Don’t Worry About the Government

pregameI’ve been quiet because I don’t want to preach to the choir and I don’t want to be preached to, and right now all other posts seem frivolous, even I can see that. But this morning I’m up early after two consecutive weeks of late nights. My hair is up in curlers, my zit is smeared with a Vitamin E salve, and I’m drinking coffee while watching my neighborhood wake up through the bedroom window.

I’m also writing the Westchester Cinema Club talk I’ll give in a few hours about Mike Mills’ jumpy, sweet-hearted “20th Century Women,” an homage to his Depression Era-born mom and the late 70s cultural artifacts that created his artistic sensibility. The Talking Heads power through the film, and I’d almost forgotten how intersectional they were, how many rhythms pulsed through their albums and aesthetics. R&B and punk and tin drums and animal calls and clangs and whistles and pokey kid tunes: the perfectpunkers anthems for the kaleidoscope which was that decade, that bridge between Carter innocence and Reagan greed. I’m supposed to be writing, you dig, but really I’m dancing around my apartment with Anette Bening in Amelia Earhart hair, Greta Gerwig in ultraviolet stockings, cute-cute-cute Billy Crudup in Levis and a wide-open collar, and David Byrne wondering and wailing so compellingly that we’re all kicking our limbs to the beat of his endearing confusion. End Times, baby.

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