August 14, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

I was in Boston, where my family lives, for a couple of days. I got to eat fried oysters and see the ocean at night as a lightning storm raged behind the clouds. I can’t even begin to parse out my feelings regarding Boston (or to be more speci… — I was in Boston, where my family lives, for a couple of days. I got to eat fried oysters and see the ocean at night as a lightning storm raged behind the clouds. I can’t even begin to parse out my feelings regarding Boston (or to be more specific, the greater Boston area) - needless to say, they’re complicated, and rather teenage and emotional in tenor.

But what I have been noticing, more and more, is that Boston overall has made some great efforts to be a more flourishing city: there’s a bike share program, the Rose Kennedy Greenway is gorgeous, and areas where I worked in high school and college that were dodgy now have no artists in lofts and new museums and condos and renovations. It’s all for the good, I suppose. There’s an artisan cheese shop in Southie next to a fancy dog wash. But I can’t shake the feeling that it’s blanding out, losing its character and its natives just to draw yuppies with money. There’s something in there that feels like a loss to me, although I suppose it’s a very familiar story.

Lighting Themselves On Fire For Our Enjoyment →

August 9, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

The New York Times Magazine on Cat Marnell’s flameout at XO Jane, which is somewhat inside baseball but speaks to certain universal truths, I find. To me, it feels like right now is a time when “confessional girls,” for lack of a better word, my peers in age and experience, are getting a certain amount of attention for writing stuff about their lives, tightly, inwardly focused. (Often, of course, called “narcissistic” by detractors.)

It can be exhilarating when it’s done with skill and vigor, and some of it is; I definitely can envy it - confessional girls younger than me make me feel like James Murphy sometimes - but mostly because because I am not so much a confessional girl. There’s a part of me that worries, motherly-ish, about what will your parents think and are you sure you can be taken seriously if you do this? I’m from New England, I was raised to think of that sort of writing as unseemly. You’re supposed to hide your emotions, aren’t you? Isn’t it better to find transcendence through metaphors?

Part of the reason I think Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? works is because it’s a confessional girl novel written by a woman who can step away, look at it, add some irony and humor to it. I also find Edith Zimmerman’s writing to be fascinating since she’s jokey and working in a milleu that thrives on … flameouts, confessions, and cults of personality, but she’s really building a career as a writer, and still retains an air of mystery as a person. She’s going to end up being Sloane Crosley-ish, isn’t she?

I took a personal essay class and the results were sort of hilarious - the essays were fine enough, the spine of them, but I managed, somehow, to write without exposing any guts, blood, or viscera to the class, in certain cases. For example: a whole essay about anxiety without delving into why I deal with anxiety, any of my issues. I’d like to revisit that essay at some point - sadly, anxiety has been a bit of a constant battle but I know how to function with it - but I’m not ready for it.

[Edit: Now that I think about it, I wonder if that’s why a goodly amount of well-received fiction by young authors tends to revel in a sort of magical realist corner, where fantastic flights of fancy can take the place of having to write realistically about your life because you’re a baby and nothing’s happened yet. I’m thinking a little of people like Karen Russell and Shane Jones.]

July 31, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

July 31, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

newmanology:

Poster for Hombre, starring Paul Newman (1967) — newmanology:

Poster for **Hombre**, starring **Paul Newman** (1967)

Source: http://newmanology.tumblr.com/post/2841217...

July 27, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

Gregory Crewdson, Beneath the Roses. — **Gregory Crewdson, Beneath the Roses**.

July 17, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

The evolution of Lana Del Rey is fascinating (and I quite like this). Obviously she’s always been her own Americana-fetishizing 60s babe before it was a thing, but it’s interesting how much she dovetails with that sort of twilight of the empire nascent Americana-fetish of the past few years?

Safety Not Guaranteed is great

July 17, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

Safety Not Guaranteed is an excellent movie, sharp and funny and wrestling with stuff beyond just a goofy meme. It was a really pleasant surprise, made more surprising since I hadn’t seen any previews for it or heard much about it beyond some mild Sundance buzz.

One note, however: Jake Johnson is funny and cute, and a good comic presence if not much of an actor (honest question: what comedians right now are actually good actors?). In the still above, he’s making that Nick Miller-on-The New Girl smelled something bad face and if he keeps doing that, it’s gonna freeze. Mark Duplass, on the other hand, let it be known: he’s super hot. I’ve interviewed him, I’ve been impressed by how hot and charming and smart he is and it all comes out in schlub on screen, er, mostly in films I have little to no desire to see.

