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Electric Company

People say they’re going “off the grid” all the time and I just roll my eyes. Usually it means they won’t be posting on social media and checking their phones quite as obsessively. Occasionally it means they’re going camping or to the sea—what in the olden days we called “going on vacation.” But when I do Ruby Intuition readings, I go off the grid whether I like it or not. Real Carrie shite is the norm–lightbulbs pop, technology fritzes, brand-new batteries die, possessions mysteriously disappear. Sometimes I can’t remember close friends’ names. Sometimes I can’t remember my own name. I don’t even try to make plans on those days anymore, because I am never equipped to keep them.

I get it, I really do. I can’t have my cake and eat it too. Which is to say: I can’t blithely tap into the biggest energy source of them all and simultaneously rely on its pale substitutes. Usually by the time I finish readings, I barely remember I have a body, let alone that I live on planet Earth. I have been returned from somewhere I can’t quite explain, somewhere that glows with an entirely different quality of light, and I need sleep and food and drink and physical contact (preferably sex) to re-enter the allegedly real world of Ben Affleck gossip and political polarities and why-haven’t-you-already-responded-to-the-email-I-sent-three-minutes-ago? Electricity and grids are extremely relative.

A Fascinating Tattoo: ‘God Loves the Fighter’

Clanging and cantankerous, “God Loves the Fighter” is a sight for sore eyes, though it also might make them sorer. The first feature-length film from writer/director Damian Marcano, it is a dance hall reggae opera pulsing with the rhythms of Port-au-Spain’s gritty Laventville neighborhood, and it is ablaze with a never-ending explosion of color in every sense of that word. Narrated by Lou Lyons as street person King Curtis, a sort of rap-poet Greek chorus who exposes the real dirt behind local news headlines, it focuses on the story of Charlie (The Freetown Collective’s Muhammad Muwakil), a young guy pulled down by the criminal elements that surround him.

Though at times it feels more like a feature-length music video than anything since Baz Luhrmann’s “Gatsby,” this is a wholly original endeavor – and not only because, as a Trinidadian gangster movie, it serves up a much-needed corrective to the excuses for celeb vacations that are Hollywood films set in the Caribbean. Shot during the 2011 state of emergency to fight crime that was declared by Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, “God Loves the Fighter” whirls in a dust cloud of past and present, fantasy and nightmare, and prostitution, church confessionals, and cocaine. Relentless and sweaty, scenes blur into each other with the beautiful intensity of a heat map – all sea greens, bold reds, and black skin that is properly lit (which is still a shameful rarity). Eventually, though, a too-pat tale emerges from the clamor. In fact, as presented by Curtis, the film actually booms its messages at us in a big basso profundo; even its subtitles bellow in neon yellow. Continue Reading →

Little Big Hearts on the Evening Train

I was on the subway tonight, sitting in the small enclave between the sliding doors and the passage to the next car: two-seat benches on either side of the aisle. Next to me was a weary-looking woman with a beautiful headwrap and big earrings. In her arms was a baby with the saddest, brightest eyes I’d ever seen on a human. (I see eyes like that on dogs and sometimes cats.) His sadness didn’t seem to stem from any mistreatment; though visibly tired, the woman was holding him with a tenderness that seemed constant to me. His sadness felt soul-heavy, as if he registered her pain and wished he could do something about it. More than that, he seemed like the kind of very small person who’d been worrying about everything and everybody even before he was sprung from his mother’s body. Perhaps I am a sadist: It made him cuter to me. Continue Reading →

"All, everything I understand, I understand only because I love."
― Leo Tolstoy