Just got back from London, my first visit there in almost 25 years, and yes it’s true: the food sure is a lot better. Of course the last time I was there I wasn’t exactly flush (I remember being in Hyde Park, literally sitting on my last pound) and could not have afforded a good meal if there was one to be had. But there wasn’t. This time my wife and I had at least one great meal at an Asian fusion place in Piccadilly called Cocoon that looked and sounded like someting out of Layer Cake: all youth and electronica, complete with girls getting completely hammered and guys trooping off to the men’s room to do coke — what year is it, anyway?

I arrived in time to enjoy the news of the Libby indictment, which was almost as big a deal there as it was here. All the papers put it on the front page Saturday and only the drumbeat about “nannystate” — the proposals to ban smoking in pubs and drinking on the tube — drove it off. People there hate Bush almost as much as we do.

I can’t make generalizations about anyplace I visited for a weekend but I can say that where the last time I felt at times that I was in a third world country, that this time I felt like the poor relation. The dollar is so weak that taking cabs there was absurdly expensive and if you tried to do anything — shop, eat, even browse — while doing the math you would drive yourself insane. (My friend Jess said that she and her family got through a recent visit there by simply pretending that the numbers meant dollars, not pounds. Then it just seems like New York.) Best to just act like an American and avoid thinking about tomorrow.

Or whenever it is the bills arrive.

My daughter Franny and I drove our cat to a hospice in Hershey, Pennsylvania yesterday. Muffin isn’t that old — she’s only two — but somewhere along the line she got it in her little cat brain that our furniture was her litter box. For over a year we tried diffferent remedies for various problems: special food for the crystals the vet found in her urine, antibiotics for urinary infections, new litter box, new litter, a cat door so she could come and go as she pleased… But after reupholstering some old furniture and finally getting new furniture all together we decided that Muffin has a will of her own and reasons for doing what she was doing that no human could fathom. (My sister April, who does pet rescue in Texas, said it was one of the biggest problems they had with cats.)

For the last two weeks Muffin had been sitting at the vet’s office, on death row basically, while we have looked for a home for her. As cute as she is, people tended to lose interest when we mentioned the little peeing problem. Even BARK, the Brooklyn animal rescue place endorsed by the Beastie Boys and other living things, told me that it was unlikely I would find a home for her. “The best thing to do at this point is just to euthanize her,” said the fellow I spoke to. When the animal rescue guy says it’s time to kill your cat, you know you’re in trouble.

But then our friend Nancy Castle told us about a place she took a mixed-up cat of hers. Called The Best Little Cat House in Pennsylvania this 25-year-old institute of last resort caters to cats that are terminally ill, generally with feline AIDS and leukemia, and anti-social creatures such as Muffin. After a couple of conversations with Lynn Stitt, the woman who runs the place, we made a date to take our kitty there. And though Franny tried to avoid the onerous, six-hour round trip the night before, I made a fatherly call.

“She was your cat,” I reminded her, even as she turned on the water works. “This is part of the responsibility of having a pet. Besides, don’t you want to know what Muffin’s new home is going to look like?”

By Sunday morning Franny had rallied and even passed on my half-hearted offer to take her to Hershey Park afterwards. She wanted to get home and do her homework — I think in time to watch the Real World but whatever. Muffin cried the whole way, pausing long enough to catch her breath, and we alternately chatted and tuned her out. It was a beautiful fall day and the leaves were just starting to change. The last time I drove to this part of PA was when I was doing volunteer work for Kerry last year. At least I didn’t have any illusions about the cat’s prospects.

The house itself is like cat heaven — providing they like other cats. The main dome room is devoted to the terminally ill, weak bony little babies some of whom are dying to be held (as well as dying). Franny cuddled one for a few minutes before we went to the well-cat room. There was a blind cat curled up on the floor. A cat with what looked like cerebral palsy came walking up to us sideways. Outside on the fenced in porches were cats on every conceivable perch, watching the activity outdoors (cows lowing in the field next door, the odd deer). Some were feral — one-eyed, six-fingered — including one gang of misfits the women called The Bikers. Muffin hissed at them all in greeting and then we were on our way.

