Clubs, By Someone Who Knows Nothing About Clubs

There are two kinds of people: people who seriously say that there are two kinds of people, and those like me, who only say it when we are joking. So imagine my surprise when it occurred to me just now that there ARE two kinds of people: those who don't go to clubs, and those who talk about going to clubs as if it were a necessary part of life.

I don't think I've EVER been to a club. Surely I would have remembered. I remember countless times I've walked past long lines of people hoping to get into a club, feeling sorry for them because I assumed it couldn't be good enough to justify going to so much trouble. Although how would I know, right? Although I've never stood in those lines and never gotten past those bouncers, I've known enough people who have to know they'd feel sorry for me if they knew I'd never been. And some would probably have a very difficult time believing I don't envy them.

I've seen countless fictional depictions of clubs in TV shows and movies, with the pretty young women dancing, the expensively-dressed young men at the bar drinking, and the international crime lords at the dimly-lit large round tables in back or up a flight a stairs. 

I've been in business establishments, called bars or discos, where there was drinking and dancing, but they didn't have those long lines of people trying to get past those huge bouncers, so I don't think you call them clubs. If you do, then I was wrong, and yeah, I've been in clubs. Cause I'm a dancin' machine.

I loved the TV series "Alias,"

but that part where 80% or so of the world's most evil supercriminals seemed to have their offices in clubs, either in the back or up a flight of stairs -- that part never seemed the least bit realistic to me, but how would I know, I've never been there.

Of course, there are at least two kinds of clubs: the dancing, yuppie, crimelord, bouncer type we've been discussing, and then the sort which used to be called gentlemen's clubs, and no, I don't mean strip clubs, which are often these days called "gentlemen's club's," making a running total of at least three kinds of clubs -- I mean the kind of club where, a century ago, only men, and almost only wealthy WASP's, would go and drink, but very quietly, and also smoked cigars and secretly ran the country, and they were all sitting in big leather armchairs. For a description of what "gentlemen's club" used to mean before it meant "strip club" -- and what it may still mean, except that they would have to have another name for it now, and they may be a bit more ethnically- and gender-inclusive these days -- see pp 18-19 of G William Donhoff's Who Rules America, 1st edition, 1967. Are many of these old type of clubs really still men-only? Really, it's so very hard for me to care. I'm certain that Jordan Peterson cares enough for himself and me and many other people, and would never begin to believe, if he knew me, that I don't envy him.

Perhaps the two types of clubs have much more in common than I would have thought at first. Besides the huge obvious differences in decibel levels and aerobic calorie-burning, they both are defined by exclusivity. The one type keeps people out with huge bouncers, the other kept them out with social and ethnic and gender prejudice.

And I'm sure lots of clubbers of both types would never believe how little they impress me. They'd be convinced I just can't bear to admit how much I envy them. Hmm. What do you think?

Dream Log: Spy Family

I dreamed that my immediate family were all still alive, and were working as spies together. Not real spies: the silly sort of spies you see in James Bond movies, or in "Alias," starring Jennifer Garner.

(Yep, those were all quite sensible disguises for a spy who needed to blend in and be unmemorable, uh-huh, sure.)

We were all about the ages we were in 1980, but in better shape. My Mom and Dad were in their 40's, and they looked good. Dad was balding and wore black-rimmed glasses, but he looked Patrick-Stewart-circa-1990-level good. He looked like he still ran really fast after balls on the tennis court. Muscles bulged out everywhere from under his tuxedos. Melodie, my older sister, ran communications behind the scenes:

Ty, my younger brother, who in real life is very alert and successful, in this dream was always spacing out. And since we were an absurd movie-style spy family, that meant I always had to watch him and keep him out of harm's way.

As the dream started, Ty and I were following Dad as he ran into a bank in a strip mall in the US, then through a door in the back of the lobby, then down some halls until we got to where the somewhat-unfriendly other spies were. Ty sat down on a sofa and spaced out, and I chased off everybody who tried to mess with him, while Dad talked to the bad guys. Dad was wearing a spiffy checked business suit, and what Ty and I wore -- didn't matter much. There was a lot macho tough talk, and there were a lot of threats made which were meant to be scary.

Then suddenly we were not in the US, but in a luxury hotel in Europe somewhere near the Alps. Mom was wearing a formal dress, Dad and Ty and I all were in tuxes, and Melodie was back at communications ops at HG in a T-shirt and jeans.

