"In October 1956, Mr. Feiffer strolled into the office of The Village Voice, which had been founded the previous year, and offered to draw a regular strip for nothing."

"First titled 'Sick, Sick, Sick,' it eventually became 'Feiffer.' (He was not paid, he later wrote, until 1964.) With his signature sketchy, scribbly lines, Mr. Feiffer sought to bring to a six- or nine-panel format a level of visual simplicity and intellectual sophistication akin to what William Steig and Saul Steinberg had done with their cartoons in The New Yorker. Often devoid of backgrounds and panel borders, Mr. Feiffer’s strip focused almost exclusively on dialogue, gestures and facial expressions.... He would present a couple bickering with each other in profile, or someone in therapy, often with the speaker facing the reader.... Complacent, self-satisfied white liberals were a frequent target, and he upbraided them mercilessly.... The leotard-clad Dancer, who first appeared in 1957, was inspired by a girlfriend. She was... Mr. Feiffer wrote, 'abused and exploited by men.... but where [her male counterpart, based on himself] grew defensive and angry over the years, the Dancer retained her faith. She danced, fell, got to her feet, tripped, sailed aloft, came crashing to earth, rose stubbornly and kept dancing.'"

From "Jules Feiffer, Acerbic Cartoonist, Writer and Much Else, Dies at 95/In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature" (NYT).

Feiffer also wrote the screenplay for "Carnal Knowledge" and the Robert Altman version of "Popeye," and his play "Little Murders" became one of my favorite movies from 1971:

"Some internal thinking can be detrimental, especially the churning, ruminative sort often associated with depression and anxiety."

"Try instead to cultivate what psychologists call freely moving thoughts. Such nimble thinking might start with a yearning to see your grandmother, then careen to that feeling you get when looking down at clouds from an airplane, and then suddenly you’re pondering how deep you’d have to bore into the earth below your feet before you hit magma. Research suggests that people who do more of that type of mind-wandering are happier. Facilitate unconstrained thinking by engaging in an easy, repetitive activity like walking; avoid it during riskier undertakings like driving."

From "How to Let Your Mind Wander" (NYT).

It's funny that walking, that is, physically wandering, helps the mind wander. That makes me think of one of my favorite songs, "I Wonder as I Wander" — sung here by the man who wrote it, John Jacob Niles. And there it is, the mind wandering once again, and I'm not even walking. Just blogging, not slogging. Tripping along.

I like walking, but I find I get my best mind wandering done while running. I do 1.6 miles at sunrise nearly every day, and I like the quality of thinking that happens with that activity — at that time of day, in that setting. If I start thinking about, say, a movie I just watched — e.g., today, "Little Murders" — I can access all sorts of ideas about it and tangential to it. 

Maybe I could do even better mind wandering while walking, but there's so much mind space in walking that I use an audiobook to fill it up. I rarely use headphones while running, but I nearly always use headphones while walking alone (and conversation when walking not alone). Maybe I should leave the headphones out — they're fixing 2 holes that stop my mind from wandering. 

The other thing I do for exercise lately is mountain biking. Now, mountain biking is terrible for mind wandering. It's something I like about mountain biking: My mind automatically stays focused on precisely the task right there in front of me. It's great for flow. Flow, the mental state. There's also flow, the type of mountain bike track. That flow/flow is like the wander/wander mentioned above.

Anyway, here's the original trailer for that movie, a weird and very dark romcom about what happens when a thoroughly apathetic man (Elliott Gould) goes along for the relationship with a entirely energetically optimistic woman: 

 

I don't think there's a better bad wedding than in that movie, with Don Sutherland as the hippie priest:

Why does one decide to marry? Social pressure? Boredom? Loneliness? Sexual appeasement? Love? I won't put any of these reasons down. Each in its own way is adequate, each is all right. Last year, I married a musician who wanted to get married in order to stop masturbating. Please, don't be startled, I'm not putting him down. That marriage did not work. But the man tried. He is now separated, still masturbating, but he is at peace with himself because he tried society's way.

So did I use all the ideas my mind wandered into as I wrote this post? No, not yet anyway. There was that Donovan, but the lyric ran through the head with a misremembered word, "trip" for "skip": "Rebel against society/Such a tiny speck... -ulating whether to be a hip or/Skip along quite merrily." It fits now, though — don't you think? — with that priest's wedding homily. 

Rewatching 5 movies I saw in the theater when they first came out and I was in my early 20s.

I have what I called my "imaginary movie project, " but it's been stalled since 2019. It began in 2019. The idea was to see how I react to these things today and try to remember and relate it to how I felt at the time. I began with the year 1960, when I was 9, and I got up to 1968, with the last of the movies I saw when I was in high school. Oh, how I cried! 

