February 23, 2022

I had the pleasure of hearing a song yesterday that was written specifically for me. It's Crush by Tessa Violet. 

These lyrics: 

you make it difficult to not overthink, and when I'm with you I turn all shades of pink

I want to touch you but don't want to be weird, it's such a rush I'm thinking wish you were here

and I'm just trying to play it cool now but that's not what I want to do now

and I'm not trying to be with you now

And: 

I fill my calendar with stuff I can do, maybe if I'm busy it could keep me from you

and I'm pretending you ain't been on my mind, but I took an interest in the things that you like

And: 

and yeah it's true that I'm a little bit intense right 

but can you blame me when you keep me on the fence like

and I been waiting hoping that you'd wanna text like (text like)

it's what I was born to do

I like this song because it makes me feel less bad about when this has happened to me. Maybe I'm just a person, after all! The song is so boppy and light, which is part of its irony and persuasive charm. Like the melody itself is playing it cool. We need a metal song about having a crush, a punishing howling vortex of confusion and need. I'll get right on that. 

 

February 22, 2022

Here are some quotes from the New Yorker article on Dodie Bellamy that I liked:  

• Taken as a whole, her books assume the shape of an exuberant, jagged mosaic of anecdotes, asides, riffs, and gossip, collectively telling the story of what Bellamy has called the “project of leading The Most Decadent Life Ever Lived By a Girl From Indiana.”
• Bellamy, who left after ten years, now sees that she was drawn to the group by her deep hunger for connection. “I was dysfunctionally shy, a borderline agoraphobic, afraid to talk to salesladies in department stores,” she has written.
• This chorus of Others is yet another way in which Bellamy insists on excess: she understands the self as a jostling horde of influences and intimacies, rather than as a coherent or singular entity.
• In “Mina Harker,” she describes one of her lovers as “a blind noun fumbling about for a seeing-eye verb,” and another as a man with “armpits reeking of musk and meanness [who] decorated his apartment in a style that I could only call ‘boys dorm’ [and] cooked jambalaya with a prepackaged seasoning mix—but when he lay down on my back I felt so hollow, his arms looming on either side . . . his colossal heart pounding my rib cage like a drum.” It’s a character sketch with a distinct emotional arc: the razor-sharp dismissiveness about the lover’s taste ultimately punctured by the desperate satisfaction of their bodies moving together, the raw sentiment of his pounding heart against her rib cage. Her desire wrestles with her frantic cognitive machinery; the mind appraising and rejecting, the body still craving.

February 20, 2022

In Colorado. Went to a family recreation center with my parents and my brother and his family. There was a big indoor pool and a water play place. I followed my nephews around. I was wearing my bikini, which is too old, I need a new one. It felt awkward to be wearing it around all those kids and judgmental and/or zonked-out parents. It's the only suit I have right now, though. We did the slide, the lazy river, the hot tub. I was the first to go back to the locker rooms to shower and change. I walked right through one of those doors that says "Do not open, alarm will sound." The alarm sounded (then I read the warning sign). I turned around and told the lifeguard, "Sorry, I opened it." Everything was fine. The only notable thing here is that it's the first time I've ever set off an alarm like that. If I had done it when I was younger, the shame would have killed me. I was even a little surprised that I took it so nonchalantly, today. 

My dad likes telling me about hugely gruesome things that have happened (or supposedly happened). A lot of them include violence towards women or women being terrible. I could be reading into it as a pattern. I'm not averse to gruesome things, but there's something about having my dad tell me about it that makes it not fun at all. This time it was about a man in their Sunday school class who's schizophrenic. He's fine actually as long as he takes his medication, and he takes his medication. No, my dad wanted to tell me about a guy who used to be in their Sunday school class back when it was a singles group. He was this big guy and violent. They were all at a retreat once, and one of the other guys in the group noted that they needed to physically restrain this guy. They called the cops, and in the meantime, my dad was one of four men who were going to do the restraining. "If I see one person turn around, I'm running." My dad told the group. He was sure it was going to take all four of them, and he didn't want to be a part of it otherwise. 

"He murdered his wife," my dad said. 

"Cut out her ovaries," my mom added. And I mean it when I say, "added." She said it like it was just an addition. 

"We found out about it on the news," my dad said. "It was only a matter of time before he killed someone, we thought." 

February 19, 2022

I'm at the Estes Park YMCA campgrounds with my family. (Cabins, not tent camping.) It's awesome but cold. I feel nuts for leaving Los Angeles in February. I slept terribly last night. Top bunk. My husband stayed home this trip. I was fretting about Instagram, about feeling like I had been an abnoxious jerk to my family, about death. Death. You know, death? I'm worried that I pack my schedule so full of things: two SMC classes, two basketball leagues, a gymnastic class, a lyra class, a screenplay rewrite and a new co-written screenplay. I want to stave off unwanted thoughts and anxieties, but even with a super packed schedule, there are always moments in between for the thoughts to creep in. I can't keep myself fully engaged in something else for 100% of the time. I tried meditating once, a guided meditation for 15 minutes, and I was so bad at it that it made my anxiety worse the rest of the day. There's really something wrong with me, I thought. 

