Dude! Weak! Weak, Dude!

OK, what the hell, man? Bergman dies, and then Antonioni??? I repeat: what the hell, man??? If I were Scorsese, I'd just check myself into the hospital as a prophylactic measure.

And yes, granted, the two guys were in their 90s, and their greatest days were behind them, but still, this is pretty close to Adams and Jefferson dying on the same 4th of July, mentioning gratefully that the other was still alive as they went.

So I guess we've all gotta go out and watch Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal (films do not get much better than this last--indeed, films flat out do not get better than this last) and L'Avventura and...and then, at the end of all this, I suspect we'll probably have to have a quiet sit in a sealed garage with the engine, because "uplifting"? Not so much, these guys.

Still, damn. Altman's gone--and now these two--who's left? We're losing the last generation of geniuses, folks. Films don't work the way they used to, and nobody's stepping up to replace the fallen because studios can't afford to experiment. Oh, sure, we've got one or two guys who know what they're doing behind a camera: Ridley Scott, Michael Mann, Allen, Spielberg, Soderbergh, Fincher--but does the work of any of these men achieve the label 'transcendant'? I think not. (Insert another few paragraphs of predictable bitching and moaning, concluding with a general statement that life sucks a little bit more than it used to.)

I realize, by the way, that I've just plain, flat-out not been posting. I'm intellectually wiped, folks--vacation time is here, and I'm using it by just flat out not capital-T thinking. (Watching the Alberto Gonzales testimony has really helped with this--that man's mind is as blank as J.D. Salinger's Friends and Family list.) I plan to indulge in this mental torpor for a bit yet, so please do not disturb the hibernating bear...

Kids--I Think I Must Acquire One

A quick post on my recent experience of a national holiday. I have--thank God--family in the vicinity of Chicago, and thus within a reasonable commute. So come the 4th, I was informed politely that I was to "get my anti-social ass down here or else--"--well, I shan't get into the threats involved, except to say that I'm fairly sure that the human body can't bend that way, and certain orifices most definitely are not that capacious. So went I did, and gosh I'm glad. Because...kids. I played with kids.

It's normally a sour point with me that of all my cousins, I'm roughly the only one sans offspring. I don't know if men have a biological clock--I doubt it, we're far too crude to have such a sophisticated piece of machinery in our make-up--we might have a mental sledgehammer, but that's about it--but if we do, mine has been ticking for awhile. And this trip, I realized why.

In keeping with the overall anonymity of this blog, I shan't identify the parties involved, but I was, over the course of the afternoon/evening, 'discovered' by a brother/sister team of not-older-than-6 younglings. They were initially quite skeptical about me--a looming, saturnine stranger has entered the house--what do we do?!--but as the evening progressed and the eating/drinking intensified, rendering most of us inert, they quickly discovered that, unlike everyone else there, I would accede to their demands to "chase me!" around the lawn and swing them waaaaaaaaay up in the air when I caught them.

So I heard a lot of "AGAIN!" that night, the young lady at one point clasping her hands and placing them aside her tilted cheek in a perfect 'pose' of beseeching, and later, when I was seated and mid-conversation, approaching me and quite firmly taking me by the hand and telling me, "Now you're going to chase me again." So now, I'm seriously considering sneaking back down there in the dead of night and stealing her away.

And whenever we'd finish, the boy--who's quieter, but quite shrewd--would just stroll up, grinning expectantly, with an instinctive "Fair's fair!" look on his face, and off he'd run, and so for most of the night, I had to chase them, be chased *by* them, and became their official spokesperson when it came to telling all assembled that it was "time for everyone to make a goofy face!" Which, since most of us were pretty soused at that point, we did.

It was wonderful, really--I'm clearly a total whore for the affection of children (which explains in some part my choice of career). Of course, spending a couple hours chasing small children *really* took it out of me. (And them--they nearly fell asleep before the fireworks.) Gasping and happy, I sat with a cocktail in my hand, when my aunt read my expression and told me "I think you need to have one or two of your own." And yeah, I kind of do. As the girl was being carted off to bed, she made a point of catching my eye over the shoulder of her father, and making that little open-and-closed-fist wave as she went.

It was very, very good, that. Very good, indeed.