Went to see Bertolucci’s Conformist at the Film Forum last night, a theater that always reminds me of my youth. The chairs are incredibly uncomfortable, the films almost universally obscure and the crowds are just this side of insufferable. The Conformist (1970) is seldom seen in theaters and not as yet available on DVD (there’s a lousy video transfer out there somewhere, if you want to track it down) and is justly celebrated as one of Bertolucci’s masterpieces. Based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, the film tells the story of a callow Italian (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant) who — perhaps due to having a morphine addict for a mother, a father in the nut house and having been sexually molested by a chauffeur when he was young — becomes a kind of cultural-political weather vane. He joins the fascists when Mussolini is in power, and even participates in the assassination of an old liberal professor of his, now exiled in Paris, but just as quickly turns to denouncing his former friends as collaborators when Il Duce is suddenly deposed. His political confusion is matched by his sexual ambivalence; he won’t sleep with his shallow-but beautiful fiancee (Stefania Sandrelli) but gets turned on when he sees a former prostitute, played by Dominique Sanda, try to go down on her.

And who amongst us wouldn’t?

As much as I enjoy hearing aging film nerds try out their pronunciation of “mise en scene” on each other, I was rather disappointed by the level of discourse on display last night. The 7:40 screening was sold-out, of course, and I spent the moments before showtime trying to mentally prepare myself for two-plus hours of monumental physical discomfort, much in the fashion Harry Houdini readied himself to be locked in a safe and lowered into the East River. This is where all that yoga and meditation really come in handy. Sadly, the trio behind me intruded on my mind-emptying exercises. They were two men and a woman and I couldn’t figure out the configuration — was one of the men on a date with the woman and the other guy a third wheel? Were the two men dating and the woman but a friend? My gaydar always goes haywire downtown but clearly there was some unfamiliarity between the three: they were going through topics — Pirro vs. Hillary, searches on the subway — like appetizers at an Indian restaurant.

“What do you think of this woman camped out in Crawford?” one of them asked, referring to Cindy Sheehan, the mother of soldier slain in Iraq who is seeking an audience with the president. This led to a general fit of Bush-bashing:

“You know, he’s just such an idiot.”

“A robot could do his job.”

“He only does what his daddy wants.”

Ad nauseum. I take a back seat to no one in my objection to GWB and his policies, was on the frontlines of the get-out-the-vote move for Kerry (see “Scranton” on the Articles page) but folks, this is no way to mount a counter-offensive. First of all, it’s pretty much a matter of record that the elder sushi-barfing Bush (to borrow Anne LaMott’s felicitous phrase) was opposed to the invasion of Iraq. Secondly, dismissing W as a robot misses the point: a lot of Americans seem to relate to his awkwardness before the microphone, and certainly preferred it to Kerry’s. (Might be an insult to robots, too: think Jude Law in AI.) And my fellow disenfranchised dems, we could use such an idiot if we ever want to see the inside of the Oval Office again. Knee-jerk condescension won’t get us anywhere. Now is not the time for conformity.

I had planned to go to the gym on my lunch hour today (working freelance in midtown this summer) but my plans were thwarted by an officious functionary at the NY Sports Club at 48th and 6th. Though I’ve been breezing in there at various times since I started this job, no one had ever stopped me before — even though it seems I have a “gold membership” that, oxymoronically, is worth less than the standard membership. It turns out that I’m not supposed to just walk into any gym I want (and NYSC has hundreds) any time I feel like, I’m only supposed to be there at “off peak hours,” which begin at 2 pm.

I’ve been a member of this gym since Jesus played varsity and I tend to forget the terms, I guess. I don’t think I’ve ever been to this particular location before 2, lunch hour being generally agreed upon as an hour falling between 12-2, so I was surprised to be stopped by a young woman with a stud in her nose at 1:40. I think she must have been a new manager or someone who just completed some kind of training because she seemed very invested in thwarting my best efforts to sweet talk my way past her.

“You’ll have to come back in twenty minutes,” she said as the towel boys behind her rolled their eyes. They knew the place was emptying out.

“But I only have an hour for lunch,” I reasoned. “That won’t give me time to work out, shower…” But she wasn’t having any of it.

A colleague of mine breezed past. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

“This woman has an attitude,” I said matter-of-factly, knowing the case was already lost.

“I don’t have an attitude,” the 90-day wonder insisted. “I”m just explaining the terms of your membership.”

