My last night in Paris (i.e., Tuesday) was spent at the tolerably seedy Hotel Bonsejour (11 rue Burq in Montmartre). Built sometime around 1900, it’s for kids and cheapskates like me. It has decent wifi, electrical outlets galore, breakfast in the morning, a dinky little shower stall, fresh-smelling sheets, toilet down the hall — a bit of a dump. But it’s the Ritz compared to the Hotel Bowery Grand (143 Bowery, five blocks south of Houston), where I crashed last night for $90 bills. It’s one thing to offer a cheap place to stay, but the Asian-American owner of this shithole adds a few insulting twists to rub your nose in the fact that you’re staying at the dinkiest little flophouse in Manhattan. A room so small (roughly 48″ x 90″) you have to side-shuffle to move around the single bed. (There’s just enough room to stack your suitcases.) Decent wifi, yes, but not a chair in the entire joint. Electrical outlets in the room but none in the lobby. It’s clean — I’ll give it that. But thumbs down on this offensively spartan establishment and an affectionate nod to the Hotel Bonsejour, which at least has a touch of old-world charm and the aroma of good coffee. And chairs.

I clench up every time a table of three or four people erupts in loud sustained giggling. Laughter is basically about the releasing of feelings that you’ve kept bottled up for whatever reason. Freeing these suppressed judgements and emotions from the cage is exhilarating — an occasion for pure joy. I’ve been there a few thousand times in my life, and will hopefully go there again very soon. But it’s over within five or ten seconds, max. And then I settle into “the space.” Because I don’t have that much bottled up to begin with. No healthy person does.

What good are you if you can’t be Zen about things? The Zen guy or the Bhagavad Gita gal lives 24/7 with the hum of the universe animating his/her spirit and zapping every molecule, and therefore he/she doesn’t explode in spazzy giggling fits at breakfast tables…on and on and on, dropping silverware on the floor, getting louder and louder.

It’s not “she knows too much to argue or to judge” — it’s “she knows and feels too much to giggle for 30 or 40 seconds straight.”

The fact is that anyone who succumbs to boorish and sustained giggling fits means they’ve probably got a shitload of bottled-up feelings and rage and bad memories, which obviously indicates they’re living in a fairly conflicted or repressed place, and are therefore probably miserable to some degree, not to mention immature. So if you’re the type of person who giggles in loud, prolonged, hyena-like bursts in a Swiss breakfast room at 8:25 am you’re probably a bit of an asshole. You probably need years of therapy, but if you haven’t done the therapy by now you probably never will.

Does it matter to you that you’re irritating others with your gales of hideous gaiety? Of course not. Why should it? You’re on your vacation and you worked hard to pay for it and so you can do what you want, whenever you want…right? So you’re a sociopath to boot.

About 18 months ago I posted a ripoff of those Esquire “What I’ve Learned” articles. But it was honest and true and came from a real place. I read it again last night and it’s still tight and clean and spot-on. So I’m re-posting it with six new graphs:

All my life I’ve tried to follow the example of Cary Grant, and this has served me well. Always try to be gracious and gentlemanly. Stay as trim as you can. Be a cheapskate. Try to eat less. Enjoy good wine but stay away from the booze. LSD can be good for the soul if you treat it with respect and keep a copy of the Bhagavad Gita nearby. Don’t go bald.

You must have good wifi everywhere, at all times, forever. Even after death.

The more free food and drink you consume, the better you’re doing in life. Free movies, free trips, goodie bags, etc. Paying for things always feels bad.

Newbie #1: You’ve got to start giving your kids a little more space when they hit 13 or 14. That’s when it’s time for them to start living the chaotic life of a teenager, and sooner or later that means taking flight and leaving the nest and telling their parents that they’ll be okay on their own, and that they want to experience stuff on their own and sometimes trip and stumble on their own. Because a kid needs to find his/her footing. At a certain point you’re doing them no favors by holding their hand and wrapping them in their favorite blankie.

Newbie #2: There’s nothing like a disappointing Bluray of an older film (i.e., one that looks no better than a DVD of the same movie that came out 8 or 10 years ago) to make your day feel like shit. If a movie doesn’t look better on Bluray, what’s the point? I’ll tell you what the point is. The point is to satisfy the grain monks.

