What happens when the relationship ends but the romance still proceeds? Whether this is you or your other trying to preserve something that has already begun to decay is not what I wish to draw attention to. But another half question. One of the worst truths you have to face when the end of a relationship has been decided but the romance continues is whether each time will be the last time. I remind myself of this at the last moment of every engagement. Just as I am thinking to pull away, I feel like I have to hold on just a moment longer. Long enough that it seems appropriate for the standard that has been set. I wonder is this me wanting to kiss him longer? Or is this me not wanting to not kiss him again?
Walking home today, I finally saw a couple outside of this apartment building I live next to. I have always wondered who lives inside of it. I think everyone that lives on the block does. I can’t help but always stare inside, curious and envious. The place is immaculate, grand, shiny. And I can’t help but be convinced that those that live inside must be too. Each day as I walk by, I hope that I can afford myself that. That I can do the work I love and live feeling proud--- with my curtains always pulled open to the street below. Finally walking by today, I saw a man saying goodbye to a younger woman. She, she seemed like a love interest. I never imagined that all the times I had looked inside the place. I pictured marriage. But by the way she just dangled there, outside his door as he kept the door open with one foot, swinging back and forth. I could tell that this relationship was not yet stabilized. He kissed her bye and just by the way she waited there, you could tell that she wasn’t sure if she would be back. And so, just as he was closing the door, she took the leap… the chance… and kissed him again. I looked down at the flowers I had just bought myself and laughed. Laughed at myself, perhaps the irony and laughed at the possibility, the chance, of our kiss having been our last.
Maybe you should always take the second leap. Maybe you should always say with a kiss, goodbye twice.
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
Friday, November 23, 2007
Starting Out In the Evening
Starting Out in the Evening Trailer
BY: A.O. Scott
A crepuscular glow suffuses “Starting Out in the Evening,” Andrew Wagner’s intelligent, careful adaptation of a near-perfect novel by Brian Morton. This is not only a matter of the cinematography — digital video given an unusual burnish by Harlan Bosmajian, the director of photography — or of the setting. Late in the day, the sun slanting down over the North American mainland cloaks the brick and limestone of the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a somber, serious light that may, more than anything else, explain the area’s reputation for deep and lofty thought.
One of Mr. Wagner’s themes (and also Mr. Morton’s) is the waning of that old, literary New York, the twilight of an idea of the city as a capital of the modern mind. Leonard Schiller, one of the main characters, is a retired teacher and all-but-forgotten novelist. His four completed novels are long out of print, and we find him, in his 70s, pecking slowly away at a fifth.
Not that he feels sorry for himself or solicits our pity. No, Leonard, as embodied by Frank Langella, is a picture of old-fashioned decorum and steadfast dignity. There is a certain kind of man who will not leave his house without putting on a tie. Leonard wears one, firmly knotted in a crisp white collar, at his writing desk or his kitchen table.
His routine, which is also the slow unwinding of his life, is interrupted by Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious young graduate student who wants to write a master’s thesis on Leonard and then also, perhaps, reintroduce him to the reading public. He is both flattered and unnerved by the attention — which is more than simply scholarly — but to say too much about what happens between them would risk spoiling one of the most delicate and peculiar romances recently depicted on film.
The romance is not only, indeed not primarily, between them, but between each of them and an exalted notion of literature, a passion that the film honors but does not sentimentalize. Writing and reading do not make Leonard and Heather better than they might otherwise be — they may have the opposite effect — or even more complicated.
Ariel (Lili Taylor), Leonard’s nonliterary daughter, is in some ways the most complex character in the story, her temperament a thicket of contradictory impulses and desires. Approaching 40, she wants to have a child but finds herself drawn back into a relationship with Casey (Adrian Lester), whose resistance to parenthood had been the cause of their earlier breakup.