I left with my gym bag, muttering oaths as I went. I hit the bricks without a destination. Tourists from Times Square were spilling over into the Diamond District (“Look, mommy, Jews!”) and I had planned the day all wrong. I had even had a couple Krispy Kreme donuts with my coffee this morning feeling guiltless — yeah, so what? I’m going to the gym. Now I was as aimless as a Gus Van Sant movie.

I wandered around the corner and walked between the buildings toward 49th Street. There’s an artificial waterfall there with a tunnel running through it. Today tourists were queued up to take pictures there. I ended up at a Japanese dive called Sapporo, ordering the katsu-don and feeling rather unimaginative. There was some sweet soul music in the air, above the hissing and clanking sounds the chefs were making behind the counter, and it took a minute before I ID’d the singer. It was a best-of-Etta-James collection and I was amazed to find the Japanese cooks singing along to “Something’s Gotta Hold On Me”. It occurred to me, reading my Janet Malcolm book and chewing on my cutlet, that if that sourpuss hadn’t blocked my attempt to work out I wouldn’t have taken that walk through the waterfall and made it there to hear their chorus (“Oh, it must be ruv!”). I figured I owed her one.

It was confirmed yesterday that Walter Salles (Motorcycle Diaries, Central Station) would direct a film version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, ending producer Francis Coppola’s search for the right director, a quest that has seemed longer than Godfather III. Coppola has owned the rights to the beat bible forever and once thought of directing it himself, but this was before he directed Jack (in which Robin Williams played a little boy who never grew up or an old man who wouldn’t shut up or something) and turned all of his creative abilities to making wine and building high-end ecotourist resorts in Central America.

First Francis grappled with the problem of how to convert the wordy, rather plotless book into a screenplay. One early version involved the use of some software of his own devising that allowed you to pour the text of a book into it in novel form only to have it emerge formatted as a script. Sadly the screenplay that emerged was about a thousand pages long and unfilmable. Undaunted, he garnered publicity for the on-again-off-again project with an open casting call in New York for potential unknowns to play the film’s lead characters, Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty (based on Kerouac and Neal Cassady). Grey sweatshirts and khaki pants were in short supply at the Gap that week but no stars were born as a result.

The quest for the right director seemed to reach a new low last year when Coppola announced that Joel Schumacher, best known as the man who killed Batman, was at the helm. And some bonafide Hollywood stars were attached as well, with Brad Pitt being mentioned as a potential Dean/Neal. (Nick Nolte played Cassady to John Heard’s Kerouac in the rather lifeless 1980 film Heart Beat; no less a Cassady cohort than Prankster Ken Babbs said that Nolte had already played Cassady, or a character directly inspired by the legendary wheelman, in the film version of Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, inexplicably retitled Who’ll Stop the Rain? And done a hell of a job.)

Meanwhile, every writer in creation was approached to have a go at the script. A few years ago Coppola hired the relatively unknown Pete Rock (The Ambidextrist) to tackle adaptation chores though Russell Banks announced to the world that he had a lock on the job before then. I talked to Banks last year when I was trying to track down the film’s status for a piece I was pitching to the New York Times. He admitted he had no idea where the project was at but had just heard that Salles might direct and was optimistic that On the Road might finally get into gear. Too bad for Banks; Salles has already announced that Jose Rivera, who wrote Motorcycle Diaries, will handle the writing.

The big question, of course, is does anybody care? Beat wannabes, young and old alike, won’t be queuing up at the cineplex on opening weekend; that’s square stuff, man. Remember, at St. Marks Bookstore in Manhattan they still keep all their Kerouac behind the counter ’cause the kids, and presumably the young at heart, still come in and steal it off the shelves. Jack probably doesn’t care, he ain’t getting paid nohow…

Saw Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf on Broadway last week, great seats at a deep discount (who would have thought sixty bucks would ever seem like a bargain?). I think the enduring appeal of that play might be that married couples, who still make up a good portion of any theater audience, come out saying, “Well, maybe our marriage isn’t so bad after all!” The Longacre Theater does not offer booze at intermission and there were quite a few disappointed patrons at the first intermission, many of whom could have clearly used a stiff drink or two. Plenty of ersatz booze being belted back on stage, of course.

This production is indeed Kathleen Turner’s show. From her opening line (“God, what a dump!”) to her final answer to the question posed in the title, she rules what remains of that rundown roost George and Martha are doomed to inhabit. She looks like she has been in training for the role in years past, enjoying the pleasures life has to offer without frequent breaks for the gym, and her Martha has a blowsy quality that Liz Taylor’s lacked. (Besides, I could never understand how a woman who looked like Liz was doing languishing in nowheresville.) She owns the role and put Taylor out of my mind for the evening.

