Totaled Recall: THE HANGOVER (2009) and WHO IS HARRY NILLSSON? (2010)

Full of triumph, tribulation, amusing comic turns, and a manageable portion of tiresome dick humor, THE HANGOVER is a fine way to end mid-life crisis month, i.e. November. It's all about memory and manliness and lack thereof, and if it took me awhile to see it, well, I confess I used to have problems with Bradley Cooper - the beady eyes, the cocky glassiness, the way he didn't deserve Jennifer Garner in ALIAS - but all is forgiven here. Now I love the nasal nonchalance with which he greets the next morning's calamities with a shrug and a swagger. Annoying Ed Helms (THE OFFICE), meanwhile, wakes up and starts instantly to fret about a missing tooth and that there's a tiger in the bathroom so he can't even get in there and check his gums. Cooper just chortles and rolls with it, like most people would. Dude, to me it was just like every morning/afternoon waking up on tour with my band! I was always trying to find my pants, like Zach Galifianakis does, but we'd never slip anyone Rohypinol unless they specifically requested.... which they did. My crew loved Rohypinol, we didn't waste them on girls, we didn't need to. We were men, y'all, men who loved to pop Mexican Quaaludes as they used to be known. Even if they made our parties turn into snoring Jonestowns, I'm sure we must have had fun before we crashed. Didn't we? No one had phone cameras in those days so we'll never know. But also, our crew had no Ed Helms whiner character, just various degrees of Galiafinakis, and all was bearded and chill with the worrlzzzz.

Erroneously called 'rufflin' or something in the film, by a dentist who should know better, Rohipynol is sooo much more than a date rape drug. Don't let the frat boys give it a bad name. May any man whose ever spiked a girl's drink with one drop dead instantly, by Crom!

Oh yeah, THE HANGOVER. Well written, well directed, well photographed, it solves nearly all the problems I usually have with dumb Nevada-set comedies, and in fact is better at depicting that special drug fueled blur than Terry Gilliam's much more pedigreed FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. Frankly, despite Helms' histrionics (he's worse than Alan Arkin in THE IN-LAWS) there's a real sense you'd want to hang out with these guys, whereas Depp and Del Toro in LOATHING seemed way too pretentious and violent to want to actually have more than a quick shot with before excusing yourself, going to the bathroom, and running for the hills. To bond with the HANGOVER posse one need take only a sixth shot of Jaeger, whereas Hunter would need to wave a gun in your face and scare you off, so you wouldn't see how alone and twisted he was inside.

Yeah, when it comes to drug-fueled mayhem, Zach, Brad and their dorky friend are like a good band - the alpha, Bradley Cooper on lead guitar and vocals, getting them in trouble with daring reckless drive. On bass, the rooted crazy calm of Zach G, and the clatter of nervous Helms on drums. Hunter's band would never even learn two chords before they smashed their guitars... that wouldn't fool me. I saw the Replacements in '84! Matsbra!

But, for all that, THE HANGOVER ain't perfect. First of all, these guys are pussies, because when you wake up with a super hangover like that, the thing is to just keep drinking. Nothing cures a hangover like more alcohol. There's no earthly need to sober up, dear friends, til the wedding's over. The wedding photogs can always redden up your pale, sickly countenance in Photoshop. Not that they did for me, that's show biz.

But, I totally felt that anxiety Ed Helms feels due to their  staying in a designer hotel suite, where you're surrounded by luxury items that cost ridiculous amounts, so you're dying for a drink and there's booze all around, but if you take it they charge you like $45 for an airplane bottle, or $25 for a small tin of nuts. Dude, when I go to a hotel I don't want to feel like I'm sleeping in the lobby of an expensive department store, afraid to roll over in bed lest I occur some exorbitant charge by knocking over a pillow. I mean, are they charging me for every splurb of ginger-lemon-scented hand soap? The whole thing never fails to throw me off, so even if I get a comp bottle of designer mineral water I become afraid to open it, afraid to even go down the hall for ice cubes, lest the top flight party girls see and judge me, snickering over how plebeian I am for expecting an ice machine in such a posh spot - everyone knows room service brings it... and charges.

