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.