Starting Out in the Evening: now available on DVDThere’s a New York you don’t read about anymore but you should. It’s the one in which the Ansonia is still a residence hotel on the Upper West Side, catering to dying salesmen, down-at-heel hucksters, and catchpenny gutter philosophers. It’s the one where you walk into a Woolworth’s to discuss Marx and Wilde while having your roast beef flooded with flour gravy. It’s the one where middle-class poverty is not only livable but the cause for political fellowship, and where cigarettes are allowed everywhere, and you get a strange look if you ask someone to put his out. It’s the New York of Leonard Schiller in bloom.

Sadly, when we meet him in Starting Out in the Evening, a subtle and fine film that was adapted from Brian Morton’s novel of the same name and recently released on DVD, most of the color has gone out of his life and work. Played wonderfully by Frank Langella, Leonard is a forgotten novelist and who’s been writing his fifth and, in all likelihood, final book for about a decade. His others, bearing titles such as Tenderness and The Lost City, have long been out of print, and he seems resigned to his status as a has-been until an ambitious and comely young graduate student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) offers to help revive his reputation by writing her Masters thesis on him. This is the moment some older gentlemen of letters must wait for all their lives, but Leonard is reluctant. He wants to be left alone in his hermitage, and nothing about him, from his careful and precise speech to his outdated wardrobe, makes this request appear confected out of false modesty. After being told by a publisher that the industry is now all “celebrity confessions and self-help books,” Leonard reconsiders. However, in agreeing to be interviewed and scrutinized, especially by a biographer-critic who wears her confidence as lushly as her lipstick, he is soon drawn into the kind of literary relationship that has felled less disciplined talents.

I suppose I’ve already given the game away, but Leonard’s dynamic with Heather turns out to be less Johnson and Boswell, more Salinger and Maynard. There are moments that do seem forced and incredible between the two; one involving honey, more about which you’ll have to hate me for not disclosing. Yet there is a quiet dignity, on par with Schiller’s own, to the way director Andrew Wagner allows what could have been a queasy and eccentric love affair – Harold and Maude take Broadway, with the gender roles reversed – to develop as naturally as any other. It helps that that common language is a dead one: literature. “A New York Jew imitates D.H. Lawrence at his own peril,” Leonard tells Heather in answer to one of her early questions, delivering a line that may not send the average twentysomething’s panties flying off, but has a definite effect on her. Heather finds men her own age like chewing gum, “ten minutes of flavor, then just bland repetition," and she is both worshipful and peremptory toward Leonard, taking liberties she thinks that having an intimate knowledge of his fictional characters has afforded her with respect to his own secluded existence. But even her easy working rapport with her subject doesn’t give her the right to interrupt his daily writing schedule (“Maybe a little shakeup in the routine is just what Leonard needs”), which he adheres to with a religious exactness. Indeed, a scene of Leonard hunched over his typewriter with his hands folded as if in prayer opens and closes Starting Out, two bookends reminding us that we should seek elsewhere for a romantic study of an artistic lion in winter.

Another bookend to complement the theme of Leonard and Heather: the fractious on-again off-again relationship Leonard’s daughter Ariel (Lili Taylor), a failed dancer turned pilates instructor, shares with Casey (Adrian Lester), recently moved back to New York from Chicago, whose refusal to conceive a child with her accounts for the off-again bit. Though gentle and disarming, Casey has big plans of his own – he wants to found a leftwing little magazine – and they only include Ariel as a sideline cheerleader. She kids herself that their second go-round can remain “hot and light,” and his self-absorption is amplified by Leonard’s lone recognition of it; though that, too, like an aged oeuvre, can be forgotten. After Leonard suffers a debilitating stroke, it falls to Casey to help him through one humiliating geriatric episode. The result is another unlikely bond forged between young and old, and this one actually seems stronger.