Now, my son John is doing a movie blog project, where he identifies his favorite movie of every year beginning with 1920, reaching a new year each day. He got up to the point where I left off, and his 1968 movie just happens to be the same as mine. Then one of his 1969 movies is the movie I watched for 1969. I watched it, but I didn't blog about it. And then I've also watched my movie for 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1973 — my college years! — all without blogging. 

So now there's a horrible disconnect between watching and writing, but let me solve the problem by writing about all 5 movies right now. Here they are — in their ghoulish, gouldish glory:

1969 — "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice"

1970 — "MASH"

1971 — "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"

1972 — "Play It Again, Sam"

1973 — "The Long Goodbye"

1. That's a lot of Elliott Gould! He was Ted in "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice," one of the doctors in "MASH," and Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye." And he could just as well have been the bumbling fool played by Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam" or the bumbling fool played by Warren Beatty in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller."

2. Whatever was happening to American manhood in the early 70s, it was embodied in Elliott Gould. Let me pick one scene to help you contemplate this issue. It's this, the beginning of "The Long Goodbye":

3. We might understand early 70s American manhood through what it is not. It is not Humphrey Bogart. In "The Long Goodbye," Elliott Gould plays Philip Marlowe, the character Humphrey Bogart famously played in the 1940s, but he's 70s Marlowe, and there's a big difference. We're tasked to remember Bogart and compare, but in "Play It Again, Sam," Humphrey Bogart appears— an actor impersonates him — and advises the Woody Allen character on manly behavior. Allen tries repeatedly to follow the advice, fails ludicrously, but ultimately finds a way to incorporate some of the advice into his own version of a man. 

4. Why was I absorbing so much movie material about the struggles of the 1970s man? What about me, a woman? There were some women in these movies. The great Julie Christie bested Warren Beatty in the wild West whorehouse business in "McCabe and Mrs. Miller." Diane Keaton was a fine match for Woody Allen in "Play It Again, Sam." Sally Kellerman embodied order in "MASH" — where the yin and yang are reversed and then men are the chaos. 

5. The movie with the most substance was "Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice." Here's something I wrote to John when he had just watched and loved that movie: "You didn’t live through the period when adults were doing those things, so what they were satirizing wasn’t really available to you. I saw it when I was 18 and that’s what the generation just ahead of me was doing. They seemed quite awful to me so it was easy to laugh at them and feel not at risk to be anything like them. I was half the age you are now when I saw that. Adulthood, even (or especially) among the supposedly hip people, looked sad and clueless."

6. Things? What things? — you may be asking. There's an Esalen-type retreat, training Bob & Carol in how to be progressive in their sexual relationship, and that challenges the more conservative Ted & Alice. 

7. Three of those 5 movies were directed by Robert Altman. Oh, my, was he a big deal. I thought "MASH" was excellent at the time (and I never watched the TV show "MASH" because I didn't want to see different actors and different stories). But "MASH" didn't mean as much to me this time. My favorite at the time was "McCabe and Mrs. Miller," and I felt about the same this time. "The Long Goodbye" annoyed me at the time, but I thought it was great on rewatch. When I got to the end this time, I went back to the beginning and watched it again. 

8. I could have said a lot more about these movies if I'd written about them one by one as I did my rewatchings. What held me back? 

9. Something about college? We watched so many older movies in those years as Cinema Guild — right across the street from our dorm — served up 2 classics every day. So many decades of great old films to see — nightly double features for 50¢. Why go to the regular movie theater and pay $2, just because something's new? There was the lure of the old. All the Bergman films, the silents, the noir, the Fellini, the Marx Brothers, the Kurosawa, the Cary Grant movies, Katharine Hepburn, the entire French New Wave. We were hungry for movies, but we had half a century of great stuff to catch up on. And, of course, back then, you had to see a film when it was playing or it would be gone and maybe you'd never get a chance to see it again. Here's "Ikiru" or "Design for Living" or whatever. Better get over to Cinema Guild or you'll regret it — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

10. It might be that what held me back from writing about those movies is that it's too personal. 1969 to 1973 — those were the years when I met and married the man who was my first husband, and those movies had so much to do with our relationship. Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade.

Surrealistic oversmoking.

They've mostly removed smoking from movies and TV, so it was striking that the Bob Dylan special, "Shadow Kingdom," was full of smoking — as quoted in last night's post: "a timeless twilight zone, where every single person in the tiny audience, man and woman alike, was smoking like a chimney to a degree that seemed less like period specificity and almost like comedy." 

Shortly after I completed the journey through Bob Dylan's timeless twilight zone, I settled in to rewatch the 1973 Bob Altman neo-noir flick "The Long Goodbye." I don't think there is a character in all of film who's more cigarettecentric — and I've seen Bette Davis — than Elliott Gould as Philip Marlowe in "The Long Goodbye":