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The Church of Rilke’s Door

April 30, 2017 in Book Matters, Quoth the Raving, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

It’s been a while since I played literary tarot, in which you randomly plunk a finger on a page of a book randomly opened and read whatever turns up. But after a hot, clattering Saturday in the city, I had a beautifully unfettered, beautifully long sleep under freshly laundered sheets, and I’m feeling magical.

Here’s what a page from Rilke’s Stories of God has to say.

The moment they passed out of the door they were changed men. They walked in the middle of the street, a little separated from each other. Their countenances still showed traces of their recent laughter, that strange disorder of the features, but the eyes of all three were already serious and observant. They understood at once.

This I love, for as much as I hate hallways, I adore emerging from them, and open doors have been featuring prominently in my superconsciousness. I read this passage as a confirmation of my last dream and of an omen visited upon one of my favorite sirens recently. I’m tucking it my pocket as I venture into this cool, dreamy morning.

Six Packs & Soft Underbellies: ‘The Outsiders’

April 24, 2017 in Age Matters, Blast From the Past Matters, Book Matters, Essays, Film Matters, Reviews

Like many growing up in the 1980s, I regarded “The Outsiders,” Frances Ford Coppola’s adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 young adult novel, as the ultimate babe fest. To date, it may be the greatest shrine to young male beauty ever filmed. Starring Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, and Emilio Estevez at the apex of their hotness, a pre-orthodontia Tom Cruise was the ugliest dude in the cast. Turning flips in the air, popping perfect biceps in rolled-up black tees, lolling cigs out of rosy pouts, and batting long lashes beneath expertly combed pompadours, these boys were so appealing that they triggered early puberty in a whole generation of tweens (then called preteens).

Thirty-odd years later, I dig this parade of Aphrodites even more, and for mostly loftier reasons. Howell stars as 14-year-old protagonist Ponyboy Curtis, so named by dead parents who left him in the care of 17-year-old brother Sodapop (Rob Lowe), a dreamboat of a high school dropout, and biggest brother Darrel (Patrick Swayze), who has forfeited his dreams of college to keep his younger siblings out of foster care. Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Curtis boys live on the wrong side of the tracks – we’re reminded of this from the first scene’s lonely train whistle– and they provide a homebase for all the tenderhearted, rough-hewn “greasers” in their gang. Continue Reading →

I’m Everybody! Are You Everybody Too?

April 18, 2017 in Book Matters, City Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Sabboytical, Spirit Matters

I slipped into the theater as Cynthia Nixon was cooing to a newborn: “I’m nobody! Are you nobody too?”

It was the newly renovated Quad Cinema, and I’d scored a ticket because I was presenting the Emily Dickinson film, “A Quiet Passion,” to a cinema club later in the week. Normally I would not be spending such a beautiful afternoon indoors, but I’d had a terrible writing morning—the sort that robs one of all confidence and joy—and I was keen to get out of my house, neighborhood, and head, in exactly that order.

The new Quad seemed a lot like the old Quad, down to ticketing confusion and the long, skinny screening rooms with tiny screens, but the seats were more comfortable and the film a stately swoon. I settled into the story that had begun 20 minutes before my arrival, and tried to block everything out.

Dickinson was bright and glaring in her strong tempers, with the knit brow and bitten lip of a nineteenth-century woman heeding too many wrong lessons. She and her kin bickered against the austere backdrop of their Amherst estate, and I sat back against red cushions and exhaled in pleasure. This was not the New England of so many films-forbidding and confined to a palette of greys and more greys. This was the New England I miss 25 years after emigrating to New York: amused and amusing, with bursts of colors so extravagant that there’s no point in competing with your own person. Continue Reading →

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