The other thing that was amusing was that in a lot of ways, Safety Not Guaranteed was like the really good version of Another Earth, the horrible sci-fi romance from last year. Despite the fact that Brit Marling is basically a star who looks like an ethereal Princess Buttercup and gives great interview (unlike Aubrey Plaza), Another Earth just took an interesting premise and patched it onto an inert story about grief, and it was padded-out-to-be-a-feature-length with gratuitous shots of Brit Marling walking and closeups of Brit Marling’s face.

But both Safety Not Guaranteed and Another Earth took young women wrestling with some sort of sadness, stuck them in the lives of these shabby, crazy men hiding out from the world, and they find a sort of romance blossoming with the question of time travel and regrets framing everything or the idea of another earth in space with another you. It’s an okay formula, very good for making a cheap film and aiming it at festivals, but Safety Not Guaranteed was really impeccably written in all aspects, and that made it a great movie, not just another piece of wonky indie stuff that serves as a calling card.

July 17, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

July 12, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

“I totally want a boyfriend and it really gets me that I basically can’t get one right now. I will not be compromised!”

— Excerpt from teenage journals, Sark’s Journal and Play!Book. My parents are visiting, I am cleaning. (Related: how are all those Rookie girls so self-composed and Joan Didion-ly?)

July 11, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

“Some of my favorite experiences of art are when I am there but my attention has wandered. I think stimulation is overrated, and persistent stimulation is exhausting. You sometimes have to be banal, tedious; make the rhythm go soft and slow, give the mind a rest. I’d rather that people could be both entertained and given rest while reading my book, than for someone to have to put the book down to take a rest. You can’t just be lighting firecrackers all the time.”

—

from an interview about the book at the New York Times ArtsBeat blog (via howshouldapersonbe)

I feel like boredom is very important. (Clearly that is the only answer to the question of how a should a person be.)

July 10, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

Taken by Stu Sherman at Kolarbyn, Sweden. — Taken by **Stu Sherman** at **Kolarbyn, Sweden**.

Stay On Air Forever, Breaking Bad

July 9, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

I came to Breaking Bad after getting bored with Mad Men - I found Don Draper’s journey to be frustratingly static, every week a movement from A to A, where something was on the verge of happening but not quite (About Season 2 or 3). Breaking Bad, comparatively, was all about the joys of plot: every week, something happened of consequence, and the line that the show was built on, a “good” man going evil, expanded and twisted in ways that were deep and fascinating.

Nowadays, I’m back in Mad Men’s pocket. (I loved the last season.) But I still love Breaking Bad the most, and find it kind of irresistible to call it “better than Mad Men.” It’s funny because really, the two shouldn’t be compared. They’re on the same station, they’re doing the same good work. Retroactively, in five years’ time, it’s not going to matter one iota - mostly it’ll just be a record of two very good TV shows on the air at the same time, one winning the Best Drama Emmy because of the nuance and class, the other winning the Best Actor Emmy. I don’t see Jon Hamm - who, admit it, is desperate like a WB starlet in an iconic role to prove that he can be comic and not Don Draper and it’s funny because it’s awkward - ever winning an Emmy when Bryan Cranston has to go from A to K to R to F to Z to B, all in the course of one episode. (This is a bastardization of Dorothy Parker’s famous Katharine Hepburn diss, “She ran the gamut of emotion from A to B.”) The point of Mad Men is that Don Draper is superficially going from A to B, with tiny little cracks in the fissure.

They’re two consistently fascinating shows, since they’re asking what makes a (modern) man? and the answer is something like to survive and succeed, you have to be a sociopathic nihilist. Those shows, Deadwood, The Wire, and The Sopranos, seem to be the main arguments for why TV is the driving force of creative freedom in the culture these days, although I’m fairly sure you could combine the audiences for those shows and get half of the amount of people who’ve seen something on CBS, and this argument about “the golden age of TV” sure does discount any sort of female perspective on the shows or as a showrunner.

What I love about Vince Gilligan is that he never, ever assumes that the audience is dumb. (Unlike a Showtime series, which is all about setting up a wacky, skewed view of the world, having some fancy guest star come in and shake it up, and then having that person die and then the game is back at zero. I am talking about Dexter here.) Gilligan lets the audience figure out the games that the characters are playing, how their motivations are roiling underneath their placid faces. It’s hard not to totally love him for that fact. He has a tendency to quote a Billy Wilder adage about “letting the audience add up two and two to four and they’ll love you forever,” which is true.