On the other hand, when you're with 'the guys' there's often a kind of vertical displacement of responsibility, as opposed to going to one of these places with your girlfriend and being expected to show her a great time even as it's plunging you into debt and she's rolling her eyes, blaming you for the rain, and making wearying demands for 'spontaneity.' Groups of guys are more fun because there's no need to constantly prove why you're a good boyfriend, to make sure she's having a good time like some overstressed cruise director, and the HANGOVER is brilliant at showing how four guys riffing and going off in random directions at the same time in the same place, concurrent yet counter-intuitive, can bewilder the world around them into a kind of on the spot detournement societal melt down, thus enabling said guys to get away with everything short of arson. My band and I, for example, could take over and completely change the vibe of, say, a sleepy all-night diner, or an understaffed bar. Special shout out to the girls of Old City Hall in Oswego, 1992. Favorite blurry memory of that tour: Five in the morning, skinny dipping in a freezing Lake Ontario while the snow drifted down! Alcohol rules!

Aside from the not drinking more to cure the hangover aspect, my only other issue with the film was the shameful portrayal of women, which I will only excuse because of the sacredness of the "what goes on in Vegas stays in Vegas" male bond. Still, why does Heather Graham always get stuck playing gorgeous, sexually available doormats? And even if that girl waiting at the altar wasn't Megan Fox, she was mighty Megan Foxy, with a dash of Catherine Zeta-Jones. Awesome, but one-dimensional. And wait, is that Cheri Oteri as the mom? Run!

But again, this is Vegas, the city of bromance and legalized prostitution...SPOILER: the final photos of the lost night smack of all the things the aforementioned stone cold bitch is right to condemn... Those implants have families damn it. They were once beautiful breasts and now just embarrassing, shocking reminders of a world gone wrong. Still it is cool to see the enemies of the day-after suddenly as the friends of the night before, preserved in the fleeting amber of digital phone memory cards. Healing, you might say.

The HANG director also made OLD SCHOOL, which I haven't seen, but I remember seeing photos of Will Ferrell at the keg, and remembering that I once partied with him, or his Syracuse equivalent, Mike "Ellis" DeAngelo. Ellis! Boys need to be boys, and what goes on under the roofie stays under the roofie, unless it doesn't, in which case, everybody's goin' to jail this moan-NIN! Some of us never left. Some of us have been here the whole time, shoveling our buckets of coins into cold, dark slots while the sheriff stands watch and we hear Tom Jones sing work songs. There is no jackpot so sweet as the one we don't remember, Lord. Just look at Harry Nilsson! What, who is Harry Nilsson? Glad ya acksed. Pull up a chair... grab a cup. Oh. No more cups? There might be one in the sink you can rinse off.

In the pantheon of rock/pop there's always those artists whose albums you see everywhere and never buy, though there's always one or two people who are into them and try to tell you how great they are and you're just not having it... Procol Harum? Molly Hatchet? Todd Rundgren? Foghat? Whaat? I used to always put Nilsson in with them, some relic of a bygone age...That won't happen again now that I saw WHO IS HARRY NILSSON (AND WHY IS EVERYBODY TALKIN' 'BOUT HIM)? a documentary with a title that instantly places him as the singer of that song in MIDNIGHT COWBOY (1969, rated X).  Off to a good startbra.

Seeing the documentary helped unearth a lot of 'lost' childhood memories, such as being five and excited for the premiere of Nilsson's psychedelic 1971 TV cartoon, "The Point." Even then, at five or whatever, the cartoon made me annoyed with its YELLOW SUBMARINE psychedelic puns and Seuss-brand nonconformism. But I shouldn't blame Nilsson for being so proud of his ABC prime time slot-winning. Do we devalue Vince Guaraldi because that bridge in 'Linus and Lucy' is so overused in commercials? Nilsson was a partier, to the extreme! That is what we must struggle through the cold Las Vegas afternoon to 'remember'.