Newbie #3: If you want to know about aridity and pointlessness and dark fates, just sit in an outdoor cafe on Beverly Drive and watch all the nouveau-riche Middle-Eastern mamas with way too much eye makeup and sparkly glitter sewn into their jeans walk by with their three-year-old daughters, who are already wearing their own Beverly Hills bling. It just gives you the worst feeling to see this.

It’s a good thing to own a baseball mitt, and every so often to have a catch with someone on a big green lawn. Preferably when the later-afternoon light is just starting to mellow down. And it’s okay to groan like John McEnroe when you throw the ball.

Newbie #4: Never, ever wear gray cross-training shoes, and think about disassociating yourself from people who own a pair. Especially guys who have milky hairless legs.

You don’t need an education that will set you back $150,000 and keep you in debt for over 20 years if you have curiosity. That’s what John Huston used to say, and is what Owen Wilson believes right now.

You really do need to know everything about something and something about everything. And if you don’t know something you just have to be curious about it. Easy.

Newbie #5: Whatever you think you want to eat, eat half of that. And everything you ate as a kid is history — meatloaf sandwiches, mashed potatoes with butter and gravy, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, ice cream with chocolate syrup, Nestle’s Quik. Forget all that.

Newbie #6: When I was ten I thought of 21 year-olds as cool studly swaggerers and men of at least some consequence. These days 21 year-olds are commonly regarded as having the character and fortitude of 13 year-olds. “He’s just a 21 year-old kid, don’t expect too much,” etc. And the disease is spreading. In an email I received a few months ago, a 60ish mom referred to her 42 year-old son as a “good kid.”

When all the right things are aligned (talent, tune, purpose, spirit), there are few things in life more transporting than electric guitar and bass and drums. Forget the vocals.

People have an unmistakable gleam in their eye when they’re 18 or 19 and about to start college. A gleam that says, “Holy shit, I can’t wait…all this stuff to savor, all these things to learn, all these places to see.” By the time most people have hit 43, that gleam has been diminished if not snuffed out. That’s what I saw at my 25th high-school reunion. No more adventures, thank you. I’ve got my deal more or less worked out and I love my wife and my kids and my weekend routine, and we go to Mexico or the Caribbean once a year. But about 5% of the people at that reunion still had that gleam. Thank God for that.

People spend way too much time sitting around with friends and blah-blahing about next to nothing in bars and restaurants. It feels good to do this — I get that — but the less time you spend shooting spurious shit with fair-weather friends, the better.

Life is nothing without travel to exotic places that other Americans don’t go to because the hotels aren’t swanky enough.

Woody Allen and Rod Stewart were right. Some people are just lucky and don’t have to sweat it that much. Their genes and heritage have paved a path. Life is unfair. But if things go too easily or too well for anyone too early, they always seem to suffer on some level. It’s best to come into the really good stuff when you get a bit older.

Don Corleone had the parenting thing all figured out. He said that “a man who doesn’t spend time with his children can never be a real man.” You also have to be able to roll around and laugh and play dopey kid games, especially with toddlers. If you can’t let that side of yourself out, or if you can’t find it, then you’re a kind of prisoner.

Women always let you know within seconds if you’re “in” — i.e., if they like you enough to go to bed with you. Now, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. At all. There are 117 different things you can do or say that will change their mind, and if you can think of 75 of these things in advance you’re a genius. But women always flash that initial green light within seconds of meeting you. Not minutes. Seconds.

Sports-watching is obviously about spiritual nourishment, a ritual that feeds you with feelings and values that you believe are good for your soul. But guys who watch sports in a weekly regimented way are living in a secular and, to some extent, prohibitive realm. I’m not saying that realm isn’t a good place to dwell in many respects, but it does shut stuff out. Remember how Ray Liotta talked in Goodfellas about how he and Robert De Niro and their wives always hung out and shared Sunday dinners and went on vacations together, year after year? That’s what sports guys are like. A sports guy hasn’t really turned the key in the lock of life until he can say to himself, “Yeah, I used to be an ESPN guy but now I [fill in the blank].”