I’m constantly surprised by Breaking Bad and I’m a little heartbroken that the “last” season is starting next week, which means there are only sixteen hours left of Walter White’s story. I have no idea where it will go, I assume it will be with his death - but maybe not - and whether it’s something epic and Greek or pathetic and driven by the return of his cancer, I don’t know. It’s not enough time for the world to quite catch up with Gilligan’s genius, for people to write about Breaking Bad in some of the ways that people write about Mad Men (which is an easier show to write about in a lot of ways, partially because it’s aspirational?). For me, I want to figure out why I have a tendency to relate a bit more to Walter White’s nihilism than the big beating heart of Jesse Pinkman. Perhaps it’s due to being the daughter of teachers.

What I do know for sure is this: at the end of the series, Walter White will be alone.

July 9, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

boniverotica:

A kitten is licking water droplets on the hood of the truck. Bon Iver is beneath, tapping dubiously at something with a paint-speckled crescent wrench.‘Whose kitten is this?’ I ask, giving it a scratch.Bon Iver rolls out and squints a… — boniverotica:

A kitten is licking water droplets on the hood of the truck. Bon Iver is beneath, tapping dubiously at something with a paint-speckled crescent wrench.

‘Whose kitten is this?’ I ask, giving it a scratch.

Bon Iver rolls out and squints at it. ‘That’s not ours?’ he says.

Neither of us is sure.

There is a cat that lurks at my new cottage. (You realize, I have moved to a cottage, I am living the fantasy world that is Bon Iver Erotica, with someone way cuter who hates yacht rock and loves The Fall.) When we leave for the day, she’s on the porch, rubbing against the posts. When we come home, she’s running up the stairs with us. She belongs to the neighbors across the way, but they lived in our cottage before us, and I think this cat still thinks of this cottage as her home. It’s sort of a great situation since we get the perks of a cat without the responsibility of a cat.

Once I was reading on the sofa and I heard a loud clang. The cat had jumped up to the windowsill and was looking through it, right at me. Cuteness was stalking me.

Last night, we took a walk. The cat was feeling friendly, and sort of hiked along with us, curving around the corner of the street, passing houses. We’d stop and look at the stars, the cat would stop and scratch an itch on the street. Once we got to a particular house, the cat stopped; she couldn’t continue with us. We turned around and saw a different white cat in the middle of the road.

When we got to the park, we watched some fireflies and heard the noise of some small animal crashing through the branches. We sprinted back home.

July 5, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

*I Would Like To Be There, Big Sur, 2010*

June 27, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

Nora Ephron directed her first film in her 50s. Her last film, Julie & Julia, showed the blossoming of Julia Child, how she found her passion in life in her 40s.There are many second (and third, and fourth) acts in American lives.What is somewha… — Nora Ephron directed her first film in her 50s. Her last film, Julie & Julia, showed the blossoming of Julia Child, how she found her passion in life in her 40s.

There are many second (and third, and fourth) acts in American lives.

What is somewhat gutting in the “movies” category of Ephron’s wonderful career is that Ephron was one of about two female American directors who could make films about complicated women concerned with relationships. They made a lot of money and were treated as major whether they flew or flopped. Her work was valuable and influential. There’s a gap where her voice used to be.

PS. Cancer, you suck.

June 26, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

“Don’t underestimate how much antagonism there is toward women and how many people wish we could turn the clock back. One of the things people always say to you if you get upset is, don’t take it personally, but listen hard to what’s going on and, please, I beg you, take it personally. Understand: every attack on Hillary Clinton for not knowing her place is an attack on you. Underneath almost all those attacks are the words: get back, get back to where you once belonged. When Elizabeth Dole pretends that she isn’t serious about her career, that is an attack on you. The acquittal of O.J. Simpson is an attack on you. Any move to limit abortion rights is an attack on you — whether or not you believe in abortion. The fact that Clarence Thomas is sitting on the Supreme Court today is an attack on you.”

— Nora Ephron’s commencement speech at Wellesley College in 1996 (via rachelfershleiser)

Source: http://malindalo.tumblr.com/post/259652219...

