On the fringes of change

 

Thursday, August 20, 2009

 

Some talking head on the news yesterday talked about how pivotal a year 1979 was: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the hostages in Iraq, and other national and international situations leading up to the Reagan era.

This struck me as very odd since that year became a pivotal year in my personal life as well. Unemployed from being fired twice in 1978, I vowed to change the direction of my life. In the 1970s I had worked in warehouses and on trucks, and wrote at night (mostly terrible stuff) hoping that I might someday find a place in the arts. I envied my friends Hank, Pauly, Garrick and others who had focused on acting, singing, art or photography, and I thought if I wrote long and hard enough I might find my place in their ranks.

I moved to Passaic in 1978 because they had created an unofficial arts community in Garrick’s aunt’s apartment buildings, with each of them living in apartments overlooking the court yard. I fantasized living out the rest of my life like that, coming out each day to greet the others, each of us fully engaged in our art, each of us making our living that way.

I tried to join the scene in 1975, moving out of a rooming house in Montclair to share an apartment with Garrick and Pauly – while waiting for one of the other apartments to open up. I moved out by summer’s end after Garrick, Pauly and I came to near blows, but always ached to return, managing to accomplish this in March 1978, only to learn a year later, that Garrick’s aunt decided to sell the complex and move out to a farm in western New Jersey. This produced an exodus of artists so that by the end of 1979, I was the only one left living there. By this time, I had returned to college and could not afford to make another move.

With the recent anniversary of Woodstock, I realized that despite living through some of the most significant events of my generation, I actually managed to miss them all: I never went to Woodstock, Hank did. I wasn’t involved with the protest at Columbia University the way Hank, David Shapiro and others had. I missed Hendrix and others at the Fillmore East. I missed George Harrison’s concert for Bangladesh. I simply existed on the fringes, meeting many of the movers and shakers in more quiet settings: Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and others. I even met members of the Manson family, the Hell’s Angels and Merry Pranksters.

In the same way, I was on the fringe of national movements in the late 1970s, living in a community where many of the Polish came fleeing the communist confrontations in Poland. I saw signs around me of solidarity, heard the voices of Polish men and women talking about the circumstances, yet was so rapped up in my own life, they did not mean much to me at the time. Pauly, of course, kept me abreast of all the end of the world issues such as the development of neutron bomb and global warming, but even these things seemed remote and insignificant to the personal changes I was undergoing, just as the events of the 1960s seems remote a decade earlier.

After hearing the report the other day, and looking back, I realized just how my personal life echoed those events and that for some reason, I go through dramatic changes at the same time as the world does, and I wonder is there a connection?

 

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I’ve been watching the film “Harvey” a lot lately, partly in an attempt to predict what Spielberg might do with his adaptation. Because I am also looking very closely at “Crystal Skull,” I see a lot of similarities of style – especially when it comes to positioning of people. Spielberg is a master at manipulating large groups of people on the screen, having them move into particular places to form patterns or to have them all exposed to the camera during particular shots. If you look closely, you can see the slight pause as they characters move off their marks when the shots switch – characters slipping into position even in the background while the main characters talk.

“Harvey” has this same interaction, groups of people moving into place, often acting like prompts to help isolate or call attention to important elements of the scene.

This struck me last night when I was watching one of the end scenes in Harvey where the Judge moved into position in the background while Aunt Vita talked in the foreground. I saw similar motion of characters in the temple scene in Crystal Skull (as well as through the rest of the film, but for some reason these two scenes seem to echo each other in my mind) when Indiana Jones is talking in the foreground and others are moving in the background to fill in the spaces behind them.

The movement of background characters is so similar in Harvey and many of Spielberg’s films, I have to wonder if Spielberg spent a lot of time studying Harvey when younger.

The fun part of Harvey is the “space between spaces” created for the invisible being. Doors held open, people moved out of the way to make room for him, even the setting up of extra chairs for the invisible Harvey to sit in.

There are some significant differences between the play and the movie script, often making the movie an overall better story than the play. I’ll probably write some essays on it at some point.

Some curious oddities stick with me about the film such as the Elwood’s missing button hole and the fact that he has a different last name from his father.

I wonder if Spielberg will solve this mysteries, or leave them for us to continue to ponder the way we pondered out belly buttons in the 1960s.