It All Comes Down to Peter Falk

Before last week, the last film I saw in a movie theatre involved a renegade stuffed teddy bear on a mission to recover stolen honey from a cell of terrorist bees. There was a manic-depressive donkey and a bunny hopped up on goof balls. Or at least that's how I wish it had gone down.

So, yeah, don't get to see grown up movies very much. But last week my (amazing) husband got a babysitter, got out of work before midnight and packed a cooler (with paris ham baguette, wine and dark choc courtesy of Pain Quotient.) He wouldn't tell me what we were seeing and even the marquee outside of The County cinema in Doylestown didn't say what was playing.

I nearly cried when I saw the ticket stub. It just said 'Wings.'

Wings of Desire is one of my favorite movies. It's a movie that is so rich in meaning and detail, passion and hopefulness, that even after almost 25 years, it still has the ability to make me think and feel deeply.

Yeah, it's about angels in Berlin, trapeze artists and Peter Falk (played by Peter Falk), but it's mostly about love in the most bald, unapologetically sentimental way a film in german can be.

I know I'm not doing a good job of selling it here, but if you haven't seen it you don't know what this film can do for you. It can strip you clean of your cynicism. At least for a while.*

from ew.com

The other big movie news (for me) this week was the 25th anniversary reunion of the cast from The Princess Bride (please tell me that you've seen this movie. I will have to come over with my DVD and popcorn if you say you haven't seen it.)

What can I say about Westly (sigh), Buttercup, Inigo and the rest? Should I tell you that I recently spotted Wallace Shawn having dinner with Fran Liebowitz at Cookshop? Or that I had such a crush on Cary Elwes (Lady Jane, anyone?) that I defended Men in Tights knowing it was an awful movie?

Suffice it to say that I still make my sister crack up by saying "You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."










This reunion video from GMA made me smile.



And The Princess Bride has Peter Falk in it, too. Coincidence? Not on your life.

What are your favorite movies and why?

*Not to mention, though I'm mentioning, that WOD has two of my very favorite bands performing in it. Crime + The City Solution and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Oh, man. 

The Muse and the Wall

I've been trying to do more than write in the last year and a half since I moved away from NYC, away from board meetings, away from Pret A Manger. I've been trying to build for myself a sustainable writing life. I don't want this to be a flash in the pan. I don't want you or my mother or my neighbor to check in here a year from now to find that I've taken up pig farming or pottery. I'm not starting a hobby, I tell myself, I'm building a life.

There are countless pros and cons to the writing life and you see mention of them everywhere, especially the cons. They range from lack of funds to working so hard at building an author platform that writing time dwindles.

But for me there's only one pro and one con to actual writing. The Muse and the Wall.

The Muse
In 1996 Nick Cave sent a letter to MTV Europe, thanking them for nominating him for an award, but basically telling them to withdraw his nomination. Why? He thought that participating in competative awards could offend his muse ("She might spook!")

I don't think he's being funny, though he's a strange lad, it's always hard to tell. I think he sincerely believes in his muse and is not taking any chances. I don't believe in muses per se, the grecian goddesses who bestow inspiration onto artists of all kinds. But I guess that's as good a term as any for what I sometimes experience. I call it being poleaxed because I stiffen up, I feel frozen for a second or two. An idea suddenly appears and starts to unroll in my head. It feels like it comes from somewhere else because it arrives so entirely where nothing was there before. Not all creative ideas are like this, but the ones that are make time seem to slow. It's a physical sensation too, a numbness that travels down my arms to my finger tips.

You can explain this as creative intuition, the subconscious breaking through to the conscious, but it feels a hell of a lot like divine intervention. When this happens to me, I feel amazing, excited and transported. This feeling is the best thing about being creative, about writing, regardless of what I make of that first seed of an idea. I keep writing because of that feeling.

The Wall
Okay, I'm cheating a little. There are two, different walls. The first is the wall you stumble into while you're writing, the one that wasn't there a minute ago and suddenly is there. It's too tall to scale and it goes on, left and right, forever. It's writer's block. Usually I can feel somewhat positive about the wall because I can look at it as a challenge. But sometimes it truly feels insurmountable and I'm cast into deep doldrums. I hate that feeling because even though recent history shows that I can get through it, it always threatens to derail me. I'm afraid, one day, the derailment will be permanent.

The other wall is really a curtain. See, I'm backstage with the pulleys, the wires, the trap doors and the grease paint. And everyone else is in the audience. Whether the audience likes my words or not doesn't matter, they get to experience them in a way I never can. Francine Prose talks about this in her excellent book Reading Like a Writer. I'm always at a distance from my writing, I'll never discover it like a reader will. That makes me a little sad and a little crazy. Lots of writers say they want to write the kind of books they want to read - but our own books are never really for us.

So, what one pro and one con of writing for you - what are they?