Picture Houses by Jeffrey Schwartz by Greenwich Academy

Picture Houses

poems Jeffrey Schwartz

Dexterity Press New Haven, CT 2018

for Betsy & Ben, always

PICTURE HOUSES

Mothers of America let your kids go to the movies! get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to it’s true that fresh air is good for the body but what about the soul that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images Frank O’Hara in “Ave Maria” Whenever I found myself getting overwrought over problems with one of my films, I would say to myself, “Remember, it’s only a movie.” It never worked. Alfred Hitchcock in It’s Only a Movie by Charlotte Chandler These films declare that our lives are poems, their actions and words the content of a dream, working on webs of significance we cannot or will not survey but merely spin further. In everyday life the poems often seem composed by demons who curse us, wish us ill; in art by an angel who wishes us well, and blesses us. Stanley Cavell in Pursuits of Happiness The goddam movies. They can ruin you. I’m not kidding.

Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye

Coming Attractions If you’re as early as I am, the screen will be dark. You might not hear yet the inane soundtrack we use to fill the silence. Neither speak nor read. Be one with your waiting self. And then from chaos, the first light. It funnels from the unreachable window over our heads. Keep your eyes open. This goes fast: a little boy in swim trunks talking to a beach cop, his grandpa, on a busy boardwalk along the sea. The cop nods. Notice the hearing aid. When the camera pulls back, there’s a Casino where the boardwalk ends. Nearer are Madame Marie’s fortune telling booth, games of chance, T-shirt shops, frozen custard stands oddly empty for summer. In the now-abandoned Casino, an older man who shot himself waltzes with a girl who remembers when the boardwalk thrived, when her mother rented rooms on 7th Avenue. We follow her up the steps to the porch & through the open door to the kitchen where someone prepares a Sabbath meal for the house of boarders. “Did you keep kosher then, Nana?” the boy, now a young man, asks, stepping like Woody Allen into his past. “Does it matter?” she asks. “Do you remember taking the train every summer to Cleveland?” the young man asks. “How could I forget?” she answers. The boardwalk carousel spins round, it spins round & round like the big kiss in Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart inhabits present & past at the same time. There’s a wedding kiss in Rumson. Another 30 years earlier in Asbury Park. Two in Cleveland. A funeral.

A gunshot. A girl screaming at the top of the basement stairs. The perpetual sound of waves drowns out her cries. From the boardwalk you can see England. You can see ads for suntan lotion pulled behind propeller planes over children bobbing on the rope in the deep end of the swimming area. You can see the daughter, now a grandmother, trip on the boardwalk, apologize, & reject an ambulance that would have taken her to the hospital where she was born. Previews give us too much information. 24 frames a second, each frame a work of art, stories embedded like DNA in every frame. The feature presentation hasnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t even started & already stories are branching off of stories. Memories split endlessly. Even the picture house will subdivide.

2001: A Space Odyssey It’s January 2001, a new millennium, & I’m showing Kubrick’s masterpiece in the school auditorium so we can be overwhelmed by the big screen vastness of space, the silences & the unusual pace of a film that begins with cavemen & ends with an embryo. In between, explorers pursue the mystery of a screeching obelisk, a sort of radio signal from aliens that no human & even no computer can understand. It’s not as much about power as it looks — especially when Hal tries to take command over the astronauts. Dave, Dave, he says, I’m losing my mind when Dave pulls the plug. It’s more like having your oxygen cut off & being left to drift between stars.

Ancient History Like the pyramids, the 1920’s theaters rose in gaudy exaltation to mythic figures. Sophie Tucker played for two weeks in the 3,400 seat Hippodrome, where the stage was large enough for a full-size swimming pool for diving horses. The Palace, State, Allen, & Ohio followed, showing movies on massively big screens through the 60’s & their speedy decline. In its vaudeville days, the Hippodrome boasted 42 private dressing rooms on six floors & a lobby as roomy as the Red Sea. When we watched the re-release of DeMille’s Ten Commandments, the opulence was already fading. Pharaoh & his staff, especially bare-legged Edward G. Robinson, were looking flabby & dated. The pyramids were cracking. Gilt peeled from the sculpted ceiling. But somehow miracles worked & we began to cultivate the sacred. As children, we expected God to speak from a burning bush, a mountain top, a big screen. We didn’t think about camera tricks or what happened to the 14,000 extras after the shoot. When it was over, we emerged onto Euclid Avenue, liberated, eyes full.