Pulling out onto the country lane Franny began to cry. I stopped the car to say that Muffin was going to be fine, that she would have a long and happy life there. “It’s not her,” my big-hearted girl sobbed, “it’s those other cats who are going to die. It just makes me feel so sad.” But within five minutes she was on the phone, reporting about the experience to her friends.

Just like I’m doing now.

It may be the best reviewed movie of the year (which is the kind of line they use to promote a film the critics have loved but audiences have resisted) but David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence did not have Wallace and Gromit looking over their shoulder this weekend. Cameron Diaz is not sweating either. For all its entertainment value — and HOV is often enormously entertaining — the film does not set out to please. Opposite, in fact. It does not give you what you want, ultimately. But like Dylan’s debutante it may give you what you need.

Canadian Cronenberg may have grown up in a different wing of the same mental institution that housed David Lynch. Like Lynch, he has enjoyed some actual box office success (with Ringers and Dead Zone) but has also made films that even hardcore fans have had trouble with (Crash, not the race relations film of the same name but the sex-and-car-accident flick, gave a whole new twist to auto eroticism. Twisted metal, that is.) And like Lynch he is often playing above his audience’s heads. Just as many people walked out of Mulholland Drive convinced that Lynch had dropped the ball at the end, not realizing that the first 4/5 of the film was a fantasy and the last sordid bit the truth, so people have complained about Violence.

“Worst movie I’ve ever seen,” said one fellow behind me at a matinee last week and I think he was jarred by the film’s shifts in tone. Some scenes are hyper-realistic — the sound of the cereal being poured into bowls in the morning is deafening; the scrape on the back of Maria Bello after rough sex with her husband, played by Viggo Mortenson, hurts just to look at. When we want escape Cronenberg provides it: unbelievable violence, triumph of good over evil, comic book villains. But there is no release, no catharsis. The violence begets more violence and the escape is the illusion. Here Cronenberg may owe a debt to Scorsese whose best films — Taxi Driver, Raging Bull — are in part about the futility of violence, even as he lovingly recreates it.

This may not be what people want on a Saturday night. They can get that any day of the week just by picking up the paper and reading the latest from Bali, or Baghdad, or Belfast. It’s like Stephen Crane’s poem “The Heart”, in which he finds a beast eating its own heart and he asks him if it’s good.

“It is bitter — bitter,” he answered.
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”

Now try it with melted butter.

The new Julianne Moore film, The Prize-Winner of Defiance, Ohio, did not make the list of box-office winners this weekend. Aside from a sharp-eyed review by Stephanie Zacharek in Salon on Friday, a lot of critics seem to have missed the film. Pity. It’s a small film but deeply resonant for anyone who grew up in the fifties with too many siblings and too little money. Most importantly, it is a tribute to mothers everywhere who try to shield their kids from life’s more unpleasant realities while instilling them with a sense of wonder and possibility.

It made me think of my mom.

Moore’s character is an extreme example of that when-life-hands-you-a-lemon-make-lemonade heroine. Based on Terry Ryan’s memoir of her mother, the Prize-Winner recalls a lost era in American advertising, when companies sponsored countless contests that took actual skill: write a jingle extolling the virtues of Dr. Pepper. Fill in the blanks of this pop song celebrating a sandwich. Countless moms tried their luck in pursuit of prizes ranging from free appliances to cars and trips to Switzerland. (Some of the funniest scenes come when Moore meets a society of homemakers all doing the same thing, who critique each other’s work: it’s a sort of commercially driven poetry salon, but the prize their eyes are upon is a lifetime supply of Jello, instead of the Pulitzer.) In a pre-Betty Friedan age of housewife drudgery these women with brains and talent and nowhere to express them found each other, while pursuing the bright elusive butterfly of material nirvana.

