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This week, paid subscribers got part one of my London & Paris travel diaries.
RAFTM1 Tia Glista, who I got to hang out with in Paris, also shared her gorgeous travel diaries.
Today’s title is from a recent Hilton Als caption that just proves that this man is PEERLESS.
As I’ve previously mentioned, I’m currently in Ithaca at a six-week criticism and theory program hosted by Cornell University. I’m always saying that I’m a city girl but I never realized what an adjustment it would be to be somewhere that is definitively not an urban center. I mean Ithaca is not the bush (honey, I’ve been to the bush) but it’s different enough that I spent the first few days being like blink blink. But the Cornell campus is gorgeous, and I walked home the other day with a new friend alongside a waterfall and it made me think of that one Call Me By Your Name scene (and I felt I had to listen to “Mystery of Love” immediately) and the sun was out and I thought, yeah this is what it’s about. As the week has gone, I’ve become better adjusted (the sun is definitely helping) and I’m optimistic I can make it to July. Hopefully…
Here’s what I consumed this past week:
Brown Girl, Brownstones by Paule Marshall
This was the first novel I completed as part of my prep for my fields exams, which I will be writing at the end of the summer. Brown Girl, Brownstones follows Selina, a young Barbadian American girl growing up in Brooklyn (Fulton and Chauncey specifically) around the Second World War. Selina is what might be described as an old soul—her eyes are described as being older than her face, as if they hold visions of a past and ancient life. The novel is a coming-of-age story, and part of Selina’s battle in growing up is whether she will align herself with her father’s dreamer tendencies or her mother’s almost cold dedication to the American dream. While Selina tends to be more sympathetic towards her father, she cannot deny her kinship with her mother and has a deep respect for the silent power that her mother possesses. What makes this book so compelling, apart from its sharp and evocative prose, is that, even as it seems that the choice is between mother and father, dreamer and pragmatist, Marshall demonstrates that it’s never such a clean cut between either disposition. At the end of the book, Selina has gone through the cycles of coming-of-age but rather than being set up to competently navigate the world armed with experience, growing up/coming-of-age has only managed to raise more questions, to cast her in front of a new blankness, one which she’ll have to get lost in before she can map.
Hit Man (dir. Richard Linklater; co-written w/ Glen Powell)
I watched Hit Man on the bus ride up to Ithaca and it was about around the hour mark that I started to get restless. This movie is less of a movie than a vehicle to show off Glen Powell’s range, which is does successfully. All the things it has to set up and do in order to achieve that are significantly less interesting than Powell himself. Based off an article written in Texas Monthly (I think), Hit Man follows a philosophy professor, Gary (played by Powell), who occasionally helps his local police force with their undercover operation to catch people who try to hire hit men. When one of their undercover officers is suspended, they sub Gary in because…I don’t even know if they have a good reason. If I didn’t know that the movie was based off a true story, I would say that it’s too unbelievable to feel true. If not for the purpose of moving the story along, I feel like the whole thing would have fallen apart pretty early on. Hit Man tries to do a lot, actually TOO MUCH, so that it never really does anything very well. I imagine that it is, probably, the closest thing to a millennial, 21st century Fight Club, but it’s philosophical message gets lost in the sauce until its hastily spelled out at the end. But whatever we need to keep Glen Powell on our screens!
“Please Please Please” - Sabrina Carpenter
HEARTBREAK IS ONE THING, MY EGO’S ANOTHER! Sabrina Carpenter has never really done it for me (even “Espresso” really took a while to make an impression) but this song seemed to WAKE SOMETHING UP IN ME. And I have woken up almost every morning since it came out and put it on. I think what really makes this work for me is that it feels like a proper song and not just a frictionless earworm that will wear us down until we can’t help but love it. This is the kind of song we used to be able to expect from Ariana Grande (and obviously Sabrina is trying to do early Ariana, as I realized when her song “Nonsense” came on Autoplay) before she got too deep into her lowercase energy.
I’m also listening to Normani’s DOPAMINE (finally!) and really like the track “Insomnia”; Victoria Monet’s “Alright” sounds ok in the music video but is VERY GOOD on its own; BRAT is growing on me but I think that’s because the extended version sounds better; Caroline Polachek’s song for I Saw the TV Glow song, “Starburned and Unkissed” is really chefs kiss (and was the one time in the movie I really sat up)!