Blood Simple This is not about the Cedar Lee (which, by the way, has become one of the great art houses). It’s about influence. It’s about what’s proper for an uncle with his sister’s 16-year-old semi-urban saxophone-playing, world-traveled kid. It’s about art — but not a film like The Straight Story. That’s easy to choose — David Lynch softened by Disney. (There the risk was boredom.) No. It’s the usual blood & sex dilemma. Will I warp him? Will I be embarrassed by the explicit portrayal of subjects we haven’t yet discussed? Will this simply confirm the Coen brothers’ bad taste or will we see the brilliant roots of Fargo & No Country for Old Men? When it’s over I still don’t know what’s right. Was it a good story? Did the cinematography redeem the blood? And what did he make of that fish & the Four Tops? In the lobby, the Channel 8 news crew busily arranges posters & directors’ chairs for a live broadcast to celebrate Cleveland’s own The Tao of Steve. Cameras ready to film the filmmakers film us, filmgoers aglow in this temple of art.

Blow-Up in London 34 years later I can’t find the theater in Piccadilly where we waited in line to see the opening of Yellow Submarine. It was the summer of ’68, just after the student strikes at Columbia & the Sorbonne, but before Prague & the Chicago Convention in the US. We were oblivious our first trip abroad, our first trip anywhere outside Cleveland, OH. We American boys with short hair & straight pants inhabited a parallel universe to the painted bodies & long-haired dancers at the free concerts in Hyde Park. Flying high, but not from drugs or politics, we were free to wander & observe, to claim streets & neighborhoods no longer identifiable on the map. One night we saw Antonioni’s Blow-Up with David Hemmings. He looked for something in the park we, too, strained to see. He seduced young models, carried a giant propeller in his sporty convertible, developed photos that proved he alone knew the truth. So we pursued him, sexy & quirky & obsessed, collecting random but highly meaningful objects, developing our own theories of the seedy life in London. We were the mimes playing invisible tennis when the movie ends, undeterred by the world spinning around us full speed.

Casablanca at the Community Here in the local art house saved from the wrecking ball, I sit with my son reciting our favorite lines from Casablanca. “And what in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?” “My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.“ “Waters? What waters? We’re in a desert.” “I was misinformed.” 62 years after it helped swell favor for the US to enter WWII, we’re in another war & who’s the tyrant? Who’s our rebel hero? “I stick my neck out for nobody,” Rick says, even though we know he will. There’s the loner Rick who plays chess with himself & who never drinks with his customers, the cold Rick who holds onto the papers of transit, the pretending-to-be-neutral Rick who denies his political past, the smooth Rick, the self-pitying Rick, the powerful Rick who has only to nod to exclude someone from the bar or to approve the band’s playing “La Marseillaise.” The cynical Rick, the broken-hearted Rick, the anti-fascist, resistance-loving Rick. Tough-talking Rick Blaine in tuxedo who can’t let anyone see he’s soft: Pondering the ethics of sleeping with Renault for an exit visa, he snarls at the young bride: “You want my advice… go back to Bulgaria.” And then lets her husband win at roulette. Grow soft, Rick. Don’t even think of putting the needs of the world before your own. In 1942 we needed to see Strasser get shot & the bottle of Vichy land in the trash. But today’s a different story. I don’t wish my son a chance to be heroic on some airport tarmac — no, only that he can sort the crap, protect the classics, stay out of the desert, & never leave the one he loves.