Those four people — Leonard, Heather, Ariel and Casey — pretty much constitute the film’s universe. But even though it is less populous than Mr. Morton’s novel (which featured a cameo from the literary critic Alfred Kazin and a few more fictitious old-timers to keep Leonard company), the adaptation, with a screenplay by Mr. Wagner and Fred Parnes, rarely feels unduly claustrophobic or rarefied. Allusions and incidents that evoked the milieu of Leonard’s younger days, and the texture of his mind, have been pruned away. But in their place is the marvelous fact of Mr. Langella, who carries every nuance of Leonard’s experience — including his prodigious, obsessive reading — in his posture and his pores.
There are not too many screen performances that manage to be both subtle and monumental. Watching Mr. Langella’s slow, gracious movement through “Starting Out in the Evening,” I was reminded of Burt Lancaster in Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of “The Leopard.” In some ways the comparison is absurd — Visconti’s film is a sweeping historical symphony, while Mr. Wagner’s is a stately string quartet — but both movies concern an old man who has outlasted the social order in which his life made sense. And what is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.
Instead of nostalgia, “Starting Out in the Evening” offers a clear-eyed elegy for that world. It also notes the persistence, personified by the seductive, uncertain Heather Wolfe, of the urge to connect to experience through the written word. Ms. Ambrose is self-assured enough to hold her own with Mr. Langella and Ms. Taylor (whose sister-in-law she played on “Six Feet Under”) and brave enough to show the vain, insecure, unformed aspects of Heather’s personality. The character’s evident immaturity shows that the actress is wise beyond her years.
And wisdom — the chastened acceptance of limitation, the resolve to keep going anyway — is the subject of this fine, modest film. Not everything in it works — the score, for one thing, is vulgar and obvious in a way that Leonard Schiller would never tolerate in his own writing or anyone else’s — but it has the quiet beauty of a late afternoon, late in the autumn, when New York seems to be not just the center of the world but the crystallization of its finest tendencies.
BY: A.O. Scott
A crepuscular glow suffuses “Starting Out in the Evening,” Andrew Wagner’s intelligent, careful adaptation of a near-perfect novel by Brian Morton. This is not only a matter of the cinematography — digital video given an unusual burnish by Harlan Bosmajian, the director of photography — or of the setting. Late in the day, the sun slanting down over the North American mainland cloaks the brick and limestone of the Upper West Side of Manhattan in a somber, serious light that may, more than anything else, explain the area’s reputation for deep and lofty thought.
One of Mr. Wagner’s themes (and also Mr. Morton’s) is the waning of that old, literary New York, the twilight of an idea of the city as a capital of the modern mind. Leonard Schiller, one of the main characters, is a retired teacher and all-but-forgotten novelist. His four completed novels are long out of print, and we find him, in his 70s, pecking slowly away at a fifth.
Not that he feels sorry for himself or solicits our pity. No, Leonard, as embodied by Frank Langella, is a picture of old-fashioned decorum and steadfast dignity. There is a certain kind of man who will not leave his house without putting on a tie. Leonard wears one, firmly knotted in a crisp white collar, at his writing desk or his kitchen table.
His routine, which is also the slow unwinding of his life, is interrupted by Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose), an ambitious young graduate student who wants to write a master’s thesis on Leonard and then also, perhaps, reintroduce him to the reading public. He is both flattered and unnerved by the attention — which is more than simply scholarly — but to say too much about what happens between them would risk spoiling one of the most delicate and peculiar romances recently depicted on film.
The romance is not only, indeed not primarily, between them, but between each of them and an exalted notion of literature, a passion that the film honors but does not sentimentalize. Writing and reading do not make Leonard and Heather better than they might otherwise be — they may have the opposite effect — or even more complicated.
Ariel (Lili Taylor), Leonard’s nonliterary daughter, is in some ways the most complex character in the story, her temperament a thicket of contradictory impulses and desires. Approaching 40, she wants to have a child but finds herself drawn back into a relationship with Casey (Adrian Lester), whose resistance to parenthood had been the cause of their earlier breakup.
