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‘The Americans’ and Cold War Cinema

April 28, 2015 in Film Matters, Listing, TV Matters

Though criminally under-watched, “The Americans,” about a pair of KGB spies (Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys) living as U.S. travel agents Elizabeth and Philip Jennings in Reagan-era Washington D.C., is one of television’s most brilliantly absorbing shows. Without revealing any details, its season finale was such a cliff-hanger that it is hard to believe we have to wait until next year for another episode. The best cure for our separation anxiety? Education. This FX series references so many 1980s geopolitical issues that it’s hard to keep up, especially when we’re distracted by Russell and Rhys’s spectacular array of wigs. So why not transform this hiatus into a Cold War immersion camp?

Reds (1981)
At roughly three and a half hours, this Warren Beatty-directed epic about communism in World War I was the last studio film to require an intermission. Starring Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson as “red-shirt” American writers bonded by romantic and ideological ardor, it dances between Russia and the United States with an elephantine grace and an appropriately scarlet-hued cinematography. As glamorous as it is long-winded, this is the ultimate Hollywood primer in the roots of the two countries’ long-simmering antipathy. Continue Reading →

Grateful To Be Grateful

April 26, 2015 in Listing, Spirit Matters

Sunday is a day for gratitude, and one of the grandest aspects of being alive is that, no matter how dire things seem, there are always reasons to be grateful. In fact, chances are good that the minute we start listing them we can’t stop. I make these lists not only to gain perspective but because they make me ridiculously, palpably happy—and stronger, too. Nothing empowers us like remembering the myriad ways we’re already blessed. It’s like asking for help and then noticing the wind already on our backs. One lovely side effect of my recent injury: It’s provided me with even more reasons to be grateful, since so many people have been above-and-beyond kind. 

1. I’m grateful for the strangers who carried my groceries today.
2. I’m grateful for the purple flowers by my bed.
3. I’m grateful for the beauty and big heart of my friend Rachel, who asks every week: What are you grateful for? Spill it!
4. I’m grateful to see Fun Home soon with my dear friend Jan, who bought the tickets after my back spasm made me miss the previews.
5. I’m grateful for my sweet-and-spicy god family.
6. I’m grateful for the mango I had for breakfast. Pure sunshine, that mango.
7. I’m grateful today marks my ninth week without sugar. This is the longest I’ve gone since my twenties and it’s starting to feel blissfully normal.
8. I’m grateful for Bruce Jenner’s interview with Diane Sawyer. There are many, many ways that our country is still deeply troubled but I’m grateful that we’re slowly climbing out of the Dark Ages when it comes to LGBT awareness and rights. Continue Reading →

Purple Rains, Purple Pours

April 25, 2015 in Spirit Matters

My back is still in spasm (it gets better, it gets worse), which makes such tasks as fetching groceries, changing cat litter, going to the laundromat, cooking, and cleaning deeply challenging if not impossible. All the lightbulbs in my apartment have blown out over the last week and I can’t replace them in my current condition. My car battery died this morning. And though it’s not a color I normally embrace, I crave purple purple purple–purple nails, purple clothes, purple flowers. I am adamantly not an “FML” (Fuck My Life) girl; I consider that attitude such an ungrateful response to the gift of being alive. So I view these disturbances as indications of a serious soul transition I’ve yet to comprehend, let alone embrace. The question is: how can I?

Feel free to respond, Sirenaders. Though I’ve shamefully overplayed the damsel-in-distress card in the past, though I now firmly believe “metaphysician, heal thyself,” all this intuitive can intuit at this juncture is I can’t intuit this on my own. The universe is bellowing at me and I need a translator to grasp what it is saying. This is me, waving a white flag and pushing the “Uncle” button with the wanest of smiles. I guess if we understood everything about our own paths, we wouldn’t have to incarnate at all.

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