Creature Sex Steam rises from the lagoon where unsuspecting teens park their convertibles. They pull in before dark sometimes six or eight in the back seat because you pay by the carload. Double & triple features lure them in. Enter at dusk & stay past midnight. The air crackles with static from portable speakers. Stars appear. From outer space it looks like a form of pagan worship. Rectangles aimed at pictures flickering on a massive screen. Close-ups tell the story: Faces touching with closed eyes signals a kiss, open-mouthed & wide-eyed a scream. The Creature has a knack for timing. Once the vehicles have cooled & the trek to the refreshment stand has come & gone, once the intruders are relaxed & distracted enough to have lost sight of the obvious danger, once the feel of the ordinary has triumphed — then the Creature rises out of the slime. Its half-lizard, half-lion face frozen into a nasty grin, its webbed fingers too big to be gentle. It can’t help scratching when it means to tickle, slicing open when it means to caress. At the smell of fear, the Creature is hungry to tuck its scaly limbs under a blanket or back seat. And, in cars wired to poles for sound & heat, it’s impossible to pull out fast enough to avoid the violence — but truthfully, who wants to? The body count drives humans into each other’s arms.

Cuckoo’s Nest in Bryant Park I’m walking along 42nd Street to Grand Central from my class at MOMA where I was hypnotized by the spiral emitting from a film by Duchamp & a short by Man Ray, meaningless, which maybe, if you’re focused on shapes & carousel lights & not catering to an audience, is the point. I wonder, when he worked at MOMA, did Frank O’Hara ever see these films & want to write “Why I am Not a Filmmaker”? Can you love Man Ray and Lana Turner? To make a sentence is, if not to make sense, at least to make meaning. Oh Doc, what do you mean I can’t get out if I wanna? Jack Nicholson asks, just about to understand the trap in Cuckoo’s Nest playing outdoors on a big screen in Bryant Park. I am amazed by the hundreds, no, thousands of film fans overflowing the lawn & the raised patios, lining the walls, lusting after a communal experience in an age when it’s easier to stay home & stream Netflix. What’s the point of the big screen if not to draw us together & of art if not to disturb and please? Sorry, Messrs. Duchamp & Ray. I’m OK with readymades & pre-linguistic utterances, but I need names & faces, an identifiable place, a story, a conflict, something that ends. Maybe it’s genetic. Maybe it’s Hollywood. Maybe it’s this crazy world.

Fairfield Film Club Where would she be without the FFC? When I picture her on the slopes at Middlebury’s mid-year graduation, I think of all the movies it took to get to where she is now. First video rentals, then DVDs, Netflix, & Film Forum for reissued classics. Mix that with Shakespeare, a love of acting, & a preternaturally good sense of humor. (No wonder she was seduced by Film & Media Culture). All those trips to Fellinisaturated Rome or parents in the writing biz didn’t hurt either. What swayed the equation, though, was the Fairfield Film Club weekend, her cousin not only curator of the Fest but enduring screen host. You can never get enough Marx Brothers & if there’s a Cary Grant gap, fill it with The Philadelphia Story, Notorious, Bringing Up Baby, & North by Northwest. You can’t go to college without Dazed & Confused, kiddo, & if you liked La Grande Bellezza, you got to see La Dolce Vita. Now she’s teaching us about movies & sharing films she’s written, shot, & produced. Somewhere on her bulging resume in between PA for Scorsese or Shop Steward for Allen, I thought I saw a credit to the Fairfield Film Club & that famous weekend when we basked in the glow of the fat-tubed, Buddha-like TV.

High School at Yale U It could have been my high school in the late 60’s. Hall passes & over-sexed teens. Tyrannical gym teachers. Alpaca sweaters & tight jeans. Southeast Asia unimaginable, despite losing boys to the draft. Wiseman’s heavy cameras loom invisibly just beyond the edge of the frame. His aim was to blend into the culture & let the institution reveal itself. At the New Haven Film Festival, he tells the crowd, Documentary is never as objective as it looks. What to cut? To keep? How shape the story? It’s a poem, distilled from 40 hours to 80 minutes. One of the students, now silver-haired, waving a yearbook, leaps from her seat. She says the school board loved it. The vice principal was a moron. Her English teacher did have a thing for Simon & Garfunkel. Yes, it’s absolutely true.