“Bad luck. That’s all it is. I pray in your life you will never find it runs in streaks. Streaks. I pray it misses you. That’s all I want to say.”

People I knew who partied hard in their late teens and into their early to mid 20s — the real animals, I mean — have all tended to end up in bad and depleted places. Some of them are dead or close to it. You have to rein that shit in or it’ll take you down. I almost succumbed to it myself.

A computer is like a person. You have to turn it off two or three times a week and let it rest. I knew that instinctually when I first starting working with them, but then I talked to a tech guy who told me it’s better to just leave them on and let them “sleep.” Jerk.

People who are still hanging out with a posse by the time they hit 35 are emotional infants. And posse people who throw their heads back and laugh loudly in restaurants and bars to the point of obnoxious shrieking, over and over while others are sitting near them and having to listen to them bust a gut like jackals, are truly repellent.

Friends will not save you. Girlfriends and wives will not save you. Your mother and/or your father will not save you. You have to save you. I’ve known an awful lot of guys (myself included) who’ve spent their 20s looking for some form of salvation from some combination of the above.

But life without a few supportive friends (i.e., those who’ve decided to embrace and accept you, asshole-ish tendencies and all, and have never changed their minds) and quality-level girlfriends or wives isn’t much of a life. Dogs and cats also tend to round things out.

Oh, to live in a world without stupidity and ignorance and religions. I don’t believe that right-wing Christians (who constitute the vast majority of the flock) should be thrown to the lions, but I certainly understand the thinking of the Romans who felt that way.

Woody Allen was also right about unstable kamikaze women being the best in bed. But nine times out of ten you’ll go crazy yourself if you settle down with them to any degree, so you have to be practical and choose someone sane and stable with good partnership qualities, and that, sad to say, tends to mean (and I truly wish it were otherwise) that sex with long-term partners never compares to insanity sex with nutty women in parking lots and closets and bathrooms and parks.

You have to be able to know and sing all the harmonic parts in all the Beatles songs. You have to know them cold. If someone wakes you up at 4 am, you have to be able to sing the low-harmony stuff without thinking about it. “Some day when I’m lonely, wishing you weren’t so far away” and “we’ll go all night long,” etc.

When I was approaching 30 I remember feeling unnerved when I read this statement: “Whatever you are at 30, you’re going to be a lot more of.” Whoa. But the guy who said that was presuming that most 30 year-olds have come into themselves by tasting a certain amount of success and failure, and have more or less decided what they really want and how to play it, and that the remaining 40 or 50 or 60 years will involve occasional dips and turns and rainstorms but will basically be a matter of “steady as she goes.” Well, it’s not like that. Sometimes you don’t hear the perfect music until you’re 40-plus. Certainly the new threshold for maturity is 40 these days. That’s when you really have to stop living off your weekly poker game with your homies (not to mention video games and skiing trips and Sunday football parties) and start exploring other realms.

Very few straight-male friendships last for more than a couple of decades. Sooner or later paths diverge. Guys don’t break up with each other. They just gradually diverge and call less and less and then stop calling except for special occasions, and then that starts to fritter away. Actually, I take that back. I’ve known one straight guy who actually broke up with me.

People never tell the truth about themselves at parties.

I’m having a late breakfast at a cafe near my place, and there’s this jabbering Hispanic guy sitting two tables away who’s louder than hell. To be heard by his tablemate he’d need to talk at a level 4 or 5 (which is how I do it — I talk to someone like I’m having a conversation, not like I’m giving a speech in an outdoor arena without a microphone). This guy is talking at a level 8 or 9.

A couple of Latino guys sitting at the counter are doing the same thing, bellowing from the diaphragm so everyone in the cafe can hear what they’re saying. Except they have to talk even louder because they have to be heard over the first loud guy.

There’s no way around it — New York Hispanics can sometimes be socially unsubtle people, and they don’t seem to care if people like me are bothered by their patter. It never even occurs. We all act thoughtlessly from time to time, but the mark of a real animal is someone who never considers that he/she might be giving offense.

