Fall Aside
Some parentheses-laden mash notes from a mid-morning walk down the Greenpoint stretch of Manhattan Avenue: 1. I love when health food store clerks loll outside their work buildings, smoking. (NYC balance, baby.) 2. I love being able to wear a trench coat without sweating. (Flasher chic, baby.) 3. I love lower-income children more easily than well-off ones (at least as a passer-by; no one said life was fair). 4. I sort of love when Poles speak to me in their mother tongue. On one hand, the reason I don’t know Polish is because all my Polish (Jewish) ancestors either died a horrible death at the hands of (possibly) their ancestors or just barely escaped them. On the other hand, it’s a high compliment to be confused for a Polish lady. 5. Speaking of which, I love the Polish lady I met in line at the dollar store. When I complimented her turquoise beret, she pulled it off and showed me her bald scalp. “I’m sick,” she said, 
and held my hand until the cashier was ready to ring up her purchases. (I send her more love right now.) 6. I I love, love, love October. Come autumn, even this finely feathered city smells, looks, and feels magic. Smoke, drying leaves, dying earth: No wonder my best love affairs have always begun this time of year. (Extrapolate away.)
Let Down by ‘Low Down’
“Low Down” won the cinematography prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and it’s easy to see why. The debut directorial feature of Jeff Preiss (director of photography on “Let’s Get Lost,” “New York Memories”), it is a crimson and gold reverie that bathes the seedy clubs and SRO hotels of early-1970s Hollywood in instant, bittersweet nostalgia. This is a film whose prism of sunlight and shadows would be worth watching all day long as a video installation. As a biopic, though, it is both too much and too little – a shame, as it is based upon A. J. Albany’s very fine memoir about her fraught relationship with her father, acclaimed bee-bop pianist Joe Albany.
Until her mid-adolescence A. J., or Amy Jo as she was called back then (she was named after two March daughters in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women), was a team of two with her daddy. As she writes:
It wasn’t a musically productive period for him, but it’s when I knew him best. If he wasn’t in jail or rehab, we were together …. He heard music everywhere, in the squeaking of rusted bedsprings and the buzzing flies. Dripping faucets were filled with rhythms to him, as was the irregular flashing of the busted neon outside our window. Some shook their heads and thought he was a nut, but I never believed that. Continue Reading →
No Saving ‘White Bird in a Blizzard’
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact appeal of Shailene Woodley. Is it her throaty voice? Her eyes, piercing yet gentle? Those endless limbs, that defiant jaw? That slightly hippy-dippy honesty? Whatever it is, the twenty-two year-old can seemingly do no wrong. She’s terrific in such serious dramas as “The Spectacular Now” and “The Descendants”; she’s terrific in this year’s big-studio smashes “Divergent” and “The Fault in Our Stars.” But perhaps the true test of her potentially Julia Roberts-level stardom is whether she can carry off mediocre material. In the off-puttingly atonal “White Bird in a Blizzard,” the answer is: sort of.
The film is an adaptation of Laura Kasischke’s 1999 eponymous novel about Eve, a forty-six-year-old housewife who goes missing just as her daughter Kat becomes sexually active. Put bluntly, it’s no great loss that this book is now out of print. It is littered with psychological portent that’s never quite realized, insights into mother-daughter dynamics that fall flat, and enough purple prose to make the head spin. Continue Reading →