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The Longest Sentence, the Creature Comforts

May 22, 2020 in Age Matters, Cat Lady Matters, Country Matters, Film Matters, Food Matters, Ruby Intuition, Spirit Matters

Five Ruby Intuition readings today and now I’m sprawled in a grateful slump across my divan with a certain permakitten’s limbs akimbo, watching Soderbergh’s sunshine noir The Limey while mawing my favorite secret single meal– a blue bowl of fettuccine with home-made mint-ramp-basil-parsley pesto, zest lemon, and greenmarket pea shoots, romaine, and spinach with melted mozzarella, grated parmesan, and fancy Fairway tuna shared, of course, with Grace.

Do not ask me why the bowl has to be blue but my delight plummets when it is not. And tonight I require creature-comfort delight because I’m not feeling great. A member of my family died this week, I’m making big changes behind the curtain I rarely draw back on this platform, and my body is registering all these shifts. Complaining, if you want to know the truth.

So I’m just taking it easy, basking in Terrence Stamp’s cockney rhyming slang and my pregnantladypalate. And of course the sweet soft stripes of Grace’s supermodel paws. The sky is steel, the wind too. Even Soderbergh’s Stamp is melancholy steel. But here in this moment my familiar and I are happily ensconced if not exactly happy.

And thus kicks off what promises to be one of the most oddbot Memorial Day Weekends ever. Not unpleasant, I’m guessing. Just: oddbot. Fitting for a middle-aged medium poised at the beginning of the end.

Also the end of the beginning.

So Much ‘Hunger’

March 29, 2020 in City Matters, Country Matters, Film Matters, Queer Matters, Reviews

I’m so obsessed with The Hunger (1983) right now, streaming on the Criterion Channel, which is the best $10 monthly investment you can make in your cinematic education. Directed by Tony Scott (Top Gun!), this blue-blue valentine stars Susan Sarandon and Catherine Deneuve as a lady doctor and lady vampire respectively who embark upon lady carnal love. Oh, and you know who’s the spurned lover in this scenario? Mr David Bowie, that’s who. Really it’s so futile to resist this movie that I don’t see why you’d try. The plot may be as flimsy as GOP logic but its cerulean desire—not to mention fear and horror of physical intimacy—is just so of the moment. Dig if you will this picture.

‘Sorry We Missed You’ Makes Its Mark

March 4, 2020 in Film Matters, Reviews

What follows is a review adapted from a lecture I gave to the delightful Westchester film club, now relocated to the Emelin Theater. Perhaps it is of note that I dressed as Emma Goldman to deliver this. Perhaps instead I should have gone full hog and climbed a table bearing a UNION sign. Either way, I now petition you to see this in theaters when you can; it opens in New York today at Film Forum.

For 50 years, director Ken Loach has made films championing the British working-class. They’ve always been acutely observed but as he’s aged they’ve become brilliant. Sadly, that’s partly because they’re driven by a greater urgency–they connect almost too well to the social drama of these fraught times.

His last project, I Daniel Blake, brilliantly confronted the benefit and welfare systems. Now, at 82, he’s indicting the gig economy with this film about a Newcastle family whose delivery driver dad, home aide mom, and two kids live precariously check-to-check. This is the kind of movie that is as worthy as it is wrenching–not just for the social messages it delivers, pardon the pun, but for the portrait it paints of familial love in the face of larger pressures. Continue Reading →

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