“There’s a word for you ladies…but it isn’t used in polite society outside a kennel.”
—Joan Crawford, The Women

Winter finally showed up in northern California this week. When the rain started I was on my motorbike 40 miles from San Francisco with a busted visor and no waterproof gear. Drops stung my face hard enough to draw blood from my lips, and by the time I got home I had to be thawed out in the bath like a Christmas morning turkey after a drunken Christmas Eve.

After that I was only fit for a Sunday Matinee: make milky coffee, snap a bar of Valrhona chocolate, draw the blinds, wrap up in my pet blanket, and watch a 1930s movie. (I know it isn’t nice to brag, but the modern spinster life is delightful.) I watched The Women, George Cukor’s 1939 version with Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, and 131 other actresses. MGM claimed that even the lapdogs who appeared were bitches.

As I learned all over again during a week of silent meditation, my attention is a misguided combination of fickle and compulsive, always trying land on written words. My laptop has become a test of commitment. If I love a movie, I can watch it through. If it flags at all, I start surfing Wikipedia and IMDB to read the background detail. (Once I get as far as Twitter and Slate, it’s over.)

I have more stomach for car chases than catfights, which bring back the trauma of Fifth Class lunchtime, and I made it only twenty minutes into the spats and bitchery before wanting to know more about Norma Shearer. How did such a squat, stiff, cross-eyed little thing ever get to star over Ros Russell and Joan Crawford?

She was disciplined, that’s how. When her father lost all his money, her mother moved her and her sister from their big house in Montreal to a verminous room in New York City so that the girls could become stars. Norma worked—exercising her eyes to fix that squint, studying dance and voice, hauling around to every audition in spite of the insults to her figure. She was turned down by the Ziegfield Follies for having short legs.

When she got to Hollywood, she kept working harder than the other actresses—retaking screen tests, practicing angles that disguised her defects, pushing for better material and better roles. She became MGM’s biggest silent star in the twenties, long before she persuaded the studio head and boy legend Irving Thalberg to marry her and crown her queen of the lot. And when the talkies came along, her fluid Canadian accent worked, unlike poor Clara Bow’s Brooklynese.

I felt better about The Women once I could root for Norma Shearer, who played racy, modern divorcees as well as this wronged, noble, and boring wife. Women’s roles were wobbling all over the place in the 20s and 30s, and she tried out several on behalf of the millions of young women who depended on Hollywood instruction to tell them how to live and what to wear.

The movie was released on the day that Hitler invaded Poland. I can imagine Brooklyn seamstresses and shop girls luxuriating in their Sunday off, forgetting daylight as they sink further into velvet seats and stare up at that endless beauty salon scene that opens the movie. They watch the rich ladies get manicured, massaged, and covered in creamy facepacks and cucumber eye pads. They study the suffering involved in electrode facials and calisthenics and store up information on how to act when you have money—how you stride in and demand a top-to-toe “makeover,” claiming to be bored to tears with your “look.”

A decade into the Dirty Thirties, nobody in my Brooklyn theater can go to the Elizabeth Arden salon on Fifth Avenue, unless they are the manicurists who paint rich ladies’ nails Jungle Red. But for a quarter, they can go to a matinee and gasp as the movie switches from black and white to Technicolor for a ten-minute fashion show that has nothing to do with the plot. Look at these modern women, switching from sportswear to cocktail dresses to ball gowns! Short, well-padded models twirl in Adrian’s avant-garde outfits as they pretend to see Paris, play tennis, and go on a cruise.

The fantasy is exotic, and also minutely specific. It shows exactly how these rich ladies put their lives and looks together, how they manage their servants and their men. It reminds me of British children’s books from the same era, which spent pages on loving descriptions of Nestle condensed milk, sausages, pink ham, and slabs of chocolate, so that half-starved readers could transport themselves to picnics and “midnight feasts” where no one had heard of ration cards.

The rules that underpin the glamour in this movie are simple and stark:

1. Get used to what you’ve got. You may rise from the perfume counter to vamp in a bubble bath, as Joan Crawford does. But you’ll never belong, and when the rich are done with you, you’ll be kicked right back to the department store.
2. Take comfort in the fact that rich ladies are miserable. They don’t have enough to do, so for sport they take each other down. And one by one, they get their comeuppance—
3. Because all husbands step out on their wives. A smart woman knows this, stays sweet and loyal, and waits out his weakness until he’s glad to get her back. And when a man chooses you over another, that’s victory. That’s triumph.