June 26, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

richardrushfield:

THE BACKLASH ERA: IS BEASTS BACKLASH PROOF?
Over at Awards Daily Sasha Stone asks the important question: will the hype over the upcoming release, Beasts of the Southern Wild, will provoke an inevitable, even greater backlash, as … — richardrushfield:

**THE BACKLASH ERA: IS BEASTS BACKLASH PROOF?**

Over at Awards Daily Sasha Stone asks the important question: will the hype over the upcoming release, Beasts of the Southern Wild, will provoke an inevitable, even greater backlash, as is the natural life cycle of the Backlash Era?

Beasts has been playing at festivals for half a year now and been winning raves everywhere, starting at Sundance. My review is to be penned so I won’t reveal whether I liked it or not other to say it is the best American film so far this year, quite possibly the best film period so far this year.

With its release looming however, the film does not yet seem to have provoked a general backlash and there is, as Sasha points out, reason to hope that it might not, that a film might just escape under the wire with people just liking it and not lashing out against it in response (Can anyone even name the last time that happened? Could’ve happened with The Artist, until the Oscar campaign pushed it into major Backlash Era territory. Before that…Toy Story 3?..Hurt Locker?)

So could Beasts sneak through Unbacklashed? Just like olden days. My considered answer is…it might! Not likely but it could.

Read this whole post, it’s so smart. Richard Rushfield is one of my favorite voices writing about movies and entertainment right now. He’s always sharp and spot-on and generally trustworthy.

Regarding this thesis, I would agree that movies, especially independent movies doing the molasses-slow platform release, don’t end up on the same hype cycle because not as many people are able to weigh in about it.

I also think that film writers just aren’t as cool or “influential” because film’s lost its cultural cache to TV (but technically, it’s really, like five shows that are generally obsessed over, not *2 Broke Girls* or most TV, which is funny. Would the likes of *Carnivale* or *Bored to Death* be part of your argument about the “golden age” of TV?) and the “holy trinity” of film writers aren’t tweeting/blogging/connecting-with-the-youth in the same way (like David Denby, Anthony Lane, David Edlestein, Manola-with-no-face, and then there’s Richard Brody, who talks in linguistic circles to make mumblecore films/terribly boring art mediocrities sound like actual profundities when they’re middling). And the youth that are determined to write professionally about films - beyond my smart friends who mostly are on fanboy sites - are boring writers with no sense of journalistic ethics and even less sense about film history.

It would be different if there were three Wesley Morris-types at relevant publications. Or if A.O. Scott and David Carr merged and became a super macha film critic with a twitter presence. Or if Grantland had Molly Lambert weigh in on every film, ever.

PS. **I wrote about Benh Zeitlin’s excellent Beasts precursor, Glory at Sea! in 2009, when it made me cry. Watch it!**

June 21, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

Starbucks graffiti, “Call Me Maybe,” 2012

Let Me Through, I‘m a Cheesemonger

June 20, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

eatinwords:

If you will permit me, I will blog.

I will write about food, mostly.

I will write about cheese, and about cheesemakers and the farms and dairies where cheeses are made.

I will write about wine, though mostly of its relationship to cheese. I will collaborate with my friend Cat Silirie on a regular segment that we’ll call, “This Cheese, This Wine.”

Once, for exactly a year, I wrote in a notebook everything that I ate. Everything. I won’t do that again. It was a horrible burden.

I will write about restaurants where they inspire me. I will praise and describe the ones I like and ignore the ones I don’t.

Read More

BEST NEW TUMBLR: Matthew Rubiner, proprietor of the wonderful cheese & grocers & cafe Rubiner’s/rubi’s, in Great Barrington, MA - some place you simply must go if you are in the Berkshires - is now online. He is an excellent writer and has one of the country’s best minds when it comes to cheese. I expect glorious, gluttonous photos and stories about cheese, featuring cheese in sandwiches and various food combinations that will make you weep - as soon as he starts tagging his posts with subjects like “cheese” and “food,” you know?

Michael Shannon has perfectly Michael Shannon-y taste in music →

June 15, 2012 Elisabeth Donnelly

Modest Mouse, “Bury Me With It”

Michael Shannon: I love this song. This is my favorite song on that album. This is one band me and my girlfriend both agree on—we both really like Modest Mouse. But it seems like this is kind of his last hurrah, wasn’t it? He made another album afterwards, but I didn’t really care for it. I can’t remember what it’s called. Something about a ship sinking… captain on a sinking ship or something…

I like this guy because he’s like an animal. I like when he starts screaming because he’s got a really badass voice. It’s Isaac Brock, right?