Entertainments
The best news I heard all week: Cher quit Facebook.
In the meantime it's coming down to the wire in Lady Caroline Blackwood's biography, Dangerous Muse, to the final chapters in which she's engaged in a fierce race beteween life and death, leaving vodka bottles and pill containers strewn over the carpets of her Sag Harbor, NY home and getting up in the morning to write for publication. If there's one sure thing about Lady Caroline it's that she wasn't vicarious, she loathed vicariousness in all its forms, having gone on fox hunts as a young girl in Northern Ireland and becoming traumatized by them.
It doesn't seem all that far from Ireland to northwest Wyoming; well, I suppose in my case it's as far as my memory can go. I'm the guest of honor at the Labor Day Rodeo in Meeteetse, Wyoming and am given a front row seat. In the bronc riding competition for kids I have the privilege of seeing a 12-year old boy smashed up against the metal fence, having been thrown by his horse, then without hesitation get up off the ground, dust himself off with his Stetson and walk away, already bowlegged, like a man. The crowd goes crazy.
Meryl Streep couldn't do what that 12-year old cowboy kid from Wyoming did, no way. The other night I caught a bit of a movie she starred in, "It's Complicated" (2009). The male lead was Alec Baldwin, the one issue beside Pakistan President Trump and I agree on--Baldwin's a lousy actor. Anyway, the great Streep and the lame Baldwin were really up against it in this flick: I've never heard such a torrent of cliches! It was truly breathtaking, one cliche after another, a battle of cliches, both as words and as images. I thought as I listened and watched, this is so good it's almost art, it could have become art if the cliches had just been pushed on a little harder, pushed by the pressure of trying to become something beyond what they were, building as it were on the firm foundation of their clicheness..but no, the cliches just kept bouncing around on the surface, content to live for posterity as cliches. I turned the channel.
Next, the movie "Deathtrap", a 1982 contraption of a film starring Michael Caine, Dyan Cannon, and Christopher Reeve. Cannon's as bad an actress as Streep is good, so bad she's sometimes very good in the way any actor perpetually mis-cast sometimes rises to an occasion they have no conscious knowledge of rising to. It was strange to watch the late Christopher Reeve without thinking of his accident: he's really good, even when not playing Superman. And the greatest film actor of my generation, without a doubt: Michael Caine. I watched "Deathtrap" for about fifteen minutes, then shut the tv off.
I hadn't read The New York Times 'Arts" section for several days--I'd stacked them beside the couch from which I watch tv--so I picked up one and started reading. Reading, I discovered Cher had deleted her Facebook account.