I feel your kinship, Brooklyn girls and women: sales clerks, mothers, typists, servants, elevator operators, seamstresses, factory girls. I could so easily have been one of you, attending George Cukor’s Sunday university to learn what I could and couldn’t do.

The 40 Year Old Virgin made me happy. Like the fabulous Catherine Keener, I endorse the obscure appeal of fuzzy men on bicycles.

It isn’t always easy to eavesdrop on how men talk when women aren’t around, but this has been a good movie season for it. Straight men’s affection for each other moves me far more than any Meg Ryan drivel. If only they hadn’t ruined the real love story in Wedding Crashers with a chick-flick ending.

If Lord of the Rings shows the terror and confusion of the First World War, and Orwell’s 1984 is a portrait of post-war London, then the movie version of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy captures seventies England, which is run by vile, blobby civil servants and depressive (robot) functionaries. Arthur Dent is a mopey Englishman surrounded by Yanks who are dazzling, confident, and dim. His main source of comfort is cups of tea, which never arrive. Because it’s seventies England, bowls of petunias in space are funny, and so are absurdist answers to weighty questions.

If I sound hard on the film, I don’t mean to be. Monty Python cast such a shadow that the comedy of cringe and absurdity is still around, and mostly holds up. I never got into the HG2G radio series or books, but was always fond of the kind of boys who did, and this movie makes me miss England, or at least the England of the BBC and Douglas Adams. The cast is lovely. Mos Def’s cheekbones seem picked to set off Martin Whatsisname’s perfect, lumpy ordinariness; I would have liked to have seen him in more scenes. Bill Nighy turns up—yay. Sam Rockwell has a great time in every movie he’s in. The closing song, “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish,” makes full use of Neil (Divine Comedy) Hannon’s Broadway voice. As for the glowing, intrepid Zooey Deschanel character ending up with that particular Arthur Dent, well, I’m glad they explained the bit about the Improbabability Drive. And I want the number of her dermatologist.

Douglas Adams took equal delight in technology, nature, and the arts, and that was rare in a country that still forces kids to limit their study to three subjects from the age of 15, herding them into art or science pens as if the Renaissance had never happened. It shows in his writing, which roamed joyfully. Before he died suddenly at 49 he had dreamed of getting HG2G made into a film, and so it was sweet to see an Adams-faced planet swim into the very last frame. “For Douglas,” ran the closing dedication; indeed.

In the Angelika Theater on Houston Street, the rumble of the subway adds to the suspense of every movie and the theaters are laid out like midsized planes. Worse: the guy behind me was the kind who would watch Fox just to yell back at Bill O’Reilly. Between coughs and refolding his crackly raincoat, he tossed angry comments at the screen like a Yankee fan getting trounced by the Red Sox.

    “Oh for crying out loud. She has a frickin’ right to her body. It should be legal,” he said, as a young girl cried and dithered before her backstreet abortion. When the police came to arrest the woman who performed it, he was bitter. “Here come the pigs. Here come the pigs. Yeah, just watch this.”

I wish he had. He missed the point. Mike Leigh’s movie, about a North London family in 1950, has compassion in every frame. His post-war London is drab and freezing, indoors and out, and yet you want to warm yourself at Vera Drake’s hearth—even though it’s a two-bar electric fire turned on as a luxury. Imelda Staunton’s currant-bun face reflects her Irish name, and like some of the women of my childhood, her character’s care for others seems as natural as breathing. Vera Drake cleans rich people’s houses by day, pops in to make tea for sullen invalids, looks after her bed-ridden mother, and takes in bedsit waifs. She is plain as suet, blessed with cheerfulness, and cherished by her husband and two children. You don’t often see people like her in movies or books. Vera makes happiness look easy, but Leigh takes pains to show that it is, instead, a series of choices, and far harder than misery.

