I had a sort of leisurely day today.  After teaching a class, with nothing in particular I had to do, I decided I’d drop into the movies and see what was playing. I can’t remember the last time I went to a movie alone, but I used to do it all the time—back in college—and was glad to see I still find it thoroughly enjoyable. I got to the cineplex on the Common just in time to see Notes on a Scandal with Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. I chose it mainly for the time, but I think my catching it like that might have been fate. Well, either everything is, or nothing is, I suppose. It’s all or nothing when it comes to Fate, innit?

The movie's a treat on a number of levels. It is a wicked comedy of manners, and the hyperventilating score by Phillip Glass gives even some of its most serious scenes an epic-comic tone. Judi Dench’s very subtly named Barbara Covett is a sublime creature somewhere between Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter and Bill Murray’s Bob in What About Bob?

Notes on a Scandal might have been many things—and is many things—part reverse-Lolita (and it’s about time, I say), part Fatal Attraction/What About Bob?—but in the end it raucously announces itself as what must surely be a new genre: the Lesbian Vampire Comedy of Manners.  I mean, how can you not love that?

Among other things I liked about this movie, I liked the idea of seeing the events unfold through the diary of an old crone. As someone with terminal raging logorrhea, who’s been "journaling" pretty much daily for going on fifteen years now for treatment of my condition, I can attest to the temptation to get too comfortable in your own company. Like laughing at your own jokes, which will result eventually in you being the only one laughing. It’s the old one hand clapping, when a tree falls in the forest dilemma.

But a good diary does suck you in, especially when you're the one writing it. You have to read it occasionally, of course—or bits of it—to get a feel for the monster you're becoming (and if you are honest in your diary, no matter who you are, you will see—thrill-horror!--that you are becoming one).

Back in '98, about three-and-a-half years into the endeavor I looked back and took stock:

The main difference I've noticed between the early entries and the later ones is I wasn't so ironic in the beginning. When I go back over those entries I notice countless missed opportunities for irony, self-mockery, sarcasm, and contempt. Back then I was achingly unequivocal. My slow-fading faith in the possiblity of elucidating and classifying, of the "truth" of "events", led of necessity to an emphasis on the primary emotional experience, no matter how ridiculous and humiliating it proved in retrospect (even in immediate retrospect) to be. There is no more truth in one moment than in the moment that follows, of course — which is the secret of becoming a good diarist. If there is such a thing as time, and if we are going to make use of it somehow, it should be to our advantage, and not to our detriment.

In fact, in ’96, dissatisfied with the humorless tone of ’95, I went back and rewrote all of the previous year. Because, hey, a diary is as much an existential project as anything.

Truth is, anyone who has kept a regular diary over the course of many years has to ask themselves, at some point, why on earth they do it. Eventually it’s a moot point. It becomes a habit, and the habit becomes a ritual, and the ritual is a kind of meditation, an altered state.  But it does leave a stain.  So in the back of every diarist's mind is the danger and thrill of being discovered in your innermost thoughts and private musings.

I had a lover who knew I wrote about him in my diary, who once told me, “I'm able to convince myself that if I make it to the pages of a diary that is not my own, it is an honor and a good thing.” Thinking about it later, I wrote in my diary:

He obviously doesn’t keep a diary. Anyone who does knows it’s not the honorable ones that show up in its pages. An honor and a good thing to appear in someone’s diary? Whoever heard of such a thing? He must live in some fairyland where people think good thoughts about others and write them in their diary so they're sure not to forget them. I mean, please. My diary would be, like, six pages long.

Brutal, innit? That’s what diaries are like when you cut into them—right into the middle where the meat’s raw and bloody.

If you have nothing but good things to say, you do not keep a diary. It's really as simple as that.  You don't need to. 

But this tendency to to be a bit, erm, critical, let's call it, which I am convinced is universal to all true diarists, is also a distortion, of sorts. For many years I balanced out the psychic violence in my personal notebooks with the sex. But when sex was scarce and I didn’t have football, I had a terrible tendency to accentuate the negative.

I eventually paid for this tendency—and dearly—in the months I spent taking care of my dad as he lay dying. During that period of my life, I used the diary as a repository for the everyday rage you feel in a situation like that, as a kind of anger-management tool. The anger, fear, and frustration flowed, but recording the good things—and there were spots of light in the darkness—seemed tedious and trivializing. So I didn’t bother.

Now, looking back on those entries—and it took a long time to go back into them—I see nothing but the seething pain of that period. I wish I’d adhered to the policy of journalistic verisimilitude I’d started out with. 

Of course, I remember it all, but for some reason, this isn’t one of those things I feel I could go back and rewrite as an existential exercise. I just have to live with it.

Anyway—whoa, whew, that was a tangent and a half, wannit?—the Notes part of Notes from a Scandal—the pivotal part that Covett’s diary plays in the plot—was interesting for me. But there were a number of provocative plot-points. The story is, in fact, a kind of perfect storm—marrying a number of hot-buttom issues society's struggling with at the moment.

For example, the issue of adolescents seducing adults, and vice-versa, which is a veritable obsession in Britain and America. In the film, Cate Blanchett's Sheba has a fling with Andrew Simpson's Lolito, Steven Connolly, a fifteen year old who’s actively courted her.

The affair is handled, filmically, in a refreshingly straightforward way, and there’s no lingering on the prurient or languishing in guilt in the aftermath. The plot is as crisp and taut as Dench’s narration, and as dizzying as Glass’s score.