It should be noted that the title of Morton’s novel borrowed from Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties, one of the more eloquent – if also mean-spirited and score-settling – memoirs about the celebrated New York Intellectuals, of which Leonard was clearly envisioned as one. (Kazin had a brief cameo in the book.) So it’s a shame there’s only a single direct on-screen allusion made to this dazzling and mythologized milieu, and that it’s made by an editor at the Village Voice: “Bellow, Schwartz. To be honest, I was never really interested in that crowd. I imagined them as a bunch of white guys in suits going to bed early.” That’s as good a reason as any to remember why you stopped reading the Voice. Here’s Schwartz filtered through Bellow in Humbolt’s Gift: “You don't know what you're missing. I'm a poet. I have a big cock.”

Who knows? There might have been a time when even the mannered Leonard Schiller talked like that.

Sayyid Qutb likes Tazo Tea: Rachael Ray's kaffiyeh troublesOne of the minor problems with being a reconstructed neocon weenie such as myself is the company I'm forced to keep. I don't much like the right-wing personality because it seems a funhouse distortion of the left-wing personality, only with better clothes. This is not an accident. How easy it was to renounce the core substance of communism and yet retain the dire style. A friend of mine, who has undergone every permutation of ideology imaginable, phrases it like this: All ex-radicals take something away with them from the 'movement,' whether it's the atheism, the loyalty to trade unionism, the love of god-awful folk music, or being a fucking asshole.

A good sign of membership in that last contingent is an obsession with the non-issue, a conspiratorial mindset that has the more even-tempered comrades rolling their eyes behind your back, or, since you're likely to suffer from an almost autistic lack of self-awareness and shame, right in front of your face. Worse still than the late-in-life-winger is the cradle-to-the-grave variety. Will someone please inform Michelle Malkin that Rachael Ray is not a jihadist? The insufferable Food Network hostess must want you to eat on $40 a day because the rest of your income should go to Osama bin Laden. Ray was caught on national television hawking ice lattes for Dunkin' Donuts while wearing a kaffiyeh, and the rest of this story some poor fool at the BBC must have written in crayon:

In a statement, Dunkin' Donuts said the silk scarf had been "selected by Rachael Ray's stylist and that no symbolism was intended.

"But given the possibility of misperception the commercial was no longer being used."

This has caused a fair amount of consternation in some quarters but the conservative blogger at the centre of the row has praised the decision.

"Fashion statements may seem insignificant, but when they lead to the mainstreaming of violence - unintentionally or not - they matter," Ms Malkin has written.

Now let us at once concede that Yasser Arafat wore this Arab headdress and had one of his strapping male Aryan lieutenants daily shape it to resemble the lost Palestine he would spare no drop of Jewish or Muslim blood to reclaim. Many beheaders and suicide bombers and illiterate adherents of a single book have been known to don the kaffiyeh as a symbol of their militant struggle, as have quite a number of secular followers of pan-Arab nationalism.

None of which eliminates the historical fact that centuries of harmless Bedouin traders, stifled not by irrendentism so much as by the unremitting heat of the desert, also wore kaffiyehs the way my fashion-backward Jewish father would his Panama Jack hat at the beach. It's the fanny-pack of the Orient.

T.E. Lawrence famously donned one while leading a popular revolt against Ottoman imperialism. Many of our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq wear the checkered garment and not out of solidarity with politically null hipsters in Williamsburg, who must think the mountain people's billowy pants intend ironic commentary of the career of M.C. Hammer.

This is the problem with iconography in general. There are only so many icons to go around. Many are bound to be hijacked and recycled, and thus their symbolism is bound to be muddled to the point of negation.

Before black became synonymous with Italian Fascism, or Ann Coulter's morning wear on the Today Show, it was the honorable hue of Russian anarchists who fought alongside the infant Red Army in the Russian Civil War. (The rather pure-seeming color white was reserved for the proto-fascist armies of czarist dead-enders.) Indeed, that the valiant liberators of the Crimea were later killed during the Stalinist terror for not being Bolsheviks only underscores the necessity of "taking back" certain banners.

More notoriously, the swastika was not just an ancient Jain glyph for fertility, it also furnished the name of Meyer Wolfsheim's dubious bond company in The Great Gatsby, a book published in 1925, when Hitler was still a reactionary house painter in the Weimar Republic. Anyway, we knew Wolfsheim was no good because he wore cufflinks made of human teeth.

