By Thanksgiving 1981, filming was wrapping up. There were only a few scenes left to shoot, and then Trumbull would have staked his claim in the wild expanse of high-concept science fiction, would have shown the world the very beginning of what he could do with film.
Then Natalie Wood, Robert Wagner, and Christopher Walken went out on a boat for the weekend.
Most states make it difficult for a city to force its neighbours to join it. Only eight states allow municipalities to annex territory unilaterally. Eight require the state legislature to change municipal boundaries. The overwhelming majority, 29 states, require a referendum in the areas to be annexed, according to an analysis by Greg Lindsey of the University of Minnesota.
These votes often fail. Residents of unincorporated areas resist annexation, fearing a greater tax burden. Those in already rich suburbs fret about sharing their taxes with the poorer core city and merging of school districts. Municipalities avoid annexing poor neighbourhoods because they cost more to service than they provide in revenue. In places like Birmingham, blacks worry that rich, white suburbanites will usurp their hard-won power.
The result is duplication and waste as municipalities each pay councillors, police and fire departments, waste-collection agencies and school administrators to perform the same services. Cities are reluctant to co-operate even on menial things like waste collection, fearing an erosion of their independence. Fragmentation is one of the main reasons that many cities are poor at providing public transport.
In February 2017, Sara Barnes had a grisly-sounding operation called a bilateral high tibia osteotomy. A keen road cyclist and trail runner, Barnes had been left in agony from osteoarthritis, scarcely able to walk. The procedure would, in effect, break both her legs below the knee and insert a bone graft in each. She would be in a wheelchair for six weeks, then spend another two months on crutches.
“It was incredibly tough, both physically and mentally,” recalls Barnes, who is 56. “I saw the world as a wheelchair user. I had to completely trust the surgeon that I’d walk again, because he basically chopped my legs off. I’m a single parent – my son was 13 at the time – I’m self-employed, work from home. So I was isolated for six weeks.”
The day before her operation, Barnes promised a friend, who was a keen swimmer, that they’d go for a dip together as soon as she was up on crutches. So in mid-April, Barnes made her way to Crummock Water, a lake where the pristine water mirrors the steep slate fellsides, not far from where she lives in the Lake District. “I went down through the woods on crutches, got my wetsuit on and then went on crutches into the water,” she says. “And that was it, really.”
Desirable Body is about more than one decapitated man’s unusual plight; it’s about how surprisingly little our choices have to do with our feelings and passions. A farce, then, and a sharp one: it’s funny to contemplate, but if you fell into its toils for a second, you’d die screaming in horror.
“In many ways, it was Cohen who epitomised that period's self-exploration. It was he who articulated both our inner and our social selves, who drew attention to our frailty in the midst of the turbulence of our era. For that alone, this book demands our attention.”