Nor does the movie dwell on the morality tale once it’s told. A short coda reconciles Blanchett and her husband and establishes Covett’s credentials as a certifiable horror worthy, I think, of a sequel or two herself.

After the movie I took the T back to Davis Square. It was just shy of eight by the time I got back. My ride home was on the moddest car on the T, without question.  Way too mod for my squad, truth told.

One of the first things I noticed about Davis Square was that it was, if not HQ, then a major center of the Brotherhood of the Black Frames...



...a secret society of which I have been a member in good standing for coming on sixteen years.

Everywhere you turn in Davis Square you see the Brotherhood.

Aside from my glasses, however, I've never had it together enough to really have a “look.” A vague sort of je ne sais quoi is all I have ever achieved, on my good days. But never anything even approaching so flawless a presentation, from tip to tail, as some of these fashionistas you see about in Cambridge these days.

Everything—and I mean everything—from the MP3 player and the music on it, the glasses and the sculpted facial hair, to the costumish get-up and the insensible shoes—is immaculate, meticulously conceived and executed, as if the whole had been designed, manufactured, plopped out of a fashionista factory, and shipped abroad as a living, breathing billboard, to shame the rest of us out of our unfashionable ways.

Look closely. There is nothing about them that is the thing itself. Everything—every article of clothing, every accessory, every itune, every gesture and every word—alludes to something.  Something arcane and esoteric that the rest of us can’t even begin to fathom. It's probably enough to know that everything, down to the minutiae of their being, is painstakingly choreographed to look effortlessly choreographed.

Fashionistas come in a variety of forms, of course—there are the thrift-shop divas, for example—I hovered on the fringe of this crowd in college—but anyone with a little work can be one of those.

No, the modsters I’m talking about don’t wear somebody else’s old cast-offs. And they’re not keen on the quirky, thrown-together Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink/Madonna circa Desperately Seeking Susan look of the second-hand crowd. Theirs is a uniform in the old-fashioned, fascist sense.

What they are fighting for, I don’t know.

But theirs seems from the outside to be a secret society of rigid rules of order—whether political or religious, I can’t say—where apostasy consists in getting just one thing wrong—length of sideburns, brand of headphones, cuff-length, or worst of all—listening to the wrong cutting edge underground band—this, I have a feeling, can get you banished to Outer Darkness (New Bedford? Lynn?).

I find this subculture so fascinating because of the totality of its vision and the obvious rigidity of its system of unspoken signs and symbols. It is life as exacting discipline. And, aesthetically, the whole—the product of this discipline is as perfect as a sonnet.

I would compare this subculture to the ghetto chic subculture—baseball cap, gold chains, hugely oversized jersey over beyond-baggy jeans, with untied pumas, etc, which evinces the same exacting adherence to an unspoken code which seems to have no single source or articulable ethos—but I hope it’s not controversial to venture that the modsters are more conscious of their mission, whatever they conceive it as.

At any rate, there were more of these characters than usual in the car on my way home from the movie, and I had several stops to admire their flawless handiwork.  (The truly flawless ones all got off at Harvard, though).

There was one of a certain class among them (not a high priest, but maybe a deacon), who might pass as a bum were it not for the fact that he displayed the Dickie logo on all his clothing. Which I found fascinating. This fellow was wearing a costume. And wanted to be sure to alert all that it was, in fact, a costume. He was, essentially, in drag.

Aside from a greater than usual concentration of modsters, there were a number of, you could tell, very, very clever people on board. I mean, as you’d expect, it being the train to Harvard and all.

My hands-down fave among them was a young woman who seemed to have taken her fashion cues from Diane Keaton circa Annie Hall (which is an observation, not a judgment)—she had one of those hats on and everything. I first noticed her on the platform at Downtown Crossing, where she was eating fries out of a Wendy’s bag in a sort of furtive way that made the activity seem a little obscene, something I couldn’t ever see Diane Keaton doing, quite frankly, even if she took a Stanislavski class.

She had finished the fries by the time the train came, but she still had a chicken sandwich she hadn’t gotten to. I was glad I had a front-row seat for it, is all I can say. She was totally enraptured by this chicken sandwich. She pulled the foil back meaningfully, and examined it. After turning it over and over to thoroughly scrutinize several potential sites for her first go at it, she brought it to her mouth slowly, watching it all the time as if it might take flight at the last moment, and then, in front of a train-full of unwilling witnesses, began making love to it. Nudging and kissing and nibbling at it. Licking her lips, teasing the flesh out, fondling it with her fingers, licking her fingers, and, exhausted, pushing it away, only to draw it back a moment later for another round of lovemaking.

I looked around, hoping no one had noticed my arousal, to see others transfixed by this steamy tableau as well. It took her several stops—at least four, and we weren’t traveling at the speed of light—to finish this flesh feast.

When it was over, with the same slow, deliberate moves, she took a book out of her bag, and I knew—I can’t say why I knew, but I knew exactly what book it was without even having to see it.  I'm serious.

But my journalistic instincts screamed, “MUST VERIFY!” So, though I was afraid to get too close, I ventured nearer, stumbling as the train lurched forward, until I could see the title:



How did I know? I don’t know, honestly. But I knew.

What a curious new world this is, I thought, as I exited at Davis Square. A curious new life.