Throughout the documentary various musicians talk about losing huge stretches of time partying with Nilsson. Wives all across Laurel Canyon came to dread his husband-napping phone calls.  He'd pick up their men and they'd vanish into the 'Rufflin' haze... surfacing later drunk and belligerent, just to pick up their guitar and accidentally break a table before driving off again, with a merry laugh and tire screech.
Meanwhile Nilsson's record producers loved his incredible voice and gifts so much they seemed to just let him go too loose, recording every drunken sing-song blather that came into his head. They were all broken up still by his leaving them. (Apparently John Lennon was a negative influence). And leave them he would.

His younger Irish wife speaks as well as she can of our Harry in the documentary, and she still looks a pretty hot, and his gorgeous children remember a loving but mostly absentee dad. Though I wished there could be a Polaroid trail of his wild lost weekends, ala THE HANGOVER, it was enough of a change of heart for me that I ran to my emusic account and downloaded NILSSON SCHMILSSON and NILSSON SINGS NEWMAN. A long time Randy Newman fan (pre-TOY STORY only, playa), it's been my pleasure to hear Nilsson sing "We got to tell the people 'bout Utah / 'cuz nobody seems / to know," while walking to work down Brooklyn's scenic Vanderbilt Ave. every morn...nin'. 

But man, this country needs to remember more than Utah... we need to remember that remembering is for chumps and blackouts mean you must have had a blast, and hangover cures don't come better than a 50-50 mix of gin and grapefruit juice... chased with an overnight jail sentence, rehab, 90 AA meetings in 90 days, and... toast... it takes you an hour to eat one piece of toast you're so shaky and nauseous from alcohol withdrawal or poisoning, whichever comes first and sometimes both at once, to be so full of whiskey you can't stand up or talk, but still twitching from alcohol withdrawal.

But in the end, is having all that candle at both ends-style fun even worth it if you don't remember a damn thing? As someone who used to spend his week dreaming of Friday when I could grab a bottle like a reverse parachute and just plunge into the void, I can tell you flatly, "nobody seems / to know." Memory is not to be trusted, and the moment itself doesn't exist outside your own slicing of past and future like a dwindling cube of sopium in a room full of grubby jonesers. You're better off seeking Jesus, but churches smell like the elderly, and you can't smoke in the pews. Your best bet is this: download Nilsson's "Jump into the Fire" and listen to it walking down the street pretending to be a coked-up Henry Hill. That should answer all your questions, you black-out reincarnater. You jumped into the Lake Ontario fire a million times and don't remember... Hopefully someone, even now, is up in the ether, savoring and recording your every lost howl.

High Strangeness: LANA TURNER'S HOLY MOUNTAIN and Rose Hobart takes a trip

2012 note - Frost apparently remixed both films together to form Lana Turner overdive, which I herewith present, leaving the text as is.
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A follow-up to Helsinki Productions' awesome LANA TURNER'S INLAND EMPIRE. This one was just posted a few days ago, and finds Lana continuing to lose her mind as she seems to connect with some cat spirit that may or may not be an old Egyptian star goddess... Just roll with it! Spot the connections to Dario!

These Lana epics remind me of one of my own psychedelic remixes, DRUNKARDS OF BORNEO. Ever see it? I'm supposed to do a poster for Ethan Spigland's class on the Situationists so I've been learning about 'detournement.' And honey, this is it:



When we think of 'reappropriation,' 'collage,' 'detournement,' don't we conjure a  handful of images, and a handful only? A urinal signed 'R. Mutt', a soup can, and a slice of film from 1933 called 'East of Borneo' that became the first remix, courtesy Joseph Cornell, called Rose Hobart?

I stumbled upon the original East of Borneo by happy accident at the Whitney Museum's Edward Hopper show back in the 90s. I never forgot it: Drugged leopards dropped onto screaming stunt men, a satisfyingly alcoholic Charles Bickford stirred to sluggish life when his non-white prince pal makes a play for his wife, come to fetch him like a dutiful, confused puppy. Imagine LOST WEEKEND if the girl in the leopard coat followed Ray Milland all the way to Borneo, where she got hit on by Bim and Ray had to disguise himself as a little turkey in a straw hat? Talk about codependence! Basically, her intrusion topples the whole kingdom. Women.

