I’m still laughing about a cinema club talk I gave recently. We were screening a dour Polish biopic that I didn’t privately endorse but didn’t want to bad-mouth. Our attendees had paid good money and gotten up really early.
It turned out they weren’t into it either, a fact they made abundantly clear.
The way things usually go: I screen the film, give a 15-minute talk, and then open up the discussion to a question-and-answer period during which everyone tells me the film was great and my interpretation supersmart. (I preen, I tell you; all hail the unbeloved child.) This time, though, they were just plain pissed. While I was talking, everyone kept screaming SPEAK UP YOU TALK TOO SOFT WE CAN’T HEAR YOU’RE MUMBLING. Continue Reading →
I spent the day at Metrograph rewatching OJ Simpson: Made in America in its entirety. Once again I found it stunning in its meticulously layered breakdown of how media, race, gender, violence, money, and injustice intersect in OJ’s rise and fall, in the history of the LAPD, and in the precarious construct of fame.
It’s shocking to realize it’s been more than two decades since all this occurred. I remember crushing out on OJ when I was a little girl; he was so damn fast, so fine, so fly. And those dimples! Also so damn funny in the Naked Gun movies (an echo you saw o shit when he infamously hamhanded the gloves in his double murder trial.) I remember crying at my kitchen table when the Rodney King verdict was delivered, crying again when LA burned afterward. I remember watching that white Bronco slide slo-mo down LA freeways with Julian and Michael (our 20something love triangle temporarily on hold while the 12 hours of this drama juicily eclipsed our own), and I remember the news suddenly being ALL OJ ALL THE WAY for the next year. Continue Reading →
Venus retrograde approaches; my dreams heat up. I won’t even get into the mixed messages I’m receiving in waking life from those I desire and those I do not. I’ll just ill-advisedly share the dream I was sent last night from my greatest long-lost lover, he whose spirit sends me a postcard in the dream world every four years or so. In real life we’ve not spoken since my thirtieth birthday when he said, I don’t know if I can live without you but I’m going to try, and I didn’t get up from the kitchen floor until long after he’d left the country. Last night’s visit was such a middle-aged fumbling–rusty, desperate, hot.Continue Reading →
I’m still laughing about a cinema club talk I gave recently. We were screening a dour Polish biopic that I didn’t privately endorse but didn’t want to bad-mouth. Our attendees had paid good money and gotten up really early.
I spent the day at Metrograph rewatching OJ Simpson: Made in America in its entirety. Once again I found it stunning in its meticulously layered breakdown of how media, race, gender, violence, money, and injustice intersect in OJ’s rise and fall, in the history of the LAPD, and in the precarious construct of fame.
Venus retrograde approaches; my dreams heat up. I won’t even get into the mixed messages I’m receiving in waking life from those I desire and those I do not. I’ll just ill-advisedly share the dream I was sent last night from my greatest long-lost lover, he whose spirit sends me a postcard in the dream world every four years or so. In real life we’ve not spoken since my thirtieth birthday when he said, I don’t know if I can live without you but I’m going to try, and I didn’t get up from the kitchen floor until long after he’d left the country. Last night’s visit was such a middle-aged fumbling–rusty, desperate, hot. Continue Reading →