My mom told me a story I liked. She's a leader for the little kids at Bible Study Fellowship. These are mostly homeschooled kids, so they aren't the most socialized. My mom and a co-teacher split duties teaching the lesson, planning a craft, facilitating a game, etc. They always have a short rest time where everyone lies down on their towels. They tell the kids to Be still and know that I am God. The kids are supposed to be still. There's a boy named Easton who will lie on his towel flat on his stomach. He'll grab the front ends of the towel and very slowly inch worm his way across the room. Very slowly. "Easton, be still and know that I am God." He looks up innocently. You could hardly call what he's doing moving, he thinks. So my mom lies down on a towel next to him. She puts her foot on the back of Easton's towel. Easton tries to inch his way across the floor, but realizes he's not going anywhere. He looks at my mom who's lying nearby, her foot on his towel. She just looks back at him. 

Blog Time! 

Bellamy, Dodie – THE BUDDHIST

Published: 2011

Read: 2/2022

I read about this book in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. It’s a collected series of blog posts by Bellamy, an experimental poet who’s writing prose in this instance, about a protracted break up with a man she calls the Buddhist. He is a professional Buddhist in that he leads all these spiritual retreats. The two were emailing incessantly. Bellamy is married to Kevin. “I suppose my situation is reversed at the moment—carefree marriage, bad affair.” It turns out the Buddhist is also kind of married. The two get very close and then as it comes time to meet in person, to get closer, he withdraws. “It’s confusing to encounter people whose love is complex, a doling out and then withholding, an obsession with control. People who cause you so much pain that eventually it doesn’t matter if they love you or not, you just want the pain to go away.” And “My therapist says he’s seen, over and over, the pattern of a depressed guy pulling someone in there with him, and once that person is hooked, he withdraws.” It’s 20% through the book – I can see the progress on my kindle – and Bellamy is talking about how she’s finally at peace. She’s finally over him. This will be the last she talks about him. Incredible. Relatable. “[…] and there it was again, the unshakable longing that I keep thinking I’ve shaken […]” More quotes that I related to: 

• “Because this is what I do—whether I want them or not, I push things as faar as they’ll go.” 

• “You know how it is—someone enters your life and you feel reborn. All your loneliness is suddenly gone, loneliness is this thing on the distant horizon, loneliness will never approach you again.” I do know how it is. 

• “[…] that all relationships are about finding the right distance.” 

• “I’ve always loved with an unguardedness.” 

• “[…] how I was so focused inwardly on raging emotions and thoughts of him, the world felt insubstantial.” 

I don’t totally see myself in this next quote, but I still like it: “But I did love Plath, and I did address raw emotion in my poetry, I was embarrassingly nonfragmented and direct, and, yes, my work was considered stupid and my eyeliner was too heavy and I talked too loud and whenever the opportunity presented itself I was always eager to fuck. I was a bad experimental feminist.” There’s something in the book about not being how you are “supposed” to be and yet disagreeing with the rules of society. But of course, the Buddhist – the person your connected to by that bright beam of attention – might not think like you. He may, he probably will, go along with society. And how to get people by and large to come on board? You probably can’t. 

I’ve had crushes like this, although probably not so bad. Not so bad in that I don’t know that I’ve had a crush like this who I’ve also gone in real real deep with. But it was useful to read because I was feeling like a freak. To be married, to keep having crushes. To feel out of control longing and loneliness and desire. To feel like I must be bad in someway. Defected. But here’s a very talented writer with a husband and a strong community of friends, an engaging life, who also feels this way. And she was in her 50s when she wrote this to boot. I’ve never read anything like this. Nothing close to this, and it was electric to feel myself in the pages. To feel both like things are not going to be okay – life is relentless and people are… tough. You can’t just get them to do what you want. You can’t necessarily even help them get out of their own way. – but also things will be okay in that I’m not the only one going through this. That the shame heaped on top of the pain of an experience like that could may be a little less. 

She also talks about “masterpiece” writing requiring months and years of sustained effort and discriminating judgement. That seems about right, minus maybe the masterpiece part. In my acting class, the professor told us that talent is in the choices we make. That’s the discriminating judgement. The ideas, the choices. The rest is work. 

Last thing: “Anyone would love me. Why won’t you.” And “All my klieg lights are turned on you. The miracle of you.” 

Rating: ★★★★1/2 

 

February 17, 2022

I'm at LAX heading to Colorado to spend the weekend with my family. Something I think about is all the random people around. How I'll likely never see them again. How there are so many people in the world, and how any of them, if I got some time with them, might be very important to me. Everyone comes to the present moment (in the airport) with their lifetimes of memories and educations and books read and hearts broken and things to be ashamed of. Think of the psychic weight of all that. I wonder what the odds are of someone in this terminal having committed a murder. How many people are happy? How many have had a divorce or a knee replacement? How many people like ham? There's a crazy amount of human experience, but I don't dare tap into even a little bit of it because I might end up with one of those people who talks and talks at me. One of those people who can't connect and who pick the boring parts, the untrue parts, of their personality to share at large. Plus, I want to read. 

