The Great Gatsby: The Game

I don't play video games. Very often. But...but...but. If you grew up in the town that was being invaded from outer space, if your home town was the one being destroyed, if you had spent your childhood as a frog, leaping across a river full of logs and crocodiles - well, you would be excited too.

Which brings us to this: The Great Gatsby video game.

It's the sort of simple, old school, Nintendo style game that is totally addictive. The people who posted it claim it's based on a game they found at a yard sale. Who knows its true origin, and honestly, who cares?

And it's set in West Egg.

Palm Trees and Warm Water

When I was growing up, bathing caps were considered the least cool thing to wear ever. When swimming at our local community pool in West Egg we were, however, forced to don them. On the weekends, teenagers were exiled to this sad, shadeless, concrete, loungeless area where we could lie out on seat cushions, but we had no seats. When I was a little kid I thought it was the coolest, but when I was forced to be there, it was just a total annoyance.

I remember being six or seven years old and being fascinated by those old lady swim caps covered in rubber flowers. They seemed so much better than the plain white regulation ones we all wore. But I never imagined a swim cap like the one pictured at left. It mimics hair. I'm sure I would have been mercilessly made fun of had I worn it for real with my two piece back in the 80s, but it's just wonderful.

On a frigid, dreadful morning like today, I can only dream of beaches and swimsuits and being too warm and jumping in the ocean. Of cabanas and drinking cocktails out of coconuts and monkeys in the trees and turquoise water. I found out yesterday that a friend of mine moved to Hawaii. Though I am thrilled for her and in no way begrudge her good fortune, the interwebs tell me it feels like 2 degrees out (Fahrenheit), so I am more than a wee bit jealous. I think I would eventually get bored, living on the beach, in exile from my beloved Gotham. But then I think it would likely take a while.

Photo courtesy FIDM. Please also read their wonderful blog post about bathing caps in the mid-20th century.

Dozens of Little Pieces of Paper

On Sunday, I visited the library in West Egg for the first time in [redacted] years, where I participated in a panel discussion of women writers (more on that later), and one thing that stood out was the missing card catalog. To be honest, I think they did switch over to computers before I left, but my memories are all of rows and rows of wood cabinets containing little paper cards. So, it was such a lovely surprise when I saw on the Brooklyn Museum blog today that they were offering their long unused library cards to anyone who wanted to use them to create something - all they ask in return it to hear back about what you've come up with.

This sounded like really exciting project to me, so on Thursday I'm heading to the museum's library to pick up my cards. I love the idea of repurposing these repositories of history.

(photo: courtesy the Brooklyn Museum)

Kings Point: A Documentary

As I touched upon briefly in Thursday's post, American's really hate the idea of getting old and dying. Not that most other nations are precisely jumping up and down about it, but there's a little more integration of their older citizens into daily life. I've been job hunting for a while, and I know my age is an issue. And I'm not even old. Logan's Run, here we come.

Which brings me to a feature documentary currently in the completion and fund raising stages called Kings Point, directed by Sari Gilman. I've seen the five minute preview (and so can you! Embedded below), and it's lovely. The film profiles several residents of a large retirement community in Del Ray, Florida. The brief exerpt I saw was fairly riviting. One woman speaking about it still being a world of couples, although she's essentially living in a city of women. We also hear a little snippet from an elderly commitment-phobe ("Bea's on top of me all the time!"). Like most things that try to get at the root of some aspect of humanity, it's both funny and sad.

Much of the time the great joy of documentaries is listening to people talk. And the people Ms. Gilman has chosen to focus on are very good talkers. It looks lovely, too, with well composed shots and a palette of greens and peaches (not, I beg to clarify, the dreaded orange and teal) that evoke Florida beautifully. I'd like to see more. Which brings me to the fund raising portion of this post. The filmmakers have set up a kickstarter page. Please click here to help them with their completion funds.



In the spirit of full disclosure, I must mention that I grew up with Sari in West Egg. Upon hearing the name of the film I initially assumed that West Egg was the subject matter, as the village in our home town where all the fabulously wealthy people (including Gatsby) live, shares its name with the title of this film. But it's just a coincidence. Sari has had a long career as a feature documentary editor, working on such projects as Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and Thank You, Mr. President: Helen Thomas At the White House among others. This is her first outing as director and I'm looking forward to seeing the completed film.

Art in the Tropics

If you are lucky enough to currently be in the environs of St. Barth in the Caribbean, you may also be lucky enough to be able to swing by and take a look at the solo gallery show by talented painter (and fellow former resident of West Egg), Jennifer Presant, who snagged a residency in paradise.

It's hot out. Drink a mojito and look at some art.

Info here.

(Image: Red Night, oil on linen, 27" x 60", via jenniferpresent.com)

See More Glass

People I've never met die all the time. And people I've never met, but have admired and in some cases almost loved, have been disappearing pretty regularly. But I've never cried before when one of these strangers died until a couple of weeks ago when J.D. Salinger died behind his fortress of implacable silence.

It's taken me a week or two to get my thoughts in order which is why I will never be a journalist, but I'm glad I waited. I'm still not sure why this stranger's death felt so meaningful to me. I've never harbored any dreams about making a pilgrimage to New Hampshire and being "the one" he would spill his guts to after all these years. I mean, how awful would that be? I prefer to keep my illusions intact.

The Catcher in the Rye has never been that big a deal to me, though I hesitate to say exactly what I feel about it as I haven't read it in well over 20 years. And I've never wanted to meet Salinger. So all this feeling is tied up in the 300 or so pages that comprise Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (in honor of my completion mania, I'll throw in Seymour, an Introduction, too. I love the part where he's describing his middle class Manhattanite mother-in-law as being incredibly heroic).

