Monday, October 20, 2003

Mars Needs Women " Mars Needs Women” announces the title of the DVD we’ve rented. Our ceiling fan is again out-performing most air conditioners as July melts on. In a week, we’ll start frequenting airports again, to promote “American Splendor.” For now, no one wants to travel much further than the kitchen refrigerator, which is stocked with frozen juice bars. I chew the sticks when I’m finished. Danielle and Harvey don’t. The angry red planet first tries to vacuum up a few well-dressed women from somewhere in North America, but Martian technology fails. We see some jerky stop-action, but the ladies seem to be evaporating en route. This may be because the Mars men are led by Tommy Kirk. I remember him tap dancing with Annette Funicello in some Disney flick. His are some low tech aliens who arrive in scuba suits and elf boots, carrying Ray-o-Vac flashlights. Tommy’s Martians will fail in their attempt to bring back fertile wombs for their dying world. Not even the sexy space geneticist and DNA expert who falls in love with Tommy during his 24 hours on Earth will make it into the Mars bound saucer as it flees an angry U.S. general and his relentless team of defending forces. I’m not sure we’ll fare much better when we make our first appearance at the San Diego Comic Con. Most comics fans crave genre fiction, action adventure. No one in our movie wears spandex and actor Paul Giamatti, while 25 years younger than Harvey, who he plays, is always the first to point out that he’s less muscle bound than my hero. The real reason we’re going is the Hobbit hook-up. If she’s lucky, Danielle will get to meet some people her own short size. 12:17:42 PM

Monday, September 29, 2003

Dancing The Red Sea parted during last night’s total eclipse, as the intergalactic sentinels, who have been studying our planet, finally made it to the United Nations and announced that they were taking us in hand and turning all our weapons of mass destruction into solar powered food synthesizers. That’s the sort of miracle it takes to get Harvey up and out to a concert or club and, Lo! The three of us went dancing last night. Harvey loves music, lives music, plays music and reviews CDs nearly every single day. That sort of super saturation isn’t what keeps him away from live performances. He’s got allergies and asthma that rule out closed in, smoky venues. Even though he’s retired from the VA, he’s still on working stiff hours: in bed at 9:00 and up around 5 AM. He doesn’t drink, hates drunks. Not exactly pub-crawling material. Harvey likes an Austin based band, Brave Combo (URL here) and stays in touch with bandleader Carl Finch. The last time BC played Cleveland, we might have made it out the door if Harvey had not been flattened by a second go ‘round with lymphoma. He’s been doing OK lately. And the Beachland Ballroom (URL here) is a comfortable, all ages place run by a friend, Cindy Barber. It used to be a Croatian dance hall. Murals of musicians and dancers in ethnic dress still grace the wall. We could bring Danielle. I remember the three of us dancing with the crowd at an outdoor zydeco concert in our neighborhood park about five years ago. I specifically remember Danielle doubled over with laughter at the sight of her recently acquired guardians in motion because we looked, to her, “like a parakeet on her perch and a gasping fish out of water.” Harvey is not an easy partner to follow. If he ever took lessons, it was from the Zero Mostel school of crazy old Jewish guys who shut their eyes and flail. We didn’t do so badly last night. Harvey stayed out until 1 AM. Danielle seems to have accepted our wobbling ways or else we’ve improved. Her ruling, expressed with the merest tinge of adolescent exasperation, was “You guys did OK. If you were actually embarrassing me, I would have told you at the time. And left you.” 10:53:49 AM

Monday, September 22, 2003

Luggage We’re going on the road for the next two weeks. I’m a fast, efficient packer. Harvey’s anxious and obsessive. We used to go to bed, packed and ready to go. In the middle of the night I would wake up and find that Harvey had unpacked everything and spread it all over the floor. He had to make sure something or other was really included in one of the bags. The rustling and grumping noises that got me up were the sounds of him failing to fit everything back together, into the suitcases. He’s more relaxed these days, or so I thought. He panicked at the LAX luggage carousel on our last trip. The suitcase he tried to swing up and off the rolling belt wouldn’t budge. Neither would Harvey, who held it in a half tackle, pulled along with his legs hanging off. As he rode around, half lying on the bag, he began to mow down bystanders with his feet. Women shrieked, fearing their children were in danger. (The kids were bent over double, laughing.) “How rude!” “So dangerous!” “Who IS that man?” It took a while for me to break through the melee and grab his belt. He was riding the wrong generic black bag with wheels. Among Danielle’s toys I found 6 identical baby dolls dressed in pink pajamas and Christmas bows, stamped with some fast food logo. They once filled out a plastic bag of Sailor Moon characters found at a yard sale. I’ve put a noose around each of the idiot children’s neck and am tying them to our suitcases. Will they help Harvey identify our bags as we touch down in San Francisco? Stay tuned. Or come on down to the airport and watch the Olympics. 10:49:24 AM

