This, it must be said, is the car that brought us to Wanakena. When we arranged to rent a compact from Avis in Newark, NJ, we had no idea that they would provide us with a bright red Ford Mustang convertible. Who needs four wheel drive when you have all that MUSCLE?
More pictures at flickr!
Usually, I get very stressed out about traveling to and from Wanakena, my friend K-Ross’s house in the mountains, and then I enjoy my time in the snowy wilderness immensely. This year I felt nowhere near so apprehensive in advance; but, while I enjoyed myself, I also didn’t have the kind of heart-filling experience I have had in the past. Whether these things are related, I can’t tell.
What is probably related is that about half of those who went this year were newfolks, a self-contained group of non-Swatties, and though they were perfectly nice, I felt a bit on the outskirts the whole time. Mostly I hung out with my small, great nucleus of friends, an experience that was cozy and lovely but not transcendent. Plus, once two of those friends ramped up the flirting and eying of each other, the prevailing narrative of the day became their courtship and then its culmination. (Of which I only watched the first part.)
Mr. Ben put in a superhuman effort to get us there, driving almost the entire way through a devouring snowstorm, after having slept only two hours of the last thirty. Listening to the last Harry Potter book on CD helped, but the unfortunate side effect was that he was more or less in a fugue state for much of the next day. Still, I think he had a good time. And it’s lucky we didn’t crash. Apparently we tempted fate by forgetting to “sit” before we left — it’s a very simple Russian tradition that consists, simply and entirely, of sitting quietly before getting up and moving into the car. We forgot, and, in consequence, LEFT OUR DOOR UNLOCKED. Nothing was stolen, thank God, but I don’t think we’ll neglect to “sit” again.
Once in Wanakena, we hung out in the sweat lodge, danced, ate, and tromped through the deep powdery snow. We also played a lot of games, especially once the strangers and half of my nucleus took off, leaving only K. Ross, Mr. Ben, the Rebbe and me alone with the leftovers. My favorite part of the experience was the outfit I wore New Year’s Eve, which came courtesy of the Rebbe with an assist from one of the strangers. I felt like a 20’s vixen. (Pictures TK!)
And now it’s 2008. I can’t believe this year is here already — it’s the one I thought would never come around. We had to offer blessings to each other over dinner, a process which freaked me out in the moment since I hate being put on the spot AND forced to be sincere at the same time, but the ones I offered the stranger next to me stand for pretty much everyone I know, certainly all of you: (1) good haircuts; (2) a Democratic government; and (3) the encountering of many new and surprising selves within the larger You. Happy new year!
In A.O. Scott’s review of There Will Be Blood, he mentions, parenthetically, “Like most of the finest American directors working now, Mr. Anderson makes little on-screen time for women.” I love P.T. Anderson. I love the Coen brothers. Most of the directors, in fact, that Tony’s talking about are men I hold near and dear to my heart. But it’s indisputable that they forget Abigail Adams’s famous injunction: “…remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”
It’s possible only the beginning of the quote applies to this particular cinematic situation.
Still, it bothers me. Last night, Mr. Ben and I watched Waitress, which meant that I have now completed 2007’s Fertility Trifecta (the other two being, of course, Knocked Up and Juno). The movie had some entertaining moments and some good lines. Mostly, though, it felt like it was trying too hard to yank on the Steel Magnolias chain, and it lacked the credibility: there’s something odd about watching Felicity and Jeremy Sisto, the creepy brother from Six Feet Under, affect Southern accents. At the end, the quirky-sweetness falls away from the movie’s tone and it becomes a kind of Herstory uptopia, a You Go Girl!, Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle pastel fantasy.
Despite the movie’s flaws, it’s one of the few 2007 films that pass the Ms. test. Juno and the the Savages also do, bless their indie little hearts, and I’m sure Persepolis will. But I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that all of those films come from source material written by women — and, in the case of the Savages, a female director too. Why are women fundamentally uninteresting to otherwise edgy, intelligent, creative, broad-minded men?
Whatever the reason for the blind spot, I do think it’s funny that directors will make exceptions for their wives: Frances McDormand is a Mrs. Coen and has played their most memorably vivid and interesting female character; Helena Bonham Carter, Burton’s girlfriend and baby momma, serves the same function. Expand, fellas! Does Patricia Clarkson need to hook up with someone to get a real role?
