What I've Been Doing

Photo by the inimitable Carl Jackson,

I bet you're wondering what I've been doing since I last posted when the year was young -- only two days -- and so filled with promise and resolution and new beginnings. Well, we're eighteen days in, Reader, and so far my favorite thing about the new year is writing 2020 instead of 2019. It looks better, it sounds better, and I'm hoping it gets better.

So, what have I been doing?

1. Reading: I've read Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney which I really liked (she's just such a readable writer), but I didn't like it nearly as much as last year's Normal People. I'm still reading The Water Dancer by Ta Nehisi Coates and finding it difficult. Dare I say he's a better non-fiction writer (beyond brilliant) than fiction writer? As the kids say, IMHO. I'm almost finished with the sensational The Yellow House: A Memoir by Sarah Broome. It's so good. In the bathroom I've got this great book called Sharp by Michelle Dean.  The subtitle is "Ten Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion," and so far I've gotten through the first profile on Dorothy Parker. I'm not one of those people who spends a lot of time in the bathroom on the toilette or doing my toilette, but I do like to pick up something interesting and short to read that I can come back to and easily pick up where I left off. I've also just begun to read Garth Greenwell's Cleanness because two of my writing mentors recommended it, and the editor of MGDB* touted it as well. I read Greenwell's earlier book, so I'm expecting this to be as good. The sex is very, very graphic. By the way.
2. Going to movies: I've seen "1917," which sucked me in and under as I've always been partial to the Great War, if one can be partial toward wars at all. Aside from sitting on the edge of my seat throughout the movie and being enthralled by the cinematography and the two beautiful co-stars, the main feeling I had was a sort of bemused rage and incredulous sorrow. WE MUST DO ANYTHING WE CAN TO MAKE SURE THERE ARE NO MORE WARS. Honestly, nearly every war movie I've ever watched has manipulated me into this emphatic imperative. Wars are hideous. There is no glory or honor in them. They are madness and insane, and anyone who justifies killing on a grand scale like that is spouting propaganda. Speaking of wars, I've also seen my beloved Terence Malick's "The Hidden Life" which is another war movie, but it's about goodness -- about what it means to be deeply moral and good. I saw Goddess Greta Gerwig's "Little Women" and was utterly enchanted by it, transported in exactly the same way I was transported by the book -- any book, actually -- as a very young girl. That took me by surprise as I had never seen any of the other renditions and only had the book to compare it to. The movie was just as much about writing and reading as it was about being a sister and a woman chafing at societal constraints. I absolutely loved it. I've watched some Netflix and Amazon stuff, too -- most memorably, "The Two Popes" which was more a story of two human beings than the weird fuckery of the Catholic Church. I think that's because Anthony Hopkins and especially Jonathan Pryce were exceptional. Reader, I still can't abide the Catholic Church and that dislike would include Francis, as he is still THE POPE of an institution that I believe should be dismantled.
3. Teaching at two different schools: I have around 60 students that range in age from 13 to 18. The majority are in a small, private, ultra-religious high school here in Los Angeles that is, at the very least, giving me a lot of material for a future memoir. No more need be said or will be said. Stay tuned, though. I have a few students in another, very highly specialized school, each of whom I adore. Truly. One of my students began reading Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and on a day when I wasn't even teaching her, she poked her head in my office and said, Oh my god! I love the book you picked out for me! I was having a particularly difficult time finding something for another of my students to read and relate to -- and then I thought of Flannery O'Connor's short stories. The kid is sucked in and under and very, very into "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." Reader, this thrills me to no end. 
4. Having my mind blown without the use of psychotropics: I attended a 12-hour Holotropic Breathwork workshop last Saturday. I haven't fully processed the experience and don't have the words to describe the journey I went on during the 3 hours of breathing I did, blindfolded and  carried by incredible music that filled the room and my body with sound. You can read about holotropic breathwork on the world wide webs. I released a whole lot of shit and am still feeling the effects in a positive way over a week later.
5. The tedious work of what Divorce Lawyer World calls "Discovery." I will say no more except that I have been set into a Matrix, a strange and mad world of no reason, where everything is transactional and my worth measures in negative numbers. It's a good thing that one of the hallucinations I experienced during the Holotropic Breathwork session was my generous body as Mother Earth, merged with the indigo Cosmos and lit by stars, my children rushing toward me as beings of power, my pelvis on fire and the only thing to fear a strange, searing pain that ran up and down my left side but, allowed to speak for itself, was released and transformed into dance. Honestly.

* My God-damn book, which I have worked on only in my brain with not a thing on paper to show for it for over a year.

 

Saturday Morning Three-Line Movie Review

If Beale Street Could Talk

Every scene in this gorgeous movie is a work of art, subtle and beautifully lit, suffused with warmth and love, and there are eyes everywhere, eyes that look out at you and eyes that you look into and eyes that look at one another. The movie is heavy, so heavy that you can't get out from under while watching it, the under that is the history of black people in America, the under that is white supremacy, a smothering blanket, and the director, Barry Jenkins, spares nothing in his literal spareness. You can hold your breath while watching it, you can feel the love emanating from the lovers, from the families, from the shadows and darkness, but you just can't get out from under the grief, the loss, the suggestion that love is sometimes just not enough.