For Moore’s character though it was a matter of survival. While Dad (played by Woody Harrelson, with a pot belly and a pair of nerd glasses) drank his paycheck, Moore kept the wolf at bay by cashing in all those luxury vacations and selling the sports cars. Harrelson gives a performance on a par with Moore’s, lending complexity to an unlovable, self-pitying alcoholic. Our dad was not prone to self-recrimination — his ego was too huge to allow room for that — but his screaming, physically abusive side sure looked familiar. The scene in which one of their ten children is afraid to walk near him as he rages over a baseball game was a page from my life. Dad would sit, cold Burgie in hand, watching the Gillete Cavalcade of Sports and lord help the child who got between him and his fight.

Our mother did not enter any contests that I recall but she clipped her share of coupons and tried hard to make our poverty tolerable by pretending our survival was part of some great adventure. Hey, let’s go pick black berries in Grant’s Pass! Buckets and buckets of them that then found their way into pancakes, muffins, cereal, jam — to the point where I couldn’t stand to look at black berries when I was older. When we had nothing to eat in the house but waffle mix and ice cream she combined the two to make a nine-year-old kid’s idea of a dream dinner. And when we couldn’t afford to buy toy weapons to enact our games of Viking, pirate etc. she used tin foil and cardboard to forge swords and shields, some with emblems and coats of armor taken from history books.

It’s important to be happy, she told us, even when she wasn’t herself. I still use my imagination to forge the armor I need in this world. And I still thank my mother for that.

I Tivo’d the first part of Scorsese’s Dylan bio on PBS and ended up watching it the next day just before Part II — the documentary equivalent, in length if not incoherence, of Dylan’s whacked out director’s cut of Renaldo & Clara. By the time it was over my hair had gotten kinda curly and my voice had become kind of nasal and I was droppin’ my g’s and sayin’ things like, “I’d like to empty the dishwasher but my hands are on fire.”

You ever get the feeling that, at least some of the time, Bob must be a real pain in the ass to be around? I know, I know — he’s Bob Dylan and he could be a major asshole all the time and get away with it if he had just written “Visions of Johanna” or “To Ramona” or “It’s Not Dark Yet” or about another hundred songs I could list (if not sing) at the drop of a Stetson hat. (My brother Ethan just sent me some samples from the new Rodney Crowell album, including a song called “Beautiful Despair” that opens with this couplet: “Beautiful despair is hearing Dylan drunk at 3 am/And knowing in a million years you’ll never write a song half as good as him.” And Rodney’s not alone.)

No, Dylan has the right to be as big a jerk as he wants and with the archival material at his disposal, Marty showed us just how much of a jerk he was — though as Davie Yaffee noted in his Slate review, this was an authorized biopic which left some of the rougher edges on the floor. The footage of him and the Band touring the UK in 1966 was taken from DA Pennebaker’s Eat the Document. It’s supposed to be unavailable but you can find a copy at Kim’s Video on St. Marks and probably about a hundred other places around the country. In it you will see the same funny scene Scorsese included of Dylan riffing off some sign outside an apothecary’s, making nonsense poetry out of the words — “I need someone to bathe my bird, knit my soul…” What you don’t see is Dylan and Richard Manuel, on the same early morning stoned stroll offering some starstruck fan a leather jacket for his girlfriend. Haha. That Bob.

You did see Joan Baez vent, all those years after the fact, about following Bob around on another UK tour, the one documented in Don’t Look Back, and never being asked to join him on stage. After all she had done for him! An unseen interviewer asked Dylan about it and for a moment he looked authentically embarrassed, human as all of us. “It’s hard to be wise and in love at the same time,” he finally says and I say give the man a cigar. Or something stronger. As he demonstrated in the remarkable first volume of his autobiography, Chronicles, Dylan has been far more self aware all these years than his critics have given him credit for. If he didn’t choose to let this film be a Bob bashing session, can you really blame him? And would you want to be on the other side of a pissing contest with Dylan, anyway? The master if the fuck-you song — “Positively Fourth Street,” “Idiot Wind,” et al — Bob has proven he can take it and dish it out. Even at 3 AM.