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Flotsam, Meet Jetsam

It’s that time of year. I have all these fashion topics I want to discuss and feel guilty for wanting to discuss them. On the list: my newfound love of lacy Victorian blouses (especially paired with leather skirts); my lust for thick white platform sandals despite how they make feet look bandaged by an overzealous World War I nurse; my deep relief that flares are coming back in style (skinny jeans make people look like they have a load in their diapers); my new appreciation for florals with a dark background (used to hate’em); my abiding love of bold pastels and Brazilian prints and YSL and red lipstick and striped socks and enormous earrings and pencil skirts and trench coats and ponchos and crisp white shirts; my abiding hatred for rich-girl hair and fringed jackets and the color mustard and crop tops and boxy blazers and flat black Nikes and jumpsuits (even overalls), not to mention tattoos and piercings anywhere but the ear (there, I said it); my deep impatience with the resurgence of ’90s fashion (it was drab and unflattering then, it’s drab and unflattering now); my raging internal debate about whether to cut my hair to my shoulders; my admiration of women who go grey (and my unwillingness to do so myself).

Of course, beneath this magazine-lady maelstrom lurk hopes that only a long-awaited spring can spark: fancies of bare legs and dinners al fresco and first kisses (and fucks). When the weather finally brightens like it did today, it’s possible to imagine a love to fit all the pretty dresses in the world.

‘While We’re Young’ and Other Adventures in Noah Baumbach’s Narcissism

Noah Baumbach is often likened to a Generation X Woody Allen, and the comparison is apt. It’s not just that both men are Brooklyn-bred Jewish writer-directors who wryly address failure, love, art, and New York life. It’s that their films, though heralded as paragons of originality and depth, are highly derivative – and most of us love them anyway. Like Allen, Baumbach may suffer from what Yale scholar Harold Bloom refers to as “the anxiety of influence” but he also benefits from an ecstasy of influence – an advanced, amber-hued nostalgia for the past and present that is always slipping through our fingers.

Never has this penchant for nostalgia been more baldly addressed than in Baumbach’s latest, “While We’re Young.” It is about the friendship between a forty-something married couple (Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who have sort of become what they wanted to be when they grew up (he’s a flailing documentarian and she’s the producer for her mega-successful documentarian father) and a twenty-something couple (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried) who disguise their enormous ambitions in a kaleidoscope of lo-fi hobbies, flea-market finds, New Age neologisms, and cultural appropriations that border on kleptomania. (She’s an almond-milk ice cream maker; he’s an aspiring documentarian who doesn’t distinguish between fact and fiction.) The film is saddled with an atonal third act that betrays the old-soul, new-millennium truths about disappointment and intimacy it seems intent on delivering. Before then, it is wonderful: loose-limbed, liquid, and glittering with the falsehood of eternal youth. Most tellingly, it’s aglow with references to other directors – micro-indie king Joe Swanberg, Paul Mazursky’s mid-century mise-en-scènes, Jonathan Demme’s gleefully teeming urban tableaus, and, of course, the glib-versus-glum morality play of Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” itself partly about New York documentarians. Continue Reading →

Event: ‘A Tree Grows in a Brooklyn’

Today marks the first meeting of the Leonard Library Film Club. On the docket: Elia Kazan’s big-hearted, broody “A Tree Grows In Brooklyn,” which is based on our very own branch (located at Leonard and Devoe in Wiliamsburg, one block from the L Train’s Lorimer stop). The event is free, with a post-screening discussion led by yours truly in a fancy hat. Tomorrow’s weather is supposed to be gloomy and cool so do stop by if you are a local. I would so love to meet you.

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