Is this primarily a New York-area thing? Or something that only low-rent Latinos do? I’ve been all around Spain and I’ve rarely noticed this level of conversational obnoxiousness in cafes. Nor did I notice this element when I visited Buenos Aires a few years ago. The Latin men and women I’ve observed in other countries can be spirited and exuberant, of course, but they mostly seem to converse at moderate levels. People with money and/or accomplishment under their belts are always more soft-spoken. You can bet that if you were to go to a cafe with Paul Shenar‘s Alejandro Sosa, the Bolivian drug dealer in Scarface, that he wouldn’t be carrying on like these three nearby donkeys. Does Edward James Olmos bellow in cafes and cause guys like me to complain about him? I seriously doubt it.

I was awoken at 4:30 am by the sound of that snoring ape upstairs. Yes, the Hispanic Party Elephant of legend. Who sleeps in a bedroom directly above mine. His snoring is so guttural and persistent that once you’ve awakened there’s no going back to sleep. And the sound of the thonging mattress springs and the bed frame creaking and groaning for dear life when he rolls over is appalling. It’s sublime knowing I won’t have to deal with this guy (who fancies himself to be a crooner, by the way — he sings Spanish love ballads as he clomps down the stairs on his way to work) any more after 10.30.09.

It was the fall of ’03 when I spoke to Dominick Dunne about Play It As It Lays (’72), the affluent-existential-despair Hollywood drama that he produced for Universal, and which Frank Perry directed. The film was about to play at the American Cinematheque and I was trying to drum up support for a DVD release. Here it is six years later and Play It As It Lays still isn’t on DVD. But Dunne died today at age 83, so I thought I’d re-run my ’03 piece in his honor.

“There’s this better-than-pretty-good film about wealthy jaded Hollywood types called Play It As It Lays, and I’ll bet $50 bucks right now almost no under-40 person reading this column has heard of it, much less seen it.

“The director was the once-very-hot Frank Perry (Diary of a Man Housewife, Rancho Deluxe, Mommie Dearest), and it was based on a respected 1970 Joan Didion novel of the same name, which Ben Stein once called ‘the best novel about Hollywood ever.’

“The stars were Tuesday Weld, Anthony Perkins (playing a cynical gay producer and giving the second-best performance of his life, after Psycho‘s Norman Bates), Adam Roarke (best thing he ever did), Tammy Grimes, Ruth Ford and several others you’ve probably never heard of.

“It stood out, as I recall, for its unusually dark and nihilistic portrait of some very skewed souls in the employ of the film industry, and for Perry’s fragmented, back-and-forth cutting that was not only in keeping with the style in which Didion’s book was written, but with the randomness of thoughts flicking around inside the head of its main character, Maria Wyeth (Weld).

“It was gloomy, ambitious, ‘different’ (even by unconventional ’70s standards), and Persona-like. It had a chilly, almost spooky fascination with downer attitudes among the moneyed elite. Some of the big gun critics bashed it, but others were admiring and spoke of Oscar-level achievement.

“And to judge by press clippings I read at the Academy library on Monday, it enjoyed a particular popularity among smart cultivated women, as it seemed to express a certain anguished something-or-other about female suffering in rarified circles in the early ’70s. It also seemed to play fairly well with gay guys.

“I caught Play It As It Lays sometime in the late ’70s at a Manhattan repertory house, and I remember being struck by the total absence of a musical score. Not a damn note. The most persistent aural effect is the sound of traffic. That’s the ’70s for you, baby.

“Now, it’s one thing for a good or interesting film to slip into semi-obscurity, but Play It As It Lays has flat-out disappeared.

“That’s because it’s been out of circulation for 30 years. It’s never seen the flourescent light of a video store (as a VHS, laser disc or DVD), and there’s no mention on the internet of it ever having played on television. Search for it on the Movie Review Query Engine (www.mrqe.com) and not a single capsule review turns up.

“Calls to Universal, the negative and rights owner, indicated there’s not much awareness of this film, much less any intention to put it out on DVD. But you never know.

“All I can say is that this stylish mood piece is too heady and distinctive and was too well-reviewed during its time (by a good percentage of the critics at least, some of whom really went apeshit over it) to warrant invisibility today.

“This article is an attempt to get the Universal crew to wake up and put this sucker out on DVD, and I’m not talking about one of those bargain-basement, no-frills jobs.