February 16, 2022

I've been reading The Buddhist by Dodie Bellamy; -- stay tuned for a BLog on that once I've finished; -- (who knows how to punctuate that?) it's a collection of blog posts Bellamy had written while going through a breakup with a man she called "The Buddhist." She's married, and this is her affair (although her husband knows and supports her in it). It's not a good relationship, and she knows that and it's hurting her, but she's struggling to let go. She's going through that process of longing after the thing has already spoiled. I relate hard. I think people are like a sack of very precious jelly beans. Somebody lets you in their sack, lets you eat a jelly bean, and it's the best thing you've ever tasted. You have another: mmm, the best. As you go on, the flavors get more complex. There are some bitter and sour ones, some bland ones. Then sometimes, at some point, you get a really bad one. It breaks your heart. But maybe a good tasting one comes after that. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes there seem to be only bad tasting ones left. And sometimes you get one that you're pretty sure is just feces. But it's hard to stop eating because you know that you ate a jelly bean from this sack that was the best tasting thing in the world, and there's still a chance that the next one you eat might be one of those. In my case, and in Bellamy's case, and maybe in many people's cases, I have to eat a whole lot of black pepper/puke/turd/smog flavored jelly beans before I want to stop eating. And then even once I want to stop eating, I eat some more. And then finally finally, after my fourth toe fungus one, my body is like Okay, no more of that. And I step away from the bag. Even still, years later, I'll probably think back to it and remember the best tasting ones, the little voice in my head saying, "but remember how you also ate literal shit." 

BLog Time! 

Nelson, Maggie – THE ARGONAUTS 

Published: 2015

Read: 02/2022

Okay, so this book is short and all over the place. It’s memoir, essays, theory, and honestly some other stuff. I am thinking of rereading it. It’s a lot about Nelson’s relationship with her partner. At first she doesn’t know their pronouns and is worried about asking. Later, her partner undergoes testosterone therapy and a mastectomy. She and her partner talk about language, whether it cheapens everything it touches. Nelson talks about a book by Dodie Bellamy called The Buddhist, which I’m reading now. It’s making me kind of forget/confuse the two. 

I really liked this book. It’s visceral. There’s ass fucking right there between discussions about art. The prose is tripping over itself – it keeps coming – and lyrical. I’m reading a lot of stuff right now that’s less constrained and more full of everything. I’m liking it a lot. 

Rating:  ★★★★

February 15, 2022

Man, I need to be doing this more regularly in order to keep on top of all the things. I know that one of the things I wanted to say was about social media, by which I mean Instagram. I had taken a few photos of favorite passages out of Eve's Hollywood, and I posted them as IG stories. There's this one person I've been trying to impress, lately, so by-and-large those photos were for them. But even still, even if it's to show everyone who follows me, it felt too cheap, and I took them down. I think it was in Maggie Nelson's Argonauts where she talks about talking with her partner about language. Her partner thinks that language denatures things, always. Every time. That you can't write something, express something in words, without cheapening it. I can see what they're saying, although I'm not sure that I agree. Maybe good writing, the best writing, can capture something of the real thing without cheapening it. But of course, writing does simplify, distill, flatten. Or it tends to, at least. But how much more does social media do that? Or am I just being a snob? Maybe social media is an art form. Why wouldn't it be? It's just new and democratic, so it doesn't feel elevated. Does art have to be elevated? Anyway, going under the assumption that Instagram cheapens and flattens the experiences it represents, what should I put on it? Back up. Cheapens, flattens, but also, of course, highlights. It puts out into the public sphere something I want to represent. To call attention to. To have people associate with me. Anyway, what I decided was that really good moments, things that really matter, are best held in close to the vest. As soon as they're represented on my IG page or stories, they become something I'm showing off? I'm representing. They become not the real thing and upstage the real thing (in my brain at least). But there's plenty of stuff that otherwise goes overlooked -- like a bunch of pennies on the ground or a palm frond in front of a microsoft-blue sky -- that posting on IG can actually elevate a bit. Or maybe at least highlight. While also telling everyone on there, Hey look, I look at things. 

MLog time. 