More Three-Line Movie Reviews

Green Book

Crazy Rich Asians
BlacKkKlansman
Far From the Tree
Sorry to Bother You
RBG
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
Learning to Drive
Love and Mercy
Not a Three Line Movie Review
While We're Young
Ida
Force Majeur 
Gone Girl
Saint Vincent
Get on Up
Begin Again
Chef
The Immigrant
Cesar Chavez
The Grand Budapest Hotel
Gloria
Labor Day 
Philomena

August: Osage County

Her

American Hustle

Carrie and Today's Blog Inertia, Overturned

I've been sitting at my computer all morning, filling out online health insurance claims, making neat stacks of paperwork, listening to the tinny strains of the Los Angeles Unified School District's hold music and periodically staring at this blank white space wondering what to write. I posted the daisy photo as inspiration because you just never know what'll strike you. As you know, I rarely have blog inertia, but in feeling sort of over-exposed and dry, dry, dry, I've been basically just conjuring up tidbits and observations of late. Offline, I'm working on a short story and -- well -- enough blathering about nothing.

My writer friend Carrie Link of love. and the author of one of my favorite memoirs, Will of God, just heroically rose out of her own self-described blog inertia and posted an amazing review of my mini memoir. You can read it here.

Thank you, Carrie and thank all of you who've downloaded and read this thing. It means the world to me, to use a blog inertia-provoked phrase.

xoxoxoxo

French intellectuals, lesbians, red vines and me

So, I don't think I'm ready for a lesbian relationship, yet, but the movie was pretty decent for a French intellectual one. Just in case you've forgotten, I was a French major in college and while I found myself ever deeper into the commitment of it -- advanced linguistics! idiomatic expressions! medieval poetry! the existentialists! Pascal! Baudelaire! -- I was unable to extricate myself even as I found all the reading and the writing miserable. French literature never did get me, or pull me in or dig down deep into my soul, with the possible exception of Sartre's Nausee that I read while swinging in a hammock on the front porch of the shack I lived in at the time in North Carolina. That book actually made me feel nauseous which I guess is as good a reaction as any to a piece of literature. As for French movies, with the possible exception of Jules et Jim and those Manon des Sources ones, as well as an early infatuation with Gerard Depardieu (who's gone utterly bonkers, evidently, but when he was young -- oh, when he was young!), I'm hard put to remember a single one that didn't make me squirm uncomfortably. Maybe it's the peasant Italian in me or something, but the intellectual pretensions of the French irritate the hell out of me, and and even sexual couplings, in French, leave me cold because they seem so conscious and studied. Even Last Tango in Paris appealed to me because I adore Marlon Brando and there's no real talking in it other than get the butter. Does that make sense? In any case, Blue is the Warmest Color has some of the most graphic sex scenes that I've ever seen in a movie theater (I won't tell you about the time I went to a porn drive-in with a boyfriend and batted away mosquitoes that kept flying through the car window that we had to leave open to hear the moaning of the actors on the big screen), and it was weird to sit and watch them, alone, with a big bucket of popcorn and some Red Vines. The two stars were beautiful and really good actors, the story was intensely romantic (the French did invent the expression coup de foudre), but there was an air-brushed quality to it, too, and I was aware the entire time that a man filmed it. Because one of the women characters was an Artist, there was some requisite art criticism which I find unbearably painful in any language, but there was some great smart talk about literature, too. But those sex scenes -- whew! Long and -- well -- long. There were many lesbians in the movie theater, and I felt like a big dork, to tell you the truth, but it would have been worse if the theater were filled with a bunch of heterosexual males.

Anyhoo. That's the extent of my review of Blue is the Warmest Color, and I think I'll stick with the Javier Bardem fantasies.

As an aside, the photo above is Oliver and Henry who took a Metrolink train down to Orange County to visit some friends yesterday while their mother went to the French intellectual lesbian movie and ate a bucket of popcorn and a package of Red Vines.

Giveaway and Sports

Australian women's swimming team - 1919

In case you missed it, I'm riffing on sports and Gatorade as well as giving away a $100 gift card to Dick's Sporting Goods.

All uncharacteristic, but you do what you gotta do. Look on it as kind of, sort of bailing me out of 24-hour childcare.

Go here, read about my boys and sports, win some sports stuff for your man, your boys, your girls or yourself. As for the significance of the photo above, there is none -- other than that I liked it and swimming was actually the only sport that I kind of sort of excelled at (excelled being a slight exaggeration).

QuikShower Wipes - A Review

I think I've mentioned before that being a blogger has its near-transcendent perks -- namely getting to know so many incredible other bloggers -- mothers and fathers and artists and musicians and poets and comedians -- my life has been so enriched that it's near impossible to really do justice to the joys I get from blogging.

The more superficial perks I get, though, are opportunities to receive free STUFF and then write reviews of that stuff. While I recoil from most commercial items, I was recently contacted by a company that makes disposable washcloths for kids.

You're raising your eyebrows right now, right?

Who needs disposable washcloths, first of all, when you can just take a shower?