“Laurent Bouzereau, the maker of dozens of brilliant DVD documentaries over the years, should be hired to assemble a looking-back doc while the participants are still around and kicking. I’m thinking especially of star Tuesday Weld, Didion (her novelist husband John Gregory Dunne, who co-wrote the script, passed away earlier this year), and producer Dominick Dunne, a plugged-in Hollywood player before his later incarnation as a novelist and Vanity Fair feature writer.

“Truth be told, Play It As It Lays sometimes feels like a bit much in terms of its despairing tone and existential hairshirt attitude. But at least it tries to disturb and provoke and point moral fingers and yet — at the same time, perversely — recreate the roguishly sexy aroma of early ’70s Hollywood so that audiences can feel what the tingle was all about.

“I mean, listen to these tributes…

“‘Once every few years, a film so spectacular and intense that it creates a whole new vocabulary for film grammarians comes along,’ enthused The Hollywood Reporter‘s Nick Yanni. ‘Such a picture is Play It As It Lays.’

“The L.A. Times’ Charles Champlin declared it a new-styled ‘woman’s picture…drawn from a rarified part of Hollywood….a sub-sub-subculture,’ and said it ‘does depict its tiny exotic world with merciless skill and sobering accuracy.’

“Writing in the New York Times, film critic and novelist Ann Birstein called it ‘a study of nihilism’ that she felt ‘fascinated, moved and stunned by,’ adding that it was ‘one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.’

“The Film Journal also called it ‘one of the best films of the year.’

“Cosmopolitan film critic Liz Smith (back in the days when she was a reasonably tough and honest writer) said in a column she wrote in early November ’72 that ‘unless something extraordinary happens between now and the end of the year, Play It As It Lays will be my Oscar bet for just about the best of everything.’

“Saturday Review critic Thomas Meehan said ‘if nothing else, it is Vogue-ishly chic in its vision of L.A. and environs as contemporary Hell, in the manner of Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point.’

“Box Office magazine called it ‘an artistic triumph.’

“In her mixed review, Wall Street Journal critic Joy Gould Boyum nonetheless said it offers ‘a deeply intelligent screenplay, highly sensitive direction, and exquisite photography by [dp] Jordan Cronenweth‘ and called it ‘a very well made film.’

“There were other reviews — some of them not friendly. (Pauline Kael ripped it to shreds.) But all things considered, does this film sound like it should have sat at the bottom of a dark well for the last three decades? When critics say ‘best of the year,’ it usually means the presence of something honorable.

Joan Didion

“My own recollection is that Play It As It Lays was certainly above average. I recall it taking the measure of the void in ways that seemed ripe and head-turning.

“‘The corruption and venality and restrictiveness of Hollywood have become…firm tenets of American’s social faith — and of Hollywood’s own image of itself,’ Joan Didion wrote in an essay 30-plus years ago.

Then as now, it follows that people high up in the Hollywood food chain have a reputation for living spiritually arid or perverted lives, and more than a few of them being very sick puppies. I don’t know how many books and movies have used the old Hollywood Babylon thing as an atmospheric starting point since Didion’s prescient pronouncement, but I think we can safely say ‘a lot.’

“Weld’s Maria character (it’s pronounced Mar-eye-ah and not Mar-EE-ah) walks around in a state of shutdown. She doesn’t seem to be in pain as much as caught up in some kind of drifting, unable-to-play-the-game-anymore mentality. Maria’s life doesn’t seem to amount to anything purposeful or self-directed as she only seems to function as an enervated wife, friend or lover to this or that Hollywood player-with-a-penis. It has failed, in any event, to coagulate for her in a way that feels rooted or worth being a part of.

“The film is Maria’s recollection of her recent past as she recovers from some kind of breakdown in a sanitarium. She has gotten divorced from her director husband (Adam Roarke), partly due to his rage over her having had an abortion after getting pregnant by one of her lovers (Richard Anderson). She has an emotionally disturbed daughter who barely speaks. One of her core sentiments, repeatedly jotted down during her stay at the facility, is that ‘nothing applies.’

“Maria’s closest friend is her husband’s producer, B.Z. (Perkins), who closely shares her nihilist leanings.