Those four people — Leonard, Heather, Ariel and Casey — pretty much constitute the film’s universe. But even though it is less populous than Mr. Morton’s novel (which featured a cameo from the literary critic Alfred Kazin and a few more fictitious old-timers to keep Leonard company), the adaptation, with a screenplay by Mr. Wagner and Fred Parnes, rarely feels unduly claustrophobic or rarefied. Allusions and incidents that evoked the milieu of Leonard’s younger days, and the texture of his mind, have been pruned away. But in their place is the marvelous fact of Mr. Langella, who carries every nuance of Leonard’s experience — including his prodigious, obsessive reading — in his posture and his pores.
There are not too many screen performances that manage to be both subtle and monumental. Watching Mr. Langella’s slow, gracious movement through “Starting Out in the Evening,” I was reminded of Burt Lancaster in Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of “The Leopard.” In some ways the comparison is absurd — Visconti’s film is a sweeping historical symphony, while Mr. Wagner’s is a stately string quartet — but both movies concern an old man who has outlasted the social order in which his life made sense. And what is so remarkable about Mr. Langella is that he seems to hold Leonard’s intellectual cosmos inside him, to make it implicit in the man’s every gesture and pause.
Instead of nostalgia, “Starting Out in the Evening” offers a clear-eyed elegy for that world. It also notes the persistence, personified by the seductive, uncertain Heather Wolfe, of the urge to connect to experience through the written word. Ms. Ambrose is self-assured enough to hold her own with Mr. Langella and Ms. Taylor (whose sister-in-law she played on “Six Feet Under”) and brave enough to show the vain, insecure, unformed aspects of Heather’s personality. The character’s evident immaturity shows that the actress is wise beyond her years.
And wisdom — the chastened acceptance of limitation, the resolve to keep going anyway — is the subject of this fine, modest film. Not everything in it works — the score, for one thing, is vulgar and obvious in a way that Leonard Schiller would never tolerate in his own writing or anyone else’s — but it has the quiet beauty of a late afternoon, late in the autumn, when New York seems to be not just the center of the world but the crystallization of its finest tendencies.
Monday, November 19, 2007
Little Extra "Volume"
Goes to show you what a little extra volume can make of a figure.
She's never looked so good.
There's a lot bottled up in me: angst, frusteration, dismay. I can recognize all weekend long, but I know the most theraputic choice would be to SAY these things. Aloud. Hear how they materialize themselves. I want to see how words hit a person's face. I mean "hit" in the most gentle ways possible.
I have an inability to relax. I stayed home in New York for an extra weekend alone before boring myself in Miami. I wrapped myself in a robe and still felt under pressure. My breathing had a certain rhythm the entire time; a rhythm you can't fall asleep to. My battery is about to die. More later.
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Monday, November 12, 2007
Risky Business
I know I could dedicate hours to reflecting then writing over all that has happened in the past days. So much goes missing in even a daily journal, that I worry that they have gone missing from my mind's memories as well. The idea that I can't or that it will be difficult to retrieve instances and emotions that I felt seems like self-sabotage.
In class I found myself philosophizing the term "thought." I am feeling more and more that thought (noun) and to think (verb) transmute themselves into actual beings. I look to personify Thought and explain that it lives as a separate being from oneself. We form a relationship with it; always attempting to grasp, understand and have it be a part of us. But it is entirely separate from us. And that is why when I think or I reflect over my thoughts, I find myself looking out at 'some thing' that is not inside of me but is at a distance from me. And then this weekend, I found myself subscribing the same meaning to a relationship. A relationship that I find impossible to gain entrance back into. The memories are hazy. They were there, I know this. But I don't know exactly what was taking place. And in the process of what will be the memory, I know I am completely emerged and intoxicated by what is being said, expressed and confessed. I remind myself to remember, remember, remember it all. And because I feel so awake, so alive in the moment, I am confident I will remember the moment more than most anything. But the next day or even minutes later, I feel as though I have awaken either from a dream or have awoken into the phase of another pattern of sleep. I can't remember what went on, I can't hear what had been said and it is if I had been heavily intoxicated that I wake in a fog of remembrance.