So in my version, the idea is of course, acidemic. The girl comes, takes a trip while never leaving the grounds, and is amused by a sacrifices both human and monkey. Through it all, a mystery man laughs and laughs! But bromance triumphs!! Bros before ho's, that's the moral. Even if I've never practiced it, personally. So.. let DRUNKARDS OF BORNEO create the space for post-modern healing, and god bless us as November 2010 crumbles into the rose-tinted abyss of memory. And if you want to get in on the weirdness... get on it. Rent THE BIG CUBE and deconstruct that tall drink of bitch!

PS - Right as I was writing this, the unimpeachable, Film Doctor was posting a bunch of great 'detournement' links. Debord is in the air! If only we could bottle it... for profit... and peace!

Lyon in Winters: LOLITA and Immortal Porpoises

Where I come from, home for the holidays means dying lawns, cloudy suburban skies, foil-covered crock pots brought unwillingly from the car to the front door; chattering hellos from perfumed relatives; ceilings slick with condensation from ever-baking turkeys and boiling rutabagas; football and the voice of Sam Elliott extolling guts, glory, Ram, from the living room; a barrage of women nattering from the kitchen. It's a time to go to school reunions and movies just to get out of the house. Hometowns leave their mark, like a lash of sameness, slash of lameness you'll never paint over... but is it that bad? What if you come from a family rife with divorce, guilt, skeletons, incest? Pedophile freaks subverting the family dynamic? Lolita cousins coming onto you while aunts and uncles look at you harshly but you're too drunk to resist? Your honor, I was not even her first lover.

I had a fine podcast discussion with Jamey DuVall at Movie Geeks United for The Kubrick Series' -- and so I've been thinking of LOLITA all day. Let me share it with you as we close the holiday down:

Laws dealing with minors and corruption are tricky things. A kid (under 18) who rapes his cousin can get off with just a flick on the wrist, but a guy who sends one of his prostitutes home for Xmas on a train can go to jail, just for buying her a ticket that takes her across state lines. This all goes back to 1910 and a law meant to catch white slavers that was amended as the Mann Act in 1948 largely due to the newspaper headline case of Frank LaSalle, a an old pervert dragging a naive shoplifting minor named Florence Sally Horner, off on a two-year cross-country spree. The constant travel making it hard to discern the unkosher relationship kept in place by blackmail (he saw her steal a notebook from a five and dime and played copper). This was a vile case, a shot heard by journalists around the world, and the headlines have never been the same, for better and for worse. They made laws designed specifically to catch evil men like Frank (and Humbert). Good for them. I'm not kicking about it. I'm super skeeved by this topic. On the other hand, my own super skeeve response fascinates me. I know I'm not alone in it, I know its origin in the Freudian Totem and Taboo root cellar of the unconscious, but what is it, really?

Kubrick's film LOLITA, as well as Nabokov's original book, seems to take the Horner outrage and subsequent law as a challenge to depict the corruption of a minor in a non-hysterical manner, with trans state-line travel galore. I've seen the film and read the book numerous times, but never thought of that strange but valuable (if abusable) law... suddenly, this past viewing, it was all I thought about.

My dad has a terribly long and ornate joke dealing with this law, involving transporting immortal porpoises over staid lions, or something --which I heard him tell other adults at drunken dinners all through my childhood--and I never understood why it was even funny or what the hell they were talking abou. The point is, it's a law designed specifically to counteract the moves of people like Humbert, himself an evil user of pretend morality. Humbert's flabbergasted relationship with Quilty is an ultra-cool mirror of the guilt-wracked hypocrite censors challenging lysergic intellectual Kubrick to both adhere to and defy the "How could they ever make a movie of Lolita?" marketing catchphrase.

