Thomas F. Cook

This is a short story which I believe was one of the last things Stefan Zweig wrote. (Update, it is the last thing he wrote.) And it was so interesting because it started out as just a story about a remarkable chess player prodigy, but one who could only play when he had a board in front of him. He can’t imagine or “see” a board in his mind to anticipate future moves. The “Shannon Number” is the number of possible moves in a game of chess and it is somewhere between 1o to the 111th factor and 10 to the 123rd factor. That’s more moves than there are atoms in the universe.

Now on some sort of cruise ship that the narrator (an observer of the story, like Tom in The Great Gatsby), notices an arrogant man that can’t believe this prodigy could win every game, so he starts betting and doubling down when he loses each time. On one of these games another observer butts in and says, “no don’t do that, you must do this,” and so on, and more or less explains the best he can hope for is a draw.

This man is Dr. B. and the narrator prods him to explain how he came about his extraordinary knowledge of the game. Dr. B., it turns out, is a holocaust survivor — having been isolated in Austria with absolutely no outside interaction. The only interaction he has is with a guard who brings the good. To prevent himself from going crazy, he swipes a book on chess with all the most famous games. He starts playing them, but unlike the prodigy on the ship, he “sees” these games in his head. He doesn’t need an actual board to play them. Finally, when he finds himself bored by having memorized all the games, he starts making up games in his head between himself and an alternate version of himself. This leads to more insanity, and once he is free, his doctors advise him never to play chess again.

The story is a very fine story I think, and it really captures the way the mind can trip itself up, especially when Dr. B. gets to the explanation of how he had to try to think with two personalities and try to pretend he did not know what the other was thinking. So a little story like this ends, which was originally titled, “The Royal Game,” ends up being another condemnation of the Nazis.

Stefan Zweig killed himself (his wife killed herself also) about 3 days after he sent this story off to his publisher. The story doesn’t really depict the despair he felt about Europe and the end of the Hapsburgs, but it doesn’t suggest he was struggling very hard with his mind when he was in Brazil.

Not the Reality TV show, but my own discovery that I’m a hoarder. I’ll post a few pictures, maybe, at the end of the post. This originally started as a letter to my sister, but then I realized I was talking about despair and some pretty deep emotions.

This is the part from the letter: “You know I can look at these pictures and actually feel the despair that hoarders must feel when they start to fill rooms up and throw stuff as far to the back as possible. But what I still can’t understand is why they want to keep everything. Even though this looks horrible right now, I’m so eager to have it gone. And it’s probably not apparent, but I’m actually sorting out everything so that the white bedding I had in my “hotel” room in Newburgh is in the same box and the bedding I had in the “warm” room, is also in the same box. I’m throwing out tons of clothing that I’ve collected over decades but I have to allow them (the building) to empty the bin so it can’t all go tomorrow. But I’m definitely feeling the sadness of hoarding because I was a bit of a hoarder, I just didn’t realize it. I didn’t clean out my stuff — I just kept buying bigger and bigger storage units. And why did I have to buy so much? To have the sharpest cotton shirt. I didn’t buy anything…”

I was going to say “spectacular” or “unique.” I bought a lot of clothes from Eddie Bauer, which is just a shop that almost never changes its design and therefore, appeals to stupid men. But 30 to 50 shirts and long sleeved things? I have so much clothing stacked on the floor but, exactly like Hoarders, I can identify every fucking piece of clothing and bedding. So, like those idiots, I can look at piece of wrinkled fabric and say, “Oh that’s from my Hotel Room in Newburgh,” where I designed a guest bedroom with almost entirely white fabric. The chair and the desk were also white. Why am I trying to convey that message to anyone? It was a white room, and nobody liked it.

The room that I designed that I called the “warm” room, was designed for greys and blues and almost everyone wanted to stay in it. So now, I’m sitting here trying to fold and press and put the blue and grey (they warm room) into another couple of boxes.

But what I’m really trying to do is boast. It should all be thrown out, and I finally realized why Trump is so fucking stupid. He took all those classified documents, knowing he had lost the election, and then said, “Here’s what they did for me. Look at this. I wanted to know how we could attack Iran. And look at this. The Pentagon gave me some papers that showed me how to bomb Iran.”

The moral of the story, is that I’m sitting here trying to justify sending bedding and such to Ohio, when the fact is I’m a hoarder. I’m like Trump, trying to say “this is what I had access to…” but when the truth is, I’m just a hoarder with money.

