I was in Boston for the weekend for possibly less than 24 hours. All I wanted to do was to get a brown butter rice krispy treat from Flour bakery (they are also flecked with vanilla bean). We went to two - we were out of luck. When I sort of went all Rob Lowe on P&R in line and was like “how, how can these be gone? I have LITERALLY waited a whole year for my chance to eat them!” I realized I should probably just make it myself.
They were delicious. They require no ingredients. Now you do them!
(Are there any cities you have complicated relationships with? I have a complicated relationship with Boston. Reader, I was going to marry Boston with the beautiful naivete of a first love and then we broke up and now I love it a little and hate it a lot and feel embarrassed and have to go there sometimes to see my family and also the sublime Harvard Book Store, where NYRB classics are a steal.)
I’m really into artisan pickles right now.
Remember Wonderfalls? That was a really good show about the icky years post-college. So much potential, snuffed out too soon.
on twitter
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off - then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.” - Moby Dick, 1851
“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself wanting to passive aggressively tweet Modest Mouse lyrics; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off - then, I account it high time to make my best friend change my twitter password.” - a bastardization, 2012
“The problem with health care is this: Health care is enormously important to people. When you tell them that you’re going to extend health care to people who don’t now have it, they don’t see how you can do that without hurting them. So I think he underestimated, as did Clinton, the sensitivity of people to what they see as an effort to make them share the health care with poor people.”
A good thing to read on a night where I talked about the Health Care system with Stu for a half hour. There is nothing human involved in the system of insurance. It makes no sense that you need a job to get access to health care when plenty of people don’t have jobs because American jobs can’t afford to pay for employees’ health insurance. It makes no sense that Stu has to pay extra money that isn’t covered by his (very good) insurance (the price we pay to live in this stupid upstate city) since he was in the hospital in Massachusetts at Christmastime. The American Health Care system is like a mad bureaucratic fantasy from the imagination of Terry Gilliam and Tom Stoppard.
“All the accounts of Gabriel’s meeting with Fanny - whose real name was Sarah Cox - embody two essential elements of Pre-Raphaelite culture: hair fetishism and erotic slumming.”
They got Adam Sandler comedy voice-over guy to narrate this, I think.
“Three extraordinary young men! All they ever wanted… was to be WANTED! They’re gonna keep on trying until they get it right!”
unpacking my feelings about “criminal” by fiona apple
(a) the first shot is of fiona taking a picture with a camera and i think that defines this piece in that it is about documenting, archiving, and making the private public — it is about exposure
(b) removal of clothes and oversharing — showing “too much” of your skin, mind, personal life, history — as performance, a radical act, art
© the “spotlight” effect creates a darkness at the edges of every shot that makes normal domestic objects (vacuum cleaner, tissue box, car) and mess (half-eaten pizza, discarded shoes, pillows on the floor) look “dirty” — it reminds me of cheaters, reality television, night-vision cameras. something is being seen that is supposed to be hidden in darkness.
(d) bathing, hiding in closets, sitting on toilets — typically private acts — becoming public through exposure with varying degrees of acceptance by fiona (the look on her face when the boy opens the closet door and leaves her there, exposed, is so familiar). she is being exposed whether she consents to it or not, so enjoying the exposure, maybe even embracing/encouraging it, can be seen as a proactive/power-taking act on her behalf
(e) bathing/water as a means of purifying oneself because women’s bodies and minds and desires and faults are dirty, dirty, dirty
(f) “what would an angel say?/the devil wants to know”
(g) this song gives me so many shame/shameless feelings that i am both in love with and disgusted by
i could analyze this all day. i feel like there’s a lot going on here that i can’t really explain but it makes me hurt a little in self-pity kind of way and that is what i need right nowi feel this analysis like, 10000000% and couldn’t have put it better myself
writing about exposure, obvs. and breaking a boy just because you can and living this day like the next will never come and being on trial.
This video is seminal. There’s so much in here. When I first saw it, I was a kid and it terrified me, because it was about, like, a completely different world. All these points above are right and true, and there’s even more to make.
1) It came out before reality TV really exploded in America beyond just The Real World - it was ‘97, reality TV was the 2000s or so? So the effect was more voyeuristic and dirty in its original context. Do you remember hearing conversations about reality TV by parents or the like, where they were like “why is this reality? It’s not really real?” Despite those reservations, however, by sane people then it just exploded as a genre because it was quick and cheap. And all of a sudden, everyone was famous.
2) The other thing that was shocking was the aesthetic. It was reminiscent of the banned Calvin Klein ads that seemed like 70s basement amateur porn, and there’s Fiona in the middle, alternately bragging and repenting. It was complicated. If she made it now, would she have to be ashamed?
