Some thoughts on landing on a jury for the first half of January.
1. It could have been so much worse–some people in my pool were roped into month-long service.
2. I’m going to appreciate non-institutionalized time so much more when my service is done.
3. I am infinitely more enthusiastic about the judicial process now that the courts are the most effective deterrent to Trump’s nefariousness.
4. I adore downtown Brooklyn, and rarely visit it since moving to Williamsburg 16 years ago. En route to the courts I bought earrings at the corner of Jay St– NYC accessorization at its best–and swooned over the serious BK lady sidewalk style.
5. The eating is good! As I type this, I’m eating cheapo Sahadi’s black caviar slathered on a Mile’s End bagel with a half-sour Kosher pickle.
6. I’m fairly certain I conjured this experience because I’ve been mainlining The Good Fight, the most progressive, envelope-pushing TV drama no one is watching. (I blame the CBS All Access platform.) I adore strong legal dramas, and have convinced myself that in an alternate universe, I am a Diane Lockhart-style badass.
So, yeah: it’s all in how you look at it.
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Brightness Falls
I cried so much when my godfamily left this Sunday.
It wasn’t just that I was sorry to see them go, though of course I was. Melina, my oldest friend, and her daughter Luci, my youngest goddaughter, had been visiting since Thursday–long enough that we’d normally experience the luxury of getting on each other’s nerves, especially since my railroad apartment is ideally occupied by one person at a time.
But I never minded their presence this time. I didn’t mind because I love them, and because, for the first time since my 30s, I’d grown accustomed to sharing space and time with a person I loved. Continue Reading →
Thanksgiving ‘Playtime’
Years ago, I saw Jacques Tati’s Playtime in 70mm on the enormous screen of Champagne, Illinois’ Virginia Theater. I’d just dashed in from a spring thunderstorm that had liberated me from a fussy outdoor cocktail party, and the film’s awkward, swooping grace–alternately eager and morose, denatured and abloom–was just what the doctor ordered. I thought I’d never find a more ideal context in which to see the 1967 masterpiece, but on this very cold Thanksgiving, I ducked into a morning screening at the Lower East Side’s Metrograph. Shoulder to shoulder with other refugees from the most family-oriented, ideologically ill-conceived holiday of the year, I didn’t just feel community. I felt communion.
Tati mounted an entire mid-20th century cosmopolis outside of Paris for his poker-faced pratfall in gloriously technicolor drab, and its mostly noverbal story is conveyed so lucidly that the few spoken lines and handful of languages 
in which they are uttered are virtually irrelevant. Following a host of mid-‘60s characters through one day in this sound-stage Paris, the film’s protagonist is the human race itself as seen through a National Geographic sort of lens. As stylized as a Buster Keaton jig with Ayn Rand sharp corners and floppy flowered hats, every moment recalls the very droll mis-en-scenes buried in more narrative-driven films of the same era. Imagine a whole film cut from the same swoon as that infamous Breakfast at Tiffany’s party scene–the heiresses, vamps, barking agents, woman laughing, woman crying, treacherously long cigarette holder, prowling Cat, and Irving baby, o Irving baby. (Imagine a life cut of that cloth as well.) Continue Reading →