Cantara’s (Social) Notebook

About a week ago I had to opportunity to view again, after twenty years, an arty but satisfying film by director-documentarian Jill Godmilow, called Waiting for the Moon . Plotless and rather devil-may-care when it came to realistic chronology, it depicted the lives of Gertrude Stein and her companion, Alice B. Toklas, as they spent them in the artistically rich atmosphere of pre-war Paris and their peaceful country house in the French province of Ain, near the Swiss border. Their days spent in Ain hold a particular glamour for writers. For who among us has not longed for that quiet place, where nothing is heard but the rustling of the leaves, the whistling of the teakettle and the steady scratch of pen on paper? And who among us has not longed for that ever-present companion who understands and fulfills not only our bodily needs—in kitchen and bedroom—but our fundamental need to get the words down right, and in order, the way we see them in our head? And, of course, how many of us...

San Francisco native Margaret Cho is among my favorite performers/artists and one of the funniest people in the world. I’ve been waiting nearly two years to get the opportunity to see the movie she wrote—now it looks like her worst fears have been confirmed. But hey Margaret! There is an audience out there in DVD World grateful to be able to enjoy your work (and the works of a few others I can name) even on the home screen. Here’s her 14 October 2005 blog posting : Tickets for our Los Angeles AFI screening are available, and if you can come support our film, I would really appreciate it. We are showing the film to potential distributors, and if we can prove that Bam Bam & Celeste has an audience out there, it might actually get to a theater near you. The film world is a notoriously racist and sexist place. “Admit one only” goes not just for the ticket, but for the different levels of “minority” you might qualify for. You can be a woman, just don’t be a woman of color. You...

[Caricature of Lew Wasserman by David Levine] Last night’s showing of the documentary The Last Mogul on Showtime reminded me that, humble as my station was at the time—I was Rouben Mamoulian ’s private part-time secretary—I actually did get the chance to meet Wasserman, although by this time it was way past the peak of his power over Hollywood. Being young and callow, I had no idea who this imposingly tall, well-tailored, skinny old man was. I also had no idea what the difference was between him and all the other old men he arrived with one afternoon to pick up Mamoulian to take him to a funeral (never found out whose). This was the only time I ever saw Mamoulian in anything besides a dressing gown and carpet slippers. Also! I managed to hitch a ride in their limousine with them down from Schuyler Road to the closest bus stop. For a review of The Last Mogul , go to Slate . The character of Leslie Braverman in my mystery novel, Cold Open , is based a little bit on Wasserman.

Some fifteen years ago I was in bad health and could not work, and Lady Gregory brought me from cottage to cottage while she began to collect the stories in this book, and presently when I was at work again she went on with her collection alone till it grew to be, so far as I know, the most considerable book of its kind. Except that I had heard some story of "The Battle of the Friends" at Aran and had divined that it might be the legendary common accompaniment of death, she was not guided by any theory of mine, but recorded what came, writing it out at each day's end and in the country dialect. It was at this time mainly she got the knowledge of words that makes her little comedies of country life so beautiful and so amusing. As that ancient system of belief unfolded before us, with unforeseen probabilities and plausibilities, it was as though we had begun to live in a dream, and one day Lady Gregory said to me when we had passed an old man in the wood: "That o...

The Library of America has just brought together in a single volume four of Philip K. Dick’s most original novels from the 1960s: Hugo Award winner The Man in the High Castle (1962) which describes an alternate world in which Japan and Germany have won World War II and America is divided into separate occupation zones; The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), which posits a future in which competing hallucinogens proffer different brands of virtual reality and an interplanetary drug tycoon can transform himself into a godlike figure who can transcend death; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), about a bounty hunter in search of escaped androids in a postapocalyptic society where status is measured by the possession of live animals and religious life is focused on a television personality; Ubik (1969), which depicts a future world of psychic espionage agents and cryonically frozen patients inhabiting an illusory “half-life”, pursues Dick’s theme of simulated realiti...

Naomi's stepmother Sharon, her father Sam, her husband Steve. Today, Good Friday, with a fire  in the Hollywood Hills (no one killed thank goodness, fire set by careless teenagers on vacation), Stephen gave a reading in Huntington Beach, Orange County for a poetry organization so filthily compromised I’m not even going to mention its name. Attendant were Steve’s in-laws, while Michael’s and my companion in this adventure was a friend who works near Cedars Sinai and, who, by an astonishing coincidence, turned out to work in the same building—on the same floor—as Stephen’s stepmother-in-law. Here’s Stephen with 89-year-old Sam Achs (Naomi’s maiden name is Achs, not Foner ) and his very pleasant wife, Sharon, who is about Naomi’s age. This was the reading where Stephen finally admitted that his poem, “While Cutting Carrots for Dinner”, was actually his fantasy about stabbing Naomi to death with a kitchen knife . “But I’m not going to read it tonight,” he announce...

[Photo by Robert Elswit] When I look at Jake, I see Stephen.