Over the passing decades this film's been many things to me, but this last viewing it seemed to be about art vs. censorship and the way the promoters of 'childhood wonderment' and the Peter Pan 'if you can dream' aesthetic--the Norman Rockwell fishing boy logo of Dreamworks and the mouth agape wonderment of E.T.-- are the both the exploiters of children and culprits who bring us the hyper-awareness of the dangers of pedophilia. The two are entwined, a double exposure of exposing, like a cobra with the head of a tail-eating mongoose. The more you pine for and prize a 'perfect family' the more pressure-cooker force you put on those latent incestuous, pedophile dark desires. Pedophilia is the ultimate evil, after all, the one crime even the other prisoners in jail will kill you for (in jail); it goes deeper than Oedipus, down into the murky swamp behind the Bates Motel, and it is embedded in the fabric of our modern trend towards the deification of children and their 'innocence.' Is it any accident that the two main architects of this hypocritical saintly children-izing in the early 1980s were Michael Jackson and Steven Spielberg?

The difference in the pre-ET 70s was that no one wanted the Norman Rockwell 50s 'childhood wonderment' thing anymore, so there was less to repress, and what you don't repress you don't have to 'act' out in sexual transgression. The pedophiles and flashers were still around in the 70s--the rate of crime in this area has not risen--but parents' intense fear for their children's safety wasn't as ubiquitous. The Don Draper cultural rubric didn't include constant monitoring of playdates. The kids were left to roam the house, yard, or neighborhood while parents smoked, drank, swapped, played bridge, and carried on. We kids knew not to get into cars with strangers or take their candy, and above all we knew when to stay out of our parents' way and when was the right time to creep downstairs and steal from the cabdt dishes. We knew when the bridge games would devolve to the point that our presence would be greeted with welcome instead of stern reprimand; we knew the tartness of our parents' whiskey sours and Tom Collins' kisses; we learned to mix drinks with the powdered packets of whiskey sour mix and play bartender. Adulthood was a virile open-shirted marvel in the 70s... there was no clear line to cross. Sometimes, it just reached out and grabbed you. You felt safe around it, yet knew that it was, itself, unsafe. You know, like life?

The sad thing now for an old rager like me watching LOLITA is to see the inexorable passage from mom to daughter to daughter-mom in Sue Lyon, as it so preternaturally predicts the arc of America's cultural mores, from repressive 50s-early 60s, (Shelly Winters) to liberated late 1960s-70s (Sue Lyon) to repressive 80s (Lyon-in-Winters). Elaborating the transformation is Sellers as the liberal trickster elite and James Mason as the outflanked conservative imposter. Just as the most vocally anti-gay politician is inevitably found drunk in a gay nightclub, so does Humbert Humbert hide, like a scoundrel at his last refuge, behind the outrage of conservative wagon-circling.

The message was clear and simple to a generation for whom Freud was like Oprah: the more concerned you are over your child's well being the more suspect you are. I was more or less Lolita's age when I first saw LOLITA, and my perspective and identification with it has changed a bit now that I'm Humbert's age, or rather Quilty's. It's the Quilty character who dominates now, more, for me. The vantage point from which art--through its transparency and deliberate digging for dirty truth--looks down upon dull, corporeal expression of desire. To paint a nymphet, like Degas with his ballerinas; to film a nymphet like Rollin with his vampire women; to write of one, like Nabokov, is to effectively sublimate the desire to corrupt them in the real. The artist has 'already' tasted such forbidden fruit in this sense and found he much prefers using the desire and rapture as a inspiration, a springboard into art. rather than actual tawdry seduction --a dead end. Artists understand that sexual gratification means an end to the dance, a sudden return to shame and self-consciousness, a hasty, guilty retreat through the parking lot. Instead of making art, you made a 'situation', a guilt trip, a baby, or a messy crime scene.  Compared to the divine rapture of creation, which is eternal, it's just a negative chalk mark on your karmic blackboard. In other words, there's those who are inspired by the muses to create and those who just want to mount the muses in their trophy room. The last ones are the evil who may or may not know what they do oh lord.

Lolita in this instance if of course the muse, dragged down too soon into the tedious abyss of mortality (i.e. getting knocked up, moving to Alaska, where maybe she'll grow up to be Sarah Palin!), and Humbert the bourgeois authority that proclaims things art or pornography according to his own licentiousness (he makes things -- Lolita herself -- forbidden to the masses [not letting her in the play] so he may enjoy en toto under the pretense of protecting her morals) and Sellers is the artist, the Bugs Bunny who actually controls the stuff of 'real' art, for he knows what's really going on... and that is the primordial jazz of constant persona dissolution.

