Foghorn

Oh man.  I have been under a waterfall of germs this fall.  Ellis had pneumonia, and still has it.  Samantha had bronchitis, on Halloween no less.  Tim had something that plunged him into the saddest dry cough at 10pm every night.  I finally forced him to go to an urgent care where someone looked at him, found nothing, and prescribed antibiotics and steroids anyway (they worked). 

I've been in and out of losing my mind with all this nursing of other people, picking up and dropping off kids at schools, pretending to care about real dinner, and finding time to exercise and write (egads).  I'm fending off the urge to just set a bomb in our basement, where an avalanche of baby clothes, books, and old toys live.  Maybe I haven't been 100% successful at staying sane, but I haven't run away with the family savings or painted a room hot pink and declared it off limits to everyone but a miniature poodle - although that sounds sort of awesome.  I think I'm probably doing great, all things considered. 

My desk has been piled high with books I dip in and out of, which isn't my favorite way to read.  I've written about this before, but I like to commit to a book.  It helps ground me at the end of a long, tedious day, but I haven't really felt that commitment lately, and it's no commentary on the authors whose books I've picked up.   

I read There, There by Tommy Orange, which is full of beautiful, sometimes quiet insights.  I really respect his writing, and I'm so happy for all the attention he's getting.  (He won me over with this video, in which he says he doesn't like to hear anyone read for a long time, even his favorite authors.) I have a hard time with multiple narrators, for reasons I mention above, but I loved his characters and their names were so evocative. 

I tore through Alexandra Fuller's newest book, Travel Light, Move Fast.  I opened it one night to see if it held anything for me, and looked up hours later, three-quarters through the thing.

I am in the middle of another one of Fuller's books, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, which is a little harder to hold onto, I think.  It's about her mother's life and sometimes feels a little family-treeish.  That said, Fuller's family tree is pretty fascinating, and I never tire of glimpses into her childhood on various farms in Central Africa, picturing her mother among piles of books and towers of unwashed tea cups.  As much as I loathe chaos in my own life, I sometimes drink it in happily when it's on the page.

Speaking of chaos, I picked up David Shields' coffee table book, War Is Beautiful, an examination of how front-page photos in the New York Times glorify and sanctify war.  As soon as I heard about the book, which Shields mentioned on one of my favorite podcasts, I leapt to find it, to hear someone else say things I've often felt about "the paper of record."  I don't know if I'll ever forget, after college, picking up the Times and reading their serious reportage about the search for "weapons of mass destruction."  I was twenty-one years old, trying to find any foothold in the adult world I could, and shocked to see the publication offer itself up as a vehicle for what felt like, to me, blatant fabrication.  It comforted me to read someone as scholarly as Shields say what I've always felt, that the Times is less an objective look at our world and more a deeply subjective, highly masculinized presentation of some of our worst biases. 

In the intro, Shields writes:  ". . . even when taking an editorial position against particular government actions, the Times, though considered 'liberal,' never strays far from a normative position . . . Throughout its history, the Times has produced exemplary war journalism, but it has done so by retaining a reciprocal relationship with the administration in power . . . it knows precisely what truth the power wants told and then prints this truth as the first draft of history." 

I've also been reading Making Rent in Bed-Stuy: A Memoir of Trying to Make It in New York City by Brandon Harris, which is exactly what it sounds like: an account of a young artist trying to live in one of the most expensive cities in our country, at a time of explosive gentrification.  It's a verbose, fascinating look at class, race, and creative ambitions, and I'm really enjoying reading it in the car when Ellis falls asleep on the ride home from somewhere.  

In other narratives of glossy places, I picked up Liz Phair's memoir, the (unfortunately titled?) Horror Stories that has a great cover, but I haven't had a chance to crack it yet.  I read Ali Wong's book, Dear Girls, and absolutely loved it.  I haven't watched any of her comedy specials - or live stand-up for that matter, because I am married to my house and car, obvs - so I had no idea how raunchy her comedy could be, but something about her jokes folded in with her genuine thoughts on family and parenting had me choking back tears and laughing out loud on the same pages.  I stayed up last night watching the movie Wong wrote, produced, and starred-in, Always Be My Maybe, and want her costume artist to please come to my house, stat. 

On that note, Tim and I have been watching Queer Eye and weren't sold, at first.  I found the rainbow typography and the black and white dance interludes somewhat seizure-inducing, but I'm having fun now.  Of course, there are problematic things about the show, like how well do these people sustain these changes?  One week isn't long enough for me to properly change my sheets, much less every facet of my life. But no matter what my hesitations, Jonathan Van Ness is my WOOBY. (No frame of reference for a wooby?  Please watch this Mr. Mom clip, then come over for a screening in which we discuss what, if anything, in Mr. Mom holds up.) 