One of the perks of having a father-in-law who lives locally? Sometimes you can get taken to dinner ‘n’ a movie. This is exciting under normal circumstances, but when “movie” = “SWEENEY TODD,” something you’re totally desperate to see, it’s beyond thrilling.
I didn’t realize at first that he agreed to take Mr. Ben and me to the movie the same way he agreed to take us to — I shudder to think of this now — The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a far less successful adaptation of a classic text. Luckily, he loved it. Does it even need be said that Mr. Ben and I did too? This was Tim Burton at his most grotesque, let loose on fantastic material. At times (the “By the Sea” dream sequence, where Mrs. Lovett fantasizes about how she & her homicidal lover could have a bourgeois life together, for example) Burton’s macabre vision actually improves on the original.
Helena Bonham Carter has a range of about five notes, but she manages to put her own spin on a role I’ve now seen inhabited by extremely different actresses (Angela Lansbury, Christine Baranski, and Patti LuPone — what could you imagine they would have in common?). ** SPOILER ALERT ** She makes the foolhardy love that Mrs. Lovett has for Sweeney moving rather than merely pathetic, and I loved her duet with Toby, “Not While I’m Around.” I mean, talk about layered subtext. Little Toby is singing, thinking, “I finally have a home! This woman rescued me and I can’t wait til I can rescue her in turn to communicate the depth of my affections!” and the mother figure is singing, thinking, “Oh, shit, I now have to kill this boy.”
Part of the twisted charm of this show is that Sondheim wrote strikingly beautiful love songs for it and then put them in the most upsetting possible context. How would you like to sing an ode to “Pretty Women” with the man who had you jailed so he could rape your wife?
HBC and Johnny Depp as Sweeney are both made up to look like zombies (sexy zombies) only partially inhabiting the colorless world of Victorian London. In that respect, they match, and they feel right as a couple. Depp also has a surprisingly good voice, or good for the role anyway. This is true of the other cast members too. They make it work.
Mr. Ben and I realized that the cast is peopled with Slytherins: HBC, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spell (the man who plays the Beadle here and Peter Pettigrew there). This inevitably made me wonder how the Harry Potter movies would be as interpreted by Tim Burton. Oh, the things of which we can only dream … But in fairness, Burton is a post-modernist; Sweeney is a pomo classic; HP is not. Burton doesn’t seem to be at his best dealing with non-pomo material, as evidenced by virtually everything he’s done since Nightmare Before Christmas.
Anyway. Sweeney left me weak in the knees, as the kids say, and I feel prepared to take on the movie that is both supposed to be excellent in its own right AND an excellent summation of the films of 2007: There Will Be Blood.
Someone pointed out that most of my entries are written on the topic of My Being Outraged About Something. That’s horrible! I don’t mean to be doing that. Most of the time I’m a very positive person. Right now, for example. I’m at my secret internet full-time job (not to be confused with the secret internet part-time job I held briefly last spring) and I like it! I really like it! The people are — well, they’re around me right now so I won’t say much about them, but they’re all my age, which makes “work” feel more like “summer camp.”
We get our first paycheck today, in fact, I believe. That’s pretty good for a week in which we’ve spent one day being oriented by playing name games; one day touring NYC campuses undercover (that really took me back); and three days now at a computer lab doing things that actually require thinking and creativity.
Also, I just saw Juno, this year’s Little Miss Sunshine the same way No Country for Old Men is this year’s the Departed. It was the best thing I’d seen in a long time, possibly since Pan’s Labyrinth. It was as funny as Knocked Up but didn’t make me feel dirty afterwards because it didn’t seem to be saying that men and women are fundamentally different and can never get along, never never never, but they have to get & stay married anyway, just because.
Atonement–you know, the literary movie about War and Love and Betrayal and Big Ideas–was respectably good, especially in its first act, but it didn’t move me nearly as much as the story of the adorable, snarky, midwestern 16 year old and her adorable, sweet sorta boyfriend. Mostly, and this is key: I believed it.