Hiroshima Mon Amour “I’ll think of this adventure as of the horror of forgetfulness.” — He to She in Hiroshima Mon Amour After a night of disrupted dreams I can’t help mangling my words. Ben asks why I’m staring at the coffee scoop. He’s deep in exams, math today, tomorrow European history. In the spring he’ll forget our arguments over studying vs. wasting time. It’s as if I can’t control the impulse to distort what’s truly important. Today will be remembered not for senior exams or insomnia, but for Barack Obama’s first day in office.The world can change in the hands of someone who’d rather not hold it by himself, someone of mixed race & nationality who is capable of a clear sentence. Someone, I hope, who has seen Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour & given in to the puzzle of time & memory. How could Hiroshima ever happen? And how could it be denied? Why is Riva, who lost part of herself after the death of the German soldier, so troubled in Japan? I wonder how the bomb will be played out in Ben’s MEH text, how the liberators’ boot steps will sound. What will he remember of these days growing alternately more settled & unsettled in his childhood bed? Where will he be when finally my words are clear? 18

Home Movies What are the rules of memory — must it have happened? Could you have a memory you think happened, like the movie of your parents hamming it up on vacation with Lennie & George? And what if you see the memory repeatedly over years & in different media — first 16mm then VHS & yesterday converted to DVD — are those memories more real? & does sequence matter? Or is everything happening at once? Is that why old people say they never feel old & when I reached 30 or 40 or 50 I wasn’t as old as other people were at that age? What does time have to do with memory & how can any memory be accurate enough even with multiple voices to create a history? & if I am the sum of every moment including what I can’t remember then is everything I witness who I am? 19

Intermission We’re not used to movies as long as Camelot or Lawrence of Arabia that require an intermission, but I tell you, you’re nearly halfway to the end & it’s time for a stretch. Take advantage of this brief sabbatical to visit the bathroom, refill the coffee, text your friends a list of favorite films. Freud should have argued that we are shaped by cinematic moments as real as sex & dreams. They write themselves on us like magic slates, words that are etched in the pad even after they have disappeared. Invisible & permanent. Don’t write your history in water if you want to remember it. Write it in images — like Goldstein’s lion. Insist, like Sotomayor, that context shapes who we are but that we can also empathize with others’ longing & illumination. If you get an idea, write it down. Listen for words that arrive unannounced from your unconscious. Watch for patterns, but be prepared to throw out the plan. See how quickly time passes? Now, kindly, return to your seat.

Keeping the Sabbath Every Saturday I got up early in the blueblack cold to get ready for temple. A jacket, a clip-on tie. A little dab of Brylcreem. Dave & Diane equally well-dressed for carpool & study. Besides the Hebrew alphabet recited backwards from right to left & the tins for tzedakah, I barely remember the lessons of religious school. More vivid were the Saturday meals: strictly observed rituals like dipping plastic bags of frozen turkey & gravy into precisely timed boiling water. And the way the bags were sliced neatly across the top to deposit their bubbling contents onto a waiting slice of white bread. But that was all prologue to an even more important ceremony: Saturday matinees at the Vogue or the Shaker where we were abandoned to double features of sci-fi or horror. What a way to pass the Sabbath! God surely made Saturdays to go to the movies. My tiny brain got it. No parents. No homework. No remaining stress from the school week. I probably shouldn’t say so, but it was a sort of theophany to sit in awe under a cloud of light, to have faith strained & restored each time earth & her creatures were saved from nuclear disaster. Though predictable, I never found it boring. Every Saturday we were feeding a religious addiction. We paid attention. We were fully present in the dark. Who knew? Who knew where we’d find a divine spark?

Leda’s Couch The Blue Cloud, she called it. Twelve powder-blue cubes pushed together to form a pool of couch in which floated bodies holding aloft popcorn & glasses of cheap cabernet. Neighbors, artists, her kids & her kids’ friends, boarders, poets, plumbers, professors & their pets. Behind them the buzz & hum of a film projector, not a videotape but real celluloid thrashing frame by frame like a river of silverfish through spools & sprockets & out a moon of light onto the sandy screen. Leda worked in organic forms — sculptures, gardens, big meals, people sprawled across the living room — a human theater planted & harvested & then completely dug up & recreated like the vegetable garden that took over the whole back yard. In cold Mattapoisett winters when even the compost 22

froze under local seaweed, Leda cultivated anti-Puritan soirees that lasted until the growing season & those first warm nights when the moon & guests would be evicted into temperate air.