The real stunner of my month has been The Art of Self-Defense, a film by Riley Stearns that is so well-written, so archly performed, it may just be brilliant.  I was howling throughout it, even when I knew what was going to happen.  Go watch Jessie Eisenberg do his weak nerd thing and Alessandro Nivola roast masculinity in socks and sandals, and if you skip the bonus infomercial about Sensei's life advice ("Pardon my French, I'll speak German") you're missing out on nirvana. 

I also watched the David Crosby documentary, Remember My Name, and was shocked by some of his declarations, such as that few can harmonize like he and Graham Nash did, other than the Everly Brothers or maybe the Indigo Girls.  At some point in the film it was revealed that Crosby is a leo, and those declarations - and more importantly, that mane of hair! - started making more sense.  I actually made a list of those declarations, but I'm sparing you here, saving it for my academic paper on how Cameron Crowe is starting to look like Werner Herzog's long lost son.

Okay, that's all.  Someone please send an exterminator for the germs in my house, and a pillow I can wrap around my head until February.  If the holidays go anything like the rest of my fall has gone, I'm gonna need some backup.   

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Van Halen, Pam Houston, and the Slippery Slope of Summer

If you told me a month ago I'd spend any amount of time reading a book about Sammy Hagar, I'd have said you were CRAZY.  Then I went on a Van Halen bender, courtesy of a book called Runnin' with the Devil, by their former manager, and suddenly needed to know everything I could about all things Van Halen. 

For reasons I can't quite explain - and don't wish to, exactly - I will probably always lean David Lee Roth in the Van Hagar wars.  And while I did make it through a whole book by Sammy Hagar, in which he somewhat convincingly points to reasons why he was the superior front man, Roth's silly videos for California Girls and Just a Gigolo played on repeat in my childhood. 

I don't know why I'm leading with 80's arena rock here.  I read lots of quality - literary! - books this summer.  In fact, I reconnected with my inner sloth and I'm better for it.  Some mornings, I caught up on petty rock star feuds with a mug of coffee while the bambinos watched Dora and built forts off the sofa.  (And yes, there's a broken shelf over there now, which we "fixed" by propping it up with lit journals.)

 

 

Sometime into my third Van Halen book, I realized that I could look up not only the current retrospective accounts I was reading, but also books published in the 80's, after the band got huge.  I could keep this party going for decades!  Then I picked up a collection of Best American Essays in Tim's office.  After reading only one essay, my spirit sort of sighed with relief and settled back into sanity. 

Before I fell down a Van Halen rabbit hole, I stayed up reading Kim Gordon's memoir, Girl in a Band one night.  I opened it merely to see if I would like it.  After finishing it several hours later, I looked at the clock, which read 4 am.  Woops!  There was something in the writing that worked for me, I guess.  

I don't really know why I picked up Girl in a Band.  I probably felt like I should know more about Gordon and Sonic Youth than I do.  But my favorite parts were the times she threw shade on Courtney Love, for whom she produced an album, and her tender remembrances of Kurt Cobain, for whom Sammy Hagar has strong feelings, too.  In his memoir, Red: My Uncensored Life in Rock, Hagar says: "Drugs kill people.  People think drugs are what made Jimi Hendrix great.  No, drugs are what killed Jimi Hendrix.  Kurt Cobain could have been saved.  The people around him let him go, for some reason.  They had to have seen that coming." 

That sort of fanatical groundedness - calling BS on the excesses of the music industry - was, I suppose, one reason I survived a whole book about Sammy Hagar. 

In addition to revisiting dubious role models of my youth, I spent part of the summer reading two books by Pam Houston, an author whose book Cowboys Are My Weakness I was given right after college. I was staying at a friend's house and her mother, having just finished it, handed the book to me  and said, "I think you might like this."  It was happenstance, it seemed, but was probably the first book of short stories I'd been given, as a gift.  Something about it felt like a benediction, and I spent a night or two in my friend's cozy guestroom reading the book.

I haven't always identified with Pam Houston, who has held jobs as a river guide and back-country guide, like many of the narrators in Cowboys.  Tim and I used to joke about her book called A Little More About Me, because it was just too fun to say, "Well, who asked?" whenever we saw the title.  (We are obnoxious.)  Similarly, I remember seeing the cover of Houston's Contents May Have Shifted and somehow conflating the book with A Little More About Me.  I didn't think there was much for me in Contents, but one morning I reached for a stack of books we'd recently gotten at a library sale and cracked it open.  From the start, the prose was haunting, nearly electric.  I kept coming back to it and spent weeks reading it like scripture, hypnotized and barely retaining it, but washed by its seriousness and elegiac reaches. 

Contents May Have Shifted is broken into geographical sections that loop and weave and it's really quite beautiful.  I went right into Houston's most recent book, Deep Creek, the same day I finished Contents, and was treated to a similar tone and pliancy with white space. 