Vera also helps girls in trouble. Girls who can’t manage. She’s done it for years, in secret, for no money, grating pink carbolic soap into a basin of hot water and disinfectant. She calms them down before she syringes the soapy solution into them with a rubbery hose. “Don’t you worry, dear, you’ll be right as rain.”

When one almost dies, she is arrested.

We don’t know why she did it. Leigh’s restraint is beautiful. He stays with the particular, and that’s the force of the film. The “pigs” that my seatmate spat at turned out to be sympathetic and humane. 47-year-old Imelda Staunton looks agelessly ancient as Vera, as women of that generation did. Vera’s husband, who looks substantial and content at his tiny wife’s side in their tiny flat, seems to shrink beneath the high courtroom ceilings and the tall, well-fed detectives. Every period detail is perfect, down to the pointed red manicure on Fenella Woolgar, who is exasperated at the friend who begs for her help over afternoon tea. “You’ve gone and got yourself into trouble, haven’t you?”

The characters do the best they can with reality—the war is recent and vivid, the Pill has not been invented, and abortion is illegal and shameful. They are not the lunatics we depend on to effect change in the world; instead their lives are overturned by the world as it is. Leigh lets his actors show how with their faces rather than the words they can’t find, and it’s affecting. Vera’s beloved son rails at her for “killing little babies” and letting the family down. Mr. Angry in the seat behind me railed back at him. He missed what Vera didn’t: the hurt and bewilderment behind the accusations.

I’m (mostly) pro-choice, from a country that (mostly) isn’t, living in a country that’s split by the issue. Abortion is complicated. This movie is rare in showing complexity without comment. Rarer still in showing true happiness. It felt like a better choice for this election eve than Farenheit 911.

After months of bike commuting, I’ve fallen off the wagon.

These things creep up on you. My bike was stolen. The tire of the replacement was slashed. I moved to Prospect Heights, which is well-named: after twelve hours at the office, the climb up Flatbush Avenue feels like a stage in the Pyrenees. Back in Carroll Gardens I could beat the chicken-bus F train to work if I pedalled hard. But up in these Heights, we have the B and the Q, sleek bullet trains that get to Manhattan in fifteen minutes. My good intentions wobble when the choice is forty minutes on the bike.

It doesn’t help that a few weeks ago my company moved to an office in glamorous NoLiTa, where the air-conditioning is as ostentatiously wasteful as a Pacific Islanders’ feast, and where you can’t bring a twenty-five dollar bike up in the elevator. You’re can’t even look like that kind of thing might occur to you. Instead we wear our winter clothes in August and zip around the loft on Razor scooters, partying like it’s 1999.

Then there was the Metrocard. I signed up to have the cost of a monthly Metrocard deducted from my paycheck, tax-free. Once that little plastic card was in my wallet, I felt as compelled to travel as the Pope. Even though I understand the economics of sunk costs, every bike ride felt like it cost me money.

So for a whole month I became a Q Train junkie, docile as every other straphanger. I liked it. I’d scribble in my notebook, or catch an extra hour a day of reading. I liked not having helmet hair and smeared mascara. I put on a few pounds as bike gristle melted back into belly fat. In the mornings, I’d listen to John Turturro.

I’ve been riding the subway with John Turturro since I moved to New York. He is my constant. When I lived in midtown he showed up twice on the E and once on the B. Once, in Carroll Gardens, I rode the F Train pressed up against his guayabera shirt. But in Prospect Heights our relationship has deepened. Every morning I get to the Seventh Avenue station at 9.27. (We are internet slackers—it’s 1999, remember?) Every morning, John Turturro is there. I live in the kind of neighborhood John Turturro would live in, and that makes me happier than a penthouse in the Dakota Building.

John Turturro commutes with a man and a woman who might be from his production company. He never sits down, even when there are seats. His companions are much shorter than he is, and they are clearly bananas number two and three. They don’t say much, but John talks plenty.

He looks good. Forty-five suits most men better than twenty-five, I think, especially the gawky ones. He’s very tall and lean, and that frizzy trapezoid of hair he used to have is now cropped and graying nicely. He still rabbits on, though, like a guy who hasn’t realized he turned out well. Or like a Brooklynite.