All I can figure is that just as thought can exist as a being outside of yourself, a relationship can too. Even though it is you that is a central figure. Maybe this happens when your thoughts overpower your actions? When your thoughts collide and disturb the truth of the memory? All possibilities. But I still feel almost regret and frustration that I can be removed from a relationship and have it exist separate from me, confined and protected in a glass house. I can't break through it, but am left trying to gain entrance.
In brief, I left the Weinstein Company on Friday because I got hired to be an assistant to a producer. Long, crazed story, that I will tap back into at some point. Working one on one is the interaction I need. I want to be stronger and more successful of a presence. I want to continue to take pride in my opinions and rationalizations and I think the intimacy of working personally with another will develop these wishes. One thing that really made me keen on placing my 'power' elsewhere was when Human Resources called me in and said that I was a distraction at work due to appearance and clothing. Buuuullshit. After putting two and two together and knowing that I never dress risque, it was obvious how threatened others can be of self-confidence or more importantly, awareness. The fact that I was told that I should change this was wrong. Presence should not be constricted, it should be...presented. Sooo, I am looking forward to this new experience. Also, on whim I sent photos of myself into a casting for a film. They said they were looking for "hipsters," so I made a big joke out of the whole thing and said I wasn't a hipster but a hip star. Turns out I got picked and will be filming from 4:30pm till 7am today. I am trying to reserve some form of energy that is not within myself and restrain from letting in nerves take the best of me.
My dad thinks I am going way too fast. I am. But I have to take advantage of my youth's energy and excitement. I'm really taking risks... not worried about getting denied and expecting to come out better than as I went in. Ever since I have been more honest and upfront with how and who I am, I have been surprising others and maybe even myself. More on...more...later.
In class I found myself philosophizing the term "thought." I am feeling more and more that thought (noun) and to think (verb) transmute themselves into actual beings. I look to personify Thought and explain that it lives as a separate being from oneself. We form a relationship with it; always attempting to grasp, understand and have it be a part of us. But it is entirely separate from us. And that is why when I think or I reflect over my thoughts, I find myself looking out at 'some thing' that is not inside of me but is at a distance from me. And then this weekend, I found myself subscribing the same meaning to a relationship. A relationship that I find impossible to gain entrance back into. The memories are hazy. They were there, I know this. But I don't know exactly what was taking place. And in the process of what will be the memory, I know I am completely emerged and intoxicated by what is being said, expressed and confessed. I remind myself to remember, remember, remember it all. And because I feel so awake, so alive in the moment, I am confident I will remember the moment more than most anything. But the next day or even minutes later, I feel as though I have awaken either from a dream or have awoken into the phase of another pattern of sleep. I can't remember what went on, I can't hear what had been said and it is if I had been heavily intoxicated that I wake in a fog of remembrance.
All I can figure is that just as thought can exist as a being outside of yourself, a relationship can too. Even though it is you that is a central figure. Maybe this happens when your thoughts overpower your actions? When your thoughts collide and disturb the truth of the memory? All possibilities. But I still feel almost regret and frustration that I can be removed from a relationship and have it exist separate from me, confined and protected in a glass house. I can't break through it, but am left trying to gain entrance.
In brief, I left the Weinstein Company on Friday because I got hired to be an assistant to a producer. Long, crazed story, that I will tap back into at some point. Working one on one is the interaction I need. I want to be stronger and more successful of a presence. I want to continue to take pride in my opinions and rationalizations and I think the intimacy of working personally with another will develop these wishes. One thing that really made me keen on placing my 'power' elsewhere was when Human Resources called me in and said that I was a distraction at work due to appearance and clothing. Buuuullshit. After putting two and two together and knowing that I never dress risque, it was obvious how threatened others can be of self-confidence or more importantly, awareness. The fact that I was told that I should change this was wrong. Presence should not be constricted, it should be...presented. Sooo, I am looking forward to this new experience. Also, on whim I sent photos of myself into a casting for a film. They said they were looking for "hipsters," so I made a big joke out of the whole thing and said I wasn't a hipster but a hip star. Turns out I got picked and will be filming from 4:30pm till 7am today. I am trying to reserve some form of energy that is not within myself and restrain from letting in nerves take the best of me.
