Seven Red

1. The Coolness – Last week, we had Ellie’s birthday party at Little Gym. These things have gotten much more complicated since I was a kid, but maybe in a good way. I remember bowling birthday parties (these were always fun) and, of course, the ubiquitous McDonald’s Birthday parties (we still don’t know how we’ll handle that one if it comes up, since we do not patronize McDonald’s, or any other fast food, for that matter). But these gym birthday parties are pretty snazzy. They have all kinds of wacky gym activities for the kids, when they’re not running around just raging on all the equipment. It looks damn fun, is all. Today, we went to yet another gym birthday party for a friend’s four-year old. Ellie fell down while she was running around a circle, and I think she got embarrassed, because she wouldn’t participate in any of the other organized activities, and she generally got very sullen. Is that right? Can a three-year old be embarrassed? And then you suddenly look down and this little blob of scream has some well-developed internal consciousness, and concern for the thoughts of others, and a burgeoning sense of self and all that. When did this happen? And, of course, it signals the fast impending date when they are embarrassed by you, when your very presence in the room is almost unspeakably mortifying to them, rather than seemingly their greatest source of joy. And we’re supposed to handle that moment how? A friend of mine has even written a book on “cool,” on the concept of cool, but I want more on this: what’s supposed to happen to your own sense of cool when your kid thinks you’re decidedly un-that. Ah, well. Maybe we have a couple of years yet on that. But seeing her today, seeing her feeling embarrassed, the realness of that day was just out there, and you have to face it.

2. The Wackness – Almost a year ago, I wrote about The Wackness before seeing it, tying it back to my own memory of that crazy New York summer of 1994. We finally got around to seeing the film last night. Now, in my typically obnoxious pre-viewing reviewing, I sniffed at the premise of the film, suggesting that its Manhattan setting and characters wouldn’t allow it to capture the feeling of that summer particularly well. Not working class enough. Not Outer Boroughs enough. Let me be the first to say that I was wrong about that. It’s a wonderful film, dead-on in creating that mood, and I just loved it.  I mentioned in my previous post that that summer had a kind of fin-de-siecle feel to it, a general euphoria seemingly derived from a feeling that everything was coming to an end. Apparently, I’m not the only one that remembers it that way, because the film just nails this theme, a Catcher in the Rye for the nineties, perfect. Everybody smokes pot, drinks 40′s of malt liquor, writes graffiti (even Ben Kingsley as the nostalgic therapist), and dreads the cultural transformations being wrought by the Giuliani regime. It’s exactly right on all of this. Everybody stays out all night, chases something, thumps Biggie somewhere in the background, and makes mixed tapes. The main character’s love interest tells him something like “You look at things the wrong way — I always see the dopeness in things, but you always see the wackness.” Everybody talks like that, yo, even in their most intimate and sincere moments. That’s how we talked, ridiculous as it now seems. But that was ours. And then the meta moment, the pomo-ness of it all, with Method Man playing Percy, the Jamaican drug dealer, talking to Luke Shapiro the drug dealer, while Method Man’s verse in The What pounds behind the scene: Yo I gets rugged as a muthfuckin’ carpet get… We’re supposed to get it: hey, that’s Method man acting and that’s Method Man’s verse.  I’m not sure my response to this film is portable, given that that time looms so large for me as this phase transition, becoming more what I now am, maybe, and less what I was, and having to face that. Leaving Queens, and everything that was, but everything it was leaving us as well, and we knew it, felt it. A whole way of life, as Raymond Williams says. Something was over. I know this is maudlin. But that was ours. I’m surprised this film tapped into it so well. And it wasn’t as maudlin as this description of it; it was even smart, and not condescending. I said in my previous review that it was a comedy. It’s not. Not at all.

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