I look at my book and listen to him talking about some production snarl. I picture him as Barton Fink, so wrapped up in his own Talent that he does’t realize that John Goodman is more of a monster than his pompous little screenwriter could ever dream up. Same voice. I see him kneeling and begging for his life in Miller’s Crossing, so that you despise and pity him all at once. Same Brooklyn whine. Or as a hapless murdering fuckwit in Fargo. Or tossing pizza dough in a neighborhood just like Prospect Heights, as Pino in Do The Right Thing. Or in Redford’s Quiz Show, where his Queens character was so outer-boroughs that he made my fillings ache. Turturro is always memorable. It’s a surprise to see, after all that cowering onscreen, that he’s well over six feet tall and growing into his looks. How strange to become a success by playing jumpy failures.

His subway monologues are mostly about some production he’s doing. Sometimes, though, he talks about his diet and exercise regime. We all have this private fascination with our own bodies, but we don’t always get to hear the exterior monologue from a movie star—even a Brooklyn movie star. He can keep it up from Seventh Avenue to Canal Street. The kind of food he eats—not Atkins, not low cawbs, but lower cawbs. How he feels on the third set of reps, now that the trainer is making him slow it down. His cardio routine. What his nutritionist says. I love listening to this familiar voice riffing on his own little world. It’s pure Barton Fink.

But it can’t last. I can’t sit like a slug while John talks about reps, and I don’t hold with gyms. On Saturday, I took Benny’s bike down to Fifth Avenue Bikes in Park Slope, to get my slashed tire fixed and to flirt with Felix, the Puerto Rican sales guy. Back in my rich days, I’d bought three new bikes there, mostly because Felix loves his job. His guys patched up my jalopy without a murmur about the rusty wheels. My Metrocard runs out tomorrow, and I’m back in the saddle again.

By the time my body clock struck 5 a.m. and the hobbits shuffled onstage one last time, the Oscars were redeemed only by the yummy fixins and beloved company at Dom and Mark’s place in Cobble Hill.

I’m allergic to Billy Crystal. All the chicks had called each other beforehand and said ‘Nobody’s wearing anything pigmented, okay? Pass it on.’ Hollywood actors spouted guff about ‘practising their craft’. Charlize Theron showed up orange and thanked her lawyer. The only bright spot, apart from Annie Lennox, was the revelation that sheets of straightened hair are officially over, and soft, sexy waves are back. Especially for Eugene Levy.

With a mixed sense of dread and duty, I finally dragged myself to see Return of the King last night, still jetlagged and increasingly irritable. I can see why so many people enjoyed it, and I’m glad they did. Unfortunately, I’m not the target audience. Though I’m ridiculously suggestible in movies about human beings—prone to weeping and terror as the director sees fit—I find special effects so distancing that I want to leave the cinema. They are never good enough if we come out saying ‘Great special effects’. I sat there wondering how they did the lumbering Harryhausen monsters instead of being transported by the story, which I didn’t understand. I daydreamed about Orc extras sitting around the catering tent and chatting in Kiwi accents. Jackson taunted me with fake endings too many times, until I was ready to yell ‘Jump, Frodo, jump!’

LOTR interests me only as a study of Tolkien’s First World War experience, where childhood friends from the shires marched off to interminable battles that were beyond comprehension, and the only cause that made sense was loyalty to each other. But I didn’t need nine hours of the cherub-in-peril stuff, even with a few years’ break in between. I’m too old and cynical not to splutter at the dialogue, and by the eighth hour of Sam Gamgee’s plump, sweaty yearning, my brain had superimposed Philip Seymour Hoffman in Boogie Nights.

My first New York social engagement, a few hours after touchdown at JFK, will be an Oscars party in Brooklyn. New Yorkers don’t watch much TV—life there is too much fun—so for the big nights television owners generously open their living-rooms. This gay Superbowl is my favourite.

The Irish media keep running interviews with the Sheridan family, who are up for the screenwriting award, but boo, hiss! I say. In America was an okay film with dodgy dialogue. It’s not that I have much respect for the Academy, but I’d like to see Sophia Coppola win that Oscar and any others going, not least because I can trust her to wear a very lovely Marc Jacobs dress to the podium.

