Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Teddy Wilson - "Rose Room"

I am listening to early jazz, am quite stoned, and am thinking of Woody Allen, feeling a bit that this, me in this city, his, and listening to these jazz standards with blaring brass is some scene from a seventies work of his, this the soundtrack. I think to movies a lot, framing particular moments of my life as scenes from movies, that the movies I love shaped so much of my perceptions about what friendship and love and joy could be. A great deal of how I live my life, or how I would like to, I am increasingly coming to realize has been informed by movies, that I want that same intensity, that same feeling depicted on screen, that longing for some achingly great connection with some other person, thinking of Annie Hall and of Manhattan especially. And maybe, maybe, to try to push my life closer to that cinematic ideal of life, I add these touches to it, will play this music to achieve the effect, to follow the same staging techniques.

Perhaps pretty clear evidence of this is that I watched Away We Go this evening, felt fairly sentimental about life afterwards, and then punched in Sufjan Stevens into Pandora, and soon had my house filled with the same indie folk that had earlier served as the soundtrack to this film which had me thinking about love and family, that to continue these thoughts, the feelings, I needed the same soundtrack.

Where I am going with this, I have totally forgotten, don’t think I ever actually knew. I really had just meant to start this off, this act of diarying that I have fallen out of practice with and which I intend to get back in the habit of doing near daily, that what I had meant to say, what I had intended, was to provide some setting to this current entry. I was going to have myself make some mention of the fact that I was listening to this jazz, perhaps to even discuss how just moments before I had concluded what had been an epic ballet staged solely for the benefit of myself to many of these numbers, how the moves that this dancer performed, oh man, you should have seen.

And there, again, I go, off and running after some tangent which I don’t even know what I would do with were I to catch it.

I spent today doing laundry and editing my co-worker’s story. As payment for this, he offered me a ticket to go see Oleanna last night. The production wasn’t that good, Julia Stiles and Bill Pullman, both being a bit bad and neither one of them engaging the other. Aside from that, the play is pretty obnoxious in its disdain for some vague notion of feminism. The play makes Carol seem wicked, seem awful, and since she is made to represent “the group” whose goals she refers to – not a particular organization mind you, but a broad “the group,” leaving you to project on to that all manner of devious feminist groups - since she is made to represent “the group,” this group, these ideals, must also be wicked, awful, ridiculous, that things have gone too far for the women’s movement if this honorable professor trying to help a student loses his job because of it, is even accused of rape, that things have approached the ridiculous. That message is one that for reasons I might hope you would understand rankles me a bit, makes me slightly uncomfortable.

I think that After Miss Julie also contained some pretty blatant disdain for “uppity” women in its text. Miss Julie, the terror of the play, is a bit of a looney toon, playing sexual power games with a couple in the employ of her house. And then when we get her back story, we learn that her mother was liberated and slept around, and clearly this is the source of Miss Julie’s emotional unstableness, her inappropriateness, that she her and mom were too loose, did not conform to how a lady should act. They are playing three blocks away from each other, two Broadway stages showing these works about the wicked ways of free women, and I wonder what it is about this particular moment. But I guess it’s a story we like to tell a lot, like to hear a lot. I am starting to get bored of it though.

Today, I really missed Washington Mutual. Chase, my new home now through the mechanisms of mergers and acquisitions, does not have overdraft usage. At WaMu, I could overdraw my account my bank account by up to $900. This was a thing that I did continually and really saved my life more than a few times throughout these past years in New York. Surely not a good thing to do since you still incur overdraft fees and yes I should manage my money better than I do, but I don’t and that’s not the point here - the point is that Chase no longer does this, so for instance right now when I have three dollars on my person and only three in my bank account, I cannot do what I would normally do, which I did as recently as a couple weeks ago, cannot still take out a bunch of cash from the ATM to make me able to continue to live recklessly until my next paycheck arrives. And I get paid on Friday and surely it is not the end of the world to live within my means for two days, but it was a major blow today to go to the ATM machine and discover that this was no longer allowed. I called Chase to inquire about this and was told straight up by the guy on the phone, a Chase employee now, that Chase does not have that and that WaMu had more benefits and that he misses WaMu too. It was a nice moment of reality with a person in a call center, something so rare to encounter when talking with customer service people on the phone.

I have had more than a few such nice encounters today, all with strangers, some really nice brief exchanges with people on the street. People are feeling it today. I certainly am. I’ve got a very well-selected soundtrack.

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