BUT NO ONE WILL EVER TOUCH MY STAMP COLLECTION>

Hoarder’s last words. hahahahahahahahhaha

The annual spelling bee for students was just concluded and it’s worth looking at the video of the young boy who won. Dev Shah.

In the Times article, they had a list of words which knocked out the competition. But one of them, I’m pasting it here and it might include the links, had a definition that was one of those that you have to look up the other words in order to understand it.

crenel: one of the embrasures alternating with merlons in a battlement.

I don’t know what Crenel means, and I don’t know what embrasures or merlons mean, and I only have a slight sense of what a battlement is.

So embrasure is usually a slit in the wall of a castle that is wider on the inside than on the outside to shoot arrows through. It is also the gap on the parapets on top of the castle that allow canons to shoot canon balls, or just a bunch of men with bows and arrows.

Merlons are the solid portion of that defensive wall, or battlement.

A battlement is a parapet meant for defense against an enemy, but can also be for decoration.

So now we know what a crenel is.

The word he spelled correctly was psammophile. An organism that thrives in sandy soils, like a cactus. He, an 8th grader, knew that psamm or psam was Greek for sand and phile was Greek for lover. Very impressive.

It’s so ridiculous, but some number of years ago the post office, strapped with ridiculous rules by congress to fund the retirement of employees that they hadn’t even hired, decided on a Forever stamp. Speculators and people that enjoy loopholes didn’t realize that even if you bought 10 million stamps at the Forever price and sold them later for 10 cents, you were betting on the fact that the post office has to raise prices almost every year.

But what the “Forever” label has actually accomplished, is a blindfold. Nobody knows what it costs to send a letter. (As of this writing, in June, 2023, it’s 63 cents for a single sheet of paper, usually a bill.) The “Forever” label on stamps has hidden the true value, except to collectors.

And I haven’t said this much, but I’ve said it enough, collecting is an important part of living. On television cable shows they show the results of hoarding, but collecting is not hoarding. Collecting — I’m going to grab at something bizarre — Horse saddles from the 1800s. TV also likes to show the riches of collecting. But that’s also rare. The importance of collecting is the concentration your tiny brain gives to this one thing.

So I collect stamps. I stopped a very long time ago with my American collection, because they were issuing one collectible after another. Every week, like an impoverished country or Island which have always relied on stamps to bring in some money. Once the US started acting like Bermuda, I realized our postal service had turned into a business that was supposed to make money. And they had to do it because of Congress and the Republican’s attempt to destroy the post office and privatize the service.

I wasn’t half wrong. I was half right. The only “service” outlined in the constitution of the U.S. is the postal service, which says it will run (a post office, I’ll look it up later), but the postal service was so important back then (1770’s) in its battle with the British, that the agency was written into the constitution. It required the U.S. to maintain a postal service. This was written, by the way, before the 1st or 2nd Amendment or the following 8 that make up the bill of rights. It’s part of the original constitution. IMHO, it would probably be unconstitutional to privatize the post office. But I don’t think it’s ever come up because it’s so deep inside our constitution. It’s not even one of the amendments which are usually the subject of cases the make it to the supreme court. The most recent “threatened” amendment was the 14th. And it still is, with Trump declaring that he will eliminate birthright citizenship with a scratch of his psychotic signature. (He does not know how to make a curve.) He doesn’t have that power, but like all tyrants, he will try to claim it.

Anyway, the “Forever” stamp is just a way of hiding postage rates. Our government uses tactics of the casino to govern, because casinos have had a very long history and have done a lot of research into human psychology. Replacing real money with casino chips, and making every chip just about the same size, allows you to forget that you are betting 40$ on a hand that you are likely to lose. “Forever” is the equivalent of the casino chip. It means nothing. It’s not a denomination. The small amount of money the post office loses on people who buy thousands of forever stamps and then sell them at a perceived discount when the price goes up is peanuts for the p.o.

The end of Barry was literally the end of Barry. And the end of everyone except the one truly despicable character, Monroe. There’s not as much to discuss as there was with Succession. But one interesting story telling device is that there were two flash fowards: one of about 5 years and another of maybe 10. The first was at the start of the season when Barry and Sally are living out in the desert somewhere and have a 5 year old son. Second was in the last episode which jumped about 10 years and the boy is now about 15. He might be a little younger. I couldn’t tell. Anyway, Sally has just directed Our Town for a high school where she works at (it snows there so it’s got to be midwest, I think). Her son John asks if he can sleep over his friend’s house and his friend keeps saying it’s time. You think they might be talking about cigarettes or drugs or beer. But what he’s talking about is a movie that was made of his father’s life. In it, Barry is portrayed as a hero that is brutally gunned down by Mr. Cousineau. Mr. C. is also blamed for the cold blooded murder of his girlfriend. And the final credits tell us that Jean Cousineau is being held in a maximum security prison for life. Sad ending, but he did kill Barry.

