Redgrave as Metaphor
What happens when a materialist film critic has an anxiety dream:
Shoes—shoes lost, shoes gained, shoes lost. I’ve lost my own and don’t have another pair with which to safely exit this terrible claustrophobic party thrown by a celeb hostess in a gentrified section of Brooklyn. Others (the hostess’s assistant!) keep stealing my original pair, bringing me five more pairs that are impeccably beautiful and whisking them away as soon I get ensnared in another vapid starfucker conversation. We’re talking perfectly soft and shined loafers and boots by Prada, Miu Miu, Marc Jacobs, Louboutin—God, labels seem so pre-Covid. I find myself longing for such refined empty luxury.
Vanessa Redgrave—even longer and blonder and more displeased than she seems on screen—turns out to be the hostess. Grand-dame sociopathy masquerading as cool calm collection. She sweeps and droops around, getting drunker and drunker on perfectly rendered martinis–lemon not olive–as her guests wax and wane. At one point there are people crammed into every corner of her too-white house. Someone does the math and declares it 2012 guests, which is a 1:1 ratio for every square inch of the living room. White furniture white rugs white walls white chandeliers. Her house is hoarder-stuffed but with the most beautiful things: Chagall paintings and Brancusi sculptures and 70s Dior so it’s hard to register the same disdain as if it were plastic angels from Home Shopping Club. More a mixture of envy and disgust and judgment that I meta-judge within myself. I feel as if I’m a poor kid in Newton again. I’m stuck because, oy, no shoes so end up sleeping on a very white couch, my red lipstick leaving a crime scene on a cushion. Continue Reading →
Astro PSA: Virgo Season in a Pandemic
Isn’t it funny that Virgo season begins at the end of August, when most of us are at our absolute laziest? In fact, I’ve been so lazy that just crafting this post felt like more exertion than I could handle. But that’s exactly why we need this sign.
The hardest worker in the zodiac, Virgo can kick us into gear even when temperatures soar into the 90s and we’re in Month 6 of a pandemic. As a mutable sign, she’s hardly the OCD queen some claim her to be. It’s just that she understands Goddess is in the details, and that straight-ahead service and solicitude is at the backbone of every calling. Truly, she is the finest healer we have and admirably modest no matter how fabulous she may be. After the radical recharging—dare I say self-indulgence?—of Leo season, only the Maiden’s focus and fortitude can keep us fighting the good fight.
So I spent the day writing this, then cleaning up links and language on rubyintuition.com, and if that isn’t Virgo season work I don’t know what is. Because this sign isn’t about big, showy actions so much as the background business that is necessary to keep the world running smoothly. Virgo is the nurse of the zodiac, and we all know the best healers in hospitals are the nurses, not the rockstar surgeons. 
(Sorry, Meredith Grey.) Virgos attend to the smallest details to achieve the biggest changes. That’s why during this Virgo season we must register everyone to vote, inspect every polling booth, and nitpick at every official–not to mention the US postal service itself–to lay the necessary foundation for a fair election come Scorpio season. The ultimate Virgo message: Think globally, act locally.
To refocus, recalibrate, and rev back into your own best service, book a reading; ‘tis the season! (Pictured in this video: Virgos—some admittedly controversial—whose labors of love have changed our lives.
Flaneuzy Days of Yore
I woke thinking about what I miss most about pre-Covid life. Every week it’s different but today I miss my old summer practice of slipping into movie theaters on Monday mornings to see the newest releases in delicious cool quiet surrounded only by other (cheap) cinephiles. I’d pay for one show, then sneak into another and then another and another before finally emerging into the still-sweltering early evening. Falling into step with all the other New Yorkers making their way to dinner and drinks and drama and doldrums–first by foot across town and then by ferry across the river and then again by foot up the Williamsburg hill. Floating in a blur of the films I’d just seen and the film of all the strangers with whom I was moving, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, all of us beautiful in our sweaty sullen noisy throng, framed by the rising steam and NYC skyline. O my god I miss the ordinary-extraordinary physical intimacy of anonymous city life.