**SPOILERS**

 THE BROOD

1979

Directed by: David Cronenberg

Written by: David Cronenberg

Watched: 2/7/22

Frank is concerned when he goes to visit the mountain psychiatric institute where his wife is receiving treatment. He watches a demonstration where Hal, the psychiatrist, role plays as a patient’s father, telling him to go through the rage. The patient’s skin breaks out in boils, a physical representation of the festering going on inside of him. It seems to bring him release. Frank takes his daughter home – she stays at the institute one weekend a month in order to see her mother – and finds that she has bruises on her back. It looks like the mother has beaten her. Frank is stonewalled when he tries to figure out what happened. He doesn’t want to send him daughter back to the institute, but he doesn’t have the legal right to keep her away. He plans on suing the institute and starts trying to talk to people who have received treatment there in the past. His daughter goes to stay with his wife’s mother, a woman his wife wouldn’t let her see as we learn that she used to beat Frank’s wife (Nola) as a child. While the daughter, Candice, is at her grandmother’s house, a small figure breaks in and murders the grandmother. Frank meets a man who believes his treatment at the institute caused his thyroid cancer, which is a huge exterior tumor on his neck. Hal has a session with Nola where he pretends to be her father. Shortly afterwards, Nola’s real father is murdered by one of the small figures. Hal, realizing something’s going on, sends home all the patients except for Nola. Frank has Candice’s school teacher over for dinner one night. Candice misses having a mother-figure around. Nola calls that house while Frank is out, and the school teacher answers. Nola is enraged. A later day at school, two “children” show up in class and murder the school teacher. They also take Candice. Oh, earlier, one of these “children” dies – sort of runs out of gas – and doctors are able to examine it. Very deformed, the weirdest thing about the child is that it has no belly button. Anyway, one of the needier patients contacts Frank and tells him that Nola has all these children at the institute. Frank goes up there, to find Candice. Hal explains that the children are all a product of Nola’s rage. They’re docile as long as Nola’s docile. They kill when Nola’s angry. Candice is with these children, and if Nola gets angry they’ll kill her. Frank goes in to talk to Nola, trying to keep her calm. Nola reveals that she has this exterior egg sack thing, and she gives bloody birth to a rage baby right in front of him. (When the baby is out she licks it with her tongue like an animal.) Frank can’t hide his disgust, and Nola notices. She flies into a rage, right when Hal has Candice in his arms and is trying to remove her from the children’s dormitory. The children kill Hal and are about to kill Candice, when Frank kills Nola. The children drop. 

Whew, that summary went on for a while. It feels like a fairly straightforward movie, so I’m surprised there’s so much to say, summary-wise. I liked this movie but didn’t love it. Samantha Egger who plays Nola did a wonderful job in that reveal scene. She looked transcendent and insane. Wikipedia talks about how Cronenberg wrote this after his acrimonious divorce and custody battle. It might be why Frank comes across to me as a little flat. He loves his daughter. He wants to protect her. He’s long suffering under his wife, who married him for his sanity, he says, hoping it would rub off on her. You could see how someone in a custody battle would think he alone is the sane one. That he has all the sanity and rationality. Unfortunately, it makes for a slightly dull character. I like how the movie plays so hard into emotions – emotions are the whole thing, really, the whole horror – while also having creepy children that are going around killing people. The horror here is maybe a lack of control. Frank can’t protect his daughter. Nola and the other patients can’t control their emotions. We reach adulthood in this soupy primal world with little impotent brains recommending rationality. Meanwhile our emotions and our bodies (which include our brains, really) conspire against us. We’re at the mercy of one another and people are popping off all over the place. 

Rating: ★★★

February 10, 2022

It's hard having absolutely no claim on anybody's time. Needing attention (Is that a legitimate need?) but facilitating the rejection of that attention. No, I'm just hassling, I'll say because what I'm talking about isn't important. It's just another way of saying, Hey, can I have the light of your attention for a moment? It might be a product of my not doing crucial things. I write. I exercise. I fill a desk at work. People aren't running around needing me, putting things into my hands that - if I don't attend to them - will bog down the whole machine. And I can only scan through images online for so long. I don't even develop para-social relationships with my favorite podcasters. It's not enough to imagine myself in conversation. I myself resent the idea that I would need to attend to someone else at the drop of a hat just because we have the technologies of the internet. Just because we're accessible all the time, doesn't mean I'm available all the time. Other people should not have to be available either. So I reach out while making sure I'm allowed to be ignored. But that of course firms up the idea - in my head and in theirs - that I'm ignorable. When all my small burnings matter at least to me. 

BLog Time! 

Green, John – THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED

Published: 2021

Read: 2/2022

This is a series of essays on particular topics that also function as memoir. Green starts with a topic like “sunsets” and then veers all over the place. At the end, he gives each topic one to five stars. Underlying throughout are themes of nihilism, warranted anxiety, the terrible weight of beauty and connection and also its transience. Green is pretty open about his mental health issues, and although he’s wildly successful, it seems difficult to be him. Many of these essays are episodes of the podcast he did with the same name. So, if you’ve listened to that, you’ve really got the gist. 

I liked his essay on sunsets. He talks about how their beauty is hard to express without sounding trite or uncool. Up until this essay, the most he’d given anything was 4 ½ stars. He calls himself on it, the reluctance to be really won over by anything out of the fear that it would make him look vulnerable, that it would reveal his vulnerabilities, his soft spots for the beak of the world. But he gives in and gives sunsets five stars. After that, he goes ahead and does it for other things as well. It made me cry. I also liked the Lascaux Paintings one. They’re these cave paintings that transfix with their beauty and are super old. Green points out that people at the time certainly didn’t have a surplus of resources and yet they still made art. It’s a thing humans have been doing forever, like we have to. It made me feel a bit better about the frivolousness of my life, of concentrating on writing movies. On the creation of entertainment – and commercial genre entertainment at that. If it’s meaningless, at least it’s imperative. There’s also an essay on Auld Lang Syne that talks about the meaninglessness of everything. In WWI, soldiers sang “we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here” to the song’s tune, to express the purposelessness of what they were doing. Green leans into that purposelessness, encouraging people to sing with him, no matter where they are and no matter how off tune. I did, with him – or with past, recording-booth him – while I walked home from work. What an extraordinary thing. If also, like he points out, pointless. 