“There’s a scene in which Maria, B.Z. and B.Z.’s wife (Tammy Grimes) are driving in a car, and Maria has just said something very spacey and who-cares? ‘You’re getting there,’ B.Z. says to Maria. ‘Where?’ she asks. ‘Where I am,” B.Z. answers. His wife quickly rejoins, ‘Where you are is shit.’

“The movie has lots of acidic, bitter-pill dialogue like this, a good portion of it dished out by Perkins. Kael said that ‘when his lines are dry, [Perkins] is the best thing in the picture.’

Ned Tanen

“I remember a scene at a party in which a gangster-producer type named Larry Kulick (Paul Lambert) looks at a young woman and says out loud, ‘I’d like to get into that,’ and Perkins, standing next to him and Maria and staring blankly into the crowd, saying, ‘I wouldn’t exactly call it the impossible dream.’

“And for some reason I’ve never forgotten the way Perkins delivers a smirking line about artificial lemons: ‘They’re not artificial — they’re reconstituted.’

“The film also has a nice assortment of sleazy second-bananas — a grossly egoistic TV actor (Tony Young, who comes on to Maria as she’s watching B.Z. and his lover play tennis by saying, ‘Why don’t you dump the fags?’), a pudgy assistant to an abortionist with a thing for Camaro’s (Chuck McCann), and Tyne Daly (extremely slim in those days) as an obsequious journalist interviewing Roarke during a desert location shoot.

“I called John Gregory Dunne on Monday to see whether he or Joan Didion had heard of Play It As It Lays playing anywhere in any format, or whether they’d heard of any plans to put it out on DVD, and he said no.

“Then I rang Dominick Dunne, his brother, at his Connecticut home. He said he hadn’t thought of the film in a long time (‘You know, you move on…’), but he seemed to enjoy dredging up more and more anecdotes as we talked.

“Dunne reminded me that Tuesday Weld’s performance won a Best Actress award at the 1972 Venice Film Festival. He also recalled that he gave Joel Schumacher his start by hiring him as the film’s costume designer. ‘He was doing the windows at Henri Bendel’s, and he went on from this and never looked back,’ he says. ‘It was also Joel who brought Berry Berenson out to the set to meet Tony Perkins, and out of that she and Tony got married.’

“Berenson’s life ended on September 11, 2001. She was a passenger on American flight #11 that slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center.

“Dunne said he’s very proud of the picture and agreed it was quite admired in its day. ‘It was never a hit but there were some people who were just passionate about it,’ he said. ‘But we also had a studio chief who hated the movie, just hated it, and he would say this to anybody…’

Tony Perkins in Play It As It Lays

“‘Ned Tanen, the head of Universal at the time, hated the book and called [the script] a piece of shit on our first meeting…he was the most awful man,’ Dunne recalled. ‘They only did it…they only made it because Frank Perry had a hit at Universal a year or two before [i.e., Diary of a Mad Housewife], and Frank wanted to direct this movie… but Tanen hated ever single day’s dailies, and he was the most awful person. It was so bitter. [Tanen died early this year.]

“‘I was on a coast-to-coast flight on MGM Grand a few years later, and I was seated right next to Ned Tanen — he on the window, me on the aisle. Our elbows twice touched during lunch, but we never spoke to each other for the five-hour flight. Kevin Bacon was on the plane, and one point he came over to talk to us and he went on about this and that, thinking we were together…it was so unpleasant.’

“I called the mostly-retired Tanen to get his side of this story, but he didn’t reply. For what it’s worth, a former studio chief who’s known Tanen for years reminded me that his behavior was partly due to his being manic depressive, or what would now be called bi-polar.

“‘[Tanen] was crazy in a colorfully Hollywood way and would not fit into a studio job today,’ the former exec recalled, ‘but when he was up or on he was the most exciting and charming guy you’d ever want to meet.’

“I don’t know how to end this except throw in another quote from the film.

“It comes at the very end. Maria, having struggled her way through into a semblance of hope or sanity after reviewing what a mess everything has been, says to herself, ‘I know what nothing is, and keep on playing.’ The voice of B.Z., who has committed suicide by Seconal, is then heard to ask ‘why?’

