The Video Room has moved to a location less than one hundred paces from home.

We have had the same seats at MTC’s Stage I for as long as I can remember. They’re in the back and on the side-aisle, and I love them, because there is nothing in front of my seat and I can stretch out my legs. I’ve become so accustomed to the perspective from this perch that, on the rare night when we have to exchange our subscription tickets, I find it disconcerting to watch the stage from anywhere else. There is also the secret advantage of being right on top of the rear exit. I have never been in a theatre that is better at making you forget that you’re in a basement.

The other night, I saw a play by Adam Bock for the first time. And I saw Jayne Houdyshell for the first time. I look forward to more of both. 

¶ The Receptionist.

The new New Museum – a chimerical presence at the end of Prince Street.

Despite an indifferent review in the Times, I went back to the Angelika this week for Paul Schrader’s The Walker. What did I find when I got there? A shuttered box office. Along with two other hardy souls, I waited in the cold for the place to open, unsure that it would. If I hadn’t had plenty of strange and funky experiences at other movie houses, I’d begin to wonder if the Angelika was the place to catch the first show of the day. The escalator hadn’t been turned on. Once again, mistakes about choice of lens were made in the projection booth. For a solid four minutes of one of the film’s most suspenseful moments, the picture was split across the middle, so that Kristin Scott Thomas’s uncertain smile floated above her eyes. I wish that that sort of thing were more unusual than it is.

The cloud cover must have been very thick, because it didn’t seem to be quite daylight. The narrow streets of SoHo and NoLIta were off-puttingly umbrous; I felt that I was in a not-quite-right dream. The subways, in contrast, were their jolly regular selves. On the way down, I “walked” my way to the front of the train, advancing a car at every station except Grand Central until, at 33rd Street, I reached the first car. This is a game that I play every week, to the extent that a train is at the station when I swing through the turnstiles.* For much of the trip back uptown, I was entertained by two German men who were talking about something that I never caught the gist of. Both ways, I read Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory, which has finally grabbed me hard enough that I’m willing to carry a heavy book around. (On the plus side, it’s an ideal luncheon companion, because its pages lay flat when it’s open.)

¶ The Walker.

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* The exits at the downtown Bleecker Street station are the front and the rear of the platform. Leaving by the front, one traverses a long concourse over the IND tracks and climbs out at the corner of Broadway and Houston, only a block away from the Angelika.

Although Broadway is wracked by a stagehands’ strike at the moment, not every theatre is dark. The subscription companies, such as Manhattan Theatre Club and Roundabout, are going on with their shows. Thanks to a very distracted summer, Kathleen and I hold no (0) tickets to upcoming Broadway shows at the moment, so we’re sitting pretty, especially given our MTC subscription, without which we wouldn’t be crossing Times Square in the blaze of nightlight anytime soon.

¶ Mauritius, at MTC’s Biltmore Theatre.

Kathleen was flying home from Washington, and, when she landed, we were going to order a tasty but unwholesome dinner from Jackson Hole. Dawdling at the computer, I conceived a desire to watch Six Degrees of Separation while we munched. In 1990, we were too busy with our still-new country house to catch John Guare’s play at Lincoln Center, so we missed a chance to see Stockard Channing on stage (we did see her, though, in revivals of The Lion in Winter and The Little Foxes). She is very much the star of the movie as well.

What I missed in Fred Schepisi’s film adaption, which I’ve seen at least eight or nine times – and I’m being very conservative here – is a location shot early in the film. Actually, it’s an intermittent series of many shots, taken from different angles. The film opens in the Fifth Avenue apartment of an art dealer, but long before that scene has been completely played out, the two principals, Ouisa and Flan, are seen summarizing it in narrative parallel to a huddle of guests at a wedding reception. We see a lot of this crowd and this setting, but only in short takes. That may be why I didn’t recognize the location until this evening. Although – why this evening?