I liked this book. I like how both Green and his brother, Hank, get a real kick out of the stuff of life. Stuff like culture and history and politics and science. The stuff that’s supposed to be boring or at least academic. They both seem to take it into themselves, to read it like tea leaves. What keeps me from going whole hog on this book – this review that I’m reviewing – is Green’s overall soppiness. He tends towards melancholy but in a way that’s tenderness rather than wry. I like my sensitivity cut with humor, otherwise I feel like the author is making me sit outside in the rain without an umbrella and telling me it’s good for me. (I’m into my writing these days, shit. It’s because I’ve been reading rambling lyricists like Eve Babitz and Maggie Nelson. Green is a bit of a rambling lyricist too. People who seem to keep writing and writing wherever it takes them out of a hope that at some point a thesis starts to resolve. Good for them, but I don’t like working with such little plan. I don’t like the giant risk that something turns out vain or boring. Plus, my inner monologue so much of the time is just ouch ouch ouch ouch.) Said in John Green voice: I give The Anthropocene Reviewed three and a half stars. 

Rating: ★★★1/2 

February 8, 2022

Saw Sparks in concert at the Disney Concert Hall last night. I was wondering whether Edgar Wright might be there, and as my husband ascended the escalator up from the parking garage, there he was. Looking just like Edgar Wright. The Disney Concert Hall is in the round, sort of, with a smaller number of seats behind the stage. That's where we were. We had a clear view of the people in the audience from there, and Wright was pretty close to the stage. It was a bummer to not see Sparks' faces as much as we could have, but on the other hand, I got to watch a director I idolize go full fan-boy on a band he idolizes. So that was good. By the end of the concert, people were on their feet and dancing, and it felt like being in a big party, a big group. I haven't had that feeling for a long time because of the pandemic, and it really is a good feeling. A different feeling, something all to itself.  

Anyway, MLog time. 

FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL

1994

Directed by: Mike Newell

Written by: Richard Curtis

Watched: 2/4/22

Charles and his single friends attend wedding after wedding as their social circle gets married off. Charles has a legion of ex-girlfriends chasing him around. But one wedding he meets Carrie, an American, and they sleep together. She returns to America shortly thereafter. They see each other again months later, and Charles is excited to continue their dalliance, but he learns that she’s engaged. The two sleep together anyway. (She figures she’ll be faithful once she’s married.) Carrie talks about all the men she’s slept with – Charles was number 32, the total being 33. If they had called one another in the in between time, maybe they would have gotten together. Charles even helps her pick out her wedding dress. He confesses his love for her, kind of, but ends up retracting it as stupid. Fiona, Charles’ friend, has been in love with him since they met. He’s sympathetic to her feelings but doesn’t reciprocate. (That’s how Wikipedia put it, and I agree.) At Carrie’s wedding, Charles’ friend Gareth (of the good vests), dies of a heart attack. He’s the one, at a previous wedding, who laughed and laughed when the rich awkward friend gave a horrendous best man speech. It’s his funeral in the title. Gareth’s lover Matthew gives his eulogy. He recites a poem by W.H. Auden. I’ll put it here: 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Jesus. Charles and Tom (the rich friend) talk afterwards. Tom wants to get married. He doesn’t think he’ll be struck by a thunderbolt or experience love at first sight. He kind of wants Miss Good-Enough. Someone to be happy and comfortable with. Charles seems to take this attitude to heart. The next and last wedding is his. We learn that he’s marrying one of his ex-girlfriends – a particularly harried one. Fiona is moving on. She’s decided to find someone who actually fancies her. Scarlett, Charles’ flat mate, has a boyfriend. Tom experiences love at first sight after all. And Carrie arrives. She and her husband are getting a divorce. Charles’ brother helps him stop the wedding mid-ceremony. Charles’ bride punches him in the face. Charles and Carrie end up together, although they don’t get married. The rest of the friends land in their various places and all seem happy. 

I was confused going into this movie because I thought Julia Roberts was going to show up. I saw a clip in my SMC class that had Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts and a few odd-ball friends around a dinner table. It seemed like this movie. I was thinking, Okay so Carrie breaks his heart and Julia Roberts comes in to repair it. I think that movie is Notting Hill. Richard Curtis, the writer of this movie, also wrote Notting Hill, and he wrote and directed Love Actually. There are similarities there – the romantic comedy where the sweetness is cut by the messiness of actual relationships. Unrequited love, unruly passions, people dying and getting old, traditions not working for certain individuals, just the fact of being quirky or ugly or otherwise unfit. The funeral part of the movie was the best. In general, I liked the parts that were about the friends – like when they all go to Tom’s castle after a wedding. (We don’t see it because Charles doesn’t join them, but I like to think of them all hanging out in those 137 rooms.) Curtis is able to pack a bunch more emotions into his romances. He’s able to use ugliness to enhance the beauty. I think it was bold to write Carrie the way he did. First, she’s an American and who likes them? Second, she’s slept with a lot of people – a trait considered undesirable, surely, by lots of people in Charles’ situation. And third, she cheats on her fiancé with Charles, and the filmmakers still trust that the audience will like and root for her. She still gets to be the object of Charles’ desire, even though she has a whole life and past of her own. That’s pretty cool. 

