Month: June 2017

Two days ago Aura, my eight-year-old white munchkin, began crying over apparently nothing. She wasn’t crying as much as moaning. As I was unpacking the parts to an IKEA kitchen cart, I thought Aura might have interpreted this to mean I was packing my bags for another trip, and was therefore distressed. Later that day she disappeared into the bedroom closet, not coming out to eat or anything. 

That in itself persuaded me to take her to the vet, but I wanted to see if she’d rebound on her own. Last night she was lying inside the closet and moaning again, but more loudly this time. That was the first super-serious “uh-oh.” It was the same sound made by my Siamese cat, Mouse, three or four weeks before he passed from pancreatic cancer.

I decided to take Aura to the vet first thing this morning instead of late last night, figuring they’d just keep her in observation until the vet doc came in around 9 am. She was still moaning just after midnight, but less audibly, more internally.

This morning we found her dead. Rigor mortis had set in heavily, so she’d probably passed around 1 or 2 am. Our hearts are broken, and we’re getting married in three hours. People who say “oh my God” annoy me to no end, but I think I might have said OMG this morning 20 or 25 times. Picking her up was agony — it was like she was suddenly made of plaster. I called a cat crematorium guy — $200 bills for a cremation plus an urn for her ashes, and the urn will even have her name on it.

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The saga of Jeff and Tatyana has been an up, down, sideways and back up again thing. We were going to tie the knot on the beach several weeks ago, and then put it off. Then we worked out some issues, and then drove around Italy and stayed in Paris as a kind of pre-honeymoon, and now I’m happy to say we’re back on again. Today is the day, Judah. Vows at La Piedra State Beach at 3 pm, and then a gathering around 7 pm with a few friends. No biggie, and at the same time big-big-BIGGIE.

You’re supposed to keep your personally composed marriage vows short and sweet, but right now they’re longish. I’ll continue to hone and refine until the big moment. Here’s what I have now:

Somebody once said that “a successful marriage requires falling in love many times.”

As we begin our life together in marriage, I can’t wait to fall in love with Tatyana again and again. I just did the other night while we were trying to assemble an IKEA table, and I’m doing that right now, and I expect that a new surge will hit me again this afternoon or this evening. Or next week or whatever.

Marriage is about hands held, eyes forward, joy, spirit, surrender, bravery, devotion and, in my case, always, always, always putting Tatyana first. I need to write my column every day, but I also pledge to love and honor Tatyana with all my heart.

She is my Russian Marilyn Monroe, my muse, my commissar, my Tsar…my own Natalya Rostova, Sonya Marmeladova, Antonina Miliukova. After watching Oliver Stone’s Vladimir Putin interviews I have even begun to call Tatyana my own personal Putin, but in a good way. Because for all his alleged shortcomings and reported inclinations to murder journalists, Putin struck me as a fairly wise and astute fellow, sly and temperate and well educated, who has his act together.

“Does Auda abu Tayi serve”? Perhaps not, but Jeffrey Wells will. Or will die trying.

I hereby pledge to keep all doors and windows open, and to try to pry open new ones each and every day. Here’s to matters of the heart and spirit, to blue and white skies and radiant starry nights, and to wit, wisdom, serendipity, clever wisecracks, inspirational guidance and the shining of kindness into all corners and crevasses.

“There is no remedy for love,” said Henry David Thoreau, “but to love more”.

I’m thinking of Luca Guadagnino’s movie, I Am Love. But that title has inspired a thought about myself since I met and fell in love with Tatyana — “I Am Luck.”

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“And though it is no one’s business, the president’s petulant personal attack against yet another woman’s looks compels us to report that Mika has never had a face-lift. If she had, it would be evident to anyone watching Morning Joe on their high-definition TV. She did have a little skin under her chin tweaked, but this was hardly a state secret. Her mother suggested she do so, and all those around her were aware of this mundane fact.” — from Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski‘s 6.30 Washington Post op-ed piece.

In order words, Mika underwent a little touch-up. Big deal.

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Get out your guns and think about drilling those pathetic bitch liberals for “bullying and terrorizing the law abiding with their lying protests.” Stand up for freedom, stop the madness, and show these lefty assholes who’s boss. This is a real NRA ad, posted on 4.7 but breaking within the last 24. NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch sounds to me like a seriously dangerous person. Her rhetoric is meant to sound serious but it feels freaky, seemingly pushed to the edge of parody.

Last month a slew of Cannes-attending journalists and critics raved about Alejandro G. Inarritu and Emmanuel Lubezski‘s Carne y Arena, a virtual reality Mexican immigrant experience.  It happened inside a hangar at the Cannes Mandelieu airport. Here’s my reaction piece, posted on 5.18.17. Everyone said the same things — immersive, visceral, jolting, head-turning, thought-provoking, unforgettable, etc.