What caught my eye first were the octagonal pillars. Pillars with eight sides instead of the usual flutes are not the most common architectural feature in the world, and these octagonal pillars were very familiar octagonal pillars. Come to think of it, so were the demilune-topped French doors on a far wall, overlooking what I already knew to be a golf course. For this scene was shot in front of the fireplace (not shown) in the ballroom of Siwanoy Country Club in Bronxville. I’d say that I grew up at Siwanoy, but that might lead you to think that I can play golf, and I can’t play golf. Playing golf is my idea of Dante’s Inferno, albeit an idea with no supporting experience. Although I do remember sitting just about where Donald Sutherland and Stockard Channing were seated, watching, all by myself, and God knows why, a special black-and-white program (this was long before videotapes) about South Africa’s Gary Player. I was bored to death, but I was giving Maturity a chance.

When I go out for a special evening, I put on the watch that the Club presented to my father when he finished his year-long term as president, in 1966. Kathleen has had Tiffany clean it, and replace the leather strap, so all I have to do is set it and wind it.

When my grandfather was president, during the War – this was my mother’s father, not the Judge – they tell me that he introduced Brunch. I have never submitted this tale to the slightest attempt at verification. I’m saving a few things for my real old age.

What follows (at Portico) is a lightly edited (and corrected) letter to a correspondent and friend who recommended that I rent and watch The Lookout, a picture that I don’t even recall seeing advertized. Written and directed by Scott Frank, it stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Matthew Goode, Isla Fisher, and Jeff Daniels. Very roughly, it’s about the difficulties that Mr Gordon-Levitt’s character has in reconstructing his life after sustaining a head injury in an automobile crash for which he was irresponsibly responsible, Two of his friends were killed, another also severely wounded. The “problem” aspects of the plot, predictably, yield a certain “made for TV” quality that is not entirely overcome until the second half of the film.

We watched the movie on Saturday night. The first thing that I wanted to do on Sunday morning was to write a report to my friend, telling her no less about the circumstances in which I saw the video than about the kind of critical response that might show up in one of my “Friday Movies” pieces. I see the movies covered in “Friday movies” in theatres, and if nothing else my letter backs up my insistence that I can respond to a film far more intensely on the small screen at home than on the big screen in public. I don’t seem to meld with audiences in the dark; the everyday detachment that gets me from my flat to the movie house follows me into the auditorium. At home, I am far more defenselessly at the mercy of what I’m watching.

The following rough synopsis ought to make my letter at least fairly comprehensible: a creep called Gary Spargo (Mr Goode) uses his girlfriend, Luvlee (Ms Fisher), as an enticement to engage Chris (Mr Gordon-Levitt) as a lookout in a robbery that Gary has planned for a bank where Chris works as a night janitor (despite his upper-middle class background), and where Mr Tuttle is the manager who won’t give Chris a chance to step up to teller. That Gary’s plans will miscarry is never in the slightest doubt, especially once we get to know a cop (Sergio di Zio) who likes to stop by the bank every night to share a box of doughnuts with Chris. Viewers familiar with Woody Allen’s Match Point may have no trouble recognizing Mr Goode’s face, but nothing else about him will be remotely familiar. Bone, Gary’s shooter, is played by a nasty-looking Greg Dunham. Jeff Daniels plays Lewis, a blind man with whom the local social workers have hooked Chris up with as a flatmate.

¶ About The Lookout.

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So, I was wrong about Don Draper’s deep, dark secret. It’s not that he’s Jewish. (I tip my hat to Max.) But what, exactly, is it? What did Dick Whitman do in Korea? All right, he switched dog tags with his lieutenant officer, the real Don Draper. That’s certainly some kind of infraction. But it’s not desertion. Whatever his name, he still deserved the Purple Heart – I think. It was unclear: did the dropped cigarette lighter cause the explosion, or was it enemy gunfire? Next week: the season finale, when all is sure to be made even murkier still.

I’m not talking about the water-cooler full of crème-de-menthe when I say that the election-night party at Sterling, Cooper must have been an eye-opener for our younger demographic, to whom it may never have occurred before that anybody actually voted for Dick Nixon in 1960, much less wanted him to be President. Didn’t everyone know that Camelot was rising in the mists?

