that was fun, if pointless.

i got the idea to go back up to the top of the rock a week or so ago, while watching the movie version of Godspell. a short scene in that film shows the cast dancing and singing on the roof of one of the Twin Towers. it made me sad because those towers were, besides blisteringly ugly eyesores, sources of fascination, aspiration, and even inspiration among creative artists and adventurers. that scene of naive, even puerile joy made me sad, but it also reminded me that i had been meaning for a long time now to go back up to the top of the rock at rockefeller center. the entrance to this tourist attraction is virtually a few steps away from my post office box, which i had to check today, so as long as i was there i thought i’d zoom it on up.

i was last there maybe 4 or 5 years ago, when a friend asked me to babysit her 10 year old for a day. she frequently enlisted her friends to do this, but most of her friends took the poor kid to exciting places like the laundromat while they did their laundry, or else they would let him play video games at home.

nothing is wrong with either scenario, but i was not really aware of this when i got the call to take care of the 10 year old for a day. i figured hey, it’s a little kid, let’s do something fun. so i planned to hit the Top of the Rock and he came up with the idea of seeing Cleopatra’s Needle in Central Park. between those two plans we spent an hour or so at the Rock, then took a bus uptown to Central Park, where we saw the needle and then i took him to Belvedere Castle, which I don’t think he had ever seen or heard of before. we talked about heading out to the Unisphere but i thought it was getting too late, so we went back to Queens and, for the first time in at least 10 years, i entered a McDonald’s. he wanted burgers, or something, and if the smell that washed over us as we entered the place made me feel ill i was man enough not to say so.

we went home to my place where we built a web page, one that plugged in images and text quips that had been running jokes throughout the day.

that was the thing, well one of the things, about that day: i was making him laugh so hard i thought he was going to get sick. so i took it easy on the humor after a while, but now and again he’d bust out laughing at something we’d said an hour earlier.

i guess it was a nice day. he and his mother talked about it for years. i wonder if they still do? he is 14 or 15 by now, and i don’t cross paths with his mother too often any more, so i would not know.

…..

i signed up for Netflix last night. i watched as much as i could tolerate of a Nic Cage home invasion flick (remember when that guy used to be able to act?) before giving up on the poor image quality and switching over to a stored copy of REDS, the Warren Beatty “epic” about Jack Reed and Louise Bryant. i admire the film in some ways but the unfortunate drawback is that Warren Beatty is just too damn pretty for the role. he was too damn pretty for “Shampoo” ferchrissake… but if the role of Jack Reed needed some manly glamour it did not need as much girlyman beauty as Beatty’s freshly-cleansed image injected into the scenes.

as a youth that movie was legion for me. the Witnesses were my favorite, but the scope of the cinematography and the movement of the narrative from New York to Russia was directorial and story-telling virtuosity at its finest for me. i still have that film mostly memorized, but seeing it again after some years reveals new things. it is *not* a masterpiece and do not delude myself into imagining that it rocks the genre of historical drama. it is full of holes and glosses over vast swaths of relevant history. it simply appeals to my insatiable inner adolescent.

but i only got about a half hour into REDS last night.

one dead-end of that film that i know i will resent upon re-visiting it is the ending. first of all, Jack Reed is clearly breathing after he was pronounced dead. his stomach rises and falls, just like a living human, except that he should be DEAD. but that is a relic of film-making common to many actors and directors. dead people are always breathing in Hollywood.

that is not what i resent about the ending. what i hate is that the fate of Louise Bryant is unreported. where did she go from there? from the bedside of her lover’s death in remote Russia, where did she go next? not even a simple “where is she now” type of closure to assuage any interest in or concerns about the woman in this story, as typical of Hollywood.

the role of Louise is better than most female roles, but she is still stuck in the stereotypical part of being concerned about a man. in this case i give that weakness some slack, since it does seem to fit the historical story…

but where her role falls into the usual weaknesses is that she is, aside from being beautiful, not a desirable woman. what does Jack Reed see in her? her writing sucks, her pedigree has nothing to recommend it, and she’s a feisty, bitchy pain in the ass. yet, like so many Hollywood creations of her ilk, some man finds this shit irresistible.

gonna resume the viewing of REDS tonight, i think.

…..