Oh, and Malcolm Gladwell! He wrote what I hope will be the definitive word on race and IQ. (God knows at least I’m not interested in reading more on the subject.) Basically, he reminds us that an IQ test is not like a blood test: you don’t get objective results because one must TAKE an IQ test. Since it’s active, the individual can’t be separated from the results. Which is to say, someone who wasn’t groomed to be sit down quietly and concentrate on a paper-and-pencil test is virtually bound to do less well than someone who was. Also, Gladwell has a way of making statistics legible without condescending to his readers. I appreciate that.
See? I like stuff! In fact, I like everything, except Ditchens and Howd.
Happy Hannukah, everyone! You know, that harmless, minor Jewish holiday that exists in America as this country’s paltry companion piece to Christmas, like a kid playing a kazoo on the sidelines as a confetti strewn marching band in full regalia, with cheerleaders and baton twirlers and gymnasts and everything, spends a month slowly parading by.
Don’t think I bear Christmas any ill will. Sure, I used to; but we’re cool now, we’re cool. I’ve gotten to celebrate a secular version a couple times with Mr. Ben’s dad’s family. I’ve done it all, in fact: the evening service as St. Marks, a stocking filled with stuff hanging on the mantle for me, wrapped boxes glistening under the tree. I can understand how, if you grew up with that — or, that plus some heartfelt religious traditions — you’d long for it every year.
It’s just not my holiday. All the same, you’d never see me go on a tirade like this about Christmas, let alone about poor, miserable, homely Hannukah! What is Christopher Hitchens thinking?
His rant, which I’ve read now twice and concluded makes not a speck of sense, seems to be saying that Hannukah is bad because it celebrates the triumph (for about fifteen minutes, once) of the ancient Hebrews over the Greeks. And who were the Greeks, asks Hitch? A culture that
had weaned many people away from the sacrifices, the circumcisions, the belief in a special relationship with God, and the other reactionary manifestations of an ancient and cruel faith.
Some religious Jews were annoyed that their countrymen were assimilating, so they rebelled against the imperial powers of the day and WON — which, by the way, didn’t happen often in Jewish history, so I’m sure it came as quite a shock to Judah the Maccabee; like my mother when she was convinced I wouldn’t get into Swarthmore, Judah probably gave away his bottle of champagne.
And why does Hitch have a bee in his bonnet about this? Because to him it’s a turning point. If the Jews hadn’t won, we wouldn’t have those pesky spin-off religions, Christianity (centered around, in his elegant phrase, the “alleged birth of the supposed Jesus of Nazareth”) and Islam. No monotheistic religion would exist! Think of it! We’d all be wearing togas and drinking wine touched up with water and having sex with little boys, just like the pagan gods intended.
There is little more irritating to me than sloppy history, especially in combination with nostalgia for the imaginary utopias of earlier eras, “before the development of the whole of humanity was terribly retarded.” (Wow, right?) I mean, yes, when I was 12, I did want to inhabit the world of Mists of Avalon, but even then I understood that it was *fiction* and anyway I was 12! There’s no point in wishing ancient Greece back. No matter how much Hitch yearns for the homosocial, toga-wearing, gymasium-dwelling, slave-holding, vomitorium-scented days of a couple thousand years ago, that empire was sacked by the Romans. The ancient Hebrew did not kill Athens; and if Athens was able to fall, on any level, to a guerilla band of hammer-wielding mountain men, it certainly could not have been very stable to begin with. So lay off, would you, Hitch? Christ. You’re putting me off my latkes.
Via NYMag, a handy-dandy graphical guide to the depressing movies to choose from this holiday season!
Via People for the American Way, the hilarious parody Right Wing Facebook!
It’s my last day in this office and I can’t concentrate properly. Last night I went to a Mountain Goats concert at NYU and was distracted nearly the whole time by this kid making out with his girlfriend in front of me. There was something so mesmerizingly wrong about the pair of them: she was a normal looking 18-22 year old; he looked like a serial killer. Pale skin, old-fashioned nerd glasses, the kind of haircut you give your middle-schooler before he learns to rebel, and clothes to match. Why on earth were they sucking face for the length of the show? Was the girl under some kind of spell?
