The Scorched Earth at The Gibson

Last week, I wrote a guest post for a fun DC culture/nightlife blog called DC Style is Real highlighting The Gibson—a speakeasy that makes some of the best cocktails on the Atlantic seaboard. The bar is celebrating its third anniversary tonight, but if you can’t make it to DC for the shindig, then head on over to DC Style is Real and check out my write-up.

It could be worse, people. I could have left you for nine years before writing again.

In real life, I gather friends together for themed double-feature movie nights a couple times a month in the summer and winter. Moving forward, I’ll translate the more interesting double-features into posts for your enjoyment. You can check out the introduction to the first set below.

In Before Sunset—Richard Linklater’s 2004 follow-up to his 1995 sleeper classic Before Sunrise—we watch two characters seduced, intimidated, built up and torn down by a third. The first two are Celine and Jesse, two thirtysomethings who met on a train in Vienna in 1995 and haven’t seen each other since. The third is, of course, Paris, a vibrant city with which they each have markedly different relationships.

Jesse, in town peddling a minor bestseller he wrote about his one night with Celine nine years earlier, sees Paris the way many young Americans with stifled ambitions do: The city of lights. The city of magic. The city of romance. As the movie opens, he’s finishing a reading at Shakespeare & Co. and sees her peeking at him from around a corner. He fumbles through the end of his Q&A and leaves with her. He only has a short time until his flight, but he’s determined to spend it catching up.

Celine lives in Paris. Over the past nine years, she has elevated her night with Jesse from a memory to a fantasy to a myth. While smoking in a café, walking through gardens and boating past Notre Dame lull Jesse into a breezy dream-state, they just reinforce for her that this symbolic reverie is breaking out of her past and intruding on her real, day-to-day life.

For Jesse, this tour is a romp around a dream land, but Notre Dame’s beauty serves to wake him up, or at least push him toward discussing his own, stifled dreams about Celine. They get in a car, and Celine breaks down, angry at him for coming into her real life “all romantic, and married.”

In the car, they each try to touch the other when the other has turned away, beautifully recalling the childish glances they stole in the first movie's music booth scene.

This sets up the movie’s quiet, stunning final act: Jesse walks Celine to her apartment, and as they scale the steps she becomes quiet, awkward and excited. He asks her to sing one of her songs, and she sings a dreamy song about their one-night stand. He finally stops pretending as though he has any intention of catching his plane. We hold on one shot as she gives in to fantasy and he admits to reality. They’ve switched places. And we fade to black.

The movie paints Paris as the city that stirs up passion, capable of reviving youthful romance that you had thought long-dead. Later this week, we’ll look at a movie that conversely sees Paris as the city that kills passionate youths.

I swear. It will be this week.

A city both beautiful and sinister.

In real life, I gather friends together for themed double-feature movie nights a couple times a month in the summer and winter. Moving forward, I’ll translate the more interesting double-features into posts for your enjoyment. Check out the introduction to the first set after the jump. 

Few cities exert as great an influence on world culture as Paris. Along with New York and London, it is one of the most aspired-to and mythologized cities in the west. UNESCO recognizes its food as one of the world’s greatest cultural treasures, its native poetry weakens knees around the world, and its streets have inspired some of the finest writers and artists any other country has to offer.

Yet America’s relationship with France has always been complicated. In the earliest days, they were nothing but a boon: their philosophers inspired our founding fathers, and their government provided us with funds, weapons and soldiers when we staged a revolution. Without LaFayette’s support, General Washington would be a footnote in history; twenty years later we fought the Franco-American war. The French showed the rest of the world how to mount a national resistance to occupying Nazis and are remembered as milquetoasts and accomodationists. In more recent years, Americans have celebrated the life of Julia Child, idealized Paris as the City of Lights and the City of Love, and held up French food and water as symbols of people and social norms worthy of derision.