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Mom and Dad finally saw “American Splendor.” Fine Line’s Jennifer Stott helped me set that up as a birthday surprise. I flew in with Danielle and stayed at my brother’s house. The next morning they came over, unsuspecting. We had brunch then drove to a nearby cinema, recruited by FL for a screening. A few old friends met us in the lobby. I’d been given the name of the theater manager as a contact and I was nervous. I’d gone to a nearby college with someone who had the same unusual name and remembered he had movie and theater aspirations. How awful if he turned out to be the same guy, still trapped in Hometown, USA. I’d looked him up on the Internet and found a photo of a stodgy Shriner and real estate agent. That seemed even worse. I was dealing with some aspect of “The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” in which my spouse finds multiple “Harvey Pekars” listed in his new phone book. My old schoolmate must have escaped, as I did. The theater manager was too young. The college friends who joined my family were too old. When did their hair thin or turn gray? And why, at the end of the film, were their eyes teared over? Of all people, they should have known how the story ends. The thing that my pals have in common with Harvey is the way everyone’s life is turning out. One guy is a two-time survivor of cancer, like Harvey. Another left a hot rock band that draws large crowds even today because celebrity spooked him. He wanted to live a more ordinary life, have a family. I get the feeling there comes a time in men’s middle years when they have to weigh potential fulfilled and ambitions realized against how a life’s been lived. Not everything turned out the way we planned, at 21, but the guys, like Harvey, have worked hard, worked creatively and honorably and found families to love them. My own family digs the movie more than I would have guessed. I expected wisecracks, complaints and criticism, especially since they’ve been peeking at www.americansplendormovie.com and commenting on “that awful wig and big glasses,” that Hope wears as Joyce. Mom’s forgotten that I really did have long, stringy hair and huge lenses, but she also thinks Hope was right on point when it came to recreating gesture, mood and inner tension. This I’ll be happy to tell Ms. Davis when we meet again, probably at the LA or New York preview. (American Splendor opens August 15th!) 10:22:45 AM

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

Our Danielle has just finished her first week of film making classes. Her instructor is cool, she says, with a good sense of humor and big, stumbly feet. I checked him out. His name is Robert Banks and he’s local, with some awards and festivals to his credit. Other than hearing he’s a good teacher, I know less about him than he seems to know about us. We checked him out at http://www.opensewer.com/banks/main.htm. Danielle got nervous because she found his work “intense,” though creative. She came home the first day feeling just a bit uneasy. He recognized her and then quipped something about his not making the cut when Good Machine rolled through Cleveland, casting and hiring for “American Splendor.” She’s afraid he might want revenge. I suggested she give him an AS t-shirt. (Fine Line sent us a bunch that they’ve printed up for promos.) No. “Giving a t-shirt is an ADULT thing to do. Kids don’t give clothes to teachers.” I take a look at the first storyboard she has created, to propose a first 2-minute film as her class project. I’m knocked out. Instead of an epic, she’s going for something minimal, a small idea that fits, based on a slight observation. She has concerns about shot and angle, not making it “too big,” or “too tall.” Clearly, she has been paying attention to Gus Van Sant’s work, whose latest, “Elephant,” reminded me so much of Ozu. Mr. Banks’ stuff, however, reminds me of experimental filmmakers like Len Lye or Norman McLaren— with social consciousness. I don’t think he’s quite persuaded Danielle to start scratching on emulsion or dyeing film stock, yet. “He’s like, more into abstract and artistic,” explains Danielle when I ask her how her presentation went. “And he said there wasn’t very much going on in my storyboard.” This lifts Harvey’s ears. He’s been called, among other things, an “inaction hero.” Critics want to know where “the story” is in much of his work. We’ve picked Danielle up after class and are driving home for dinner. Danielle notices and leans over to reassure him. “I told him a story didn’t have to be BIG to be a good story. You don’t have to have a whole lot happening to be interesting, if you shoot the film the right way.” Harvey cracks a rare half smile. It’s my turn to be reassured. “My teacher and I agreed to disagree because we’re both right.” She’ll be doing her movie, her way. I want to meet this guy. 9:26:37 AM

Friday, June 06, 2003

We received all kinds of wardrobe advice from people before going to Cannes. To walk the red carpet, and there actually was one, I could not get away with pants. And my shoes had to be expensive: nothing from Payless. It’s only recently that we’ve started shopping at anything more haute than charity thrift stores. (“Gently worn” and resale stores seemed too elegant.) Once Danielle came to live with us, we moved up to places like Value City so she could wear the kind of jeans and sneakers that allowed her to blend in with the “Lord of the Flies” crowd at school. At first, the choices were a little overwhelming. When you go to a thrift store to buy a navy blue sweater you look until you find one in your size with no visible stains or moth holes. That’s your sweater. Eventually, though, I got used to the racks and the rows. I borrowed some very expensive, never worn shoes from a friend who had gone to an estate sale. The original $295 receipt was still in the box and the toes were stuffed with tissue paper. Pretty classy, except no one warned me that lady shoes, unlike my rubber soled sandals and sneakers, were built to glide. Make that slide. When I actually hit the red tread, I felt like I was learning to skate. Still, people saw what they wanted to see. Shari Springer Berman pointed out an article that was written about us by a reporter who interviewed us one breezy day by the Mediterranean. It was solemnly reported that Harvey was somehow uncouth and I was wearing a plebian green hooded sweatshirt. This is because I come from Cleveland. Joanna Connors, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, would have seen a sea foam colored poplin windbreaker, tailored by London Fog and bought at 40% off from Kaufman’s. And it matched my skirt, blouse and socks 9:22:42 AM