Thanks for Robert Altman

Well, so it's a few days after Thanksgiving, and I'm just starting to get the hang of being anywhere other than the couch, and resuming less frantic feedings; right now (for instance), as I write this, my mouth is, at least relatively, unfull. I may possibly be getting to the end of the prolonged period of procrastination so many of us embrace at the back end of a holiday, where you feel like you live in a huge, slow, heavy house for big fatsos.

We take Thanksiving very seriously here at Kelp Manor -in fact, it has always been our favorite holiday - and this year's festivities were second to none. We ate everything we could get our pudgy little hands on, and then sloshed it down with the same horrendous swill I always lay in for my guests at holiday time. There's nothing like buying some really cheap, awful wine, safe and secure in the knowledge that your victims will all be too ossified to know the difference.

The stage diving was more accomplished, and the incomprehensible babbling in tongues was more eccentric than ever, as a particularly varied and charming group of contestants vied for the honor of being designated "Mayor of Drunktown" (a non-paying, not particularly complementary or honorable annual honorarium with non-valedictory arboretums.) This year's campaign was even more hotly contested than usual, with the outcome in doubt until the very last moment, when the judges awarded the mayoral seat to one Ellen Prell "Hot Dog" DeSilva, who only stopped twirling just recently. (Congratulations also to the First Lady, and to his extensive retinue.)

The trouble is, nowadays I look like this no matter what, and nobody knows the trouble I've seen voluntarily.

Which brings me around to something that's very much on my mind the last few days, which is the loss of Robert Altman, one of history's best and most iconoclastic directors, not to mention most lovable rogues. He made big, generation-defining movies like "M*A*S*H", "Nashville", "McCabe and Mrs. Miller", and "The Player"; great experiments like "Short Cuts", "Popeye", "Gosford Park", "The Company", and "California Split"; even utter flops like "Quintet". He earned the right to flop every now and then, because he was taking chances, doing anything other than making the same movie over and over again.

For me, he's on that short list of directors whose movies I always needed to devour instantly on release, regardless of the subject or the cast. Not that he was ever remotely cast-deficient; most of his films feature hilariously large and fascinating collections of the coolest actors playing the smallest parts for the lowest dough. If he won less than his share of awards, he made up for it in a steady avalanche of peer approval, and not just because he made good movies, but because making them was fun.

He was prolific, creative, edgy, and funkily elegant throughout his life: the last movie he completed, a collaboration with Garrison Keillor called "The Prairie Home Companion", is just as casual and funny and profound as anything he ever did, and, as usual, chockful of great actors (Lily Tomlin, Tommy Lee Jones, and especially Meryl Streep, all at their best.) Now that we've lost him (how could we be so careless? -first the Sagamore rotary, now Altman!), it feels like a beautifully nuanced, lingering goodbye. Though frequently hilarious and joyful, the movie somehow also has the feeling of a friend holding your hand through a difficult time. Apparently, Altman knew he was dying of cancer when he made it, but kept it to himself- as he also did, amazingly enough, with a heart transplant he had more than a decade ago without anyone finding out about it until he mentioned it at an awards show about a year ago.

He seems to have been a remarkably generous, non-meddlesome type (especially for a director!), and one of the lucky by-products of this attitude (and of his apparently unflagging energy) is that he did director's commentary tracks for a large number of his films, and they tend to be the exception to the rule in that he actually sounds engaged and focused, and the commentaries as a result are relatively informative and charming. "The Prairie Home Companion" hits the spot on that level, too, as Kevin Kline actually asks him some good, pertinant questions, and Altman has enough respect for his audience and his work to answer them graciously, and occasionally even seriously.

He said some interesting things: he doesn't necessarily read his scripts before he starts filming (didn't on "Prairie Home Comapanion", for instance); he's also well-known for not being overly fussy with his actors, who seem to bask in the autonomy he routinely awards them. He seemed to place a particularly high value on finding the right collaborators and letting them loose.