3) I remember there’s always been a lot of talk about Fiona’s body and skinniness. It’s interesting that in the past ten years, I feel like the majority of female performers in movies/TV are about this skinny. (And yet people will always say, with pointed fingers of judgment, anorexic! when Fiona Apple is around) There’s a big disconnect between seeing size 0s, size 2s, and visible clavicles on screen and seeing real life people whose bodies are different. It was a mind-fuck to me when I was writing about film all the time, thinking that my body was wrong and bad because it wasn’t what I saw on screen.
I don’t understand why film/TV has followed fashion standards when it comes to female bodies. Scratch that - I understand sort of, it’s been the results of the whims of the camera, a capricious asshole of a machine. Some actresses are very skinny in person just so they can look good on camera. But can you believe that Julia Roberts states she’s a size 6 in Pretty Woman? It wouldn’t happen in today’s films. She would be fat. The Devil Wears Prada - even though it was, you know, satirical - seems like an important point in that conversation.
I’ve wanted, at times, to write about this, but it is a fine line to write about women’s bodies and their meaning because it could sound like the patriarchy when you have the best intentions. But I do think that widely displayed images of females place unnatural expectations on women and it’s a raw deal that’s only getting worse. (Lena Dunham being a notable exception, even though the Glossy Magazine Lena Dunham Image, all I’ve seen as of late, seems completely dissonant with her art, which is kind of funny if you think about it.)
It’s why the media can get weird obsessions over something like Jennifer Lawrence’s body, simply because she’s “different” from the current accepted norm. Those scare quotes are there on purpose.
4) Lady Gaga’s “Just Dance” video is a ripoff of the Criminal aesthetic. I think it was an effort to make her seem like a hipster, and her music palatable to hipsters? Sort of like Lana Del Rey’s magpie videos and “realness.” Then her campaign kind of went full pop and art and weird.
“You began, spectacularly enough, with the excellent “Bottle Rocket”, a film we consider to be your finest work to date. No doubt others would agree that the striking originality of your premise and vision was most effective in this seminal work. Subsequent films - “Rushmore”, “The Royal Tenenbaums”, “The Life Aquatic” - have been good fun but somewhat disappointing - perhaps increasingly so. These follow-ups have all concerned themselves with the theme we like to call “the enervated family of origin"©, from which springs diverse subplots also largely concerned with the failure to fulfill early promise. Again, each film increasingly relies on eccentric visual detail, period wardrobe, idiosyncratic and overwrought set design, and music supervision that leans heavily on somewhat obscure 60’s "British Invasion” tracks a-jangle with twelve-string guitars, harpsichords and mandolins. The company of players, while excellent, retains pretty much the same tone and function from film to film. Indeed, you must be aware that your career as an auteur is mirrored in the lives of your beloved characters as they struggle in vain to duplicate early glories.”
(Gorgeous Bannerman Castle photo from Tom in Poughkeepsie)
The forsythia is blooming, and Bannerman Castle looked pretty close to this photo when I passed it on the train last week. (The Castle, however, is more of a crumbling wreck, a silhouette in the sky.) I have found that listening to the band Shearwater goes nicely with escaping back into the country, Bannerman Castle on your left.
Bannerman Castle makes my heart stop every time I see it. The stories! The potential! It’s a gorgeous wrecked little piece of land.
It is this, but also a metaphor
This week I had the pleasure of seeing Joachim Trier’s second film, Oslo, August 31st and reading The Vanishers by Heidi Julavits. They’re both worth seeking out. Oslo, August 31st is purposefully small, a day-in-the-life of a junkie, whereas The Vanishers is a batshit insane novel that’s fun to describe: when a woman gets physically attacked by her psychic mentor, she’s off on a journey to find out secrets about her dead mother. Or something. That’s actually an attempt to be succinct.
But what was funny about both works was that they were dealing with big topics - drugs and addiction, psychics and European spas (it’s a crazy book) - they were both very much fronts for what the artists were interested in. Oslo, August 31st feels very much a film about being in your thirties, as opposed to Reprise, which is one of the very best films about being in your twenties. The Vanishers is wrestling with grief through satire, with Sylvia Plath looming above everything as a benevolent ghost. It is also distressingly on target about the little wars that women wage with each other - sometimes the behavior is that of a psychic attack, but we ignore the wounds.
Oslo, August 31st may be a little bit of a masterpiece - it manages to take a selfish story and make it something about everybody, humanity, the pulse of a city. Anders Danielsen Lie is quite a good actor. There’s stuff happening on his face even when the scene is still. The Vanishers is definitely uneven, but fascinatingly so, and the writing is so good that you need a highlighter for certain sentences. It was a wonderfully maternal world, and I wondered whether Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry - or a female writing/directing team that I haven’t even heard of yet - could make a little bit of weird magic out of its words. It would be a dream, for sure.