Lines After a while the poems are not just filmed experience (which was never translatable) but about poetry itself, the poem always in process of becoming, words jostling for meaning like crowded moviegoers winding in line in the underground lobby of an NYC cinema, anticipating a disturbing & liberating film subtitled from French, Corsican, & Arabic, waiting to rediscover through the illiterate main character behind bars how to read the spaces, how to make the letters & silences make sense.

Looking into Harrison Ford’s Face, I remember my father’s cringing at the news that because of a stroke he must cease his life’s work. He thought he could work forever. Gentle healer. Aging, Ford, too, knows no physical bounds as he leaps rooftops, tackles the drug czar, seduces Lena Olin, the soothsayer who, counting wrinkles, sees when it’s necessary to worry about purpose & time, & when it’s necessary to close our eyes & escape. We do our best. Sometimes that’s enough.

My First Job in Film Long before I had aspirations of stardom, Mrs. F gave me my first job in film. Induced by the $5/week not the precious cargo I drove heavy tins of film back & forth from the Cleveland Board of Ed to my suburban high school. She was the teacher who made learning real, who before she left for Esalen & Gestalt said put aside the books, class, & meet at my house. She pointed the camera inward, taught us to pay attention to our hidden impulses, to pursue dream & desire. 26

My Life as a Dog Because Ingemar’s mother is dying they send him to his Uncle Gunnar’s in rural Sweden which is impossibly lonely without his dog & everyone avoids talking about his mother. There’s an unspeakable gap that surrounds him & like Ingemar my nephew comes to visit but it’s Connecticut & my mother is the one dying. Now Evan connects me to Ohio where they are trying to keep her comfortable & till I can get there distracts me with his great appetites for movies & music & racing about. When he runs the dog goes wild barking & biting at his ankles to herd him back to the fold. She has an instinct we can’t train out of her to chase everything that moves. Parting, especially, is unbearable.

My Nearly Great Uncle Jack “Actors? Schmucks. Screenwriters? Schmucks with Underwoods.” — Jack Warner As I recall, it was Aunt Pauline who would’ve married Jack Warner if it weren’t for my great-grandparents’ figuring he was a shmo. Pictures, shmictures. In Youngstown in the 20s that meant he was a jackass with no future, so instead Pauline married Harvey something who owned a department store in Pittsburgh. Her brother Moe, the youngest, married Birdie who begat Ruth & Dan who married Doris who begat David, Diane, & Jeffrey, who married Betsy who begat Ben. Our branch of the family settled somewhere between Hollywood & the Pittsburgh department store (that quickly went out of business). Somewhere between obscene wealth & dignified, soup-line poor. Birdie & Moe survived the Depression running a hardware store that barely broke even. Aunt Pauline disappeared. Jack Warner, among other things, became the world’s biggest putz whose legacy was written by schmucks. And the rest, we like to say, is history. 28

Naked City On the day NYC subways are flooded & Metro North has just resumed a spotty schedule, when it hits 95 & New Yorkers are packed sweating into every slow bus, we take a cab from Grand Central to Soho. We pass film locations in Stuyvesant & the East Village, get stuck at St. Mark’s & the Bowery, hop out early on “House-tin,” as it’s pronounced by the voice-over. Jules Dassin got it right: There are 8 million stories in the naked city… Whitman’s blades of grass. After a slice at Ben’s Pizza, we join the line filling Theater 1 at the Film Forum. Does no one work in New York? I am the man with a cane who limps around the corner from 6th Ave. I am the businessman who at the last minute sweeps in with his briefcase. I am the lovers necking in the back row. The serious-looking boy reading The Onion. I am the tall frizzy-haired woman sitting in front of me. The girl sharing popcorn with two boys, one who takes advantage of her & the other who loves her too much. I witness a murder. I solve it with an Irish accent & a sense of humor. Noir promises justice by the last frame. There’s always a moral divide, slim & clean as light slanting through the venetian blinds. Cracks of sun between smoke, rain, & clouds.