The moral to all this? Family ain't perfect, but you can trust its imperfection a lot better than you can trust the TV that tells you a true family is like the one they show. TV gets its messages from the Humbert elite and they don't have your best interests at heart, and never did. In the 1980s, before SSRIs were popular, some of us had to successfully kill ourselves just to convince our parents we needed therapy. In the 1990s it's reversed, but the same principle of fear and gray flannel blending applies. Therapy was once taboo, as in 'people would talk' - they'd think you were bad parents if your kid had to go to a therapist. Now that once 'moral' attitude that therapy is taboo is itself taboo. We've got to get the Lyons back out of the Winters and lift the immortal porpoises across staid lions if we're ever to wise up to the fact that our desire is inherently unfulfillable. Only then we can wise up to the double-edged sword of desire, and just hang it on the wall rather than wield it-- for we only ever cut our soul to ribbons. The only exorcism of desire that truly fulfills and heals that soul is art. Humbert can shoot up the Quilty art museum all he wants (in the beginning), but he's already lost the war... he's already given the surest sign he's a dirty old man: he's a prude.

Quixote Ugly: THE SWIMMER

"He had an inexplicable contempt for men who did not hurl themselves into pools."
-- The Swimmer, John Cheever

Of all the great white male midlife crisis epics, outside of TV's MAD MEN, what can beat the Burt Lancaster-starred adaptation of John Cheever's THE SWIMMER (1968)? What kind of 'meet' competition is there for challengers even to lap up against? The recent Time magazine cover lauding Jonathan Franzen as the literary canon's next Great White Hope sent a shock through the up-and-coming, young, brilliant and angry writing community at Pratt. Here was yet another middle-aged higher-educated white male of means writing about mid-life crises, college tenure boondogles, student affairs, eccentric characters spouting pithy one-liners, and car accidents that leave multi-generational ripples across sprawling summer cottage-owning families - just what the world needs now.

I'm guessing on all this, of course. Never read no Franzen, whatever it is he wrote. But the writing community at Pratt was nonplussed and that's enough for me. Sight unseen it was Time grasping at any last straw in the arsenal for keeping awake their dwindling upper middle class white male readership (1), attempting to fully lionize another Norman Mailer, or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or John Cheever, Phillip Roth, or even John Irving. In this way, was it not unlike the drowning grasp of The Swimmer himself!

Wait, is that why I'm writing about it? Dude, I've made my peace with all that, I hope, the loss of the automatic advantages my dad's generation received. I vowed long ago to ever be caught sober in a country club again, unless it was for a memorial service, preferably mine own. (2) How's that for pith? (hic')

THE SWIMMER too is morbidly pithy, it was made the year after I was born but it already saw the writing on the wall for my life story. It's aware of the absurdity of great white drunk male lionization. It reaches into the floater's open chest wound for the heart of white male 'pride of ownership' and finds it all turned to ash except for rotting crotch. But what a crotch! So sad we lost it.

What happened?

According to one disgruntled neighbor of Lancaster's character, Mr. Merrill's: "You got tossed out of your golden playpen, that's what happened."

As an entitled sexist white male myself, born in 1967, I grew up hearing overhearing racist, sexist and Polish jokes, told by adults over cocktails on the couch. Sitting beside the feet of the adults in awe, rushing to refill their drinks on request, blending the whiskey sour mix in the blender, smelling the sweet sugar sweat of hungover adults on copping sips at all hours, the association of maturity with booze, cigarettes and unconscious prejudice is built deep into me. These proclivities forged this site, and though I know it's all wrong, I smoke nonetheless and have an attitude of class entitlement so inappropriate to my actual circumstances that I consider my maintaining it a form of Quixote-ugly heroism. So when I see Burt in THE SWIMMER gradually sink into the deep end of illusion, I weep, for us both. The scene of his humiliation at the hands of the filthy ethnic grocers at the public pool especially wrankles. This is the ultimate in both comeuppance and validation of the class system the film is watching die with the impassive eyes of a five year-old boy on the cusp of sociopathy watching the last gasp of a flopping fish.