LayFayette Square, in my old hometown

This dichotomy, while always present in post-war American culture, has only intensified since September 11, when France’s leaders began to openly criticize American foreign policy at a time when our national wounds were still raw: Some Americans saw the criticism as a welcome breath of fresh air, feeling that it reflected their own hesitations about our country’s administration of the War on Terror; other Americans understandably took offense, feeling that such open opposition at such a sensitive time deliberately undermined our efforts pursue justice in the wake of terrible acts of terrorism. Still others, becoming ideologically entrenched in individualistic neoconservativism, began to understand France’s very social and political system to be threats to their personal values.

Gravy Boat’s first double-feature will highlight two movies coming at Paris from very different ends of that spectrum. Join me later in the week for a brief discussion of Before Sunset, and then on Monday for a quick look at Taken.

After being featured on WordPress.com’s Freshly Pressed section, today has already seen more visits to this blog than any month on record. Figures. I take seven or eight months away to look for a new job, move and get settled in a new city, and on my first day back people are suddenly reading this thing. I was hoping to be safely hidden from the critical eyes of the wider internet while I worked off any rust that may have developed, but I’m not complaining about the new guests at all.

For those of you who are wondering, let me briefly introduce myself and this blog:

And just so you know, this is what I'd look like if I were a Mad Men cartoon.

Growing up, I read a lot, watched far too much TV and committed movies to memory. It was a little sad, really. I went to college in New York City, where I studied fiction writing and film criticism. After graduation, I put my love of words to work in political and non-profit communications.

So, why is the blog called Gravy Boat (Stay In The Now)?

I figured, “What better way to headline a blog about often-snarky, rarely original musings on politics, art, culture, pop culture and the intersection of any two or more of the above than with a quote from a not-that-well-known novel that’s not really about politics or pop culture and that’s written by a talented author who I actually don’t like as much as my friends do?” (Home Land by Sam Lipsyte, in case you were wondering.)

“Gravy boat! Stay in the now!”

I remembered my father barking those words one Thanksgiving years ago, my mind wandering as it was wandering now, making its maybe-not-so-beautiful-nor-extraordinary connections while a row of aunts and uncles waited for me to pass what wasn’t technically a gravy boat but more on the order of a mason jar filled with pan-spooned turkey juice.

I try to post once or twice a week, but I can’t promise perfect consistency. In the mean time, feel free to explore some archived articles, including ones about How I Met Your Mother, worthwhile politicians, Lost, internet ephemera, vegetarianism, the best of New York, and my quirky childhood and somewhat surreal adulthood.

I’m glad you guys are here, and hope that some of you will stick around for more than just the one post. (In a shameless attempt to draw you back, I’ll tease you with the fact that I’ll be writing a bit about Ghostbusters 2 in a few weeks…)

Let’s say that four or five years ago, Vince Vaughn, Steve Carell and Tina Fey were going to star in a movie written by Carell and Fey and directed by Judd Apatow that riffed on classic Laurel and Hardy sketches and Buster Keaton setpieces and featured a supporting role played by Stephen Colbert.

That’s sort of what happened in the mid-1980s when Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis got together with Ivan Reitman to make Ghostbusters, a movie that I’m willing to bet shaped more than a few of our childhoods.

Apparently they couldn't spare the original sign.

For those of you who don’t know, Ghostbusters took the general concept of such classic comedies as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and put it in the hands of some of the best comedic minds to come out of the generation that gave birth to Saturday Night Live and Second City TV. The film follows Murray, Aykroyd and Ramis as mildly disgraced Columbia University professors who mix their Ivy League bullshitting skills with enough quantum physics and occult knowledge to open up a “paranormal investigation and elimination” service. (The first of a planned franchise, according to Murray’s character.)

It’s one of the funniest movies ever made–if you haven’t seen it yet, you should do so right now—but its humor is so dialogue-driven and its ancillary thrills so visceral that I didn’t realize it was a comedy until I was a teenager. Instead, I spent my childhood stomping around my house pretending to be the Sta-Puft Marshmallow Man, dropping globs of slime on unsuspecting action figures and trying to bust my parents’ poor dog (appropriately named Sad Sack).