The Namesake in Stamford, CT When I’m outside the Avon & I call your cell & you answer at dinner with your 97-year-old father in Sarasota, FL, I can’t explain fast enough why I’m trying to reach Sandy, your husband, & shocked you ask, “is everything all right? did you know I was in Florida?” yes, yes, but I’m at The Namesake & it’s completely sold out & I met Sandy but he left & by luck I got a second ticket & how are you, how’s your dad, yes, my sister, the weather down there, up here the phones have been out for a week, sorry to interrupt, “I’m sure you’ll find him,” yes, the usher said she’ll recognize my friend, “the caffeinated man in the suede coat,” & sure enough by the time the film begins Sandy has found me & there’s one more seat next to him when John appears, charming, we three bound by images, story, & Mira Nair’s voice that transports us from Stamford to Queens to Calcutta, from Oyster Bay to Ohio, searching with Gogol, the boy who chooses, rejects & finally reclaims the spirit of his father to be of many worlds.

Next to the Ben Franklin Five & Dime There’s a picture house as small as they come the only one, of course, within miles of the big city of Burlington so if you want a night out you go no matter what they’re showing. I could see anything well, almost anything short of Forrest Gump or Jurassic Park III but you you have no stomach for violence, gratuitous or not, a standard hard to uphold if you’re measuring against the films of Jeanette MacDonald & Nelson Eddy. So our date was effectively doomed the night we set out to see The Untouchables — maybe Kevin Costner, I thought, would save it but when the shooting started you disappeared to the Five & Dime. How does one finish a movie alone? You rest your popcorn in the empty seat beside you & continue watching even if it means checking your watch every ten minutes to imagine a crane shot of the streets, shops, & town green of a perfect Vermont village uninhabited by Ness or Capone.

Paris, Texas An unlikely place to be conceived but that’s where he needed to return. First picked up in a desert & later retrieved by his clueless brother from LA, he was wandering thirsty, mute, & for years estranged from his son & young wife, who even as she forged a new life as a stripper in Texas, never forgot the sound of his voice. Paris, Texas is the movie I remember lugging home with a rented VCR from the neighborhood 7-Eleven in Pittsburgh. I was newly in love & burdened with work but had to see a film — no matter that Harry Dean Stanton made me feel lost & guilty for every mistake I had or was about to make. I needed to reconcile with everyone. I could even relate to the compulsion to polish boots & line them up in the sun. Betsy must have been teaching & Frank Miro’s roasting vegetables permeated the air as usual from the apartment below. The sun was blazing & I know I could have been cooler outside on the stoop or at the library grading a batch of papers. Wim Wenders was a rare find at the corner 7-Eleven. 32

Pittsburgh Paradiso At dusk we assemble our folding lawn chairs on the hill overlooking Schenley Park & the Pittsburgh skyline. As in Cinema Paradiso when the projectionist aimed the movie outdoors, we sit under open sky, waiting for it to get dark enough to begin. A small town gathers. Four boys playing soccer. A couple on a blanket sipping wine. Grad students from Carnegie Mellon allowing themselves a night away from the computer screen. An old man who misses his wife. An ice cream vendor. A trio of strings. Frisbees, Fritos, 6-packs of Iron. The three rivers of Pittsburgh carved passages through hills where steel mills rose & ethnic neighborhoods set in. More than one immigrant walked the length of Pennsylvania for a job & a tiny tenement in Braddock. Small steps have brought us separately to this grassy hill craving a love story in the summer air.

Potage de Canard In Paris, 1968, we saw Groucho & Bonnie & Clyde with French subtitles — no one, of course, laughing except us, but everyone aware of a revolution on screen — outspoken comic genius & two outlaw rebels pulling a gun on the established order. As teens we could relate to the robberies & the romance even though we were horrified by the twisted massacre, the spray of bullets that sent lovers into a ragdoll dance. Nothing translated — not our studies, not our headmaster going crazy, not Larry instructing us about girls or Caryl taking a group of guys to the gynecologist or Dom talking about, not even doing, pot. Driving by the Sorbonne on our bus tour of the city we saw gendarmes still patrolling with rifles past students we expected to stand & cheer instead sitting worn-out on the sidewalks, but alert enough to look up &, without a word, flip us the finger.

