A big month in movies
The things we think we lack
I read No One Tells You This, a memoir by a Canadian writer living in New York, talking about her itinerant life, her mother's death, and how it feels to live without a partner or children but among many friends. In one essay, she's looking at Instagram on New Year's Day after a very hard year and says
we're drawn to the clearest articulation of the things we think we lack.
As I’ve been dealing with this ongoing set of injuries and the pandemic and all the other dryer-of-life tumbling, I have noticed myself doing that. The benefit for me has been that in observing other peoples’ myriad creative lives, having one seems more possible. Not because of any positive quality inherent in me but precisely because nothing else is working out.
The Linguine Incident is not a good movie
I got the Criterion Channel ($12/mo paid monthly, less if paid annually; this is not an ad, just an endorsement) to watch Woman in the Dunes after listening to the audiobook, which was upsetting — very stomach-based anxiety, foreboding, the horror-movie feeling of “don’t go in there!” — and wondering how it would translate to a movie.
The movie did not replicate what was scary to me from the book (claustrophobia, paranoia); seeing an actual human woman makes it difficult (for me at least) to think of her as this evil luring spider. In the book, since we’re in the narrator’s head, it’s easier to hate and revile her. All in all, wouldn’t recommend it to everyone but if you like that sort of thing (60s B&W Japanese art house movies), the photography is really well done.
What has been the most interesting thing about this subscription is the 24/7 channel. It just… plays movies. They’re bound to be good (or at least culturally relevant); I appreciate the human curation. I had it on and caught most of Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (which should be titled People Should Not Have Guns: The Movie). When it was over, The Linguine Incident came on and I was willing to give it a chance because it had been approved by the Channel and the opening titles were fun but I did not like it even only half paying attention; the premise is ponderously wacky and I don’t find David Bowie attractive but there were some moments with the campy restaurant owners that made me laugh. I appreciated that the movie has a consistent idiosyncratic logic, which is not always the case with beloved bad movies, but it is another movie I do not recommend story-wise but for the aesthetics: peak freaky 90’s, the Rugrats logo come to life.
Anyway, I love Criterion 24/7, it’s the movie-watching version of not waiting ‘til you feel like it to exercise.
Where is the worst place to get KrazyGlue?
I’m taking a jewelry-making course right now and my teacher is a tiny Persian woman with an asymmetrical haircut and a mouth shaped like a peanut (complimentary) who thinks rose gold is gross and is always yelling at us like we’re idiot children.
I designed a brass pendant (assignment 1) so I would have to do as little coursing (carving into the metal) as possible because I’m very bad at it. I chose drill holes as decoration. The drills are these unwieldy boa constrictors that hang from their bellies on a hook at our workstations - the butt is a foot-operated power pedal and the tongue is the drill bit. The problem is that because a snake’s body is heavy and stiff, it’s hard to position the drill straight up and down - this is the only way to drill, darling - so I find it easiest to do if the cord of the drill is draped over my shoulder and my face is pretty close to the metal.
I was drilling, flinging off these satisfying golden ringlets of brass, when I took my glasses off to see better and took a beat to consider how much worse my life would be if I injured my eyes in addition to my calf, back, shoulder, neck, hand, elbow, and self-esteem. So I checked with my teacher: should wear proper goggles or just keep wearing my glasses? She said I should definitely wear something because she was two days out from surgery that resulted from being very close to a tube of superglue that blew out the back and glued her eyelid and eyeball together. A great reminder that things can always be worse!
I chose to wear my glasses with goggles over top.