Lost in Translation was the first true American movie I’ve seen in years. In script, photography, casting, and music, she outdoes daddy and her gurning ex-husband (and skewers Spike Jonze beautifully by casting twitchy, zombie-faced Giovanni Ribisi as Scarlett Johanssen’s husband.) Bill Murray, bless his pockmarks, has always been my dream dinner date, and I would die happy if he ever serenaded me with “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding?” And Johanssen, though her character is maddening and maddeningly familiar, does a fine job.

I hear complaints that the movie is racist, that it propagates Japanese stereotypes, that it shows only postcard Tokyo. They’re missing the point. This movie is about dislocation and fleeting recognition. We need to be at home in ourselves to explore, and her characters aren’t, yet. That’s why Coppola shows us faithfully the postcards and cartoons they see.

Yesterday I learned how to tie a clove knot. The purpose of the clove knot was to string a white bedsheet between two trees outside the Pilot House cabin. The purpose of the bedsheet was as a screen for projecting National Film Board of Canada shorts. I was planning a big night’s entertainment with my ranger pals.

The bedsheet hung in front of the newly-chopped September woodpile, and made the cabin look even more like a jaunty wooden boat. I swept the porch while Ranger Tim balanced the projector and the DVD player on a home-hewn chair. We flipped through the borrowed films: Leonard Maltin’s Animation Favorites from the National Film Board of Canada, Best of the Best: Romantic Tales (and who could fail to be stirred by The Romance of Transportation in Canada? ). I was all set for a campfire singalong to The Log Driver’s Waltz. I was ready and willing to get excited about shadow puppetry, if it came to that.

Dear God, what has happened to me? I am a page of the Utne Reader made flesh. I am Laura Fecking Ingalls Wilder. Is the next step knitting jumpers out of yoghurt? Starting a national wood-chopping fitness boom? Whittling?

I used to get my eyebrows waxed. I used to wear a little spandex unitard to spinning™ classes at the gym. I could live for a year in the woods on what I once spent on Prada shoes. I used to go to openings. (I don’t remember what was ever opened, but I distinctly remember openings.) I saw two movies a week: proper, at-the-cinema movies, not DVDs. I chewed through braised lamb shank after braised lamb shank at posh Manhattan restaurants. There were book parties, and also real parties. I spent a lot of money in Sephora on creams and powders to give me pink cheeks. You don’t get much change from fifty bucks when you’re shopping for pink cheeks in New York City.

But signs of my troublesome wholesomeness were already evident. I once went to a live taping of public radio’s This American Life show. I refused to buy “coffee drinks”. I canoed on the East River, an unlikely Brooklyn Pocahontas. I would have read The Gawker every morning if it had existed then, but I know it would have left me feeling as icky as an it-drink hangover. I refused to spend any time in art galleries unless there was a free bar. Sometimes I cooked to eat, not as performance art. Twice I baked.

So my golly-gosh transformation in the Canadian north woods is not a shock. I’ve spent the last two years chipping away at the polish I’d carefully lacquered on since the age of sixteen. Still, though. National Film Board of Canada marathons. This is the X-treme sport of wholesome dorkiness.

My Toronto buddy Rosalinda sent an email spanking the last time I slagged off these films.

I know now that these are beloved cultural artefacts in these parts. Mark, a Canadian curmudgeon from my Brooklyn days, once surprised me by launching into an NFB cartoon song in Sparky’s:

“Oh the cat came back
The very next day
The cat came back
He never went away…”

Rosalinda again:

Well, I watched three DVDs straight through last night, and if I were eight years old, I would still feel crushed whenever RTE showed these instead of Bugs Bunny. But as a dorky adult, I like them. They are sweet, often entertaining, too often worthy, usually strange. They’re not for kids.

My favourites are the straight narrations, like the 1974 film The Family That Dwelt Apart, where EB White reads his own story, a funny-sad parable of the disasters that follow well-meaning American intervention. There’s a cartoon of a Stephen Leacock story, “My Financial Career“, that I’d first seen quoted in full on Ftrain. A Mordechai Richler story, “The Street” of a young boy waiting for his grandmother to die so he would get his own room. There’s a cartoon song about the tormenting blackfly of “north Ontar-eye-air-eye-o”; we groaned and scratched along to it. And a wonderful deadpan version of Cinderella starring medieval penguins in wimples, and a glass flipper.

