"Life is a Struggle For Me"

The title is another one of my catchphrases. It's my go to expression to myself to cope every time I walk past or espy an especially attractive group of people who are socializing and appear to be really enjoying the experience. Of course it is ridiculous, I have never struggled any near to the extent that I ought to have, and that would have been good for me, but like many pampered modern people who are occasionally unable to get everything they want on demand, I like to think of myself as a social victim and the idea has always had a very prominent place in my conscious thought. 

I haven't done a post of videos in a while. The imbeds do not generally last, so these posts age especially poorly. However, it is another record of where my mind is at particular points in time, so I like to do them occasionally. This is a sample of what I have been looking at lately. I am probably missing something that was actually really good, but if it isn't coming to me it isn't coming to me.

Jo A Ram--Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

One of those things that is kind of infectious, at first anyway. And what can I say, she is very cute. She has many videos, but this is the best one I have found. 

The Dream Academy--Life in a Northern Town

Somehow I missed ever seeing this back in the 80s. Wherever they filmed this is amazing. It doesn't look quite like where I live now, though it has similar weather, but it does remind me a little of some of those hilly towns in the interior of Pennsylvania, Pottsville or Hazleton or Wilkes-Barre and places like that, which are quite dreary in the winter, though poignant.

Texas Real Estate Lady

  

I don't know how I came upon this, but something about it held my attention. My northeast bias is really going to come out strong here, but I cannot imagine living in a place like this (even though it is apparently in the very desirable Austin area). That kind of landscape and climate is more alienating to me than almost anything else I have seen in the United States. I would feel more at home in the town in the last video. However, maybe if I went there I would feel differently. I used to have a revulsion towards Florida and the south before I went to see it for myself, and I enjoyed my visits, though I still think I would be depressed if I had to live there.

Wolters' World 

I've been watching a lot of travel videos lately--I was already in of those states where I was fixated on when I was ever going to be able to fly somewhere glamorous and cosmopolitan again before the current situation in which many commentators are giddily speculating that most regular people won't be doing much traveling in the future even if the pandemic ever does end. I still like Rick Steves's shows, not going too upscale, but still having a nice view and getting to linger over dinner and drinks in an atmospheric setting, and I found this guy, Mark Wolters, a university lecturer from Illinois who has a very affable personality and is very positive, qualities that I admire but sadly have never been able to attain. Most of his videos are just him standing in some picturesque location talking about various aspects of travel, but his presentation of his experiences I often find to be interesting. His videos seem to me to have gotten better over time as he has gotten more practice. He seems to be about seven years younger than I am and in light of my own recent experience he strikes me as a heart attack waiting to happen within a few years, so I hope he will be all right. These things sneak up on you as get towards fifty.

 

Jo Stafford--You Belong to Me

I come back to Jo Stafford at various intervals. I had one of her records when I was in college that I did not play all the time, but on certain occasions and times of year that seemed extra-significant or prescient of a change or transition of some kind, this always seemed to fit my particular emotions at such hours. Her voice always reminds me of ice cream.

The Sundays--You're Not the Only One I Know

The epitome of ca. 1990 wimp rock, no doubt--the Megadeth fans at my high school would have wanted to beat the brains in of any male who expressed the slightest affinity for this stuff, to what end it is not exactly clear to me but the emotion behind this desire I believe was genuine. I like this song though, I find it resonant and nostalgically wistful in my advancing age, and this video is one of the best in the pop-song-meets-classic-movie genre that I have seen. Everything about it screams out "Where my youth go? Where did our youth go? Where did our art go?" emotions which are very cathartic and congenial to me.

New Edition--If It Isn't Love

I heard this on Rite-Aid radio, which has been a surprising source of forgotten hits for this page over the years. I don't think I had heard this in decades, and couldn't remember the title or who sang it, I had to try to call up some of the lyrics from the darkest depths of my memory. This is pure me-wandering-around-suburban-Philadelphia-in-the-summer-of-'85-waiting-for-something-exciting-to-happen stuff here. Nothing particularly exciting ever did happen, which may be for the best, because if anything had, it would have been so monumentally great that perhaps the rest of my life could not have lived up to that memory. Or perhaps I would have been launched on a lifetime of building on my early positive experiences to generating ever-better ones by habit and expectation. One never knows. 

Nothing else is coming to me tonight.  

The Fantasy of Popularity

I've always wanted to use this title. I imagined it would resonate with the public. However, the material to go with it never materialized, yet it maintains an odd presence in my daily imaginative life. So I am wondering if finally using it will kill it off.