The basic drill is “you’re really there” in the sense that you’re not watching but living it on your feet…feeling the vibe, smelling the fear, grappling with the trauma of getting busted and pushed around deep down. Border guards yelling and pointing guns as you stand barefoot on the cool desert sand at dawn, and then you drop to your knees with your hands on your head.

A longterm engagement of the exact same experience will debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art three days hence — i.e., Sunday, 7.2. It’ll cost $45 a pop if you’re not a LACMA member, student or senior. But in sharp contrast to the celebrated Cannes installation, there’s been zero promotion behind the LACMA thing. I’m guessing this is because the LACMA installation can only accommodate one person at a time (the experience lasts 6 1/2 minutes), and that the costs of presenting it will far outweigh whatever income might result so no one wants to spend too lavishly.

I understand that, but I wanted to experience it a second time and this time bring Tatyana, whom I tried to escort to the Cannes installation before being told by the IDPR guys that there was a strict “no friends or partners, only credentialed journos” policy in place. Alas, I was just told by the IDPR guys yesterday that there’ll be no assistance in visiting the LACMA thing, and if I want to catch it again I should just fork over the $45 ($90 for two of us) like anyone else. Okay, fine, but how about allowing me to see it sooner rather than later, without having to arrange my own visit from the back of the line like the rest of the citizens? Nope — you’re on your own, I was essentially told. Okay, fine. But in retrospect I wish they hadn’t been so strict in Cannes about not letting journos bring girlfriends.

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John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Tim Holt and Alfonso Bedoya, among many others, didn’t shoot The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (’48) from inside a silvery black-and-white membrane, but within a normal, full-color reality realm like anything else. I feel safe in saying that the first two shots were probably captured in real photographic color; the last one is colorized.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson pulled a Steven Soderbergh on Phantom Thread, the ’50s-era fashion-world drama with Daniel Day-Lewis that Focus Features will open on 12.25.

I regret to say I’m no fan of Gillian Robespierre‘s Landline (Amazon/Magnolia, 7.21), which I saw last night at the Rodeo Screening Room. (I ducked it at Sundance last January.) And I’m saying this as a devout fan of Robespierre’s Obvious Child and particularly Jenny Slate‘s performance in that noteworthy 2014 film. Slate is also the star of Landline, and I’m sorry but I didn’t care for her character this time. I didn’t care for anyone‘s character in the entire film.

If I were to run into any of these guys at a party, I’d make up an excuse and bolt within 25 or 30 minutes. Why? All they talk and think about are themselves — their own little dwarf realms. Me, me, mine, mine, why, why…unhappy, vaguely pissed off, unsatisfied, fickle this, fickle that, etc.

Set in ’90s Manhattan, Landline is cut from the same basic cloth as Woody Allen‘s Hannah and Her Sisters — an episodic tale of a smartypants Upper West Side Jewish-Italian family (half-healthy, half-neurotic) and how they cope with infidelity and general middle-aged weltshmerz. It’s particularly about Slate’s Dana cheating on her fiancé Ben (Jay Duplass) with a glib lightweight type (Finn Wittrock) and how this affair precedes or somehow sparks an interest in Dana bonding with her younger, very bratty and sullen sister, Ali (Abby Quinn).

In the meantime the pater familias, John Tuturro‘s Alan Jacobs, is secretly boffing a middle-aged blonde, or actually not so secretly since his wife Pat (Edie Falco) gets wind about halfway through the film.

I just found the whole cast tedious and tiresome and flat-out dislikable. I can’t stand married characters who ask each other if they’re about to come — that’s one thing — and I despise any husband who offers to urinate on his wife’s upper leg in the shower in order to fend off poison ivy. It felt to me like the kind of typical Sundance indie that gives me a headache. I wanted to escape but I felt it would be unprofessional to do so. On top of which Tatyana was enjoying it (Landline being more or less a woman’s film) so I was stuck.

Tatyana: “I liked the movie, at least in part because it reminded me of my relationship with my slightly older sister and with my mother, who also dealt with infidelity early in her marriage. Excellent acting, very realistic, very truthful. I could feel the characters’ inner anxieties and emotions and longings. Love, infidelity, remorse, disillusion.”

Back in the Eisenhower era tail fins were de rigueur on luxury cars. Before their heyday the only kind of fins you’d see anywhere were shark fins (or more welcomely dolphin fins) while you swam at the beach (Jersey to Florida back east, San Luis Obispo to Mexico in California). Nowadays the only fins that are commercially available in any form are the plastic surfboard or boogie-board kind. I know because I was thinking about buying a pair for my recently purchased Morey boogey board, which I just bought a special leash for down at Rider Shack. I’m mentioning this because I’ve found it extremely bothersome that when you research boogey board fins online you mostly get listings for what I’ve always called flippers — i.e., simulated frog-foot slip-ons. The second problem is that if you check retail boogie-board fins cost a bit more than $100 plus labor costs to install them. I don’t think that a dilletante like myself needs them anyway.

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