The Dreamers (dir. Bernardo Bertolucci)
I came of age on Tumblr, which means that I’ve been haunted by screencaps from The Dreamers for the last decade. I tried to watch this movie for the first time a month and a half ago, only to find out that it wasn’t available on streaming or to rent online (this might have changed). Luckily, Cornell’s library seems to have an extensive DVD collection and DVD players on hand, so I finally was able to watch it. And GOD I LOVED IT! When it was over, I couldn’t help but think why anyone would want to make a movie that wasn’t trying to be this, and then I thought, oh that’s exactly what everyone has been trying to do. If you don’t know, The Dreamers follows Matthew, a young lost American (played by Michael Pitt) living in Paris in 1968. He loves to go to the movies, where he meets Isabelle and Theo (Eva Green and Louis Garrel, looking fine as hell2), two siblings who are exceptionally close (biblically close we might say). He’s immediately seduced by them and becomes their eager third, and they spend a hedonistic month or so together in their parents’ apartment. One of things that I was surprised by in this movie were the nods to film history, the interspersing and explicit mirroring of its own references. Here was a movie telling you exactly what it’s about and it didn’t feel tedious; rather it was generous—Bertolucci pulling you into the conversation—and powerful—a reminder of what cinema has been and can be. There’s also an electrifying scene with Michael Pitt and a lighter.
Another Country by James Baldwin
I truly can’t remember the last time, or if ever, a novel has made me feel the way that Another Country has. Reading it was a whole body experience. I felt overwhelmed, like being constantly battered by a wave, but at the same time, powerfully held, like the narrative was never going to let me get completely lost. Similarly to The Dreamers (there’s some kinship between these two texts, I think), Another Country feels like the standard for novels. Why would you want to write anything that doesn’t try and achieve what it achieves? Any kind of summary feels reductive but essentially the novel follows a group of friends and lovers fucking and fighting through a year or so in New York. There is grief and longing and rage and sex and jazz. Baldwin has a completely 360 view so that every part of a scene is considered, from the hiss of the flame heating up a pot of coffee to the way someone is leaning on their chair. It’s this quality, of being everywhere all at once and yet powerfully grounded in the scene, that I think makes Another Country such a cinematic text. This feels purposeful on Baldwin’s part—the characters in the novel spend a lot of time finding reprieve at the movies and sometimes acting in them. There’s a great scene where a group of them go to see a movie that one of them stars in and the narration of how the characters are watching the movie also serves as a powerful piece of film criticism on Baldwin’s part. This novel is so good, I feel like it’s spoiled other novels I’m going to read now…I can’t help but compare them all to this and see how they struggle to match up…This is what they mean when they talk about diamonds of literature.
I Saw the TV Glow (dir. Jane Schoenbrun)
I was pretty certain when I first saw the trailer for this (before a screening of Problemista) that I wouldn’t want to see it. But after hearing some mixed reviews from friends, I thought I should go and see what it was about for myself. What really pushed me to go see it was RAFTM Nick Armstrong’s recent dispatch about it, in which he compares the movie’s concern with stasis and denial to Old Beavis and Butthead. (I also reread Nick’s dispatch after I saw the movie which helped me think about it better.) I felt unmoored and detached for the first hour of the movie—I couldn’t find anything to hook onto. I think a lot was lost on me because I didn't really watch Buffy growing up and so the references to that and its cultural impact didn’t do much for me. The movie is about Owen, who connects with a classmate, Maddy, over a television show, The Pink Opaque. (When they first meet, Maddy is reading an episode guide for the show.) Unable to watch the show at home, Owen sneaks to Maddy’s house on Saturday nights and this bonds them as much as their obsessive love for the show. Secrets will do that. The emotional and interpersonal experience that is the development of Owen and Maddy’s relationship, and is the movie’s foundation, didn’t translate for me. I can’t say if it was the movie or just me, but I wasn’t that convinced that they were forming a life-altering friendship that produced the kind of urgency the rest of the film is hinged on. I felt that I was being told what I should be feeling and yet not being made to feel it. The movie relies on being invested in their relationship, so without that, even as I started to become more compelled in the last half of hour of the movie, I never could get lost in it.
RAFTM = Reader and Friend to Me; I stole this from my RAFTM Rachel Tashjian.
Like, I actually felt sick with desire every time Garrel and his sexy nose came onscreen.