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Subway Saturninas

Three stroppy females on the subway tonight: 1. A woman standing, unsupported, in the midst of the crowded moving car, blithely reading The Wisdom of Insecurity as she sways into everyone around her. There’s such a thing as overkill, doll. 2. A woman wearing three pink bows in her hair, shoving people out of her way and stepping on feet as she enters the train. Why do the meanest broads always wear bows? 3. Me, shaming a manspreader into closing his legs enough to make room for me to sit, then out-manspreading him so outrageously that he’s forced to close his legs entirely. Good thing I wore pants today! Feminist in the streets, liberationist in the sheets.

Bohemians & Flappers, O My!

Anthology films are so underrated. The best ones are celebrations of form and concept, as they focus on pure theme rather than the conventions of more traditional features. Even the worst ones have something to offer, though, especially if multiple directors have contributed their work. Take 1989’s “New York Stories.” Frances Ford Coppola and Woody Allen may have contributed self-indulgent shorts but Martin Scorsese’s offering, “Life Lessons,” provided such an epic glimpse into obsession, the artistic process, and the male ego that it singlehandedly merited the price of admission.

In general, New York-based anthology films may be the finest example of the genre; at any given moment, so many different worlds and eras coexist on the same tiny island that they’re bound to generate compelling fodder. An adaptation of Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells, a collection of Manhattan-based Vanity Fair pieces written between 1913-1936, may be just what the doctor ordered, then. The glamour of that time is almost unparalleled, and matching the right directors to the various essays, poems, and profiles of this book would be like shooting fish in a barrel. We’d be bound to score at least once. Continue Reading →

Apples Sweet and Tart

Two champions of empathy died yesterday: Albert Maysles and Lisa Bonchek Adams. They had nothing in common with each other, nor I with either of them. But because of their great example, this does not matter. I feel their loss as keenly as if I’d shared sacred coffee with them every week. Lisa, who was as tart as she was sweet, implored everyone daily to embrace beauty and truth. Maysles found both where others merely found junk. I keep thinking about how we must honor their very bright lights. Change is inevitable when big stars go dark, and we must court that change. I keep reading this Louise Erdrich quote, and listening close.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

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