“Passion” for Poetry in New York

New Yorkers love the arts. Don’t they?

And this latest effort at promotion proves it. At various city venues the Poetry Brothel convenes for readings of high quality, literary works, poetry,  by names and no-names alike.  People like you and me.

Apparently the accoutrements feature heavy velvets, feathers, gambling tables, a bar, along with The Madame and her male partner, Tennessee Pink. 

But the REAL reason patrons are there is the poetry.

The website posts the offer, “Want to be a poetry whore?” If you do, you’ll get to read your own original work to the sincerely interested literary set.  For a price. (We’re not a non-profit, Pal.) For a higher fee, visitors can get a private reading.

Poets have to make a living, too, Maybe they became addicted to poetry early on. Maybe they have no training for other lines of work, so writing and reading “high quality” poetry is all they can do. Society has forced them to choose this dubious occupation.  At least some New Yorkers care enough to give them a chance.

I wonder how many Robert Frosts and Walt Whitmans out there will have their talents recognized and thus be discovered through this new kind of outlet? What a service is being provided! What irony! Capitalism applied to poetry. Principles of marketing 101. Advertisers have always known this: Poetry sells!

American ingenuity is what it is. We know that given the right environment almost every normal person will appreciate poetry. We’ve been using faulty, inferior means — a classroom and a textbook — not to mention those sadsack English teachers.  Now wonder they hate it.

On the other hand, I fear that if the concept proliferates, other industries will follow suit. Next thing we know there’ll be “performances” of various types at baseball games, recreational parks, and concerts. 

But then again, maybe people who love  a good concert, don’t need extras to get them to go.

“Of all the gin joints in all the cities in all the world . . . ”

Casablanca, which won the Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay for 1942, is a perennial in Top-Ten lists for movies. A personal favorite, the film offers patriotism, love (a trois),  wit, and friendship. The plot, the one-liners, the characters are all familiar. The cynical, suave, expatriated American, Rick (Bogart) claims to be politically neutral as the Nazis are advancing into Europe. He runs a nightclub and entertains and secures favors from the corrupt but likable French chief of police, Louis (Claude Rains) and lives with a broken heart.Rick’s soft underbelly is exposed when Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) enters the club with her on-the-lamb husband Victor Laszlo, under hot pursuit by the Nazis, Laszlo being an anti-Nazi Freedom Fighter. Rick and Ilsa had a torrid, but brief affair in Paris. Ilsa was married at the time but believed Victor to be dead. She sends a “Dear John” to Rick, who is literally left at the station.Ilsa’s betrayal, as Rick believes it to be, has led to his cynical outlook on life and caused his removal to the North African city. And then one day “of all the gin joints in all the world she walks into mine.”Many issues beg discussion, but the ending most of all. Rick and Ilsa are demonstrably still in love. Sparks noticeably fly. But something, perhaps he’s conscience-stricken in Laszlo’s presence, causes Rick to take the high road. He deceives Ilsa into believing that he has proper letters of transit and that they will run away together. Ilsa is for it. But on the foggy runway with propellers whirring, Rick reveals his true intentions: though claiming to be “no good at being noble” he makes Ilsa escape with her resistance-leader husband.

The restoration of the fact of her love in back in Paris as well as then and there (isn’t she willing to leave her husband?) has restored Rick’s faith in humanity. He’s ready to rejoin the fight; the cynicism fading as he walks into the fog with the previously maleable Louis, also restored as a patriot.

Evaluation? How about in 1942? Two men, each attractive in his own way, in love with the same woman. She loves her husband; she appreciates, admires, and respects him.  Ho hum. The affair with Rick was a love match — she can’t and won’t give him up.

She doesn’t get to decide.

Are we satisfied that Rick makes the decision for her in such a way as to preclude objections, Laszlo a few feet away, jet engines roaring? The consensus today would be stay with Rick. Follow your heart. Dump Laszlo. In a nice way. I suspect that the original audience of the forties would have understood better than we (world wars having a sobering effect,) and therefore would have applauded Rick’s choice for the greater good.

Either way, the film shows that in ideological wars and real, physical wars as in love, very little is fair. The battles between men and women — the hard choices and the attractions and betrayals are part of the human stage. Often, like Rick, we choose rightly and unselfishly.

This film has it all.  So for all generations, “Play it, Sam . . .” again and again and again.

Coen Brothers’ film depicts “No Country” for any of us

Wait. The ending. Did I miss it? Dead silence as credits start to roll on a black screen.  It can’t be over!

On this rainy Monday night, we tentatively ventured across town to see No Country for Old Men. Tentatively because it was rated R for violence, and well, we just had Thanksgiving and all. But is WAS the Coens, and the brief theater review promised some of their typically dark humor and excellence in cinematography and acting. Rolling Stone called it a “literate meditation.” Sold.

Not one who enjoys watching psychopathic killers at work, I was unable to watch even the first scene. And many others that followed. Violence? Ad nauseum. But the violence, as it turns out, is central to the message.

Good old boy, commoner, Vietnam vet, finds $2 mil in drug money at the scene of a desert rendezvous gone bad and naively believes he can keep it and his life. The story is that of a chilling assassin who is hired to get the money back. He coldly kills most of the innocent and not innocent people along the trail randomly and senselessly. With a pneumatic cattle gun. His bad beatle haircut, pale skin, and slouching demeanor hit the right strings for creating horror of a too real, too possible kind.

Who will stop him? Tommy Lee Jones (the main draw for me) is the sheriff of this early ’80’s West Texas arena. He is the wizened, smart, capable law man found in many an old western. Almost. He’s tired. He’s near the border, and he has seen one too many drug melees. He confides in a paraplegic former law man that he feels “outmatched.” A sheriff in another town where more related killings have occurred tells him, “You can’t stop what’s coming” after Jones remarks that he knew there was trouble when we stopped hearing “Yes, Mam,” and “No, Mam.”

So who then can help us (them)? It won’t be the Vietnam vet, whom we don’t exactly cheer for (keeping the money is illegal) but identify with as a potential hero type. The killer neatly dispatches the best assassin the drug brokers can find. The sheriff is too weak and too old and too tired. The citizens are easy prey, hayseeds.

The end. That’s all folks.

The point? More postmodern bleakness and existential despair. There are no heroes, and even those few with potential are ineffectual while “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” The best we have are just not equipped to handle the measure of resident evil. 

The world created by this film (based on the Cormac Mcarthy novel) is fiction. But really, how much of our literature and how many serious films incorporate this same theme? Surely this isn’t the main message of our time.