(I remember my father’s boasting that he was the only man in Bronxville who voted for Kennedy. He would continue this boast by insisting that his vote had nothing to do with shared Irish Catholicism, and certainly not with the fact that the Kennedys had lived in Bronxville, too, for a while. No, my father voted for a natural-gas-pipelines-friendly plank that LBJ brought to the party. Or so he said. My mother’s enthusiasm was more genuine. I don’t think she knew or cared a thing about Jack, but from day one she self-mockingly worshiped “Zhock-a-leen.” Despite their equestrienne girlhoods, my mother and the First Lady shared a powerful streak of American aspiration.)

Kathleen says that that Mad Men is by the far the most interesting television program that she has ever seen, “aside from Masterpiece Theatre and such.” And that’s the beauty part. Finally, American television is cranking out top-drawer shows the likes of which we’ve been importing from Britain since the repeal of the Stamp Act.

What’s your favorite comedy? What a question! The Palm Beach Story, though, stands firmly within the clutch of ten or so films that answer that question at any given time. Preston Sturges does things that nobody else ever thought of trying. Surely there has never been anything as grossly transgressive as the behavior of the Ale & Quail Club members in their bar car. And the way Geraldine keeps stepping on Hackensacker’s spectacles! Lots of “ouch” factor there. Just the same, there has never been a more seductive surrender scene than the one that Claudette Colbert and Joel McCrae deliver at the end.

Our favorite line:

“Don’t you think garnets are a little lifeless?”

Our second favorite line:

“You’re thinking of an adventurer, dear. An adventuress never goes on anything under three hundred feet – with a crew of eighty.” 

¶ The Palm Beach Story.

Being thick as a post, I had to see the show twice before I got it. Why was Don Draper so determined not to be recognized as someone called Dick, by his own half-brother Adam? Had he committed some terrible crime? I was thinking à la 2007. Watching the show a second time – bless you, AMC, for re-running these fascinating episodes the moment they’re over – I got it. What’s Don Draper’s horrible secret, the one that inspires him to pay his half-brother 1960$5000 cash American to make him “go away”?

It’s in the names. The half-brother is Adam. The step-mother is Abigail. The uncle is Max/Mac. These are the people that Dick, a/k/a “Don Draper,” walked away from over ten years ago, when Adam was an eight year-old boy. Adam and Abigail are popular names today, and they were popular with English (but only English) protestants into the beginning of the Nineteenth Century. In Mid-Century USA, however, they were common only to –

Jews.

Don Draper is Jewish. That’s why nothing about his past is on display. That’s why he can’t have Seth as a half-brother. Is Matthew Wiener going to take the Sopranos formula and use it to etch the far subtler drama of bourgeois American anti-Semitism?

Jon Hamm’s most amazing face – and he turned in many during this episode – is in response to Adam’s pathetic question, “Did you ever miss me?” Don is paralyzed by the horror of having driven such “missing” from his mind with an iron discipline, until the Hallmark answer, “Of course I did,” presents itself to his adman’s brain. Don usually knows what he’s supposed to say right away. The surprise of Adam, a brother whom one ends up (after the third meeting, anyway) thinking that he loved, slows him down.

I may, of course, be wrong as Worcester about all of this. But when I shared my theory with Kathleen, she jumped on it. I’m suddenly wishing that I knew a few chat rooms.

It feels like a thousand years since I’ve been to the theatre. Last August, Kathleen and I went to the theatre every Friday night, and what fun we had! We meant to do the same this year, but circumstances have worked against it. There’s only one play on Broadway that I’m keen to see, Old Acquaintance. A production of Pygmalion, with Clare Danes and the amazing Jefferson Mays is coming up – must order tickets.

Based on a Totally True Story is a bittersweet comedy about Hollywood’s ability to rip off the heads of creative people and then to sew them on backwards. It made a permanent Kristine Nielsen fan out of me. 

¶ Audience>MTC Diary>Based on a Totally True Story.