“Weld looks at the camera, smiles serenely, and delivers what I consider one of the most cheerful closing lines in movie history.

“She says, ‘Why not?’

Jezebel‘s weekend editor got pretty angry at Saturday’s “Just Hot Enough” piece and went after me pretty savagely in a Sunday piece called “Jeffrey Wells: ‘Life Would Be Heavenly And Rhapsodic If Women Had The Personality And Temperament Of Dogs.'”

I posted a reply on Jezebel but this is just a variation on the old line that reads “if you want a friend get a dog.” We all know what this means. Hetero relationships are always being reassessed and renegotiated. Your stock goes up or down with your wife/girlfriend depending on various evolving factors. People fall out of love in relationships. (And sometimes back in love.) Ardor fades. People get fat, lose jobs, lose their love of life and sometimes turn to drink. Expectations are unmet and disappointment ensues. All to say that “love” is definitely conditional. Whatever kind of “love” you and your significant other have going right now is not necessarily going to be there tomorrow or next week, let alone a year or two from now. Nothing new in this.

Just a few more licks to post on this cranked-up, trumped-up Oxford Film Festival media-panel fracas, and that’ll be it for good:

(a) I forgot to mention in my initial post about this yesterday morning that I tried using my AT&T air card service (which I pay $60 bucks a month for) and that it worked for a while and then it didn’t. I’m used to the fact that it’s a temperamental device, but when it crapped out on me along with the hotel wifi and the ethernet cable connection, something collapsed inside. I felt as if the four horsemen of the apocalypse were circling and going for the kill.

(b) If I had it do over again, I would have gone to the friggin’ media panel and listened to moderator James Rocchi do his brilliant pontificator routine while I waited for a chance to get a word in edgewise in front of 50 or 60 people who’d been partying like the panelists into the wee hours the night before. When I said to a couple of fellow panelists (Rocchi and someone else) on Friday morning that I wouldn’t doing the panel due to fatigue and rage and a general deadness-of-the-brain, I wasn’t coming from a place of firm resolution but from what you might call a mood pocket. Mood pockets are temporary emotional foxholes — not a home or a fortress or any kind of fortified structure but a place you’ve just sort of crawled into for a bit. If Rocchi or Kim Voynar or anyone had come up and said, “Look, you have to do this and the hell with your mood pocket!,” I probably would have shaken myself out of it and done the damn thing. But nobody said zip. One of the panelists told me a few hours ago that they were all in shock — novocained! unable to respond! — and that’s why nobody said anything. I’m not saying the no-show wasn’t my call entirely, but if I had been one of the others I wouldn’t have numbed out if one of them had been in a dispirited mood. You could go so far as to say that’s what friends do when you’re depressed and funked out — they come over and tell you to snap out of it, get over it, do the right thing. Sentimental me!

(c) Imagine I’m the film festival chief and you’re coming to my town to watch movies and take part in a panel discussion. I pick you up at the airport, take you to the local motel. You notice after unpacking your things in your room that the bathroom has a strip of yellow tape across the entrance that says “out of order.” You come up to me and ask what’s up, and I say “Uhhm, I know, it’s fucked up…but you can use the bathroom near the front desk in the lobby and” — I hand them a roll of peach-colored Charmin bathroom tissue — “there are also woods right outside, so you can always go there in a pinch.” Let’s say one of the panelists doesn’t show up the next day. Now, I might be disappointed in this, having paid for their airfare and hotel room costs and so on, but if I were honest with myself I might allow that an emotional cause-and-effect symmetry might have been a factor.

(d) “Regardless of the wifi-gate specifics, the cool kidz are ganging up on you,” a journalist friend wrote me today, “and the winners write history, so to speak, even if they’re idiots. I was initially horrified and then I thought about it in context. That things were so screwed up with the motel wifi that you thought something was wrong with your own shit is a major organizational error on their part. But you’re cool with the fest people, and frankly controversy is the BEST publicity known to man…but all these other critics? I haven’t seen them writing shit up all over the place, have you? They showed up for a panel, but have they been pimping that place large?

