Just as Hollywood once used the dog days of August to dump movies that no one wanted to see (now they do that all summer long) so magazines seem to try new “advertising synergies” in this bleak month, possibly because they hope no one is looking. The New Yorker just published its first single-sponsor issue with Target and though reps for the magazine claimed no one would care, I for one find the effect of nothing but red-and-white-target themed adverts surprisingly monochormatic. I feel like I’m reading something sponsored by the Soviet state.

More suspicious to me is the special pull-out section in the September Vanity Fair (which hit newssstand about a week ago) listing the 50 Greatest Films of All Time. First, there is only one sponsor, Turner Classic Movies, but that could possibly mean that it was just a neat little advertising coup for someone at Conde Nast. (If it had happened at Entertainment Weekly, a Time Warner publication, it would raise no more suspicion than the usual business-as-usual synergistic hand jobs.) But then there is the list itself. Much of it is pedestrian stuff that any freshman film school student would automatically cough up: Amarcord, Casablanca, Grand Illusion… you know. Then there are the exclusions: nothing directed by Truffaut, Scorsese, Huston — and the only Germans mentioned are the ones who came to Hollywood. But most egregious of all are the let us say controversial choices that made the list. Die Hard. Animal House. Old fucking School.

In fairness to VF, the cover of this insert reads “VF Presents the 50 Greatest Films of All Time, Plus Old School,” the latter separated with an asterisk. But something about the whole production stinks. The text seems to have been written by a summer intern (“film critics have been speculating about Blowup’s meaning for decades”); did VF film critic Bruce Handy really sign off on this? Did Graydon Carter? It looks and smells like a piece of advertorial, a kind of smash-and-grab that a magazine like VF, that likes to think of itself as serious about film, should be ashamed of. Instead they plugged the thing on the cover (no one noticed, what with Jennifer Aniston trying on one Brad’s old shirts there) — which is against ASME rules if it’s actually advertiser sponsored editorial. You could look it up.

Sometimes tragedies can bring diverse peoples closer together. Think of this month’s narrowly averted Russian submarine disaster, in which the UK, the US and other nations rallied to rescue the suffocating sailors to avoid a repeat of last year’s Russian sub disaster. (Note to self: stay off Russian subs.) Or the news from Indonesia today that the government has signed a truce with the rebels of the Free Aceh Movement after the longterm enemies were brought together in the wake of the devastation of last December’s tsunami. Or the way in which the rest of the world rallied around the US after 9.11…

Never mind.

After July’s subway bombings in London I read a number of articles about the disaffected youth of the UK that included references to NEET, a term the British govt. uses to define young people Not in Education Employment or Training. Yes, it’s lame and I can’t imagine any but the most pudding-headed bureaucrat thinking that the acronym NEET was neat and not, in fact, hopelessly naff. The context was that the young bombers were supposedly among the Neetniks.

For a minute I thought I had key to unlock the mystery of the lyrics to The Damned’s “Neat Neat Neat.” It was one of England’s first bonafide punk singles and one we used to pogo to in SF with no idea what it was about (“It can’t be found no way at all”). But as anachronistic as it seems, NEET is a post-Thatcher and hence post-punk creation so like most great rock songs, “Neat Neat Neat” remains unresolved. Your guess is as good as mine.

Makes me wonder though: have these disaffected young Muslims considered punk rock as a means of expression? Drummer Rat Scabies conveys plenty of fury on ‘Neat Neat Neat,” even 28 years after the fact, and that kind of rage might actually win these losers some sympathy. Anger is an energy, like Johnny Rotten said, but it’s all in what you do with it.

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…