There is something so soft and forgiving in Houston's life and work now, far from those tough, cowboy-crazed narrators that made her famous.  I'm in awe of the discipline it takes to record her life as lovingly as she does.  I'm also grateful someone is recording the sounds and light of Colorado's high country, a space I find beautiful but rather lonely, a space I'd much rather read about from a cozy bed, frankly.  Plus, the cover of Deep Creek, with its dog in a creek bed looking across a green meadow, should really be a poster.

I am not someone who struggles with the passage of time, normally, but living life in the shadow of academic schedules sometimes gives me low-grade panic.  It's always been my worst nightmare to live in a rush but thankfully, it's been a summer full of beach trips and sleeping in and late nights for me and it's been healing. 

Ellis knows how to say "ant problem" although, thankfully, there isn't much of one in our kitchen anymore.  Samantha helps him dress and get into pjs, and the two of them entertain each other (and squeal like alley cats fighting over toys) all day long.  A man stopped me in the store to tell me that when he closes his eyes, he sees his 50-year-old son at Ellis's age, and it feels like two days ago that his son looked just like Ellis.  His son was down the aisle and didn't seem as charmed as I was by his outgoing dad.  I guess 50 years of it has grown thin.  All of it made me happy - the older man's enthusiasm, his grown child's indifference to his father's joy.  What will my children ignore about me, if I have the good luck to grocery shop with them when I'm 80?  And what will I brag about then, recalling these days?         

American Animals

Sometime in March, I scrawled a note to myself to see Boogie Nights.  Later that day, picking up holds at the public library, I discovered it in Tim's pile.  We watched it later that night and I felt like I needed three months to recover.  I also discovered, with Mark Wahlberg's full head of hair that, in the right light, with the right angle, he almost does it for me.  I think that means we should all be wearing wigs, all the time.  

After reading my last post, a good friend called it "borderline sacrilege."  Apparently, Reality Bites is one of those movies she quotes with her partner all the time, and though I absolutely stand by my own experience of watching that film as an adult, her reaction threw me into a bit of a panic.

One of my biggest fears about talking openly is of being a jerk and/or crapping on someone else's joy.  The internet is full of cranky opinions.  I never want one of mine to make someone feel bad about something they like or, worse, something they made. At the same time, if I don't like something, I want to be able to say so in a fair and, hopefully, intelligent way.  Do I sound defensive? Ha!  I'm just trying to figure out how to be a good citizen - on the internet, and in the world. 

All this hemming and hawing is an appropriate segue to a film that got mixed reviews when it came out, a movie called American Animals about four college students who stole books from a special collections room at a private college in Kentucky.  An exploration of a true story, American Animals is one part-documentary, one part-fiction.  Using moody imagery and a deliberately overlapped mix of interviews and narrative, it operates as a heist movie with added, real-life gravity.  I loved it.  Tim said it caught flack for being a film about white boys pushing against the limits of their privilege, and while the emotional substance of the film is a little thin, I could not stop thinking about one of its most successful images - the famous pink flamingo from James Audubon's Birds of America, lit up inside a giant glass case inside the special collections room.  I also just appreciated the film's stylish cinematography.  It plays with genre and perspective, as well as veracity in story-telling, and feels like the director is winking right at you, which really worked for me. 

I've watched a few other things, like Maudie, which I liked.  It looked saccharine but was, in fact, pretty moving.  I also can't stop thinking about Call Me By Your Name, for some reason, which I watched last year and loved.  Maybe it's all those summer scenes: the sun in Italy, the bikes and the stone pool, but I'm craving a re-watch.

I'm reading Tonight I'm Someone Else, by Chelsea Hodson, a collection of essays so intense I vibrate when reading it.  When I started it, I couldn't stop sending passages to my friend Amelia, basically reading the book aloud, via text. 

I finally saw The Favourite, which I dragged my feet about because I found The Lobster so disturbing.  Once upon a time, I was on the fence about Rachel Weisz, but after seeing her in Youth, the Paolo Sorrentino film that followed his 2013 masterpiece, The Great Beauty, I'm for her. Youth is less compelling than The Great Beauty, and maybe not as good as The Young Pope, Sorrentino's 2016 HBO series starring Jude Law as - what else? - a young pope, but I'm not sorry I saw it. If anything, Sorrentino has a casting problem.  He gets big American stars but doesn't use them in the best way.  Meanwhile, some of his Italian actors are deployed with perfection.  If you can find a more likeable playboy than Jep in The Great Beauty, I'd like to see it.

To sum: if you can work flamingos on screen, as Sorrentino does in The Great Beauty, or a kangaroo inside the Vatican, as he does in The Young Pope, you've won me.

And now it seems we've come full circle, what with a second flamingo anecdote.  Wishing you magic and mystery in your daily lives, and all the wild animals your dreams can hold.