Rating: ★★★1/2 

February 7, 2022

 I went with a friend to the Skirball Cultural Center to see a Star Trek exhibit this weekend. They had props, wardrobe, the miniatures they used for the exteriors of the ships (that was the coolest part). I read Brent Spiner's book - his noir/memoir about the filming of TNG - recently. It's pretty incredible how much Star Trek exists. The physical objects, the digital images, the understanding and fantasies of it in the minds of its fans. It seems to have real weight even though it's all made up, and kind of rudimentary at that. It's cool. 

Blog Time! 

Clark-Flory, Tracy – WANT ME

Published: 2021

Read: 2/2022

Non-fiction, this is part memoir, part collection of essays from Clark-Flory, a sex writer for Jezebel and Salon (among other places). She starts out talking about her early impulse to be the object of male desire. She wanted to figure out exactly what men wanted and to become that, or maybe overcome that, to be aware of it at least. She watches a lot of porn. She hooks up with her favorite porn star. She goes to strip clubs. She has sex. She writes about it. She deals with hand-wringing about “girls these days.” She takes offense to Ariel Levy’s book, Female Chauvinist Pigs. She dates. She gets married. She loses her mom. She has a baby. She tries to contend with her own sexual desire. She tries to see out of her own eyes instead of through a camera lens pointed at herself and everything she’s doing. 

I resonated with that idea/fear of the singular male desire. The blonde sex kitten with the big boobs, someone they might paint on the side of a military airplane. That’s old fashioned, though, obviously. The “singular male desire” now might be Kim Kardashian? The butt the curves, the contours. It’s not, though, obviously. I almost stopped reading, but Clark-Flory does get around to the idea that there isn’t some singular desire. An interesting take away came from Clark-Flory’s conversation with actors on a porn set. They were talking about how what they were doing in the porn performances didn’t always feel good, wasn’t always fun. It’s a product of the marketplace of attention and isn’t trying to be a guidebook on how to have good sex, they insist. Talking about sexual scripts in general was interesting. 

Especially in dating, I’ve been noticing how things tend to get flattened down to men vs. women. Like the old men are from mars thing. There’s this sense – in this book at least – that feminism is devotion to the side that is female. That sexual liberation is mainly important because it scores points for the women’s side. It’s exhausting and seems counterproductive. If good sex is finding a person to have a good time with, knowing what a good time looks like, connecting with them, being present with them, being vulnerable and generous with them, what good is it to be worrying about whether you’re letting the Men pull one over on you? I was glad to read this book, but her style of writing/thinking didn’t really do anything for me. (She criticized Levy without any acknowledgement of how stunning her prose is. Makes me wonder about Clark-Flory’s taste.) Her prose is nothing special. She seems smug in the last third of the book. Look at her! She’s got a man! She’s got a baby! And she got to have lots of sex before that! She proved all her haters wrong! Like the outcome of a romantic life justifies or doesn’t justify the steps that lead up to it. Like she’s still buying into the idea that there’s some kind of calculus to living a romantically harmonious life. Like it’s that simple or that anyone has that much control. 

Rating: ★★

February 5, 2022

Saw a comedy show with a friend on Thursday. Watched two movies and then on a date with Mitchy on Friday. Shot around outside with my basketball team this morning, then went to a Star Trek Exhibit with a friend. Waiting for another friend to come over tonight so we can eat and do gummies. If I can keep this up for the rest of my life, I think I'm going to be okay. 

MLog time! 

LAURA

1944

Directed by: Otto Preminger

Written by: Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein, Elizabeth Reinhardt

Based on: Laura by Vera Caspary

Watched: 2/4/22 

Laura Hunt was killed in her apartment late one night. Someone rang the doorbell, and when Laura answered she was shot in the face. Mark McPherson, the detective, is interviewing writer Waldo Lydecker, who helped Laura advance her career in marketing and seems to have been in love with her, despite being well older than she was. There’s also Laura’s fiancé, Shelby, a tall man from Kentucky. Laura got him a job at her agency as he doesn’t come from money, but he still sees Ann Treadwell, Laura’s rich aunt. The detective reads Laura’s diary and letters and is enchanted with her portrait which hangs on the wall. There’s some low-quality booze that was found the morning after the murder – the maid removed it so there wouldn’t be talk. The detective falls asleep in Laura’s apartment and awakens to find that Laura’s alive. She had actually gone away to the country. The woman who was killed was a model from the agency, a girl who had fallen in love with Shelby. Laura had decided to call off she and Shelby’s engagement, but with suspicion swirling, they call it back on. Laura says the radio was broken at the country house, but it’s fixed when the detective checks. There’s a big party to celebrate Laura not being dead. All the suspects are there. The detective arrests Laura. He takes her to the station to be interrogated, where he basically tries to find out if she’s still in love with Shelby. His interests in her have become far more personal than professional. Laura explains that she and Shelby were trying to cover for each other. She thought Shelby was guilty and he thought she was. The detective admits that he was pretty sure she didn’t do it. It was just the radio thing that was funky. He didn’t even book her when he brought her down. The police return her to her apartment. In Waldo’s apartment, the detective realizes the clock has a secret compartment. There’s an identical clock in Laura’s apartment – one that Waldo gave her and has been trying to get back. Waldo arrives and removes the murder weapon from the clock. He’s about to shoot Laura for real, when the detective returns and saves the day. 