“If you post any further followup, the only recommendation I have from a debater’s standpoint is that you reiterate that the no-showing for the panel is something the festival organizers and you are cool about, and that you’d challenge these other folks to show any of their coverage of the trip or experience that isn’t Defamer fodder that has nothing to do with promoting the festival. You ‘agree’ with all the jerks that you answer to the festival folks, and according to them, you’re cool. So what’s the problem?”

(e) “Don’t let the bastard commenters get you down,” a seasoned journalist pal wrote two or three hours ago. “The Oxford coverage is great. If I wanted to read bland coverage of movies and other crap at a small regional film festival, I can go to Variety or the Reporter or one of those earnest film blogs that think covering every last lame movie is important. but your bizarre adventures (and your very fine tourist photos) is what makes your site so fucking readable. The only thing i would change is (a) add some photos of cute Oxford girls and (b) maybe an mp3 of Scott Weinberg or one of the other pissheads getting into a verbal harrangue with you over this thing.”

(f) “Hey Jeff, how are you? I just wanted to email you to make sure that you and your readers know that I am Scott Feinberg from the L.A. Times and NOT Scott Weinberg the guy who commented on your post about the Oxford Film Festival, since I’ve been getting emails for hours from people who think you and I are in a big fight, when in fact I consider us to be friends. Perhaps you can post a clarification?” Sorry, Scott — clarification posted.

This is my last and final post about the emotionally vivid cowboy hat, which connects to an item I ran yesterday. Which you need to read along with the comments in order to understand the context. Okay? Do that first and then come back to this.

The Star hotel is a b & b — not a hotel. I stayed there in ’07 and ’08 and was very content to do so. Carol Rixey, who’s been managing until this year (when her son took over), runs it quietly and efficiently but with a kind of personal touch. She makes you feel as if you’re staying in someone’s home back in 1962 or something. My mother would love it if she was still getting around. So would have Gary Cooper , I suspect, if he had dropped by during the Eisenhower administration.

For the Star is a quiet little old-time America trip — a kind of time-capsule remnant of the way it all used to be and feel. (Except for the wi-fi.) It’s a homey little place with family pictures and little knick-knacks on the walls, and it all makes you feel good and settled-down. Carol serves breakfast in the morning, there are always potato chips and pretzels and cheese squares on the kitchen table, and if you’re feeling sick with a fever (as I was last year, beginning on the day that Heath Ledger was found dead) Carol might offer you a homemade remedy or a first-aid pack that she keeps in a box near the front entrance.

But you have to be a mellow, quiet, laid-back type to fit in. Some haven’t. A couple of lesbians going through relationship problems stayed there last year — it was a little bit weird. A pair of Australian party animals stayed there the year before — they were coarse and gross and stank of booze in the morning, and one of them slurped his Cheerios like a pig. But the Toronto Globe and Mail‘s Liam Lacey has stayed there year after year in a very col and quiet way. He gets it, fits in, etc. As I have.

Star hotel”s dining room

Carol is a Texan but she kind of reminds me of my grandmother (my mom’s mom) in a tough way. She’s no softy and won’t take any guff, but she’s maternal and caring in her way. And I came to feel very cared for there. I could talk to Carol like she was family and vice versa. And the wifi is pretty damn good. Not the fastest but always functioning.

So when I said to her last year that I’d like to leave my cowboy hat there so I could just pick up in ’09 where I left off in ’08, I was obviously saying to her (in my head at least, and I can’t imagine how she could have interpreted this any differently) that I’d like it very much if she could be a nice and considerate grandma and hold my hat for me, and that I’d be back to stay the following year. Simple and quite clear all around. I trusted her to get what I meant because, I figured, she surely recognizes the trust and affection that we’ve had between us over the past two years.

But now things have ended badly. Very badly. I just heard from Carol that she considers my having discussed the matter in the column to be a form of blackmail (a somewhat hysterical interpretation, in my view) and that she’s given my hat to the Park City police and that I can pick it up there when I get to town. The fuzz, for God’s sake! She’s brought the cops into this! Talk about a violation of the trust that comes with friendship and the values of good grandma-hood!

The idea that nice people can turn around and suddenly act erratically and illogically (to put it in gentle terms) is not a very pleasant one, but obviously it happens. Good God.

Typical Star Hotel bedroom.