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Saint Agnès Now

March 29, 2019 in Age Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, Spirit Matters

Agnès Varda’s movies were dreams spun by a woman, a punk rock pixie whose gaze–wide and eternally bemused–was amazing to behold but even more amazing to share.

A powerful female director when the world had few, she spun her dervish dreams while the rest of us stumbled stridently in linear time. While watching her films, I always calmed down and also came alive. Not one did I watch on a small screen. That would have been a profaning of her magic–that wondering wonderful movie magic that she birthed while like lovers and children we sat at her feet.

Once at a luncheon I was seated next her—the host thought we’d like each other–and I was struck uncharacteristically dumb. Her lavender-auburn coupe à la Jeanne d’Arc, her oyster smile, her puckish striped costume, they were all like her movies and it was just too good. Both object and subject, she was art and artist–what woman are trained to be, what women fight to be–and as we ate our lunch she asked good questions while her eyes told much more. I wish I’d asked more, said more, taken the hands off the clock. But then again, there are some people from whom we can never get enough. Fairy godmother, thank you for sharing your gaze. You showed us life.

More Lipstick for the Wolf

March 23, 2019 in Age Matters, Astro Matters, Book Matters, Cat Lady Matters, City Matters, Country Matters, Essays, Feminist Matters, Food Matters

Lately, I spend my Saturdays reading.

I have read five books by Ruth Reichl, wonderful stories of travel and food and champagne and love. I have read all three of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon books, which, as Natasha Lyonne avers, are better if grimmer than the Anne of Green Gable series: more honest, higher stakes. Also I have reread Eve Babitz’s Sex and Rage and Black Swans. And of course all of MFK Fisher.

Especially How to Cook a Wolf.

It does not escape me that all these books are by and about women writers who found love and literary success.

For the moment, both evade me. I say “for the moment” because I am relentlessly hopeful in my own way. Though my romances have conferred as much pain as pleasure, I still look forward to the next one.

And though I have yet to sell my book–yet to finish it, even–I see its cover before I go to sleep at night. Sometimes on someone else’s night table.

In the meantime I keep my scale very, very small. Frankly, I’m too broke to go out. I have no money to spend and though an affordable New York still lurks beneath the city’s Instagram ops and best-of lists, I find myself weary and wary when faced with the prospect of restaurants and bars. Friends invariably pick up the checks and it hurts to burden them. This is not how I like to live. This is not how I like to treat my people.

In my home I can take care of business. I rise early and write as long as my brain will let me, then go for a long walk, the neighborhood quiet in the mid-afternoon. I shop the grocery sales and cook slowly as the sun ripens in the horizon. I cook because it is cheaper than eating or ordering out but also because the rhythm of stirring, chopping, stirring–knife thumping, oil sizzling, sauce thickening– feels elegant and serene. The way I felt before the Legend smiled at me and I smiled back. Continue Reading →

American PTSD

March 20, 2019 in Country Matters, Feminist Matters, Film Matters, TV Matters

I’ve been thinking a lot about the cultural phenomena issuing from the trauma of a Trump presidency. In the first year, we had #metoo, in which powerful men who’d sexually assaulted and manipulated women (and sometimes men) actually faced consequences. It was such an obvious and constructive displacement of the rage we felt about not being able to unseat a well-known sex offender elected to the highest office in the land. Enter the 2018 elections, in which voter turnout hit a 50-year high, the Democrats finally took back the House of Representatives, and a record 117 women won office. More recently, have you noticed all the takedowns of liars and fraud schemes? Just today, my social media timelines include discussions of the admissions scandal; The Act, a Hulu series about the Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome queen DeeDee Blancharde; the Netflix and Hulu documentaries about the Fyre Festival fraud; and The Inventor, Alex Gibney’s doc about Elizabeth Holmes, the long-con CEO who even lied about her real voice. If only we could take down our Liar-in-Chief, too.

Then last night K and I saw Us, Jordan Peele’s brilliant followup to his game-changing Get Out. In the years leading to this Very White House, dystopia was the name of the Hollywood game. But now that a real-life dystopia has taken root, horror is the most logical cinematic response, and Peele’s American Horror Stories comprise an uprising unto themselves. Though his genius is fully his own, I believe the record-breaking public receptiveness to it partly can be attributed to the revelation that we’re in a real-Life American Horror Story. Exactly like that, actually. The demons of this country have been released like the spirits of a displaced Native American burial ground, and Peele’s reigning metaphor, the Sunken Place, reflects the ramifications of DT’s real gospel: Hate and Fear Thy Other.

We’ve all got PTSD–President Trump Stress Syndrome, also known as the DTs. And you know what? Some of our “symptoms” have been powerfully productive.

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