It’s also one of the best New York movies ever made. The story would hardly work–or at least, it would hardly be able to get the same kinds of laughs—if it were set anywhere other than the New York of the 1980s: a strange place full of hard, impatient people. A place where the only people tougher and less afraid of anyone than the gang members are the yuppies with whom they share the city. Much has been made of the scene where Rick Moranis (a Second City alumn) is assaulted by a hellhound (okay, I’m not even going to pretend that I don’t know they’re called Terror Dogs) outside of Tavern on the Green, only for the clientele to resume their conversation as though nothing had happened. But for my money, it’s the brief scene of a man getting into a cab completely oblivious to the fact that the cabbie is a corpse that says the most about the cold, hard, self-absorbed New York of the Reagan era. (A New York, it should be noted, that I’ve never actually experienced.)

By now, you know that I love New York. What you may not know is that Ghostbusters was hugely influential in the way I see the city. (Yes, even more than Sports Night or that last scene of “Winter Dreams.”) Every time I set foot in Columbus Circle, walk up Central Park West, or set foot on the Columbia campus, my first thought is, “They shot part of Ghostbusters here!” I get a thrill when I walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, because I know that Ray and Winston had their talk about “the dead rising from the grave” driving across that same bridge. And when I first saw Hook & Ladder 8 in real life, it was one of the greatest thrills I’ve ever had.

Seriously, this place does not look right without a massive column of ghosts shooting out of the roof.

Now, I may not be living in New York any more (I moved to Washington, DC, a few months back…), but the news that Mayor Bloomberg is aiming to close Hook & Ladder 8 as part of his efforts to keep the city’s budget under control still hits me hard.

Now, I know the kind of pull this blog has in New York. My readership extends well into the single-digits, and at least 10% of those readers live in the Five Boroughs. So I’m counting on you guys to keep our cultural history alive. Tell the mayor that you won’t stand for this. Tell your city council member that you hope they won’t, either. The Ghostbusters’ office stays open, end of discussion.

Oh yeah, and I guess you should make an argument for keeping firefighters employed and close to where people live and work. That’d be good, too.

Have you met Hugo?

Really this is just a quick temp post to lay claim to the headline as soon as possible, because for those of you who don’t know, Jorge Garcia was on tonight’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, playing Steve, the gang’s perennially unlucky friend reuniting with them after years of absence.  He came up with a mysterious phone number for them to dial (481-516-2342), and mentioned that he had been stuck on an island for a long, long time.

It’s a busy week ahead of us, what with traveling for the Thanksgiving feast and getting to participate in my favorite family tradition (the big post-Thanksgiving putting-up-the-Christmas-tree party), but I’m going to make some time this weekend to write up this episode of HIMYM (and really the past two and a half months of the season) along with bringing you all the next installment of TSOL.  So, you know, look for that.

Until then, though, have at the turturkeykey.

It’s sort of an online address book for people with Alzheimer’s: It not only allows you to keep people’s phone numbers and e-mail addresses in one place, but it also lets your contacts include photos of themselves so you remember what they look like and lets you include notes or classifications so that you know where you met them. It also has several options for continuing to communicate with them, all from the same “web page.”

Problem is, while the whole country was out voting last night, the people at The Facebook seem to have changed their font. If any of you are thinking about signing up for this thing, I just want you to be aware that you may need to strain your eyes to read it. This has been a public service announcement.

Vote.

The last time Armenia had a general election, there were riots.  A couple friends of mine have been living in Tanzania, and haven’t been able to leave their home for two days now because of the fallout from an election being held.

Here in New York City, I just got back from voting, and I want to remind you all that polls are still open.  Go vote.  Right now.  As long as you get there by 9 o’clock, you have the right to vote, so get out there and celebrate the fact that you live in a country where you actually get a say.  And before I hear any lip from any of y’all, yes, we may have two parties that are both largely center-right, but that doesn’t change the fact that there are usually very real, substantive differences between candidates for major offices in this country.  And even if there weren’t, there are differences of competency to execute said offices, and–oh, yeah–the fact that we live in a place where you probably won’t die just from walking outside on election day.

The fact that we get a say in how, when and to whom power is transferred in our government is a huge responsibility, and it’s one we should absolutely be celebrating.

Seriously, go vote.