Last night American Masters focused on Dick Van Dyke. There were three men on television that I revered growing up: Jack Benny, Steve Allen, and Dick Van Dyke. The first two I wanted to be like, funny and smart, the last I wanted to be. I wasn’t drawn to Van Dyke’s physical comedy – even then I was more attracted to words – but I dreamed of someday having his TV life, not just the beautiful wife but his job as a writer with wisecracking office mates. And, marrying my Polish girlfriend and spending most of my career in the features department of a daily newspaper, I got pretty close to it.
We watched Jay Kelly last night and when it was over Hania said what I’d been thinking: That the presentation of the loveless, self-centered movie star was heavy-handed. And while the movie has faint echoes of Fellini’s 8½, George Clooney doesn’t have the gravitas to play an existential antihero, à la Mastroianni. Not with that thousand-watt smile, which he employs frequently. Also, he seems too much of a nice guy in real life to play a heartless one in a movie.
In my ongoing effort to find good shows to stream that nobody’s talking about, I stumbled upon A Storm for Christmas. It’s a six-part Norwegian series on Netflix that takes place at the Oslo airport on a day when all flights are cancelled because of bad weather. It follows the stories of about a dozen characters – a pop star, a bartender, a female pastor, a luggage handler, an aging pianist, a man heading for vacation in Malaga – and it is charming without being cloying. You watch it and wish you were stranded at the Oslo airport. My one quibble is that almost everybody – passengers and airport personnel – is attractive, which seems a bit of a stretch. Though it is in Scandinavia.
Yesterday I arrived at Philadelphia International Airport, for my flight home, looking for something to read. I went into a small bookstore, checked the magazines in an all-purpose store, and browsed the magazines at a kiosk in the concourse. Each carried the same two “serious” magazines: The New Yorker (which I subscribe to) and The Economist (which I bought). There was no Atlantic, no Harper’s, no New Republic. Though People and The Oprah Magazine were prominent in all locations.
Philadelphia is a major city with excellent colleges and universities in its vicinity: Bryn Mawr, Haverford, Swarthmore, Penn. Students at these institutions are probably too busy with course work to read periodicals, but presumably a number of graduates still live in the area. Wouldn’t they appreciate more stimulating reading? Or is it assumed that, when traveling, everyone’s IQ drops a few notches?
Went to see Blue Moon at The Gateway yesterday and, after being bombarded with commercials, ear-splitting trailers for Coming Distractions (Jamie Lee Curtis screaming therapeutically in a romantic comedy), additional commercials (and Hollywood wonders why people don’t go to the movies anymore), we were treated to the conversational sallies of one of the greatest lyricists of the 20th Century.
Yesterday the New York Times Magazine published its special Voyages issue. The lead story was about a father-and-son trip to the Badlands and it began with a scene of the son spilling gasoline on himself at a gas station. This was followed by the father’s description of the boy’s personality. Turning the page, I read the father’s reminiscence of a mugging he'd experienced at the age of 13, an event that, clearly, had left its mark.
The next story was about a three-day retreat in an all-dark, sensory deprivation chamber.
The next story, about the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, might have been interesting had it not been a photographic essay.
The final story was about a skateboarding park in Sweden that had been imported from Philadelphia.
So I finished the magazine knowing only a very little more about the world than I had when I started it.