Rated G At 8, Ben knows lines from all of the Marx brothers, the difference between Philip Marlowe & Sam Spade, how to wiggle his hips like Lauren Bacall, which movies are too bloody violent & which are too sweet, the range of John Wayne’s best westerns from the Ringo Kid to Ethan Edwards. He knows what it’s like to be Gary Cooper alone on the dusty streets of Hadleyville or to walk boldly like Errol Flynn into the evil prince’s castle, slam the contraband deer onto the wooden banquet table, & insist blasphemously on the good king’s right to the throne. He’s flown with Dorothy & Aladdin, whistled with Crosby & Sinatra, spun across the floor with Kelly & Astaire. He’s cleaned up Tombstone, Bottleneck, Tatooine, & dodged the crop duster with Cary Grant. At 8 it is routine to rescue princesses, defend the Rebel Alliance, improvise endless puns in the face of authority, & return justice to its proper balance in the universe.

Self-Portrait in a Sound Stage Mirror When the movie opens, look for the mirror over the oak bureau where I stood to take this photo & in the reflection the haphazardly made bed & unread stacks of books tilting off the nightstands. Look carefully for the stuffed rabbit in silk bow I propped against a cloisonne jar & pearls curled casually in a Turkish bowl. The camera will move too quickly to savor every detail, but try to notice where the ceiling lifts & the walls retract & how sooner than you’d imagine the whole apartment will have been disassembled, the furniture returned, the books donated or perhaps given to some aspiring assistant who lives in an apartment much smaller & less inviting than this. Look for how, in movies, mirrors never speak directly, so if I were the cameraman I’d understand how to remove myself. But what if for an instant I was filmed in this recreated Upper West Side apartment no less real than Barb’s? & what if in post-production the editor forgot to cut me out? I don’t need a credit— only a hint that I appeared in this peculiar world.

Star Wars In the mountains of Casper, Wyoming, where the air is thin, I stood in line for my first Star Wars. No wife in sight, certainly, no kids. My sister there with her future husband. Years pass. The films turn into videos. The action figures reappear at ToysRUs where boys browse for the newest release. I only notice because now I have a son & what better than Star Wars to bind us. It’s the space version of all the westerns we’ve seen. Substitute John Wayne for Obi Wan, James Caan for Luke, Robert Mitchum for Han & you have El Dorado. When Episode IV, I mean I, comes out, we line up for advance tickets. WICC is broadcasting live & there’s a contest for the best costumes. People come dressed as Darth Vader & Queen Padmé. No one complains when the light sabers swish during key scenes; as a matter of fact, everyone else wishes they had brought theirs. Star Wars proves people are secretly related. It joins generations. It explains where evil comes from & how to defeat it. Forgive me, for loving simple truths.

The Vertigo House 45 years after Hitchcock stood here we pose in front of the Vertigo house at 128 Lombard, the crookedest street in San Francisco. Ben & I walked down from the cable car stop at the top of the hill. The street so steep cars have to park on angles to the curb & people walk slanted, leaning back with a clear view of the SF skyline, not including Coit Tower which Hitchcock inserted for effect. If he couldn’t show Kim Novak naked he could certainly imply what took place. This is the house where Jimmy Stewart brought her back from her plunge into the bay, that beautiful scene under the bridge when he couldn’t stop himself from stalking & rescuing her. He was obsessed with a blonde who said she believed in ghosts. We create our own ghosts & follow them: Joplin in The Haight, Ferlinghetti at City Lights, Hitchcock here. We see flowers & pictures of one stapled to a tree, we leave a note for another after peeking in on his desk. It doesn’t matter how long they’ve been away — we make them appear.

