No Candle Can Replace It
I’m really milking every last bit of summer out of this month. Today I had to read the wonderful book Tracks for a gig so I planted myself behind Red Hook Fairway and read the afternoon away on a bench overlooking the NY Harbor. As the sun dropped lower, more and more locals and Fairway workers came out to watch. I couldn’t stop grinning. When hanging out on the West Coast years ago, I’d been so touched that people would casually congregate on streets and in parks to watch the sunset. I’d never imagined we hardbitten New Yorkers would do the same (which goes to show you how much time I spend on the West Side Highway, I suppose). It all felt even grander since I’d spent the day with a loner in her Aussie desert, widenening into a wordlessness that she painted with the same voluptuous palette.
On the way home, I felt that sour apple feeling: happy to be nestled in a poncho and a long skirt, sorry the layers were rapidly growing essential. It reminded me of when I started back East on my road trip around the country. (My sweet auto Sadie was but a lass back then.) The first night the sun dropped in my rearview mirror rather than my windshield, I wept bitter tears. From then on, I understood manifest destiny not just as a race toward gold but as a race toward the glory of the sun itself. I felt that same grief tonight as the day exploded in the back of my now-geriatric car—and so early, too. Oh, oh, oh. A real lump in the throat. Anyway, apples and fire: that’ll be this fall.
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 →