Love Is Real
Whether or not I’m in a relationship, I have become rawther cynical about the possibilities of romantic love–so much so that the other day I gave a mean little shove to two teens with entwined tongues who were blocking a subway door. But Elizabeth Alexander’s New Yorker elegy for her husband doubles as a testimony to what two people can offer each other in the name of clear-hearted intimacy. Of a dream she had a few years after his death, she writes:
I look back. I look back. I can still see him, smiling and waving me on.
It was the two of us walking the road and now he has let my hand go.
I walk. I can always see him. His size does not change as I move forward: like me, he is five feet nine and a half, exactly right. I can still feel the feel of my hand in his hand as I walk. I wake and the room is flooded with pale-yellow light.
This essay is the most beautiful thing I have read in a very long time. It is so beautiful and so lovingly, piercingly true that, though I still think successful marriages are less attainable than Greta Garbo (now), I am once again grateful that they can exist.
Are You a Cat or Are You a Ghost?
After three weeks of snow and ice and, for variety, ice and snow, this weather is really getting old. Permakitten Grace has such cabin fever that she now spends all her times hunting me, thereby confirming my theory that everyone needs a frenemy. Mostly she crouches in corners, ears pinned back while she studies her prey with narrowed eyes and half-hearted growls. (She’s not naturally a mean sort.) Sometimes she takes it up a notch, and manages to scare me. She’s very sneaky. This morning she poked her head out of the slightly ajar sock drawer, landed on me while I was peeing (who closes the door when they live alone?), and materialized in my boot when I bent to put it on. I’d be cross except a. her stealth technique is admirably high-caliber b. she’s cracking me up. In fact, said feline has earned herself a new name. All hail Little Miss Pop-Up Video.
‘The Humbling’ of Video on Demand
The term “straight to video” used to be the kiss of death for any film; for a while, “straight-to-video-on-demand” became the twenty-first-century equivalent. Sometime in the last five years, though, streaming video content became a legitimate movie distribution platform, one ensuring that more obscure content – documentaries, indies, foreign films – reached wider audiences than ever before, albeit with less pomp and circumstance. So to say that “The Humbling” is a straight-to-video-on-demand movie isn’t exactly an insult.
It also isn’t exactly true, since it concurrently opened in a scattering of theaters across the country late last month. But the fact remains that, though this film boasts a pedigree so impeccable it’d make a blue blood weep – Oscar winner Al Pacino stars, Oscar winner Barry Levinson directs, and Oscar nominee Buck Henry co-writes this adaptation of Pulitzer (and National Book Award) winner Philip Roth’s 2009 eponymous novel – its lukewarm theatrical reception was almost a foregone conclusion. You might wonder: What’s the catch? Continue Reading →