February 2012
12 posts
4 tags
Clybourne Park
Maybe the best play I’ve ever read. I really want to see it but I don’t know if I’ll be able to afford it. Still, if Mel also wants to go, it might be worth it.
Clybourne Park is a masterpiece of structure, and I’m always struck by how important structure is in a play. I’m typically in the weeds of syntax, and it’s phenomenal to see the underpinnings of...
4 tags
My Pins, My Self: Getting Pinned and Liking It →
Original title: “Pinterest isn’t feminine, and other false statements.”
This is the first article I’ve written that was relevant to Hacker News! Nice to see some conversation start there.
I work in tech, and over the past few weeks I’ve found myself in various conversations about the resounding success of Pinterest. The site just reached 10 million users, and is growing...
3 tags
How We Will Read: Laura Miller and Maud Newton
I had the privilege of interviewing two of the smartest people I’ve ever spoken to, simultaneously, about the new blog they just founded, The Chimerist. Maud Newton and Laura Miller were so easy to talk to, and I think they had incredible insights about reading in our brave new world. Check it out at the Findings blog below.
fndgs:
Welcome to the second installment of “How We Will Read,”...
5 tags
Catharsis through Netflix: Watching Atonement →
Oh my god, I got a piece published at The Rumpus. Trying not to hyperventilate.
This is the most intensely personal piece I’ve ever written, by the way. Fair warning, dear readers.
That fragment of dialogue was solid. I felt like I could hold it. It was the truth I’d made myself a vessel for.
3 tags
News.me: Getting the News — Alan Murray →
newsme:
(This post is part of News.me’s ongoing series, “Getting the News.” In our efforts to understand everything about social news, we’re reaching out to writers and thinkers we like to ask them how they get their daily news. Read the first post here. See all of the posts, from writers and…
In which I get my Deborah Solomon on. Interviewing Alan Murray for News.me’s...
4 tags
Friends with Benefits
I cannot defend my decision to watch this movie so I will not try. It was predictably terrible in all the right places and I’ve forgotten most of it already. It had a lot of potential, as far as rom-coms go. Funny and sexy and cute, in a pretty good balance, with requisite family melodrama partway through.
But Justin Timberlake is just a lightweight actor. He can’t carry a romantic...
3 tags
Drive
You know how when you’re watching TV in a different language or in a foreign country and something comes on late at night (because you’re jetlagged) on a channel you’ve never heard of and it’s this super-pulpy prison-gore sex-thriller revenge fantasy? Drive is like that but with really high production values. And Ryan Gosling looking hot all the time.
I’m so disoriented when a movie I heard good...
4 tags
Archer, Season 2
Still delightful, still delicious. But especially when Lana Kane and Sterling Archer are on the screen at the same time. The breast cancer diagnosis episode might be my favorite episode ever. I know that sounds weird. Trust me, just watch it.
5 tags
"Is 'New Girl' Secretly Feminist?" →
Probably not? But it’s worth discussing. In which I take on Zooey Deschanel, twee, and my least favorite word, “adorkable”
3 tags
The Marriage Plot
1. I don’t know what people who didn’t specifically experience post-graduate malaise after going to Brown got out of this book.
2. Beautifully written, because everything written by Jeffrey Eugenides is beautifully written, but thematically inconclusive. Richly accurate descriptions of place and time. The ending could have been better, but Hil and Mel argued in its favor.
3. One of...
5 tags
Pretty/Ugly: Young Adult and Tiny Furniture,... →
This is a cleaned-up/more experimental/slightly more fit for publication version of my blog post from a few weeks ago. Tell me what you think!
2 tags
The Artist
I didn’t get any of the references but this was still highly enjoyable. Well-made! Detail-oriented. Incredible acting. Forces you to think about sound and film and acting and celluloid and talkies even if you wouldn’t regularly or didn’t want to.
I think I’m a little bit deranged because even though it’s a really good movie, obviously, I still can’t maintain an...
January 2012
14 posts
4 tags
“He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their...”
– Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
5 tags
Strindberg: Three Plays
Who thinks people talk like this?
The Father: Very dark. Too dark. Dark with an agenda. Overall fascinating idea of what the battle of the sexes is like, but either beyond me or too far out of my context for me to agree.