It's my feeling that the clothes are much more important in James Bond movies than most people realize. In "Alias," of course, they dropped all pretense and went all-out with the clothes and hair. And it was glorious.

Mom and Dad got into a twin-propeller passenger plane that looked to have a couple dozen seats or so. Unless the seats were extra-large and luxurious. I took off the tux jacket, put on a bomber jacket and goggles, and rode outside, on one of the plane's wings. I know the hotel was near the alps, because soon after take-off we were over the Alps. I was on the wing for a surprise attack, because the bad guys inside the plane thought that only Mom and Dad were there.

I don't know where Ty was at this point. I got inside the plane in time to see Mom kicking some guys expertly with her high heels, and then there was no more fighting to be done. "Save some bad guys for me next time, okay, Mom?" I joked, and then all three of us got into skydiving gear and jumped out of the plane.

A Hummer met us on the mountainside where we landed, and that's where Ty had been: he was driving.

And it turned out that I had been wrong about Ty being spacy; rather, the whole time he had been concentrating on becoming the the world's greatest spy driver, motorcycle rider and pilot of both planes and boats. Now that he could reveal his true identity as world's great driver etc, his entire personality was different. He was sharp as a tack, and made no more effort to conceal it.

I was about to ask him why he had needed to keep any of this secret from us, his family, when we got to the entrance to the bad guys' lair underneath the Alps, and there was no time to talk: all four of us grabbed our submachine guns and ran top-speed to our firing positions.

Then the mountain turned into a monster and the whole dream completely changed from a silly entertaining spy movie into something very scary, and I woke up in a cold sweat. It's the closest I've had to an actual nightmare in a long time.

Dream Log: HER Again

Last night, for the third time in a little over a week, I dreamed about a woman I knew thirty years ago. In the first of these three dreams, she was an actress on Broadway. In the second dream she was a small-town Midwestern civil servant. It last night's dream she was a secret agent like the ones in campy shows like the Jame Bond movies, or "Alias," the TV series starring Jennifer Garner which ran on ABC from 2001 to 2006. She resembled Sidney Bristow, the character played by Garner on the show, in many ways, but not in the many elaborate disguises Bristow wore. Instead she mostly wore black jackets and black pants, a laborer's clothes. Like Sydney Bristow, she was able to beat up just about anybody in the world, if necessary. However, she lacked Bristow's nightmarish background and constant smoldering anger. Unlike Bristow, she rarely came to blows with anyone.

The secret agent and I were in our 20's. At the same time, she and I were both our actual selves, at our actual ages, in our late 50's. And at the same time, she and I were both figures in paintings.

From the inside of my home, I have some close-up views of some large old elm trees. Often, sunlight hits the nearer leaves of these elms in such a way as to give them a silvery appearance -- especially if I'm half-awake, coming out of a nap. The paintings in my dream, pictures of the woman I used to know and myself, had silvery highlights similar to these trees, and similar to some of the paintings of Gustav Klimt:

I had a date with the secret agent. Her house, which she shared with some co-workers, had yellow borders painted on the windows and the front staircase. Yellow delivery vans were driving by on the street nearby.

I had driven there in a Mercedes-Benz. She asked if I wanted to go to the back seat of my car. The car opened up in back and a large carpet rolled out onto the ground. After we had been on the blanket for a while, a large group of her secret-agent co-workers had surrounded us. They followed us silently as we walked to a dock which was otherwise deserted. They stood around watching us expectantly. I wasn't sure exactly why they were there. I told her I would be more comfortable if they left. She shouted, "Danger zone!" and they all vanished.

We stood on the dock and held each other for a little while, and then I woke up.

Old Smelly Geezers Hooking Up With Sweet Young Things In Hollywood Movies

I'm hardly the first to complain that Hollywood has depicted a lot of nauseating relationships between old men and young women. Perhaps the most notorious such depiction involves Gary Cooper (b 1901) and Audrey Hepburn (b 1929) in Love in the Afternoon, released in 1957. I'm surprised that Cooper was only 28 years older than Hepburn. In the movie, he doesn't merely look old enough to be her father, he looks old enough to be her grandfather. Cooper was in his mid-50's when Love in the Afternoon was shot, but he could easily pass for a man in his 60's, and while Hepburn was in her mid-20's, her character in the film doesn't really look, or behave, as if she is full-grown.