Succession has finally ended.

It didn’t end EXACTLY as I predicted from the first time I wrote about this show, but it was close enough that I give myself 3 stars out of 4. I always believed that a story like this is about the father and the son, or the oldest daughter if he has no sons. So I always looked at this series as Kendall Roy’s story. You can bring in lots of other characters (like Gerri, Maddsen, or the white supremacist who won the presidency because this family decided to call the election in his favor) — but ultimately it comes down to one person — the main protagonist — and it started and ended with Kendall. In the series opening, and in many subsequent openings, he was always on his way to work, as the heir apparent.

In the last scene of the series, he is sitting at the tip of battery park, the southernmost point of Manhattan but also the spot where trade began and even though lots of money managers and traders, etc., have never been to Manhattan, it’s still called WALL STREET. As a bizarre story about mergers and acquisitions, and buying politicians who will let “deals” go through, or backing other politicians who will “regulate” the hell out it, it’s utterly boring. But combine that obscene wealth with sibling rivalry and anger, and the fact that Logan Roy apparently left no will except as it related to his apartment, there’s a reason everyone became addicted to this show. It was an absolute triumph of writing. (There were 8 or 10 people in the writers room by the way, just to add a little support to the writers strike).

The One And Only Thing I Didn’t Understand… was Shiv’s change of heart. They could have kept the company 7 to 6, Ken-doll would have been CEO and she and Romulus would have had their own branches of the empire – that’s basically what it is.

(I’ve had time to think about Shiv’s change of heart, and though it wasn’t uttered, I think she went where the power was. She was livid that Tom was going to take her job as the CEO of the new GoJo or whatever it was going to be called, which caused her to temporarily side with Kendall. But when it came down to it, she’s pregnant and her baby is biologically part of the Roy bloodline, a fact that Romulus made while they were fighting. Kendall’s daughter is adopted and Kendall’s son probably has a different father. There’s hints throughout the series that Kendall is impotent and can’t father a child, and just like the despicable man his is, Roman’s father does not see them as “real.” Shiv also brought up the fact that Ken had killed that waiter — I was desperately waiting for that submerged fact to come up — and finally Romulus, having learned his lesson, calls all three of them “nothings.” “We’re nothing, this is nothing.” Shiv, finally, instead of letting Tom be hand puppeted by the Swede, will be in the background doing the handpuppeting herself. And because he put one of those ridiculous stickers that Connor handed out on Greg’s forehead, Greg is still in the mix too with Tom and Shiv. The three boys [including Connor] are out.

This all depends of course, on whether regulatory approval will be granted, and there’s no guarantee that the horrible Menken will regulate it up because of his xenophobia, and there’s no guarantee that the Wisconsin Courts will call for reissuing the mail in ballots that were destroyed, most likely, by one of the fascists.)

I just didn’t buy the fact that she turned on Kendall and suddenly, as the last vote in the room, decided to change. They gave her some dialogue and she said something like, “You can’t run this business.” (She’s right, btw, but neither can her husband, who ultimately became the CEO and put a sticker on Gregg’s forehead.)

The one thing that Tom said to the Swede is that he could absorb an enormous amount of pain, and I think he was trying to explain that if he won control of the company he was going to fire an enormous number of people, (like Musk Suck’s Twitter. And earlier in the episode Tom had said to Greg something like “Your salary is going to be castrated.” {Not the first time Tom has used the word castrated on Greg.})

But, my heart goes out to the killer Kendall, who was doing drugs in the first season and accidentally killed someone in the mode of Chappaquiddick. At the start of the series, he was trying very hard to overcome his father’s influence and become the heir apparent. At the end of the series, he had lost that battle. His father won. Because his father was an absolute bastard and an abusive piece of shit.

One thing I was curious about is what the deal was that their mother’s husband was trying to offer. It was probably better than anything they could get and I think she said, “I’ve wanted you to get rid of that evil piece of garbage.” And she actually gave them an out. But we didn’t get to hear what it was because all of a sudden, Shiv discovered that her name was XXX’ed out of the press release. Which led to the happiest moment in the series, until the choice Shiv made in the end.

