Today's challenge:
Singing along with that MIA song lodged in your brain without just sounding like an eight-year-old boy's interpretation of a machine gun.
"Dun-dada-dun-dada-dun-da-da-dun..."

Best lyric, though, from Timbaland: "Don't get mad!/In fact, let me hit that."

Snotty remarks about a smart film.
Saw The Counterfeiters tonight. I recommend it. It was one of the best films I’ve seen in a long time. Really good. Well-done.

My one thing is this: In period movies that take place at any point pre-1960? In scenes at like, parties? You can just see the wardrobe people having damn orgasms over getting to dress their beautiful, uniformly well-fed and leggy bit actors. In this one, it was all early(!) 1930s(!) Berlin(!!) party.(!) And these people; god, they looked good.
And I’m sure people did look good at such underground soirees, but I’m also sure that not everyone looked so uniformly good: so spotless and stunning and nattily dressed. It’s like movies where there are Halloween parties. Everyone’s always gone all out. (Like they had access to, oh, a costume closet somewhere.) There’s no whole cadre of non-dressed up people, and there’s no ten women all dressed up like Goth Sexy Whatever, to varying degrees of success. (Goth sexy carrot! Goth sexy dresser drawer!)

Okay, but the beautiful people party scenes in The Counterfeiters are like, a sixth of the film. They do dazzle. They made me feel all melty and yearn-y over the gorgeous shoes and red lipstick and yawning creamy expanses of silks and skin. And maybe the whole point was contrast, since the other, dead-serious five-sixths of it takes place in, um, concentration camps. So fine, but fine.


The little-by-little.
It’s midnight now, after day #1 of summer vacation. The last summer vacation. A first day of frantically working on el thesis and trying to make myself relax about working on it. Trying to make an honest effort and convince myself with no feedback from anyone else, that this was fine, this (very) little-by-little.
I do love a schedule, Henshaw. It’s why I came back to school in the first place.
So, summer vacation is good practice for what’s peeking out from ‘round that corner over there: That life post-MFA. Shh!

At any rate, it went fine.


A Telephone that Rings, but Who's to Answer?
So it’s late, now. It’s tonight, now. And I go for the most knee-jerk source of comfort to reward all my solitary Grown Up Lady effort. Oh yes: Headphones plus Stephen Stills. Who’s up for a little “Southern Cross”? Oh, me. Just me. And “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” with those Brothers Allman, and, as you know, Abba, “The Eagle.” Terrible, wonderful, awful music of childhood, I shall crawl inside of you; I shall shut my eyes.

It’s funny. Most of these songs remind me of my ex-hippie uncle; all of them remind me of being a small child in some hazily-lit nighttime summer where everything was green and the grownups and older cousins and siblings were all relaxed and happy and I was flitting about playing, probably annoying everybody and spending long moments watching them all, so much younger I was than all of them. The specifics themselves aren’t clear. I’m thinking…croquet game? Maybe cashew nuts in a dish on some low coffeetable that I gorged myself on?

(Though too: CSNY and leads to Billie and Art Tatum and Ella; grandmother music. Don’t think and for a second you hear her singing along in her rusty voice, her pink glasses catching those fluorescent kitchen lights as she turns her head upwards, mouth open.)

Trying, trying, trying to assign specifics here, to re-incarnate.

I can give you no real concrete detail, Henshaw. I’m a poor writer about this. It’s so weird how these details fade to us, and yet the feeling—that capital-H happiness—still hangs there, still hazy and warm like a summer night, like the very words, “long ago summer night,” wrapped inside some sound.

Tonight, I ate some killer soup. Today, I had an all-right workshop. Taught two classes that went fairly well.
But I didn't feel nearly this good.

Love ‘n Euskara for dummies.
Just saw Lars and the Real Girl. It was so sweet it made me choke right up, and feel all wistful and wishfullike inside the way these movies do—and I’d definitely recommend it to you, Henshaw. Because it was well done and believable. And because, when it is well done, I love the idea that social-misfit weirdos can find true love.
I love-! It-! And you know. Um, it’s springtime.

Still, it makes me consider again this tv/film phenomenon of the socially unsalvageable lad whom some perfectly adjusted gal rescues for no clear reason. You know: 40 Year Old Virgin did it, and Knocked Up—and it’s not just Judd Apatow. Consider, too: Garden State, Everybody Loves Raymond and on and on. And sure, we all heard, like, TV Guide, jibber-jabbering away about the “fat guy/hot wife” sitcom phenomenon (“ho, ho, ho”) a while back as though it were some sort of isolated outcropping, the Basque language of that second’s pop culture.

But, please. What’s with the “2005”-labelled shrink-wrap on this phenom? This weirdo, supremely unhealthy notion that the best men are special cases who need to be nurtured back to emotional health and ushered gently into the world by their women is really nothing new. Girlfriend as mother, all that; not new. I mean, gah, consider the entire decade we call the '70s. Nor has it died now that we’ve tired of talking about it temporarily. And, it doesn’t, it does not help men or women in the real world.

So then, what’s with the movie rec, if that’s how I feel? Well, because: competing synapses. Because nurture, too, and not just nature, works on all of us. What if they’d made Sir Main Character Guy really physically unattractive? How much then would I still be rooting for him and how much would I have been forced to confront my own little urge to jump his bones and then make him casserole?

Maybe I’m just disturbed by that. And, by how much that scene of Lars and that girl on the date at the bowling alley? The one where he’s just sighing a lot and rolling his eyes heavenward just trying to think of a good response to her innocuous conversational volley? While she sits there with a damn expectant grin plastered to her face? Reminded me exactly of someone I once dated.


Meanwhile, big, big changes sharp and bright going on, it seems, with friends far and wide. Time for upheaval, Miraclegrow, all that. Carmelita and Ginger are planting all sorts of new things out on the veranda, so this might really be the year I overcome some of my infamous black-thumbage. Also trying to get some friends to start playing the rock together; currently = all I can think about. Ah, spring fever.
Anyway, take care, ya’ll. Get out there in the sunshine.
(now playing: “Imperial” – Unrest, though, in general, lots of “Ceremony” by New Order. I blame those NPR music buttons between news stories for this.)

No virtue #32.
There is no virtue in the mere act of sitting at your deskchair, no matter how businesslike your mood. Sitting there without writing weighs out to about the same righteousness-quotient as watching Rock of Love, splayed out prone on the unvacuumed-for-too-long couch, holding a jumbo-sized bag of Cheetos at a 45-degree angle over your mouth.
Cheetos, the least-virtuous of snack foods.

A Friendly Suggestion.
or two, actually.
Maybe your day's not going so well. Or your week.
You should help it along, by listening to Wussy's song, "Airborne."

I wish they'd come down south. Come on, Wussy! Come to us!