Watching Mad Men With My Mother →
Check out this week’s Lives column in the New York Times Magazine. I wrote it. It’s about my relationship with my mother, dresses, and Mad Men. Funny enough, it’s one of the most personal things I’ve written!
Bonus fun facts: my mom is addicted to Mad Men now, but it literally took “watching each episode twice, to get through the bad feelings.” She even considered getting cable to watch this season. For this piece, she had to get fact checked by the New York Times Magazine. She also called me at one point to point out some typos in a draft. She’s really great.
Armando Iannucci is a comedy genius
I really don’t say that lightly. Peter Cook’s probably smiling down on him.
I made a list for GQ about 10 of the best insults to come out of Iannucci’s oeuvre, which includes The Thick Of It, In The Loop*, The Day Today, and I’m Alan Partridge. I didn’t know he had his own show on the BBC, too. He’s very Scottish!
*Inside baseball, but it’s a shame In The Loop was released by the teensy IFC. Stupid economy! If a Fox Searchlight had got their hands on it, it would’ve gotten the Oscar noms it deserved, not just a token Best Screenplay. Arguably one of the best political satires ever.
Click on this and laugh in the most not safe for work way possible.
Perfect movie.
So I feel like this Nicolas Cage in Moonstruck scene imprinted on the likes of Ryan Gosling and Adrien Brody at a very early age, don’t you think?
PS. Please watch this scene over and over again. It is PERFECT. Just like the movie!
PPS. Nicolas Cage, you are a sexy, brooding wolverine in this film.
The Feminine Tension
I follow a bunch of rad feminist tumblrs, so forgive me if this topic is tapped, but here you go: one thing that’s very interesting to me as of late is the sort of performative femininity pushed in pop-culture. I think that gulf between the “ideal lady” and the awkwardness of trying to be that lady is what makes Anna Faris pretty consistently funny, and there’s a similar tension with Lana Del Rey*, where she’s trying on a costume of blase cabaret singer from 1957 - loving the wrong man, her “daddy,” her “old man” - but she can’t quite pull it off in various ways. A show like Mad Men - even though I feel like it’s mostly, at its heart, about work - is all about that gulf with the female characters, but where it’s most interesting (and has received the most vehement criticism) is with January Jones as Betty Draper. The idea - as a generally accepted thing, let’s say - that January Jones is a “bad” actress, and how that plays into her role, where her marriage is a sham and she’s following the “right” path, but who is she, really? is sort of fascinating.
At some point I would like to write something long-form about this topic. Perhaps not quite at this moment. The short version, I think is that the performance of femininity simultaneously says that “this performance, this striving for some sort of feminine ideal of womanity, is utter bullshit,” and yet, with the attention these women get for striving (two out of the three named have had plastic surgery) for a typical ideal sort of proves that the game is rigged and people will still give you attention and worth based on an amorphous “ideal womanity.” [Early days, early ideas, let’s say.] I also think the backlash to January Jones as an actress and persona is sort of interesting - she’s kind of utterly herself, un-media trained, in a way that indicates the tyranny of being really beautiful, that it overrides needing to make a good impression. Presumably the beauty is the overriding impression. It’s sort of badass, in a way. (January Jones + Meghan Fox in interviews = two sides of a similar coin?)
Some of the outraged vitriol spit at these women (on the internet, mostly, I guess) makes me feel like I just want to give them a hug and full support.
*I am deep within the throes of a Lana Del Rey obsession at the moment, although I suspect it will wear off in a month or so, partially because the album is inconsistent. But the songs I love on it - “Off to the Races” “National Anthem” “This is What Makes Us Girls” - teeter between hilarious and great. The first two are kind of insane, veering wildly from idea to idea. The last one works for me as a portrait of a Twin Peaks-like youth in Lake Placid. It’s gotta be Lake Placid. Lots of hotels with swimming pools.
I’m a pretty good mimic - I used to entertain my elementary school classes with my spot-on Fred Schnieder from the B52s doing “Love Shack,” I’m still pretty good at it - and I tried to sing “Off to the Races” the other day, like Lana Del Rey. I thought I could do it. She’s in my range. It’s really hard to mimic the studio track. It’s a song sung by about eight different women. It would be hard to recreate in a live show. I start squeaking and petering out around “I’m your little harlot/starlet.”
[In France, The House Bunny was Super Blonde. And No Strings Attached was retitled Sex Friends. Hee! And a note: these observations apply to a specific Caucasian Marilyn Monroe/Grace Kelly idea of “womanliness,” but I would love to know how it affects other cultures.]
My Debt to Ireland →
John Jeremiah Sullivan inspires envy, admiration, drive. Reading his work makes me want to quit writing, and it also makes me want to keep going, because how awesome is it, to be a writer while John Jeremiah Sullivan is out there, taunting you with verbal elegance that you can only dream of? It’s pretty great.