Miss Julia: I don’t know what she did to deserve her fate, except merely exist, but I think I enjoyed this one the most. Maybe it seemed the most relevant to my life.
...
3 tags
The Nutcracker
Can you tell I’m behind on my reviews? Does the Nutcracker count as a narrative work of art? Does it surprise you that besides my obsession with ballet this is the first ballet I’ve seen by a “real” company? Is it weird that I thought it was too short?
6 tags
The Iron Lady
I watched this movie through a haze of tears. It is ostensibly about Margaret Thatcher, but really it is about aging, coming to terms with the creeping irrelevance that age brings.
There is still (but hopefully will not be forever) a novelty in seeing a great woman contemplating her power. (I was reminded of the book I just finished, Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra: A Life.) Margaret Thatcher at...
3 tags
“But for indie music, “authentic” designates anything but genuineness—it’s just a...”
– Tracy Jeanne Rosenthal, “Why the Indie Music World Hates Lana del Rey”
(Maybe the most important crystallized idea about us to take with you.)
4 tags
Blue Valentine
This is the type of movie that makes me upset that I have decided to review everything I watch. I don’t feel qualified to say anything intelligent about this movie. Here are some observations I made but they do not coalesce into anything grander.
This movie is actually, at times, blue.
I didn’t really like either of the characters, though I thought both were masterfully pretty and...
6 tags
Book Review: Cleopatra, A Life →
I just finished this and reviewed it over at Persephone.
3 tags
My essay was published at Persephone Magazine! →
HYPERVENTILATING
5 tags
Young Adult/Tiny Furniture
[Very delayed reviews of Young Adult and Tiny Furniture, which I originally wanted to make a longer essay but didn’t have time to, mashed together because they both made me feel icky:]
I’d like to say I hated Young Adult, but it’s not that simple. It didn’t make me feel very good about myself, or about anyone in it, or really about humanity at large. And largely this is because I thought I...
2 tags
Downton Abbey: Christmas Special
I never published this draft! Publishing now. Better late than never. But because US fans are watching Season 2, observations on the Christmas Special are behind the cut. I will also be rewatching this and recapping it for TFT in February.
It’s hard to me to not react to this episode as a person extremely invested in Matthew and Mary’s relationship. Overall this special was so much...
4 tags
Archer, Season 1
Delightful and delicious. I love Jessica Walter in all things and can be relied on to get over-emotionally involved in the lives of animated sitcom characters. Hope I get to be Lana Kane when I grow up.
2 tags
The Art of Directing a Fight Scene →
Melanie sent me this link, in which Steven Soderbergh, director of my heart, confirms that we are all always watching The Matrix.
6 tags
The Art of Rewatching
[This essay was cross-posted at Persephone Magazine.]
Technically speaking, I’m more of a rewatcher than a watcher. I’ve seen a lot of movies and television shows in my life, but ultimately what gives them meaning is the second/third/tenth/nth viewing. I used to do this with books. There are books from my childhood I can still quote wholesale from, an ability I have utterly lost with my grown-up,...
3 tags
The Help
This book is not as good as everyone says it is. But it is not as bad as everyone says it is, either.
It was extremely absorbing, which has to mean it was well-written, but its plotting was a bit juvenile — relying too heavily on the soap-operatic revealed secrets to really be engaging. But what was most compelling about it — I suspect why the book made it to Oprah’s book club — are the seemingly...
December 2011
11 posts
1 tag
“When your only female character exists to be battered and abused, that is lazy...”
– Monica Byrne.
(via bon-bon)
this post was brought to you by “the girl with the dragon tattoo”
(via remove)
2 tags
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
I’ve heard a lot about this book but never read it. Watching the movie, I could see why. It’s great — probably an incredible adaptation — but almost entirely devoid of women. I can see why men (boys) really like this book, and Smiley in particular.
I did like the movie. I liked that it was so methodical in its pacing, and somehow still managed to be terrifying and suspenseful. I liked...
5 tags
Noel Coward: Three Plays
Blithe Spirit, Hay Fever, and Private Lives
I’m on a script kick. These were fantastic. Admittedly they are the cocktail-clinking dinner-party British plays that everybody can get behind. Privileged white people doing privileged white things and producing sardonic bon mots at the drop of an ice cube. Fortunately these are probably the best of that genre.
