Listful and Asea

I’m sitting up in bed—an unmade bed, even, which is so unlike me these days. It’s a big, soft tousle of linens and pillows and books, and I’m leaning against a velvet headboard, drinking a latte—extra-hot, extra shot—while eyeballing the grey, cool morning right outside my window. I like the idea of it all but, frankly, I’m exhausted.

Part of my exhaustion is just another day at the races: I did my laundry, fetched my groceries, picnicked by the water before it was even 10 am. But partly I’m exhausted because this was a huge week for me. It marked the real end of my Summer of Reckoning.

I fear bureaucracies—the IRS, the DMV, health insurance companies, housing agencies, patriarchy—the way others fear public speaking or being alone. In June my fears came home to roost or, rather, the rotten fruits of my avoidance became unavoidable. In the months since, every day I’ve had to do something that scares me. Which, of course, has not been the worst thing in the world. But a fun summer it did not make.

I crossed the last onerous item off my SOR to-do list yesterday morning, and immediately took off for the beach to celebrate the occasion. It was my first trip to the Rockaways this summer, never mind that to most summer had already ended. Continue Reading →

The Players (‘The Drop,’ ‘Life of Crime’)

It takes a keen sense of the absurd to successfully adapt an Elmore Leonard novel to screen. Quentin Tarantino has one, and “Jackie Brown,” his adaptation of Leonard’s Rum Punch, may be his most best film to date. Steven Soderbergh has one (ever seen his “Schizopolis?”), and his eponymous adaptation of Leonard’s novel Out of Sight may be his best film, as well. Now, in “Life of Crime,” director Dan Schechter applies his own sense of the absurd to Leonard’s prequel to Rum Punch, and the result is a match made in heaven – if heaven were a micro-noir in which people tried to pull off half-baked scams in between stumbling into the wrong person’s bed.

At the center of this small-scale maelstrom is Jennifer Aniston, and it’s been a while since the former sitcom actress earned her keep this well. Deadpan and frostily blond, she plays the beleaguered Mickey Dawson who, in between ducking the drunken rages of her corrupt real-estate developer husband, Frank (Tim Robbins), is sleeping with her friend’s weasley husband (Will Forte). It’s gotten to the point that, when kidnappers Ordell (Yasiin Bey/Mos Def) and Louis (John Hawkes) stow her with their neo-Nazi pal Richard (Mark Boone Jr.) while awaiting a million-dollar ransom from Frank, she doesn’t seem that much more beleaguered – even after Frank, already planning on ditching Mickey for his morally and sexually flexible mistress (Minnie Mouse-voiced Isla Fisher), calls the con men’s bluff. For a long stretch, everyone just chain-smokes unfiltered cigarettes while languidly considering how to outsmart each other. Continue Reading →

September 11 in Parentheses

Every year September 11 takes me by surprise. I forget that the day after September 10 isn’t just a day when an article is due, when my this-or-that class is scheduled, when I’m supposed to meet up with so-and-so for coffee. I don’t remember the import of the day until it arrives, when comments start flooding the social media you can’t escape anymore. That’s when I realize what my body has already been registering for days–in the generalized depression I’ve been feeling, in the uncharacteristic anxiety that has been seizing my limbs and messing with my attention span, in my suddenly sour stomach (gut instincts being almost mundanely literal). What I recognize is I can’t run away from the losses of that day. For me, the events of 9/11 will always be profoundly personal—someone I loved died, a future I’d envisioned for my city and myself (one that included a marriage and a child) died as well. But it’s a date that everyone in the world quickly seized as their own. Now it’s the worst kind of personal-is-political—a day upon which everyone projects (institutionalizes, even enforces) their particular brand of fear and fury. If only we could make it National Shut Up and Think Day instead.

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