A more recent example is Draft Day (2014), with Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner. With a Costner looking old and a Garner looking young. I channel-surfed by this one a few times, and gathered during my brief stops that Costner was an NFL team owner whom everybody thinks is going to get completely creamed and outplayed in the upcoming draft by the mean old other NFL team owners. Frank Langella, for example, doesn't actually have fangs in this movie, but brimstone does seem to be smoking whenever he makes his ominous appearances onscreen, grinning sadistically at the thought of how he and the owner team owners are going to rip decent old-fashioned American Kevin Costner (think 1950's James Stewart) to shreds in the draft. Maybe it's not actually brimstone smoke, but things like steam from the vents on NYC streets, and ominous lighting and so forth. And I haven't watched this entire movie, and the parts I did watch I didn't watch carefully. So maybe Langella's character actually does have fangs, and a long red tail and cloven hooves.

Anyway -- as I channel-surfed, I could stand up to about 30 seconds at a time of this Ivan Reitman masterpiece, and I gathered that Garner plays a young woman who works in decent, all-American Costner's office, and who seems to have a personal relationship with Costner apart from work. I thought, maybe she's his daughter, working at Dad's place. But no -- ewwww, ewwww, she's the female romantic lead!

I haven't been able to stand a second of it since I figured out that much.

I was surprised to find out that Gary Cooper was only 28 years older than Audrey Hepburn, and I was very surprised to learn that Costner is only 17 years older than Garner (born in 1955 and 1972, respectively). In Draft Day, Costner, lean and worn, more than a bit thin-limbed and stooped and leathery, looks much more than 17 years older than Garner. His character looks old enough to be her character's father if he wasn't particularly young to have had a kid at that time.

I'm really surprised that Jennifer Garner is 43 years old. I was thinking 34 or 35, I was thinking that she had been 20 or 21 when "Alias" started airing. I was also under the impression that she had done every single one of her stunts herself, at least until she got pregnant in the final season, but apparently I was misinformed about that as well. This is truly crushing for me. I thought every second of all of that ass-kicking sexiness in "Alias" was Jennifer. Sweet, sweet 20-to-25-year-old Jennifer.

*sigh*

And this brings us to The Intern, a film starring Anne Hathaway and Robert De Niro which was released yesterday, which I haven't seen, a summary of whose plot I have yet to find. All I've seen are some trailers. And sometimes it's a mistake to judge what a film is about by the trailers. Sometimes the trailers are extremely misleading. But the trailers for The Intern give the strong impression that the character played by Hathaway (born in 1982 and could pass for younger) is almost uncontrollably horny for the character played by De Niro (born in 1943 and looks it). It's no stretch at all to say that De Niro's character looks like Hathaway's character's grandfather.

But I haven't seen the movie. Is this one going to go into the Ewwww! Hall of Fame alongside Love in the Afternoon and Draft Day (and let's not forget the notorious Entrapment, starring that adorable couple Sean Connery and Catharine Zeta-Jones, 39 years apart in age, where Zeta-jones' behavior onscreen and off made her name into a punchline)?

I've heard Hollywood women, actresses and writers and directors and producers, complain about the typical movie romantic pairs of men with much younger women much more often than Hollywood men. The Intern was written and directed by Nancy Meyers, the producers were Meyers and Suzanne Farwell. Is this going to be one of the rare Hollywood movies that mocks such couples? I haven't seen any of Meyer's movies, I think she may already have gotten started mocking older men with young women in Something's Gotta Give. Maybe in The Intern De Niro's character is as good a guy as Hathaway is constantly saying in the trailers, and he tells Hathaway's character that her crush on him is kinda messed up, and that she ought to snap out of it because so-und-so, some younger character in the film, played by, oh who knows, Orlando Bloom or Chris Pratt or some other actor who is actually less than 40 years old, is obviously a great guy who loves her and, like her, still has all of his teeth.

But that's pure speculation on my part. If Something's Gotta Give and/or some other films of Meyers' actually have subverted Hollywood's sweet-young-things-love-smelly-arthritic-old-geezers paradigm (let's not forget De Niro and Carla Gugino in Righteous Kill from 2008. Or De Niro and Amy Brenneman in Heat in 1995 -- eh, maybe that one wasn't so much of a stretch. And in Righteous Kill some of the onscreen characters did say that De Niro's relationship with Gugino was odd because of their ages, instead of acting as if it was all perfectly normal and waiting for the director to yell "Cut!" before they could rush away, looking for a quiet place to vomit), maybe Hollywood only allowed her to make that/those movie/s if she vowed to really go all the way in supporting the stereotype in a future production, so that in The Intern, Hathaway and De Niro are gonna....

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!!!!!