But for those who presume to read clothes as manifestos, they should at least be well acquainted with the histories of both before holding forth on so-and-so's revolutionary aims.

America may run on Dunkin', but the conservative blogosphere runs on paranoia.

Here are two Friday Afternoon Specials for Memorial Day Weekend. First, Hillary Clinton has news for the naysayers who think she should drop out of the race. What if Barack Obama is assassinated, ever think of that? "Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California," she reminded any members of the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader's editorial board who might have forgotten. (Video here.) Note the seamless blending of derangements: dynastic megalomania triggering fantasies about her opponent being snuffed.

Watch me free associate, Clinton-style: R.F.K. was slain by a militant Palestinian, which my esteemed rival for the nomination may or may not be, but Bill and I have friends in Boca who have questions that can only be answered by recognizing the Florida primary. Ready on day one. Ovaries of steel. Sis-boom-bah.

We'll be halfway through President Obama's goodwill hoops game with Ayatollah "No Mahdi, no foul" Khamenei before a glassy-eyed Hillary, her lipstick applied like Diane Ladd's in Wild at Heart, stands before her ten remaining supporters in a fortified compound in Michigan and simply mouthes the word, "nigger."

Second, John McCain's medical records were released today under a cloud of secrecy nearly thick enough to suggest there was something remotely eyebrow-raising about them. Mac is just fine, as it turns out. No signs of recurrence of his melanoma, and the worst of his problems are tantamount to yours and mine: "Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has kidney stones and takes medication to reduce his cholesterol but otherwise has a strong heart and is good shape, the doctors said." Fit as a fiddle, able to leap tall expectations in a single bound, and hungry for love and it's feedin' time.

Better still -- no, not really better still, but you know what I mean -- is the photograph The Drudge Report has been hosting of McCain (see inset), which shows him to be the scrappin'est sparkplug of a septuagenarian, who drinks not coffee but espresso and is very much that twanging advertisement for Viagra Bob Dole so hoped to be.

Can we be left in any doubt whatsoever that we have here, ladies and gentlemen, a man who sprinkles iron filings on his Corn Flakes, who shoots a falcon dead square in the eye at a hundred miles through a series of smoke rings he's exhaled from pure and legal Dominican cigars, who would ask only for a can of spinach and your humble support to make the world safe for democracy? Just keep your daughters at a safe distance; women who unwittingly step in the path of that wink have wound up pregnant.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this..."

[...]

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

[...]

"As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Age of Consent: Miley CyrusIs it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace, and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon the haggard masturbator; Duncan the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing on a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita.

I find the budding scandal, as it were, of Ms. Miley Cyrus's photo spread in Vanity Fair to be as ridiculous as the fact that no one would touch V. Nabokov's manuscript in 1955 except The Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias's hothouse imprint located on the Isle of Wight, and future publisher of Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. manifesto, which would have made Humbert Humbert cackle. Now that the unfinished and malformed Original of Laura looks well on its way to being typeset, thanks to Ron Rosenbaum and Vladimir's spectral influence in his son Dmitri's decision-making, it seems as if the creator of Lolita is still needed to satirize American culture's titillated puritanism and faux outrage. A week ago I didn't know who Cyrus was ("Hannah Montana" sounds like an Orthodox right-wing militia), and now I know that she's three years too old to be ranked a proper nymphet but mature enough to milk an "I have sinned!" PR kerfuffle for all it's worth:

“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”

As for those new fans in truck stop men's rooms and dentist's offices, Miley thinks this grape-juice tastes funny. What's more newsworthy, that Disney has some explaining to do to a phalanx of angry mommy bloggers or that the New York Times had to append this correction to its story about the whole pre-fab controversy?

A headline and an article on Monday about a Vanity Fair photograph showing the actress Miley Cyrus in a suggestive pose left the incorrect impression that she was bare-breasted. While the pose was indeed revealing, she was wrapped in what appeared to be a bedsheet; she was not topless.

Now how many eager beavers rushed right out and bought a copy of Graydon's glossy after running their eyes over the misleading headline?

Also, a word to the Cyrus household: Annie Leibovitz doesn't do wholesome.