Private Lives probably was the one...
2 tags
Face/Off
Basically, I should not agree to watch John Travolta/Nicholas Cage movies at 11:30pm on a Saturday, because I get stuck at Broadway-Lafayette waiting for a train that doesn’t exist and don’t get home until 4am. Then the whole next day I’ll feel groggy and hungover, like I ate too much bad candy.
4 tags
Crazy, Stupid, Love.
I didn’t even know Steve Carrell was in it until I started watching because this was part of the “I will watch anything with Ryan Gosling” exercise. (I was not disappointed. He’s really adorable.) I did not get the twist before the end. The twist was a lovely payoff but the rest of the movie was paced a little too slowly for me.
The best way I can describe it is that it is...
2 tags
2 tags
Frost/Nixon
Everything I read/watch about the Nixon presidency makes me profoundly sad for the man. He was so susceptible to his own frailties.
A well-done analysis of Nixon done through the medium of what did him in — television. I don’t think we’ll ever get tired of analyzing what Watergate did to America.
3 tags
American Gods
I read this and I’m not really sure what I felt about it so I have delayed writing this. But I haven’t come up with anything new, though I did reread the ending. Structurally I think the book built up well but then concluded awkwardly. I felt like the reader did not have enough time to come to terms with the “truth,” especially the truth about Hinzelmann, because the fable...
4 tags
FRAME-BY-FRAME ANALYSIS OF THE ENIGMATIC AND... →
5 tags
Catching Fire and Mockingjay
At the risk of sounding absolutely too sincere… last night I finished Mockingjay and when it was over I outright sobbed. I don’t think I’ve ever sobbed over a book that way. And I’ve read almost all of the requisite sentimental young-adult novels that jerk tears: Beth’s death in Little Women, Ruby’s death in Anne of the Island (oh yes), Lyra and Will’s separation in The Amber Spyglass. The...
“You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it...”
– James Reston, Jr, in Frost/Nixon
November 2011
26 posts
3 tags
Snow Crash
I had a pretty complicated reaction to this book.
I saw it highly recommended all over the place as a seminal cyberpunk work and Neal Stephenson himself is all over NPR’s top 100 science-fiction and fantasy novels. So I was like okay, trusted news organization and my friends, I will read this book, even if I hate the main character in the first four pages.Eventually, Hiro Protagonist grew...
2 tags
Out of Africa
This was a strange movie. I think it was deep, and I think I liked it, but I’m not sure about either. Out of Africa stars Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, was directed by Sidney Pollack, and was released in 1985.
It’s certainly a very beautiful movie. At first I thought merely that was the point, that the movie was supposed to be this beautiful, sweeping romance with a man and with...
2 tags
Tangled
It was so good! It was so refreshingly non-trite, but still a comfortably predictable story in all the important ways. I didn’t even mind Mandy Moore! Everything was so cute! (The brunette won? Sort of! Exclamation point!)
It’s interesting, but perhaps not surprising, that I can still get really excited about and caught up in a Disney princess movie. I just cried a little watching...
News.me: Editor's Picks — Nov. 18, 2011 →
newsme:
Here are some conversation starters for this weekend, curated by me from around the web.
“Obama’s Flunking Economy: The Real Cause,” by Ezra Klein. What happened to the promise of Barack Obama’s presidency? Ezra Klein investigates. New York Review of Books. Nov. 24, 2011.
“The End of Cheap…
Curated picks for the weekend!
2 tags
The Hunger Games
Definitely a book meant for young adults, but shocking and gripping for adults, too. I really liked all of the semiotic undertones about surveillance and the commodification of human relationships in the games (at the risk of sounding like a total snob, I think Foucault would have a lot of fun dissecting that arena). And the whole performance of self in a fascist society — oh man....
3 tags
“The title essay duly begins: ‘The centre wasn’t holding.’ It doesn’t seem to...”
– Martin Amis, “Joan Didion’s Style,” London Review of Books.
2 tags
4 tags
“I am not sure that it is possible for anyone brought up in the East to...”
– “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion.
3 tags
You know what I need in my life?
thismasterpiecewilltearusapart:
The score playing when Matthew and Mary kissed last night.
YES. ME TOO.