December 2010
70 posts
This is How It Goes
If somebody told me two years ago that I’d be spending the last sunset of this year with my ex and his boyfriend, I’d probably give a puzzled frown and say, “No way that will happen.” What do you know. Life always surprises.
Beautiful Interlopers
I saw two films in succession that are so similar in story, but are so different in execution — where execution finally makes one film “art,” and the other one a mediocre retread into Hallmark Channel territory. Which leads me to toy once again with the notion that it’s not really about the content anymore, it’s the form that counts. Because all stories have been told...
“If you’re good at something, never do it for free.”
– Heath Ledger as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight
Miss Carson McCullers Talks About Love
First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And...
“No one [is] at the least hungry anymore, but that is precisely what is so good...”
– Muriel Barbery on pastries, Gourmet Rhapsody
“What is writing, no matter how lavish the pieces, if it says nothing of the...”
– Muriel Barbery, Gourmet Rhapsody
An Unsentimental Christmas
When I think about the Christmas that is to come, it hits me each passing day with increasing gravity that I will be spending it alone. I take this with dispassion. It does not matter, I tell myself. And somewhere in the fathoms of me, I smile with a firm nonchalance I’ve taken at this idea of exquisite solitariness surrounded by holiday tinsel and cheer.
Of course, when I mention this to people...
“Transparency is a foolish ideal. Life becomes intolerable without a capacity for...”
– Alain de Botton
Winona Forever →
I miss Winona Ryder. That girl had subtlety. Take note of her May Welland in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence: so sweet and caring … and manipulative. Please bring her back, Hollywood.
“Leave the dishes unwashed and the demands on your time unanswered. Be ruthless...”
– L.S. Schwartz, advise for writers
Every Line Tells a Story
The pleasures of Robinson’s New York Line by Line: From Broadway to the Battery, which was first published in 1967 and which I bought recently at the MoMa, are endless. In every single line drawing of the city, there is so much to take in, and I’m left breathless with the artist’s eye for exquisite detail. Consider this nightscape of the city, for example…
You are left...
“Man is a curious animal. He is uneasy in the face of great experiences, and if...”
– Roger Ebert on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968]
Darkness Shades Me
I’m listening — or trying my damn best to listen — to Kirsten Flagstad and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s recording of Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas to simmer down. There’s nothing like this almost perfect opera, with its signature aria “Thy hands, Belinda; darkness shades me,” to calm down even the most tempestuous of demons. The demon is an old one,...
“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person....”
– Albert Schweitzer [via mlq3]
“The time between meeting and finally leaving is sometimes called falling in...”
– Lisa Loeb
With Movies This Bad, I Might as Well Go Straight
If you have been wondering, you might as well know by now that I’ve been watching all these queer films for research on an article about gay films that I am writing — and for the most part, I’ve enjoyed the assignment, having discovered obscure (and mostly foreign) gems along the way, films that never got into my cinematic radar before. (And for obvious reasons.) But lately,...
MentalFloss's List of 10 Works of Literature That... →
There is no excuse for not writing.