My dad thinks I am going way too fast. I am. But I have to take advantage of my youth's energy and excitement. I'm really taking risks... not worried about getting denied and expecting to come out better than as I went in. Ever since I have been more honest and upfront with how and who I am, I have been surprising others and maybe even myself. More on...more...later.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
Don't Think to Think.
I require too much from people. It is not that I impose my requirements. They just escape me when I breathe. My mouth opens and they escape from where I was hiding and holding them away from any potential confrontation. When I speak I ask people to think. I am learning more and more of what it is I want out of my work-- I am being told to look at the ways in which I execute what I am producing, what are the motifs, what am I concerned with-- I have faced one barrier, the same barrier, in multiple mediums: first, the novel then, the film and now, the play. In blatant terms, I don't care about actions. I don't care about what people are doing. I am disinterested in the details from that life. I observe individuals and try and see what they are thinking. My dialogue for them are thoughts. The dialogue doesn't instigate or produce action. If anything, it explains the power thoughts have on making an individual incapable of action.
My playwrighting teacher barked at me, "Thoughts don't make anyone feel. The only way you can feel, the only way the audience together can feel, is through actions. Thoughts don't make the characters move. You have to learn to make your characters move, Chelsea." I am still not convinced. Feelings are the byproduct of thoughts. Actions are motivated from the feelings we have reflected over the thoughts that we recognize and take witness of consciously having. Thought controls everything.
And so, back to where I started. I inspire, make, FORCE people to think..which makes them feel..and as a result, act in ways that have left me stupefied at 3am and raising possible psychological scenarios to my sister who then shuts her door with, "You require too much from people. You ask them to do too much. And not everyone wants to see themselves."
No one will understand my play. No, not now.
My playwrighting teacher barked at me, "Thoughts don't make anyone feel. The only way you can feel, the only way the audience together can feel, is through actions. Thoughts don't make the characters move. You have to learn to make your characters move, Chelsea." I am still not convinced. Feelings are the byproduct of thoughts. Actions are motivated from the feelings we have reflected over the thoughts that we recognize and take witness of consciously having. Thought controls everything.
And so, back to where I started. I inspire, make, FORCE people to think..which makes them feel..and as a result, act in ways that have left me stupefied at 3am and raising possible psychological scenarios to my sister who then shuts her door with, "You require too much from people. You ask them to do too much. And not everyone wants to see themselves."
No one will understand my play. No, not now.
Head That Aches
A terrible headache resides in my temples. Sits there, pulsating, since morning and now to night. It is as if, it never moved from my bed when I woke. It as if I have been here all along. I have a terrible headache that resides in my eyes. It sits here on my lids like a child who has grown too heavy for his mother's lap. She asks him to play on the ground and he does. He slides off, smothers the floor and twice every sixty seven seconds bounces up and down on the earth's trampoline. I've asked my headache to move, but it has become too attached. Instead, it stretches itself further across, transmuting my yesterday's eyes into bat wings. A terrible headache resides in my faceless face. Siting here, in my blind bat eyes, fingers beat to the pulsation's rhythmic headache.
If only I had thought about my headache all day, maybe I wouldn't have such a headache. Instead, I took notes on Moreau, Redon, Rossetti and Klimt (read The Red Lily by Anatole France between slides of Fauvism and Cubism), edited my ten pages of play that I'm writing to be turned in by midnight, rambled on and on to a class about Anais Nin's personas and elimination of experiences when proven to be unnecessary work material, began delving into the concept, philosophy and psychology behind morphing, bought The Anais Nin Reader, collection of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, The Decadent Reader and Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea. I have "an addictive personality" (using that label loosely, I actually just have phases in life and during these phases I dedicate mind, energy, heart and time entirely, other than my self which I always try and be most aware of--yes I admit this--to that entity). Currently it is literature. Last night he looked at me and said, "Chelsea, you look actually worried that you are reading and buying books so much. Don't worry, this isn't a bad addiction." I have started feeling guilty though. Why? Well my professor said it today, "Even when you are creative you need to pause, release. You must make sure not to not be dynamic, always. Show the serenity of life, the concentration." He referred to symbolism as the request to study yourself and he advised that we should. It is all I do. And now literature, which once was an escape, is now just a furthering of my study through the philosophy of another's subscribed meaning. I am always working. I am always going.