The rules of this descent are especially telling, the class consciousness vivid without being judgmental. When the playing field is equal, says all great white epiphany, the lowest common denominator always rules. Once you let the poor people in, your pool is officially 'public' i.e. packed and full of kiddie urine, a slum. On the other hand, maybe it's you who was the slum the whole time: "Ya wanna know what your kids thought of ya, Mr. Merrill?" the grocer says. "They thought you were a big joke!" Exemplifying the nouveu riche (the type who have to tell you how much everything cost), they're like devouring birds who wolf down our Burt like one of Sebastian's baby turtles.

Standing forth from the nouveau riche-ethnic fray, in the film's most touching scene, is Joan Rivers, playing a weary (hungover) but genuinely present broad at the nouveau riche party, who sees--just for a minute--a chance at something new and exciting at the thought of driving him off with Burt on the spur of the moment. But before she can find her car keys, the moment passes. Still, what a moment. Everyone Burt Lancaster meets before her is either oblivious to his 'living-dead' ego or resentful of his past flaunting. Joan is just lonesome and radiating that special late afternoon ennui. Her sad but witty resilience creates a small oasis of realness in Burt's downward spiral, like if she wanted they could swipe a fifth of vodka from the bar cart on their way out of the party, hop in her BMW back down the river to her East 82nd street apartment, and shack up for the rest of the weekend in the AC, just drinking, screwing (as they called it then), watching old movies on the late late show --and he'd never have to get his well-deserved comeuppance. It's easy! I've done it myself, had a girl in Cherry Hill who I sometimes miss and her parents were fun and had a pool. She smoked menthol and blew her hair out and had that accent but she was thrice the lady my more cosmopolitan ladies were... Watching Joan you can feel the way sex and drinks in an air conditioned room cures a weary hungover sunshine-infused soul. Seeing her you can feel the chill sunburned skin gets from cold from being in pools and drying in the sun, the dusky chlorine and nicotine smell washing through the AC, like a cozy womb of air.

 Burt, forget about that little young blonde and go where the flavor is!

And that's my advice in a nutshell to all future Swimmers: Never go back to your wife, the kids, the house. Never get out of the goddamned pool. There's no such thing as ugly women, only sober men. So grab the first boat that comes along, as long as she's just hot enough you don't have to hide, but not enough that you get jealous. Never get out of that boat, Burt. Absolutely goddamned right.

THE SWIMMER doesn't get out of the boat, yet it still sails without him. The age of the great white sharky novel sinks down to the bottom as he pounds the iron doors of his golden playpen like its the locked steerage gate on the Titanic. His future is all drank up and pissed out into the rose bushes. His key don't fit that lock on his door. Another mule has long ago kicked down his stall.

Released in 1968, THE SWIMMER is like the last conservative helicopter out of hippie-swarmed Saigon. Burt swims backwards through the evacuees like a sperm whale who alone realizes there's a prophylactic net ahead. But there's no going back, oh Connecticut Paragon! Your day of slapping polyester asses and drinking the world into a hazy welcome mat is over. Swim to the sea, Cheever of Men, if it will have you. Just know there's lots of other sharks fighting over every last late-night co-ed spring breaker, and for far too long you've coasted in a sea of spoon-fed chum. Are your teeth sharp? Is your skin hard? Is your mouth a little weak? Are you smart? Or would you rather be a duck? Then quack, Mr. Merill. Quack! 

NOTES:
1. My dad's subscribed to TIME all my life. In the words of Allen Ginsberg, I read it every week, especially Richard Corliss' film reviews, and carbonizing my prepubescent hormones via its pictures of Cheryl Tiegs and Charlie's Angels - back in the days before I knew what sex was or that my arousal was 'dirty'. I hate it but it's a part of me, that's a fact. Nowadays I'm too leftist to tolerate its petit-bourgeois slantiness and Effexor has left me a happy eunuch! 
2. Postscript - it turned out to be my mom's - Kenmure CC, SC - 2/15 - RIP Nancy Kuersten xoxxox