It's National Let Elvis Costello Say It Day

La Dolce Vita

(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love And Understanding

As I walk through

This wicked world

Searchin' for light in the darkness of insanity.

I ask myself

Is all hope lost?

Is there only pain and hatred, and misery?

And each time I feel like this inside,

There's one thing I wanna know:

What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh

What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

And as I walked on

Through troubled times

My spirit gets so downhearted sometimes

So where are the strong

And who are the trusted?

And where is the harmony?

Sweet harmony.

'Cause each time I feel it slippin' away, just makes me wanna cry.

What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh

What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

So where are the strong?

And who are the trusted?

And where is the harmony?

Sweet harmony.

'Cause each time I feel it slippin' away, just makes me wanna cry.

What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh

What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding? Ohhhh

What's so funny 'bout peace love & understanding?

Umbrian Angel

I landed up going alone last night to see La Dolce Vita, even after asking at least ten people to go, including the person with whom I saw it first about thirty years ago. I'm a big solo movie-goer, often preferring it to having company. That's mainly because after a movie, a really good movie, I don't want to hear anyone talk but would rather sit under the spell of it all. But I didn't want to go to this one alone, felt sad in the going and when I sat down in my seat, next to a young man with ripped-up jeans who was sitting in my seat and who moved when I told him, I felt a tiny bit irritated. He had weird breath and said incoherent things. He spoke aloud even as the opening credits rolled. He knew nothing about Fellini, laughed and asked what language is this? before he settled in his seat. I imagined the glorious and wild opening scene of Jesus floating through the air, hanging from helicopters, the waving rooftop girls in bikinis and the gorgeous Marcello and Paparazzo gesticulating to them finally silenced this guy, because that opening stunned me into thinking that maybe I'd never seen this movie on the big screen after all. The entire rest of the movie I kept thinking that, too, because how could I have lived this long and not remembered the nearly bodily sensations of joy and humor and disgust that I felt last night in my solo seat? The guy next to me pulled a quart of juice out of his backpack, noisily slurped it throughout the first hour and then finally muttered I don't understand what's going on in this movie!, got up, stumbled over us and left. I breathed an audible sigh of relief, the guy on the other side of me whispered, Was he on something or what? and then he sighed and I relaxed into the rest of the movie and relative oblivion. I'm not going to review the movie because, really, why bother? I don't know whether it was the giant screen or whether I am old now, older than when I first watched it, but dear god -- what a movie. I am prone to hyperbole, true, but this time it decimated me. I wrote as much to the person who I had seen it with thirty years ago -- then I cried all the way home. A very different experience when the screen is so big and you're 51 years old. I was decimated. 

But the Umbrian angel Paola still smiles, my friend replied.

Yes. The Umbrian angel still smiles.

Thoughts of the Day and a Photo of Marcello***

When I opened my back door this morning to let the dog out, I was surprised to feel that the impossible heat had broken. I could almost hear the cogs of my little brain working, freed from the apocalyptic stasis of the past few days. I might even cook tonight.

Wasn't it just a short time ago that the NFL thought that the admission of gay players into its hallowed, manly ranks would bring it down? I hear the tinny sounds of dirt hitting a coffin, a grave being dug, and I can't help but think hmmmmmmm.

My friend Jeneva Stone, the brilliant writer, poet, advocate and mother of a severely disabled young man, wrote a post on her blog the other day that is living inside me. You should hop over and read it at Busily Seeking 2.0.  Oh, it has nothing to do with football.

Jeneva's post made me sit up in my own bed where I'd been lying, yellow wallpaper in my mind. I am strengthened, galvanized. I was also made whole by the incredibly generous favor from my friend Cara. I can't reveal what it was, but it came along with a tub of Lalicious Sugar Kiss Extraordinary Whipped Sugar Scrub that I dragged myself out of bed for, took a shower and slathered all over my body. When I slipped into bed, I was reminded, again, of how small the measures are that one must take to feel replenished.

Absent anything interesting to binge on as far as television, I've been on a bit of a reading frenzy. I finished Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See, and am making my delighted way through We Are Not Ourselves by Matthew Thomas. Next up is Tana French's In the Woods, a genre that I generally don't like but recommended by my friend Vesuvius whose taste is impeccable and for whom, despite our age difference, I aspire to be more like. This morning I discovered newly crowned MacArthur poet Terrance Hayes' poetry and can't wait to read more of it.

Christy Shake, a beautiful writer and advocate, my soul sister in Maine, has been making THCa oil to give to her son Calvin whose seizure disorder is as devastating as Sophie's. She wrote a letter to her doctors this morning that ya'll should read, too. Here it is: Dear Docs: Calvin and Cannabis.

It's amazing what a bit of cool air, literature, poetry, feminism, NFL-bashing and freedom from seizures can do to one's little brain, isn't it?








***I'm going to see La Dolce Vita tonight on the big screen for the first time since college. I am so excited I can hardly bear it.