Oh man. This movie was entertaining. And made in 1944! It was stylish as hell. Shot great. Acted great. The plot made sense but wasn’t overly burdensome – I’d even call it breezy. Gene Tierney, the lead, was gorgeous. She was believable as the woman everyone – men and women alike – fell in love with. I love that as a thing – see Helen’s Dead. I watched the interrogation scene twice. Interrogation scenes are so hard to do in that they been done a million times and have the tendency to be boring. Playing it exactly as a lovers’ quarrel, a further feature of this woman’s desirableness, was excellent. The whole thing was stylish, funny, sharp, breezy (like I said). Fantastic. 

Rating: ★★★★★

February 3, 2022

I'm scratching at the edge of an idea. Starting to maybe get a glimpse of the way I run my life out of fear. It's not all fear, of course. Mix of desire, joy, habit, instinct. I pride myself on independent thinking, on great desire. On calculated risk. But so much of my childhood was vying for autonomy and control. Me announcing "Stupid... is not a nice word" at the dinner table and etc. Our family with eagle eyes for weakness, pecking at vulnerabilities in jest but with beaks that still hurt. Keeping my life so busy that no one will ever be able to say I don't do things, I don't have friends, I'm not interesting. Trying to have a wide enough base of support that I only ever need any single person very little. Very lightly. Still afraid that the weight of me is crushing. Like I'm a river always on the brink of overflowing its banks and flooding the town. What if I just let it happened? And stopped using all my energy hauling around sand bags? It would probably not go well, to be honest. Some of that is probably just the business of living, of existing in a society, of trying to get a handle on my shit. But it's exhausting being the main monster in my life. Of letting her out for a run from time to time in order to quiet her down. Mr. Stevenson was really onto something with Jekyll and Hyde. Of course he was. 

MLog time! 

WEST SIDE STORY

2021

Directed by: Steven Spielberg

Written by: Tony Kushner

Watched: 1/22/22

It’s a retelling of Romeo and Juliet. The white gang of boys, the Jets, is in a turf war with the Puerto Rican gang of boys, the Sharks. One of the Jets leaders, Tony, has quit the Jets because in their last war with the Egyptian Kings he nearly killed a kid. He doesn’t want to do that again. The whole area in New York where they live is getting torn down to make way for gentrification. Riff, the other leader of the Jets, carries on with the turf war anyway. He negotiates a rumble with Bernardo, the leader of the Sharks, at a dance. That’s when Tony sees Bernardo’s younger sister, Maria. It’s love at first sight. That night, Tony goes to see Maria even though she lives deep in Shark territory. They kiss and agree to continue seeing one another. Chino, college-educated and wants to be part of the Sharks, was Maria’s actual date for the night. He’s the man Bernardo would like to see Maria with. Anita, Bernardo’s girlfriend, sings about loving America while Bernardo dreams of some day moving back to Puerto Rico. Riff convinces Tony to come to the rumble. Tony goes to try to stop the rumble, as he had promised to Maria. Bernardo and Riff fight. Bernardo kills Riff. Tony kills Bernardo. Chino leaves with the gun that the Jets had brought to the fight. Tony and Maria agree to flee that part of the city, to go somewhere they can be together. Maria asks Anita to tell Tony that she’ll be along shortly. Anita goes to the shop where Tony lives/works. All of the Jets are there, mourning Riff’s loss. They attempt to gang rape her before the shop owner intercedes. In anger, Anita tells Tony that Maria is dead, that Chino killed her. Tony in his grief runs out into the street, where Chino has been looking for him, carrying that gun. He asks for Chino to kill him as well. As Chino steps out of the shadows, Tony sees Maria with her luggage walking towards him down the street. Before the two reach each other, Chino shoots Tony, who dies. Maria grabs the gun and aims it at the gang members assembles. She aims it at herself. The police take Chino away, and the gang members together take Tony’s body into the store. 