The Village Square Theater Because I needed a uniform fast I hemmed my usher’s pants with black electrical tape. The red jacket & black bow tie fit well enough for tearing tickets & guiding sightless patrons to their seats. The first time I felt drunk was opening night at the Village Square Theater when the leftover champagne swayed in double-exposed plastic glasses & I saw the screen-size face of Faye Dunaway kiss Steve McQueen. The Thomas Crown Affair was followed by weeks & weeks of Yours, Mine, and Ours & then a riveting black & white thriller, In Cold Blood, that had them fainting in the aisles. Watching parts of movies — randomly, repeatedly, in & out of sequence — I learned how a good story is embedded in every frame & how one strong image — the silver dollar rolling under the victim’s bed or the black electrical tape — outlasts a whole film.

Volver First the toothbrush, & then her trademark paper towels. My sister has a secret: A year after her death, our mother has moved into the third-floor guest room. It’s not as complicated as in Almodóvar’s movie about murder & incest & fiery retribution. Actually, quite simple. Mom showed up after Diane’s heart attack. She understands the sudden jolt into mortality. If there are reasons, they are irrelevant. I haven’t seen her, but Diane says she’s an easy guest: she eats little & entertains herself studying photos & the closet-full of papers none of us can throw out. Diane says I’ll be shocked at how normal it is to talk to her. Nothing is off limits, but, she adds, nothing’s resolved.

What Remains On Friday nights, Cleveland teens weren’t ashamed to stay home & watch Ghoulardi host sci-fi & monster movies on TV, inserting himself in the operating room or on the lonesome highway just when the young couple was about to be attacked. It wasn’t the movies so much as his irreverence — Ghoulardi in goatee, lab coat, & wild hair poking fun at the Poles in Parma or telling Dorothy, the stern local newscaster: Turn blue! Then Saturday afternoon they’d be released for hijinks & double features at the Vogue. The same day Mothra attacked Godzilla in some post-apocalyptic nightmare, they were busted for shooting guns with clay pellets. Real injury was as unimaginable as blood on the screen. Had they lost an eye, they’d have felt as cool as the 50-foot Cyclops. Celluloid was made to disintegrate, but forty years later screams from The Attack of the Giant Leeches can be heard in surround-sound, giant-screened home theater. And Ghoulardi can be recalled in fuzzy clips on YouTube, his accented voice echoing forever in the vacuum of cyberspace heard, who knows, by life forms on distant planets.

Closing Credits If the dead are waiting for us in heaven, then won’t it be crowded? Like rush hour at Grand Central Terminal? You could actually be in the same room but not see, at first, the person, or soul, you’re looking for. A minute too late or too soon & you may even miss him. I ran into a former student once who was moving back home after the collapse of Wall Street. She was bent over her suitcase while I was reuniting with the class I had chaperoned to Waiting for Godot. At Godot, now pronounced God-Oh, even people familiar with the play didn’t know what to think. Stark, pointless, cruel, a little funny, it still shocks 56 years after the original audiences demanded their money back. Who wants to be subjected to rants on nothingness, even when performed by Nathan Lane? Wouldn’t you rather see a musical? Or, better yet, a music video? We love you, Michael, the lucky fans who got tickets to the memorial service, shouted, unseen, from the heights of the Staples Center in LA. The Creator has a plan, Marlon Jackson told them, but we won’t know it till the end. Usually that’s when the credits roll, when the theme music returns to console obsessive viewers, those who must learn the names of the songs & see if they recognize the gaffer & best boy. But what if there is no plan? What if it’s all accident & improvisation? In old movies “The End” signaled time to rise from your seats, but now things are less directed. The End will be filled with silence & light. I don’t believe in everlasting life but if it’s a potential masterpiece, I’ll stay in my seat & wait, no matter how long it takes, for the next show to begin. 42

COLOPHON

Picture Houses was printed on a Vandercook Univeral 1 Proof Press by Jeff Mueller at Dexterity Press in New Haven, CT & by Tyco Print in New Haven, CT in Avenir type on 24 lb Neenah ivory laid paper Cover printed on 100 lb Cougar natural white Unryu Tissue Kozo & Chiri end papers made in Thailand Cover Art by Zoe Hedstrom Hand stitching by Volunteers in the tradition of Emily Dickinson And, in case youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re wondering, the book you are holding is number

of a limited edition of 100 copies.