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Astro PSA: Full Moon in Buzzy, Busy Gemini

December 11, 2019 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Book Matters, City Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters, TV Matters

I write from a neighborhood bar that has a great and relatively quiet happy hour. Drinking sazerac, mawing nuts, rereading the day’s pages, and listening to a man my age mack on a girl who at the very oldest is 25. I’d judge the shit out of him except when I walked in, he raised his eyebrows suggestively and I shook my head. Also the last person I snogged was half my age, which made them roughly 25 (ok, younger). If this paragraph didn’t land where you expected, welcome to my 2019.

Then again, time is a construct.

Earlier today NYC was a storybook—-kids bobbing on parents’ shoulders, everyone bundled like toddlers in mittens and hats, and snow, glorious snow. But by midday it was back to bleak, urine-drenched, and sooty. Enter free-wheeling Sagittarius season and tonight’s full moon in Gemini. Both aspects remind us to be here now since linear time is big old myth and nothing else is real either save the story you tell yourself. And love, the greatest gravity of all.

I don’t know about you but I’m feeling that inside and out. Even on television, at least Watchmen, the most momentous show anywhere right now (see what I did there?), the notion of linear time is being savagely imploded.

Fourth dimension is, like, so twenty-teens.

Taking place in the earliest hours of tomorrow–that’s 12/12 at exactly 12:12 am!–tonight’s “long cold night full moon” also exits us out of a cycle of karma since the number 12 is all about reincarnation. Ask yourself: What hard lessons have I begun learning this year that I can finally put to use? Venus, Saturn, and Pluto are conjuncting, which suggests the lessons may be taking place in our relationships and finances. Certainly that was true for me, though ain’t that always the case? Bottom line: we are moving past the limited thinking that we were taught kept us safe but really has held us back. Don’t be scared. Be glad–and dress warmly.

Little Women, Inner Children

December 10, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, City Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Reviews, TV Matters

Yesterday we taped the first episode of Talking Pictures since my back went kablooey (and yes that’s the official medical diagnosis). To celebrate I got it into my head to decorate my head, and so wove into my triple-braided bun pine cones and branches, baby’s breath, and tiny bird. All in all it was an effect that raised more than a few eyebrows among the normally unflappable population of NYC.

Chalk it up to the fact that I was reviewing the most recent iteration of Little Women, which I had approached with great trepidation and from which I had floated with great elation.

There have many, many film, television, and stage adaptations of Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War-set saga about four Massachusetts sisters who are rich in love and poor in cash, but this is the most ravishing and the first that does not betray the intense feminism of its author. Directed by mumblemouth millennial Greta Gerwig (cue my trepidation), it boasts an intensely good cast including Soirse Ronan as stalwart Jo, Meryl Streep mugging to unusually good effect as drolly disapproving Aunt March, Timotheeee Chalomet very right if too slight as Laurie, and Florence Pugh, channeling the authentically big emotions of Midsommar to animate Amy, the most bedazzled and entitled of the March girls. (Laura Dern is too Modern Millie for the Marnie of my dreams, but I’m immune to her Lynchian charms.) Continue Reading →

No Room to Let (Dowager Chic)

November 22, 2019 in Age Matters, Book Matters, City Matters, Essays, Etiquette Matters, Feminist Matters, Past Matters

2002 me

This is a blunt story–which of mine are not?– and it probably deserves to live somewhere besides a blog post. But as is so often the case, I will begin writing it to the audience that exists in my head when I write here–namely, sensitive, smart, and roughly my generation, at least psychospiritually.

Four years ago I began a battle to establish my apartment’s rent stabilization. I’d moved into the building in 2002, a few months after September 11 had dashed my dreams of being a wife and a mother (a separate post; a separate book, really). There was a markedly different group of tenants  because back then third stop on the L Train did not mean hipster. It meant working-class families of mostly Italian, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent. I was the only woman on the block living alone–definitely the only blond wannabe writer from Boston. Mostly I got along with everyone–oh, there was the time I got in a fight with a mafia princess over a parking space and her father came after me with a baseball bat screaming YOU FKING WHORE-but having grown up in Newton’s The Lake I knew how to hold my ground. Sort of. Continue Reading →

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