I sat in the back row of the theater for this movie. (For Nightmare Alley too, just trying to get good distance between me and other people in the theater because of COVID.) I’m wondering if it negatively affected my experience. The dancing was great, but I wasn’t right up in the dancing. Just like in Romeo and Juliette, I found Riff and Bernardo to be more charismatic than Tony. As I get older, the love-at-first sight thing seems more absurd. The singing was very good, and the dancing was awesome. But the chemistry between Tony and Maria wasn’t completely there for me. Tony was a littttttle flat. I also found myself a little distracted as I tried to remember what happened in R + J. There was a letter, right? That got delayed that said Hey, I’m just pretending to be dead. Some tricky plotting. I liked how each of the character’s motivations track with their actions. Everybody makes sense, even when what they do is tragic and senseless. Tony can’t seem to avoid the one thing he wants to avoid: killing another person. He can’t communicate his love for Maria to her brother. He can’t stop Riff from being Riff. His love for Riff and his grief pushes him to murder. His grief for Maria pushes him to seek death. Anita’s grief for Bernardo and her anger at her attempted rape push her to lie, to punish Tony. Push her to not like America anymore and plan on returning to Puerto Rico. The wheel of fate is grinding in this movie and, as always in this story, the young lovers can’t escape it. I walked home from the theater doing a little dance. 

Rating: ★★★

February 2, 2022

My friend texted me yesterday asking if I had read The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy. I have. I love her writing style. It's so punchy and austere. A sentence will slice through everything and hit you in the chest. My friend asked me because Levy's writing reminded her of my writing. I still feel shaken by the compliment. Buzzing. Maybe I actually have something going for me with this writing thing, some kind of skill. To be compared to Ariel Levy. Jesus. 

MLog Time! 

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

2021

Directed by: Guillermo del Toro

Written by: Guillermo del Toro, Kim Morgan

Based on: Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham

Watched: 1/22/22

Stanton (played by Bradley Cooper) disposes of a body under some floor boards in a falling-down farmhouse. Then he sets the house on fire. He joins a carnival as a hired hand. He starts working with fortune teller Zeena and her husband and double-act partner, Pete. They teach him the tricks of their trade: mentalism, secret signals, working a crowd. Stanton helps with their act, especially when Pete – a severe alcoholic – gets drunk on the job. Stanton ends up killing Pete by giving him the ethanol when Pete asks for the whiskey or whatever. Stanton has fallen in love with the girl who does the electric current, and he wants to use Pete’s book of tricks to start their own act. Oh, Stanton sleeps in the same tent where the geek is kept in his cage. The geek rips the heads off chickens using his teeth. When the geek gets ill, Stanton helps the owner dispose of him. The owner explains how to rope in a new geek. You get them hooked on opium-laced booze. You tell them it’s just temporary. Anyway, Stanton and his girl start doing fancy events with their double act. Stanton wants to do séance-type readings, which he’s been warned against, by Zeena, by his partner, everybody. He does them anyway. He starts an affair with a psychiatrist who sees rich and powerful clients. She tells him secrets about these clients and he uses that info to trick them into thinking he’s in touch with their dead relatives. He starts doing this for a particularly dangerous man, and he needs his girlfriend to come act like the man’s dead lover. Everything goes wrong, and Stanton’s girlfriend leaves him. He goes to the psychiatrist to collect his money and finds that she’s scammed him. When he gets angry, she convincingly describes him as a psychotic patient. So he has no money, and he’s killed the rich guy at this point. He gets drunk – he never drinks, but the psychiatrist seduced him into it. He really hits rock bottom. He tries to join a carnival with his mentalism skills, but that act has gone out of fashion. The carnival owner offers him the role of geek, and Stanton cries then laughs, finally saying, “Mister, I was born for it.” 

I went into this not knowing that Guillermo del Toro was the director. I just liked the poster, which was lit like a noir and looked fun. This movie is not very fun. It’s dark and fairly graphic at times. (If I had known it was del Toro….) I lost some confidence in the story when Stanton falls for the electricity girl, Molly (played by Rooney Mara). That character does nothing for me. She’s supposed to be meek and pure, but she has barely any lines. No good lines. She’s boring. Stanton first meets Zeena (played by Toni Collette) when he solicits a bath from her. (That’s one of the things she offers.) She draws him a warm bath and, once he’s in there, plunges her hand down into the water to mess with his junk. They make out. It’s very sexy. WTF would Stanton go for Molly over Zeena. It makes no sense. Then, when Stanton meets Dr. Lilith Ritter, the psychiatrist, she refuses the money from the scheme. All she wants from him is a session. It felt like the dumb male writing you’ll run into sometimes, where the powerful beautiful interesting female character wants nothing more than to listen to the male character talk about himself. Absurd. Of course, it turns out that Dr. Ritter is setting all this up in order to screw Stanton and take his money. To her it’s about power. But you find that out much later, and I was already feeling bumped. 

I could tell the whole movie, of course, that Stanton was going to end up being a geek. But the ending still surprised in Stanton’s recognition and humor at that inevitability. This movie was kind of anti-American dream. Stanton rises to wealth and power. He kills his father (that was the guy in the beginning), he throws off his origins, he makes a man of himself. But in the end, he was born for the gutter. I also wonder if this movie is being remade now because we’re in the age of success through hucksterism. (See Donald Trump, Fyre Fest, etc.) Maybe it’s a little bit of wish fulfillment for us, that people like that wouldn’t succeed, that there would be an inevitable fall. It’s kind of anti-American, though, all the same. 

Rating: ★★★