When I read Nine Stories in high school I thought I had found God. After Franny and Zooey, I knew I had. After Salinger's death I reread the stories which I don't think I've done in about a decade. I still loved them and I was pleased to discover that I remembered them very accurately. My enormous love for the Glass family was intact and undiluted. For those who haven't read the stories, here's a rundown of the basics: Vaudevillian parents, Irish/Jewish Manhattan upbringing, seven kids - all of whom appeared on the radio quiz show, "It's a Wise Child". Seymour, the oldest, committed suicide. Buddy, the second son, is clearly Salinger's alter ego. Franny and Zooey are the two youngest, both actors. For a while I used the piece where Franny goes off about how awful actors are as my audition monologue. When I worked on it in class, my teacher said, "Your acting problems aren't acting problems. Go see a shrink." Probably rightly so. Salinger was also (along with Maugham's The Razor's Edge) my first introduction to Eastern philosophy* which opened up some new avenues of thought for me.

"The Laughing Man" though one of the Glass-less stories may be my favorite. I think I've been hopelessly influenced by it, as upon rereading it, I saw bits and pieces of this 15 page story in nearly everything I've written. The whole idea of the Paris-Chinese boarder may be one of my favorite things in any story anywhere, and have loved imaginary real places ever since.

I read these stories and fell in love with them long before I was capable of analyzing why I liked anything, but certain things seemed really clear. His writing is pitched emotionally in a place in which I am very, very comfortable. I've said the same thing about Wes Anderson's movie "The Royal Tanenbaums" which was my favorite of the past decade and was heavily influenced by Salinger's stories. I guess what I'm saying is that I don't find any of the emotional content embarrassing. The people in these stories feel recognizable to me in ways that fictional people rarely do.

There is also a solid New York City vibe in the stories - to the extent that upon rereading I realized that I didn't just feel as if I knew these people, I actually knew them. The Jews and Irish of upscale New York and environs were all I knew growing up in West Egg. And Salinger's mid-twentieth century Manhattan was the city of my parents and my uncles who worked in television and my grandparents who lived on the Upper West Side until they retired and flew south. The Glass children were alienated from the same world I was alienated from.

So to get back to why this death seemed like such a big deal to me - I'm still not sure. My life has been full of endings recently. Virgodog and I are splitsville. A dear family friend passed away. My best friend and collaborator parted ways from me about a year ago. So maybe I was just wide open and ready to be moved by the death of a stranger. Or maybe I'm just waiting like everyone else to see if there are any new stories. I half-believe he left instructions to have everything burned upon his death like Kafka and Emily Brontë did. I'm torn. Joyce Maynard said there was at least another entire novel. But maybe it's best if we're just happy about what we have and not always want more and all of us should stop thinking about more Glass family stories and that lost novel of Emily's that Charlotte consigned to the flames. Strangers are still strangers no matter how many of their books we read.

*Okay - maybe Kerouac, too, but I could never stand him. I've gotten into more arguments with more people defending my loathing of Kerouac than almost anything else.

West Egg Revisited

Last weekend I drove down to North Carolina with Virgodog, where I was his guest/Sig Oth/arm candy at his 20th high school reunion.   After arriving in Little Chicago, North Carolina*, we hung out with a good friend of Virgodog's from high school and his wife.  They were both delightful.  This was a huge relief, as I hadn't at all known what to expect.  Aside from the Virgodog support aspect, I was attending in the spirit of anthropological zeal.  I didn't grow up in a place anything like Little Chicago.  I grew up in a place called West Egg.

Tacky North Shore suburb, over-indulged, over-privileged, gold-plated pressure cooker that it is, I hated it.  I left as soon as I could.  I did my best to carve out a life for myself that wasn't too informed by what I perceived as the narrow values of the place in which I grew up.  And then the two fold way back machine of my own high school reunion and joining facebook happened.  

It's nice to have perspective, or so I've heard, and I don't know if I do.  At my reunion, I felt exactly as I did when I was in high school and I didn't terribly enjoy the acid flashback aspects of the event much.  I looked around the room, and thought "who are these people?" and was sorry I'd come.  Most everyone was nice, some extremely so.  But everyone seemed a little shell-shocked, or maybe I'm just projecting.  Thank god for the open bar.  The people I liked in high school, I still liked.  The psychopaths were still psychopaths, and it was mildly comforting to find that my opinions of these people weren't completely colored by the hormonal hysteria of adolescence, but were, in fact, accurate.  Everyone looked good, everyone was successful in their own way, which, I think speaks more to the self selecting nature of reunions than anything else.  At the end, I would have regretted not going.

And then I joined facebook, which engendered another, slow motion high school reunion.  A particularly interesting aspect to this is that I link my blog entries to my facebook account, eschewing all anonymity.  I have reconnected with lots of people.  In a nice controlled way, I've messaged and chatted and said hello to lots of people I grew up with.  Which has been fun, really. 

I have no animosity for anyone I grew up with.  We were raised in strange circumstances, in a place where none of our parents were from.  (I remember the day when me and four friends all discovered that our fathers had attended the same high school.  We thought it was a remarkable coincidence, we didn't realize we were the product of a cultural cliché.)  Our school system was a sophisticated mechanism devised to achieve exactly one end:  to get its students admitted into an array of elite colleges and universities.  Inevitably, one of the byproducts of such an education are the acquisition of the tools required to analyze and dismantle the machinery in which we were caught.  If, like me, any of us chose a different path, we knew we could.  Like Gatsby before us, we saw that green light.

*all names have been changed to protect the easily embarrassed, i.e. Caviglia