The Murdoch children should take note!

*******

A bit more commentary as a writer: I would not want to write a season 5, even though the whole television world has turned its head to watch this series. It was a great series, almost as good as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. But do you really want to follow Romulus as he keeps calling people fags and threatens to fuck grannies. Do you want to follow “Shiv” (knife) as she prepares for a life with Tom Mushroom. It was kind of fun to see Gregg slap Tom in the bathroom, but their life is for life. And Kendall… I don’t know… I think that’s the one great mystery left. By my calculations he got about at 45 billion from the deal, but as children of extremely wealthy parents, they probably haven’t learned how to make a dollar. And they don’t need to. We can empathize with his failure as he stares south toward Staten Island, but he’ll never have to take that boat — and the show made it clear that he still has a body guard and a driver. Heavy implications of suicide in his future. But fuck them all. They’re all hateful people and Yeah, yeah, yeah, “Imitating the awful acting,” Okay, okay, okay, are you with me, yeah, yeah, yeah.. Let’s go, let’s go. Good riddance.

One thing that will be missed by almost everyone, and it relates the title of the episode: “With eyes wide open.”

The opposite is “With mouths quite shut.”

And that’s what happened. Shiv tried to touch the hand of her husband, who is now the head of Rayco, but she could barely touch his palm, as if he was radioactive. She said nothing.

Romulus went to the bar and started drinking. He said nothing to the bartender and nothing to the others around him. It was as they knew what he had to drink.

And or course Kendoll went to Battery Park and stared at the setting sun. (Hint, the sun doesn’t set there except in the winter.)

None of them beat their horrible, abusive father — all of them victims of how horrible vicious and despicable man who they all wanted to love.

I sincerely hope that these characters find some love. They should look to their older brother from a different mother, who is probably the only one who understands how abusive the patriarch was.

I’m so glad the composer for the Succession opening music and theme music is getting some recognition. I noticed how stunning it was in episode 3, the famous episode where Logan died on a plane. I just rewatched that episode to see when it happened — this majestic sweeping classical strings and I noticed a couple of extra things. Logan says, before he gets on the plane, “Today’s the day.” There’s a slight pause before he says “when we do whatever blah blah blah and fire Syd and kill Gerri and tell all my kids to fuck off.” In retrospect, of course, today’s the day he dies. The last sight of Logan is perhaps an homage to the chilling end of The Godfather, except in reverse. In the Godfather, it is Diane Keaton’s face that the door is slowly closed on. In Succession, the door is closed on Logan and the living people where the camera is, start to work on a statement. All you see of him, before the door shuts, are his feet. There’s no camera in that room.

I tried to pinpoint, without much success, where the kids were the moment Logan had his heart attack in the bathroom of the plane. (Did they ever say what finally done him in?) It could have been at the exact moment that Roman Roy was leaving a pretty foul message for his father, for making him tell Gerri, the grandmother he lusts for, that she was going to be fired for some made up reason. I think he called his father a fucky fucky fuck face. But Tom’s first attempt to reach Shiv came 5 to 10 minutes after that moment so he might have died when they were boarding the boat that’s supposed to take them to the wedding. It’s just hard to know unless the writers had a specific ironic moment in mind. But it also explained why Roman asked, “Did anybody check his cell phone messages?” Because HE thinks he might have killed him with his message. (Doesn’t really know his father that well. Only one of the four kids knows that man and everything he is, and the name of the episode has his name: Connor’s Wedding.)

Logan left the world as shittily as he lived in it. His last acts were to fire Gerri and Syd; to scream at his son Roman for not being on his side; to skip Connor’s wedding with the excuse that they got them a… “what was it,” he asked his lovestruck assistant. She answers, “Napoleon letters to Josephine,” or something like that.

Really Connor had the most honest and interesting reaction to Logan’s death. He says, quite simply, “He never even liked me.” The other three all reacted in the different ways that abused children react. They all professed to love him. (Only, possibly, Roman actually does.) Kendall says (in his dead father’s ear), “I can’t forgive you.”

Anyway, the point where the music soared to the level of a great concert was when the plane with the corpse was landing at Teterboro, the children were driving up in their black Suburbans and the emergency vehicles were gathering around the plane. Anyway, here is the article behind a paywall about the soundtrack of Nicholas Britell.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/arts/television/succession-soundtrack-classical-music.html#commentsContainer

I put that in quotes because it was really a series of conversations he had with Stewart Stern, the screenwriter of “Rebel Without A Cause.” When they were discovered, one of his daughters worked with someone to compile, edit, clarify into something that is a roughly chronological story — though there are, at times, leaps forward. These don’t distract however, and what we get is a pretty good narrative about his life: less centered on his movies but much more on his insecurities.