I know it has been two months since I have gotten a post up on this site. I am just going to pretend it has only been a couple of days. I am catching up on my movie reviews.

The Star Chamber (1983)

This is not the sort of thing I am generally interested in (it's about lawyers, who also operate a secret vigilante society on the side), but it is pretty well-made and well-scripted, and retains something of the distinctive qualities of the 1970s, pre home-video style of filmmaking. The settings and the acting feel a little less superficial and corporate product-like than what was soon to come, the pace is less frenetic, the story, which could be confusing, is laid out clearly and with deliberation. That said, coming from a background of literature and traditional plays, these kinds of Hollywood stories about competitive, cynical lawyers, with a lot of gun and explosion generated violence and death, I have a hard time getting into, and always have.

Mr Wonderful (1993)

This kept turning up in my game that I use to pick movies, so I thought I would try it. It's a romantic comedy from the early 90s, which was kind of my time, though it's more about late baby boomer people than people my age. I thought that maybe there would be something about it I'd like, but it was pretty bad all around. The script is weak, and it is exacerbated by unfortunate casting. The married middle-aged English professor having an affair with a grad student is a motif I can sometimes be persuaded to like, but unhappily the professor here is played by William Hurt in the full realization of his inimitable smarminess. (Ugh) Matt Dillon and Annabella Sciorra are the leads around whom the plot centers, and there is no chemistry between them at all. Annabella Sciorra didn't have any chemistry with William Hurt when she was his mistress either, so she really did not have a good movie. I remember sort of thinking Matt Dillon was all right in something at some point in the 90s, but I can't remember what it was now, and it seems hard to imagine after seeing this. The part of the plot where Matt Dillon and his electrician buddies are looking to get out of their (presumably) pretty well-compensated union jobs to pursue the dream of restoring and re-opening a dilapidated bowling alley in what looks like Lower Manhattan was painful to watch from the vantage of having lived through the past twenty years.

The actress Mary Louise Parker was appealing in this, though mainly because she reminds me of a type of early 90s girlfriend/love interest that never quite materialized. Maybe I'm not ready to revisit  any Hollywood movies from this era yet even for nostalgia purposes, regardless of their quality. There is still too much that causes me pain to remember. I like the European films from this time though, those make me happy. I suppose because I can identify them with my more pleasant dreams at the time, and not with the painful truth of my actual social existence.

Goodbye, Columbus (1969)

I read this book some years back (and liked it), and I thought this was a good adaptation, as did most critics and even moviegoers at the time, as it was a decent hit at the box office. It accurately identified, I think, what were the best and most interesting parts of the book, and made those particular dynamics the points of emphasis in the movie, which I find to be the case with most of the better film adaptations of literature. This is obviously the kind of movie I am inclined to like, romance between collegiate English major type people, 1960s America--and, pretty rare for the 60s, a Mid-Atlantic setting outside of Manhattan Island--characters, attitudes, rooms, dinners, activities, and so on that are recognizable to me from my childhood but that have increasingly gone out of the world. Many contemporary commentators note that this reminds them of The Graduate, and they are kind of similar in structure and general mood, I guess; I would think of them as belonging to the same family, but the things that work in this are not the same things that work in The Graduate, or at least that it is famous for. The soundtrack by the rock band The Association, for an obvious example, was a complete flop compared to the classic Simon and Garfunkel songs in the other film, and the pool scenes and cocktail parties, despite taking place at a country club, come off as shabbier and less assured. Goodbye, Columbus struck me as perhaps more humane. I had not really understood the ending when I read the book, in the sense of what was the real point, and when the same dilemma come up again in the movie some idea did occur to me which I wish I had written down because I can't remember what it was now. It had to do of course with Brenda being guided inwardly by what her parents would have wanted, but also with why she had even gone out with the guy in the first place, which seems like the real question...but I can't remember what it was now. 

I was going to write up six or seven movies here but time has defeated me this week, so I think I will just post these three. Goodbye, Columbus is an interesting movie from its time if you have somehow missed it. The book was published in 1959 but the film is clearly set in the late 60s and it works just as well. The star of the movie, Richard Benjamin, whom I don't remember seeing before though I guess he was something of a name for a while in this era, starred a few years later in an adaptation of Portnoy's Complaint which seems to have been a bomb. 

I'm not sure why this picture is at the bottom. The new Blogger format is throwing me off here.