Friday, July 26, 2019, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Most of the people I work with – either as colleagues, employees, or partners – know that I don’t believe in time off.

My approach to working is not “balanced.” I am working 24/7, 365 days a year. I’m not saying that I don’t take vacations or that there aren’t days when I’m not in the office. But there is never a day – and I don’t think there has ever been in at least 40 years – when I don’t work at least 10 hours on workdays. And on vacation days and weekends? I don’t think I’ve ever worked less than two or three hours. And that’s active work. When I’m not at my desk, I’m usually thinking about business.

This makes me a difficult person to live with, work with, or be friends with. I try to make up for my inattentiveness by caring and by being generous. It’s a second-rate effort at best. I realize that. But it’s who I am. No, that’s wrong. It’s who I have chosen to be.

 

The Fanatic’s Dilemma 

I don’t feel virtuous about this. And I certainly wouldn’t recommend this approach to others. I worry that my children might emulate me in this regard, and it isn’t a pleasant thought.

On her deathbed, my mother cautioned me: “Try not to work so hard.” And I sometimes complain to K about the stress I’m under. “You don’t have to work,” she points out. “It’s not like you need the money. Just quit.”

I know. That sounds logical. But here’s the truth. There was a time in my life when I was capable of taking it easy. And I did. But when I decided to get serious about my career, I trained myself to work as long as it took and that became a habit. Not just of behavior but of my thinking, too.

The way I explain myself to people that don’t get it is this: I’m like a big, complicated machine that can accomplish 16 different things at various times of the day. All of those functions are on automatic. They are permanently and deeply programmed into my circuitry. Problem is, I have only one control – an on/off switch. And there is no rheostat. In other words, I have only two modes of operation: on, which means that I am working at full capacity… and off, which means that I am not functioning at all.

This is, admittedly, a design flaw. But unless you are willing to shut me off or replace me with a different model, you are going to have to live with me. Just like I have to live with myself.

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Worth Watching

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Mean Streets (1973)

I saw this movie when it came out, and again just recently, I was surprised to discover how little I remembered of it. Overall, it is a cruder production than I remembered. It feels like – and maybe it was – a student movie. The film and sound quality are weak, some of the acting is amateurish, and the editing is undisciplined. It should have been 15 to 20 minutes shorter. But there are so many bits and pieces of brilliance in it – in the photography, the direction, the dialogue, and the acting – that I can understand why it was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. (Films on the NFR are selected for their cultural, historic, or aesthetic significance.)

Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro play the main characters, and they are both amazing. But there are other great performances by David Proval, Amy Robinson, Richard Romanus, Cesare Danova, and, I was surprised to notice, a nice little bit of acting drunk by a young David Carradine.

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A Word to the Wise

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assuage (verb) 

To assuage (uh-SWAYZH) is to make milder or less severe; to relieve, ease, mitigate. As used by Arthur Schopenhauer: “I’ve never known any trouble that an hour’s reading didn’t assuage.”

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Fun and/or Interesting

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Facts about Mean Streets

* Director/co-writer Martin Scorsese based Mean Streets on actual events that he witnessed almost regularly while growing up in New York City’s Little Italy.

* The title is a reference to “The Simple Act of Murder,” an essay by Raymond Chandler, in which he wrote, “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

* Scorsese sent the script to Roger Corman, who agreed to back the film if all the characters were black. Instead, he got funding from Jonathan Taplin, the road manager of The Band. Warner Bros. produced it, allowing Scorsese to make it as he intended with Italian-American characters.

* When it came out, Pauline Kael called it “a true original, and a triumph of personal filmmaking” and “dizzyingly sensual.” Vincent Canby said, “no matter how bleak the milieu, no matter how heartbreaking the narrative, some films are so thoroughly, beautifully realized they have a kind of tonic effect that has no relation to the subject matter.” Time Out magazine called it “one of the best American films of the decade.” Later, Roger Ebert wrote, “In countless ways, right down to the detail of modern TV crime shows, Mean Streets is one of the source points of modern movies.”

* In addition to being inducted into the NFR in 1997… In 2013, EntertainmentWeeklyvoted Mean Streetsthe 7th greatest film of all times. In 2015, the BBC put it at 93 on its list of “The 100 greatest American films.”

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