Some of the things that surprised me was 1) his relentless negativity, 2) a certain bitterness about his beauty, and 3) his hatred of his mother.

That doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. But the overall sense I had was that he was a closed and defensive person, probably stemming from the fact that his mother treated him like an object. She was obsessed with his looks and he was more of an ornament. Eventually, he stopped speaking to her at all, and for the last 15 years of her life had no contact. When she was dying, he visited her a couple of times, but they were short visits.

He also had a son by his first wife who had drug and alcohol problems, and when his son died of an overdose, he says very little about it. He does say that maybe if he had shot himself in the head, Scott would be able to have his own life and stop competing with his famous father.

He claims that it was Joanne Woodward, his second wife and basically, his heart, who made him a sexual person. Prior to her he was not sexual, he said, though he had plenty of sex.

But by the time he got to the salad dressing part of his career (and I would add popcorn and salsa), I was getting a little tired of the negative and unrelenting doubt. He and a friend had mixed up some of their own salad dressings and then started trying to sell them at local shops in Connecticut (I think it was Connecticut). Finally he agreed to put his picture on the labels and of course it took off and became an enormous brand for charity (all proceeds go to charity). But again, he seems to resent the successes he’s had because, he believes, and maybe he’s right, that it all came from his beauty and not talent or ability. I think that’s harsh, because although it’s true that as an actor, you must have a face — even if it’s Abe Vigoda. But that doesn’t negate your talent. His co-star in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Elizabeth Taylor, was an extraordinary beauty, but she was also an extraordinary talent.

Was Paul Newman an extraordinary man? He would say no. That’s the message of his book and the meaning of the title. He would say he got lucky because he was born beautiful.

By the way, he was born in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and that is the suburb of the first home that I remember. He was an Ohio boy. Went to Kenyon College. Organized a panty raid on the girls at Dennison. Enrolled at Ohio University before joining the navy and discovered what everyone in Ohio knows, that you go to Ohio University to party. He was a severe alcoholic but quit hard liquor in favor of a case of beer. Eventually gave it up, probably due to Joanne’s insistence. (He states that she probably would have left him.) He was also Jewish although his mother was not and converted, for some bizarre reason, to Christian Science.

I think this book was meant to be as a companion to the television show or movie called “The Greatest Stars,” by Ethan Hawke. That title might be “The Last Great Stars.” I don’t know. Yes. Doubts. We all have them. Even the greats. I think his greatest work was The Verdict which came relatively late. He was great as Brick in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, but that particular role is extremely hard for actors to play, because he is an enigma. It’s not stated that he is a homosexual but Tennessee Williams often wrote characters with enigmatic sexualities: Blanche Du Bois is a female version of someone with a conflicted sexuality. Maggie in “Cat” is not conflicted about her sexuality but knows that she must have a child by Brick whatever he is.

I went to one of the shows that Joel Edgerton appeared afterward for a Q&A, but it was not a Q&A from the audience, but a series of questions from an obnoxious and loud host of some radio station. Actually, I didn’t resent that at all. Indie movie houses need all the help they can get, and his appearance for this talk gave it a sold out house in the middle of the afternoon.

Paul Schrader is one of those writers who has become “important.” So much so that his movies are called “A Paul Schrader” film.

Taxi Driver was my first introduction to his writing and Martin Scorsese, because my film teacher at the time (and I could probably find her name because most of my teachers were famous in one way or another), said, “Well at least we know they (Scorsese and Schrader) have no problem telling us how they feel.”

Through the entirety of this long and boring movie, I kept thinking about Travis Bickel and other Schrader men who are probably what this one is: white supremacists that don’t have a dime and can’t make a buck. Where this anger comes from is a mystery to me. But this is why I felt privileged to hear Joel Edgerton talk. He said, among other things, that his character had to have learned his racism at a young age: it was given to him as a kind of evil gift. He said he was constantly fascinated by the references to racism, but that it was never talked about. And he said that Paul Shrader’s way of directing is to ask his actors not to use their “tricks.” He’s almost Hitchcockian in that way. Hitchcock loathed actors and he loathed what they had been taught to do: show emotion in the Stella Adler school — or basically Stanislavsky. Edgerton said that he had been directed to not reveal emotion on his face, as well as the other actors (Sigourney Weaver and Quintilla someone.)

