Is this like something you have to be? Or automatically become?

And why are there these special, all-cringeworthy words for getting older?

Why aren’t I the same person, in somewhat different form? Read the rest of this entry »

On Richard Brody’s New Yorker Blog, the DVD of the Week is that fave, that treasure, Terrence Malick’s Badlands.  Read the rest of this entry »

“Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?” asks Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker

Oh, but it doesn’t—or rather, not only then. Not at all. Anything fantastic enough, witnessed, will do the trick.
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Burning down the cloth house. Have you a shred of a chance of realizing all that you know in your heart are your dreams withheld, stifled, lost? And does this loss, what you have already lost and what will come, does it resonate anywhere? Or do your struggles as women rise and disappear like waves in the ocean, what does one woman matter, in a world you know is Wrong. Misguided, stupid to the core. Could you do better with one little finger than the men you refuse to call, anymore, leaders. And don’t you have to live with the terrible obviousness. Your perfect skill to find the moral balance midst conflict. Isn’t it all a big pissing contest, no more than gang behavior … and aren’t you, as a woman, with your maternal, familial skills, aren’t you the hope of the world?

{ fin }

Oh go ahead. Hit full screen. They don’t come much more beautiful than this. And with that iconic sound. Think of it—two notes that not only speak the Sixties—and honey, if you don’t know the level of social unrest of the Sixties, the assassinations, the deaths, you don’t really know America, nor what lazy, lulled shits we have, as a country, become—but here they go all over again, those notes, these lyrics, Chuck D, and, in such a beauty move, Steven Stills … Read the rest of this entry »

Kids, I hadn’t planned on writing about Alice’s Restaurant …

Come down here and be my house monk. Course you can’t do that. Kids and all. And I am so much older than I used to be. I no longer look or feel very foxy, although god knows of course that I am a good-looking woman. Some things never change. I was watching Otis Redding at Monterey Pop, a time seemed to last forever, then. I don’t think I could bear to watch it if I didn’t, in some far corner of my dreams, think it could all happen again. Or never ended. Right, and Otis is not dead. He was twenty-five at the time of those incredible recordings. Twenty-five and bursting with a talent it’s hard to account for, with soul and good looks. Good moves. What if someone like that had lived?
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“We are but a moment’s sunlight fading in the grass …” I was kneeling on the floor next to the big radio, weaving to the music. It was late afternoon. We had drunk perhaps foulest concoction ever, boiled dope tea, never to do so again. But the stoned-ness, ah, the stoned-ness. The extent to which one was stoned, the way in which one knew oneself to be utterly, thoroughly, completely stoned, washed over me in that special dope way, a feeling of both sinking and rising at the same time, much as a feather might float this way and that upon the air. Read the rest of this entry »