I wish I could say the same of Bill Irwin’s George. Though I liked the kinetic, almost Robin Williams quality of his jesting (seeing him trade bons mots with the hapless Nick was like watching McEnroe play tennis with the ball boy) and was won over by his abstract take on the disappointed, cuckolded “associate professor” (as Martha continuously reminds him) he let me down in the last act. That’s when you need George to turn around, to reveal that beneath the animosity is a deep well of concern for his wife — as Richard Burton does so convincingly in the film — and I wasn’t feeling it on Wednesday.

Maybe it was an off night, who knows? Wed is a matinee day and after going through that Walpurgisnacht twice the actors may be a bit spent (though Turner didn’t show it). The couple’s evening guests, Nick and Honey (played here by David Harbour and Mireille Enos) are rather hapless foils; though Enos makes the most of her role, milking it for the laughs the playwright built into it, I didn’t find Harbour sexy enough to raise the amount of steam that clouds the evening. All the great lines are in place (“But that’s all blood under the bridge”; “Georgie-porgie, put-upon-pie”) and the play stands up. But since Albee shocked Broadway with its first staging 44 years ago, a lot of people have copied his style; in how many final acts have you seen characters unmasked, forced to face their illusions, psychologically burned to the ground to face the harsh light of Truth?

The amazing thing about George and Martha is that they endure, even their marriage endures. Though Albee was about thirty when he wrote WAVW, it still seems like a young man’s play: fuck you, mom and dad! He even named them after the parents of our country. But as Nick and Honey learn the hard way, no one knows what really holds a marriage together except the two people bound to each other. It is a lesson for the young, and a humbling one.

Leaving Franny’s camp on Monday we stopped in the neighboring town of Liberty, NY for a quick lunch — only to discover water pouring into the car underneath the dashboard on the passenger side. I may not be one of the Tappet brothers but I know that’s not a good thing. After eating half an Italian sub while Peggy had a slice of pizza, all the while listening the an endless tale of woe by the guy in the next counter over (his wife had thrown him out the trailer, monthly disability checks were less than he used to make driving a forklift in a week, his father-in-law just plain didn’t like him) I found a gas station with a garage and had the problem quickly diagnosed. A hose running from the air conditioner was supposed to drain water and was clogged up, causing the small flood in the front seat. We elected to have him address the problem while cooling our heels in the garage’s waiting room.

There we encountered another sad example of local destitution: a young couple with a two-year-old child who were waiting for their own car to be fixed. They had their groceries with them — Fruit Loops, Oreos, large bottles of soda — and seemed unusually agitated. They were both rail thin, with bad teeth and seemingly no volume control: whether talking about the car or which soap opera to watch on the garage’s TV, they shouted at each other in an unenunciated mush of reproach that sounded to me like a parody of the family in Napoleon Dynamite. I lived in a number of redneck towns growing up, though none quite as destitute as Sullivan County seems to be now, and pegged them for a somewhat familiar brand of local loser. Until I got a look at the young mother’s bruised, scabby legs and realized the awful truth: They were meth freaks.

Not to sound naive. I certainly encountered a lot of speed freaks in my youth, at rock concerts and on the streets of San Francisco, especially in the Haight. And I have been reading a lot of press coverage about the nation’s meth epidemic, including the cover story in this week’s Newsweek but I thought of it as…out there. Like Oklahoma. But one look in this woman’s eyes — she asked Peggy for money after she said hi to her toddler — told the tale. The little girl was adorable: blond haired and blue-eyed, she could have come off a Sunbeam bread bag. She was also seemingly unmonitored by mom or dad. They kvetched like Job about everything while their daughter ran in and out of a rather dangerous environment.

Though probably not as dangerous as the one she faces at home. Of all the horror stories about meth addiction — a scourge that is literally sweeping rural America, like a white-trash crack epidemic — the worst are about the children. Neglected, abused, exposed to the worst sorts of depravation they are part of a new generation of the damned. The closing line of my last post, re the Pillowman, seems callous in retrospect. That play concerns an author who writes stories about children being abused, having witnessed the same thing happening to his brother. They’re both dead by play’s end, as those meth freak parents may be in short order. But the girl will live on.

Postscript: In Slate’s Press Box today Jack Shafer challenges the Newsweek piece saying, among other things, the magazine gives no figures for how many lives meth has actually claimed. I guess that all depends on how you define living.