And therein lies the strangest mystery of this movie: how did this guy, with a white supremacist background, a member of a group like the Proud Boys, (although this group seems a little more serious than the Proud Boys, who seem to like parades more than actual engagement) — how did this guy go from that reprehensible character to a man in love with a young black woman, with a kind of intermediary in the form of the racist character played by Sigourney Weaver.

She is a woman lost in the illusion of plantation life and slave holding life. And apparently, at some point, and FBI agent comes to her and asks her to “hide” in her dilapidated Louisiana plantation as the master gardener. She is still a slave holder, and Schrader uses the scenery to make it clear. He lives in a shack and she lives in a mansion across the road. She has servants. He is a sexual servant. But her house is also devoid of decoration — there’s almost no art or color. There is one maid and I don’t remember the food but it wasn’t lavish. Pointedly, when the Sigourney Weaver character tells him to take her up to her bedroom and make love to her, she says “Take off your clothes,” first, because she wants to stare at his racist tattoos. Later, when he reveals himself to the black girl he’s fallen in love with, she demands that they can continue to be together, but that he must remove them.

Edgerton said that he thinks the reason he kept the tattoos was to remind himself of his past. But he had nothing to say about what caused that change. And that’s where I finally have trouble with the movie and probably many of Schrader’s movies. If we don’t get a chance to understand what’s driving these characters — if they don’t reveal themselves to us with, basically, a way of expressing their innerness — why are we watching them? Yes: action is character. What a person does tells you everything you need to know about their character: what kind of person they are. But sometimes that inwardness can be very rewarding and even surprising, if it’s revealed.

I learned, also, that his named is Edge-r-ton. Not Ed-Ger-ton as I had previously thought.

The IMDB page

That Guardian quote is a pretty exact description of this pretty amazing movie. The story is essentially about two friends that live in the alps north of Turin. They meet, initially, because the father of one, Pietro, wants to get away from the pollution of the city, so they buy a house in a small town in which Bruno, a farmer’s son, is the only child.

Pietro’s father and mother make a somewhat ham handed attempt to bring Bruno back to Turin to get an education, stating that Pietro’s friend needs a fair chance at having a life. This makes Bruno’s absent father angry, and instead he takes Bruno away and makes him become a construction worker in Turin. Their friendship is over and they grow up to be young teenagers or perhaps they are in their early twenties, when they happen to see each other at the same cafe. They barely acknowledge each other — just a not and a kind of wave. And again, a period of time passes before they reunite because Pietro’s father dies and leaves him a dilapidated stone house in the same area as the town where they have their getaway apartment. Bruno, who now lives back where he started, suggests that they rebuild this stone house, and that’s when Pietro discovers that his father had a friendship with Bruno, and that they often spent time together: far more time than Pietro ever spent with him. His father liked Bruno better, and basically took him as a son. Pietro’s girlfriend also seems to like Bruno better, and eventually becomes his wife and the mother of his children.

I don’t remember when, exactly, Pietro decided to move to Nepal, but he finds a wife there, and I was struck by the fact that both friends have found their homes high in the mountains. Pietro, on one of his visits to his stone house, tells his former girlfriend and Bruno about the fact that they can’t cremate people in Nepal because of the lack of wood, so they have sky burials. This is where they place the body high on a stone peak and let the elements take the body. Then, he claims, they go up to retrieve the bones, grind them into a powder and do something I can’t remember. I looked this up and it’s only true of some Buddhists.

Anyway, I won’t belabor the story because it’s a quiet one and beautifully sad. What struck me so acutely is that friendship between men is rarely spoken about or depicted. It either becomes Brokeback Mountain, which is an entirely different friendship, or it’s kind of jokey and palsy like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Rarely is a regular friendship between two straight guys handed to us with great sensitivity and reality. The reality is that straight guys don’t talk very much about their feelings and especially with each other. They often find that they can only talk about deep thoughts or feelings to their wives. And these guys are not really very different, but the unspoken feelings between them are almost palpable. Pietro doesn’t voice his hurt about his father sort of adopting Bruno, but you feel it. Likewise when Bruno takes his girlfriend, or rather, she moves away from Pietro and toward Bruno, you understand perfectly why Pietro had to go find a life in Nepal, without him saying anything at all. I think that’s where this airy feeling comes from.

Anyway this was a wonderful movie.