He seemed to have an uncommon respect for his audience, evinced by his fluid, flowing idiosyncratic camera work, which always had a feel and a rhythm that was all his own. In his last movie, the camera almost never stops moving; even on close-ups, it's still in motion, albeit very slowly, sometimes almost undetectably. It's a sort of amiable, relaxed drifting, and in the voice-over, he says that he always avoided telling the audience where to look. He also avoided telling them what to listen to, his patented overlapping dialogue a case very much in point. But he sure gave us some faulous choices!

Usually, when someone dies, you're sad for them and their family, but you get over it. Sometimes, though, a person is just plain irreplaceable, and you never stop thinking about them or missing them. For me, that list includes John Lennon, Andy Kaufman, a personal friend or two, and now, Robert Altman. There'll never be another like him.

The Case of the Missing Rotary

Well, and now here I come, hippity-hop over hill and dale, spreading joy and all those amusing little folksy tidbits of mine you've all so grown to love, let's have a picnic! (By the way, special thanks to PJ O'Connell of Eastham, MA., for nominating the word/words “hippity-hop” for inclusion in this week's extravaganza, and for correctly sensing that it/they would indeed add the precise amount of extra “zest” that this opening paragraph had lacked up until then.)

Fine. Well. So. The big story this week of course (or one of them, anyway) being the recent absence of rotary at the bridge.

Now, probably this may shock some of you, as I know that in general most of my readership prides itself on its inability to travel past Hyannis (and only that far during emergencies, and even then you have to multi-task like a son of a bitch to prevent having to go back there ever), so you may not know this, but for the past fairly lengthy time period, they've been digging around down there by the bridge, and apparently what ended up happening is that someone stole the damn rotary.

Or at least that's how it appeared to me the last time I drove to Boston, and got over the bridge and -whoa! -no rotary at all! Did you hear about this? Absolutely missing. And on the one hand, I can't imagine how someone could pull that off, but on the other, well, I saw the digging; I mean, for months I saw the digging, but I never once asked anyone about it or tried to report it or anything. Which is just another example of how apathetic we've become as a nation, myself in particular -I'm obviously part of the problem.

I haven't seen anything about it in the papers, but I can't imagine I'm the only one that's noticed. I mean, it is kind of glaring. You can tell someone's embarrassed about it, because it's still kind of a mess, with just a bunch of those little cones kind of scattered around for no particular reason.

It does turn out, however, that there is a real upside to its disappearance, in that you can drive over the bridge way faster now. In fact, if you get a good head start, you can just race over that thing. It's like this great roller coaster now, where if you really go like hell on the way up the bridge, you can actually get airborne as you fly over the hill, sometimes for as long as two or three hundred yards! Of course, you'll go a lot higher and further the faster you go on your approach, sooo, don't spare the spark plugs!

Actually, it seemed to affect my driving time between Boston and Eastham much more drastically than I had figured. I used to always allow two hours to go to Boston, but my business (which, as you might imagine, is basically low-end thievery) took me to Somerville, which always added another three hours (both ways. It took me a long time and much bitter experience to learn how incredibly long it takes to get from Boston to Somerville; no matter how tricky you try to get about it, and despite the fact that Boston and Somerville are almost right next to each other, it's still three hours.) (Lovely drive, though.) (And all the shopping!)

So I was pretty surprised that now that the rotary's been disappeared, the trip takes about 35 minutes, one way. Of course, that's driving as fast as I can, really late at night. My car (it's a late model Buick LeBaron)'s speedometer goes up to, I think, 140, and it was totally pinned; by the time we landed from the jump on the bridge on the way back, we were almost in Mashpee! So, I don't know exactly how fast I was going, but we got in to Kelp Manor maybe a little more than 35 minutes after leaving Johnny D's.

Anyway, a big thumbs up for not having a rotary -you're gonna love it!