This actually began as a digression away from beginning script coverage that if up to par will land me an assistant position for a producer.... who has a rather, inviting smile. It is pass 1 am, will be up by 7 and need to have this done before tomorrow's day looks me in. I have a terrible headache... that I am actually, just pretending to be concerned with.
If only I had thought about my headache all day, maybe I wouldn't have such a headache. Instead, I took notes on Moreau, Redon, Rossetti and Klimt (read The Red Lily by Anatole France between slides of Fauvism and Cubism), edited my ten pages of play that I'm writing to be turned in by midnight, rambled on and on to a class about Anais Nin's personas and elimination of experiences when proven to be unnecessary work material, began delving into the concept, philosophy and psychology behind morphing, bought The Anais Nin Reader, collection of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Verlaine, The Decadent Reader and Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea. I have "an addictive personality" (using that label loosely, I actually just have phases in life and during these phases I dedicate mind, energy, heart and time entirely, other than my self which I always try and be most aware of--yes I admit this--to that entity). Currently it is literature. Last night he looked at me and said, "Chelsea, you look actually worried that you are reading and buying books so much. Don't worry, this isn't a bad addiction." I have started feeling guilty though. Why? Well my professor said it today, "Even when you are creative you need to pause, release. You must make sure not to not be dynamic, always. Show the serenity of life, the concentration." He referred to symbolism as the request to study yourself and he advised that we should. It is all I do. And now literature, which once was an escape, is now just a furthering of my study through the philosophy of another's subscribed meaning. I am always working. I am always going.
This actually began as a digression away from beginning script coverage that if up to par will land me an assistant position for a producer.... who has a rather, inviting smile. It is pass 1 am, will be up by 7 and need to have this done before tomorrow's day looks me in. I have a terrible headache... that I am actually, just pretending to be concerned with.
Monday, November 5, 2007
Why Write
Once you recognize yourself as a writer, you begin to use everything. You begin to see all things, you can use, in dimensional layers that are perceived (at a rather, obvious and unconcealed level) and special to the writer, fabricated and even, fictionalized. Truth becomes entirely subjective. The writer is using these entities as potential material for himself and perhaps, with time, for others who are seeking a voice to listen to. The writer defines what he qualifies as truth; he makes no apologies or excuses, other than one--he writes in his I's eyes. The reader will see as he does, but he does not have to apply the same judgment.
I begin this...this...more or less, as a form of filing, storing or really, materializing. I can write only what I know and thoughts are fleeting. As soon as I sense that yes, I am being perceptive to some thing, I am able to take recognition of it but will easily find myself forgetting just what it was or what it was about it that had struck me. Therefore, I lose the material. I lose the alternate dimension that I can begin judging things at. And my writing becomes less developed and perhaps, less accurate to all I really know or have known. This will help me retrieve, process and reconfigure all I face. Whether to believe it in its entirity? Often I cannot even believe all that I actually "face" but I know that it was there--in some realm of reality, in some guise of truth.
I begin this...this...more or less, as a form of filing, storing or really, materializing. I can write only what I know and thoughts are fleeting. As soon as I sense that yes, I am being perceptive to some thing, I am able to take recognition of it but will easily find myself forgetting just what it was or what it was about it that had struck me. Therefore, I lose the material. I lose the alternate dimension that I can begin judging things at. And my writing becomes less developed and perhaps, less accurate to all I really know or have known. This will help me retrieve, process and reconfigure all I face. Whether to believe it in its entirity? Often I cannot even believe all that I actually "face" but I know that it was there--in some realm of reality, in some guise of truth.
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