visit is a lot of fun. But Bergman’s Sweden always reminds me of something Henry James said about Ibsen’s Norway—that it was full of “the odor of spiritual paraffin.” How I sympathize with that! I share neither Bergman’s interests nor his obsessions.

For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn’t come alive. I know that directors find serious and sensitive audiences for films where people sit around peeling potatoes in the peasant houses—but I can’t read that kind of novel either. Somebody has to be knocking at the door. I figure that is the way Shakespeare thought, so I can’t be in bad company!

(I love Ingmar Bergman, but he ain’t wrong here . . .)

ANYWAY

. . . that’s all I have to say about Woody.

Uh. Yikes!