The House That Jack Built was one of several late-Sixties indictments of the evils of capitalism, smoking, and cars. “Tax-funded pinko commie Canuck propaganda,” I taunted, but the placid rangers just smiled and drank their beer. We watched George and Rosemary, a story of midlife love where the protagonists lived “reasonably happily” ever after: only in Canada. And then there was weird stuff: in early CGI an operatic nerd built machines to fire cows at his kitchen wall. We learned to flick straight past the CGI shorts; too much form, not enough function.

What I admire most about these films is the breadth of styles and voices, and that they are not afraid to be dark. In a for-profit studio system, like Hanna-Barbera, there’s an instantly-recognisable house style, but the NFB paid artists and filmmakers to experiment. Broadcasting may be the one area where government funding of the arts doesn’t create comfortable, dull work.

Back in July, I met a woman who has no sense of smell. She shook huge quantities of salt and pepper onto her salad to prod her tastebuds, but most flavors were lost on her. I couldn’t imagine being deprived of my wine-loving gluttony, but she’d never known anything different.

Barbara Kingsolver has a piece in The Poisonwood Bible where Adah returns to America after years in the Congo. She marvels at supermarkets, which have a massive, odorless arrays of food, and misses the smell assaults of her African market.

The US is terrified of smell, I think. Procter & Gamble has warned us about all the nooks that harbor body odors, and we’re careful to hunt them down with the right products. There are too many people in New York to escape smells completely—our garbage ripens on the sidewalk, and Chinatown smells of raw fish and cooking all winter long. For the most part, though, you can persuade antiseptic Americans to bond over hushed stories of the guy in the office who had B.O., or the time they rode the Paris metro.

I wonder, what’s the big deal?

My friend Mark is taking steroids for a particularly nasty sinus attack, and can now smell properly for the first time in years. The experience seems traumatic. He’s being mugged by a sense he’s ignored until now. He sends me plaintive notes about previously unremarked smells and tastes—cleaning fluid, garlic breath, Diet Coke.

“I’m particularly concerned about the cat’s ass,” he says.

I realize that compared to him, I’ve been living in the olfactory equivalent of Pepys’ London, all chamber pots and reeking fish. I kind of like it. Nostalgie de la boue.

Could we launch a serious threat to P & G by offering sinus cauterization as a cosmetic procedure for the sensitive? No more need for Shake ‘n’ Vac, scented tampons, or Diptyque candles at $45 a pop.

On second thoughts, the economy might collapse altogether.

When I first moved to Manhattan, almost everyone I knew was between 25 and 30. The school you’d been to seemed much more important than your Old Country. In fact, some of the new arrivals seemed to regard Kentucky or Michigan as the Old Country, and the extreme cases thought that Harvard was.

Carroll Gardens is different still, despite all the chi-chi restaurants that opened for yuppies like me. Most people at Saturday’s party were Irish, Italian, or ‘half-and-half’, as Dominick says. Each side told jokes about the other. Matt, my Santa Claus neighbor, says:

“The Irish people and the Italian people, that can be a real beautiful mix for a marriage.”

Everyone wanted to know what part of Ireland I was from. Matt told me that his friend, Damian, who was killed in the Trade Towers, was one of nine kids of a family from Donegal. They all grew up in Inwood in the ’70s, when it was still an Irish neighborhood. Matt’s from the Bronx, but his family had a summer house in the Catskills next to all these Inwood families. Four Green Fields, they called it. Matt’s father would put on a brogue when talking with the rest of the Four Green Fields men, and the kids would tease him for it. Matt was a year or two younger than Damian and was dying to hang out with the bigger boys.

I realized I’d read a huge New York Times feature about Damian and Inwood a few weeks back. Sonuvagun, If Isn’t Dominion. The article isn’t online any more, but I remember that the whole family was crazy for Gaelic football. Damian was the youngest boy, and his father used to put him down to bed doing commentary on an imaginary match where the brothers all played on the same team.
“And Michael passes the ball to Sean…and Sean passes the ball to Eugene…and Eugene heads it over to Paul….”
The ball always ended up with Damian, and he always scored the winning goal. Lucky kid. He was golden, Matt says.