Sex Pots… and Pans
Tonight I ruined my beets. I boiled them for such a long time that by the time I looked up from my book, smoke had filled my apartment. I haven’t been that cotton-headed since I started living by myself twenty years ago but it was an engrossing book (another Octavia Butler) and it has been a terrible summer.
I mention the beets because, in the process of ruining them, I also ruined the pot, which made me panic for an existential minute. I’ve had this pot, a Brazilian stainless-steel 3-quart saucepan, for as long as I’ve lived by myself. I inherited it in a very stupid breakup—or, rather, in the demise of a very stupid relationship, the sort we used to have in the 1990s when we still equated sex with death and so made long-term commitments out of what should have been one-night stands. This man, whom I have called The WASP elsewhere, left me in his West Village studio when he left for graduate school, where he began shacking up with a fellow student before properly ending things with me. When the lease of his NYC apartment ended, he was too terrified to claim the household items he’d left behind. To be fair, by then I’d threatened to mutilate him with most of them.
So I found a sweet and affordable Brooklyn apartment of my own, and soon enough the only traces of him could be found in a set of stainless-steel pots as well as two sky-blue plates. (I ritualistically burned all his plaid flannel shirts.) This established a pattern. Whenever I received kitchenwear from a lover or, worse, their mother, the romance’s death certificate appeared on the wall. Continue Reading →
A Huge and Savage Conscience
For three weeks, I’ve been reading Octavia Butler nonstop. I download her books from the Brooklyn library website—my favorite use of the iPhone technology finally introduced to my life—and I devour them while waiting in screening rooms, sitting on the subway, as soon as I finish work. I read them on park benches and I read them while eating bowls of spicy beans and grains and vegetables and fruits–meals I’ve unconsciously prepared according to her descriptions. I read these books until I fall asleep.
Butlers’ novels are not warm. They are stark and brave and painfully prescient. But like my understanding of God, they are all-encompassing and savage in a way I did not know I needed. She writes of the limitations of our species, of our un-useful constructs of gender and race and sexuality, of our bloodlust and unnecessary hierarchies. She offers a range of solutions in her many series, which, I am beginning to realize, weave into each other though those connections are not entirely spelled out. She may have meant to spell them out eventually: She died at 58 though she predicted that she would live until her 80s.Her abrupt demise
–this unintentional discontinuity–feels like a challenge right now: Pick up your tools. Listen to the ancestors but do not heed them above your own instincts. Love what you can. Change what you cannot. Above all, never abandon your desire and will.
I struggle with writing my books. Who cares if I finish them? What if they never find homes? Then I flash on Butler writing every night after spending every day cleaning other people’s houses; workin so beautifully with what our culture deemed bad odds but she deemed worthy challenges (lesbian, black, poor, dyslexic); making use of every scrap of science and spirit. I shake off my anxiety and loneliness. They are ill-afforded luxuries. I must try.
‘Ricki and the Flash’ & the Curse of El Diablo
It’s hard not to get excited about “Ricki and the Flash.” It stars Meryl Streep in what is amazingly a new kind of role for her. It is directed by Jonathan Demme, who has been charming the pants off us since his 1984 Talking Heads documentary “Stop Making Sense.” And it is written by Diablo Cody, whose script for “Juno” (2007) set the bar for witty teen-pregnancy movies everywhere. (Let’s hope that genre doesn’t become too much of a cinematic trend moving forward.) But rather than being an embarrassment of riches, this musical dramedy suffers from too much of a good thing – namely, too much of its titular character at the expense of any true plot or supporting character development. The problem can be traced back to Cody, who may be a better memoirist than screenwriter.
Streep stars as Ricki, who fronts a cover band in Tarzana, California, and ekes out a living as a Whole Foods cashier. With her still-good gams (since when are Streep’s legs so fine?), semi-cornrowed mane, kohl-lined eyes, and reams of silver jewelry, she’s the spitting image of a woman who refuses to sacrifice her dreams even when they’ve sacrificed her. Ricki abandoned her family decades before so she could pursue a rock and roll career that never took off. But when daughter Julie (real-life daughter Mamie Gummer, who needs to stop working in Mommy’s shadow) has a nervous breakdown, Ricki grudgingly steps up to the plate, though she’s not entirely welcome in the Indianapolis McMansion of ex-husband Pete (a sweater vest-clad Kevin Kline) and his tightly wound wife, Maureen (Audra McDonald), who raised Ricki’s three kids.
For all those accolades, Streep doesn’t get her due as a skilled comic actress, and she revels in Ricki’s inconsistencies with expertly timed double takes and cocked eyebrows. Cody, who based the character on her own mother-in-law (a longtime rocker who did not abandon her family), has constructed a beautifully complex woman – a 1970s counterculture siren with a retrogressive chip on her shoulder. Continue Reading →