Then the Goats played The Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Denton as their final encore. There’s nothing like a packed auditorium of undergraduates screaming, “Hail Satan!” to shake one out of a reverie.
Whee! Enchanted, that girliest of girl movies starring Amy Adams, won the box office match-up this past weekend, beating, by a long shot, Natalie Portman’s trippy-sounding entry, Mr. Magorium’s Magic Emporium. Not that I contributed to Enchanted’s success; I was too busy watching boy movies 1. I’m Not There and 2. No Country for Old Men, both of which I enjoyed and admired, although neither knocked my head off my shoulders.
I’m Not There at least breaks free of the tedious biopic formula in which the director attempts to psychoanalyze the subject based on a five minute snippet of his childhood, tracing all of his problems with women, for example, back to that time his mother put him in a closet. Todd Haynes doesn’t try to understand Dylan at all; six actors portray different facets of the rocker, and the composite both serves as a good overall sense of the people Dylan has maybe been at different points AND a good example of the Being John Malkovich/Walt Whitman theory of identity. You know, that we contain multitudes.
The two standout Dylans are a little black boy who rides freight trains with his guitar, dressed like a Depression-era mini hobo, Sir-ing and Ma’am-ing and performing for the bemused 1959 adults he meets along the way as Grassroots Bob, and a b&w Cate Blanchett in fantastic drag who captures everything itchy, rangy, brilliant, and savage about Famous Bob.
As for No Country, aka this year’s Departed, I liked it better than Nora Ephron did. (Caution: her piece contains spoilers, in case you care, when going to watch a bloodbath, exactly who dies.)
Mr. Ben and I went to his dad’s house in Westchester for Thanksgiving with a swarm of Russians, which meant a feast lengthened by frequent cigarette breaks and toasts that made Ben’s dad weep with laughter. He and/or Mr. Ben tried valiantly to translate but I only found the jokes perplexing, which made everyone else laugh harder. One gag began, “So, you remember Stalin” and went on to be about a man who had fathered three kids by three different women.
“Get it?” said Ben’s dad at last having painstakingly explained.
“Yes,” I said. “But what does that have to do with Stalin?”
The table roared.
Foodwise, everything that didn’t have meat had mayonnaise. I ate a lot of bread and, at the debut of the fruit bowl come dessert-time, I fell on those melon cubes like they were my personal lord and savior. But the evening was definitely an experience.
Mr. Ben had cause for celebration this weekend so we ran a lot of errands. This is the way things work around here. But they were fun errands! Thanks to them, I traded in a few books I wasn’t crazy about and got in return Best American Comics 2007 (f0r Mr. Ben) and Under the Banner of Heaven (for me). Barnes and Noble can be a regular lending library if you know how to game the system! And then, in a different store, I traded in a couple movies I wasn’t crazy about and got in return Season One of the Gilmore Girls, a Madeline Peyroux CD, and Bruce Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on video.
Especially when the various birthday parties and friends and sleepovers and Buster Keaton shorts and Korean dinner and magical sandwich brunch were factored in, it was the best weekend I’ve had in a while. Mr. Ben and I hadn’t gotten to spend that much uninterrupted time together since he started at the firm. Um, because clearly he’s been spending too much time golfing at the club? Whose life am I living?
I did realize recently that my draconian regimen of no alcohol and no food with more than 25g of sugar has turned me into a new person. It’s been months since my last anxiety attack, and that one was over the wedding weekend; and christ, if a person can’t go shaky before they get married, then I don’t know what. Anyway, it’s wonderful not to have to worry all the time that I’m going to turn into a fragile, eplileptic mess, crumpled on the bathroom floor like a junkie trying to inject relief in the form of a children’s book. (Before xanax, the Snicket series was worth its weight in gold.)
Even the time of year hasn’t been stressing me out. I’m changing jobs but voluntarily and wow! what a difference that makes. The holidays seem to be arranging themselves nicely. The Scrabulous ratings system was instituted after my unlucky streak and before my current lucky one, so my rating is a whopping 1511. It’s bound to go down and might never reach that pinnacle again — thus, even though I know not what the numbers mean, I feel like I must enshrine them. And to top it all off, my sainted mother went dancing this past week in my high school prom dress. She promises pictures.