Well, I'm the mother of two boys who adore sports and I bet that they spend six to eight hours a week, between them, practicing those sports. Since we live in a city and try to carpool to all those practices and games, we often have five boys in the Mazda, and sometimes, well -- it stinks. I don't know when little boy smell turns into big boy smell, but when it happens it's overpowering. And that's when disposable washcloths actually do come in handy.

Here boys, I yell over their din, glancing in the rear view mirror at their red and sweaty faces, Open these up and wash up. And then I toss back a few packs of QuikShowerWipes.

Here's what the company says about them:

QwikShower Wipes are a must-have for active children and pubescent tweens and teens who get soiled, sweaty, stinky and self-conscious.  These portable single-use disposable washcloths offer an easy, convenient and economical way to help kids get clean and eliminate embarrassing grime and body odor after gym class, sports, outdoor play and other physical activities. QwikShower Wipes are also great for adults for use after the gym, a jog, when traveling, during a long shift at the office, or even after work en route to another engagement. Purchase online at www.QwikShower.com - 1 for $1, 10 for $7, 50 for $29 and 100 for $49.

Isn't that bad for the environment? you might ask as well. Do we really need another disposable product?


I'm happy to report that QuikShowerWipes are actually green, at least to the extent that unlike popular body sprays, they are non-aerosol so there are no fluorocarbons. That also means, evidently, that the scent doesn't invade everyone else's personal space or overwhelm a locker room. I'd say the only weakness, as far as my feelings about this is that it is disposable and apparently not biodegradable.

However, overall, I'm impressed with the product and wish that I'd had a few in my backpack, particularly in middle school when I had split period lunch. That meant thirty minutes of PE, followed by lunch and then back to PE. It was mortifying enough to show up in the cafeteria in a polyester, snap front jumper (yes, that's what we wore back in the seventies) but to be sweaty and stinky, too?

Visit the site here and surprise your teen, tween or stinky child with the cute package.

**I received no compensation for writing this review -- just a few packs of QuikShowerWipes which my boys loved.

A Tentative Retraction

A few weeks ago, I wrote a quick "review" of the movie Waiting for Superman, which I watched with free tickets from the company K-12, an online educator. I was moved by the movie and found it both compelling and depressing, and, overall, it left me feeling uneasy about much in the American public school system but grateful that my own children are safely learning in a very good charter school here in Los Angeles. This morning, I opened up my new The New York Review of Books to an article by Diane Ravitch called The Myth of Charter Schools. Ravitch proceeds to eviscerate Davis Guggenheim's movie in a careful argument, concluding that the movie is simplistic, sometimes patently untrue and, above all, an assault on public education as a right and cornerstone of American democracy.

At risk of seeming all over the place or impossibly fatuous and impressionable, I feel far less enthusiastic about the movie and my probable superficial interpretation of it. The weird thing is that the company who asked me to write the review, K-12, and then sent me an American Express giftcard to buy the tickets, is a company started by William Bennett, the very conservative blow hard who I happen to know through my brother-in-law. I won't tell the story, here, but a long time ago I had an actual verbal argument with him at a wedding (my sister's) -- suffice it to say that I still find him insufferable and if the company hadn't been sold a while ago would have refused to do the review. I found it curious that they were part of the promotion process but only after reading the Ravitch review do I really understand why. According to Ravitch, "Waiting for Superman is a powerful weapon on behalf of those championing the 'free market' and privatization. It raises important questions, but all of the answers it offers require a transfer of public funds to private sector."


When I first heard Guggenheim interviewed on NPR, before I actually saw his movie, I was driving around Los Angeles, and when he mentioned that the impetus for the movie was the occasion of passing three "dismal" public schools on the way to dropping off his own children at their private schools, here in Los Angeles, I felt irked. I thought to myself what the hell does he actually know about the public schools here in Los Angeles, other than the sensational stories he hears? I imagined that he probably lives in a neighborhood where the public schools are probably excellent, but due to his social status and the general allure of the private school system, he would shun it and make himself feel better by equating all public schools as "bad." I myself live in a district with the best elementary school in the city, and most of my friends, if they can afford it, choose to send their children to extremely expensive private schools (upwards of $20,000 for K-5 and nearing $30,000 for middle and high school). Why? I don't know. Do they know anything at all about public schools? Most don't and all appear to have been seduced by the notion that the public school system is horrendous here in Los Angeles. And while they might pay lip service to the "good" ones that their property taxes support, they wouldn't dream of sending their children to them. Guggenheim himself said in that interview that he felt guilty about not supporting his local public school.

Anyway, I went into the movie feeling conflicted and worried, a bit, about the inherent elitism of the movie. I am also aware of my own very conflicted feelings -- my children are in public school, a local charter that was started only six or so years ago by concerned parents who wanted an alternative curriculum for their children, but if I were to suddenly be able to afford a private school, would that change my decision? When I look at the private schools and the incredible facilities, the field trips, the teachers, the extras -- well, it's hard not to wonder what my own children are missing. However, what I also see is excess, lots of material excess and an education marked primarily by entitlement -- and I'm sort of relieved that I don't have to expose my sons to that any more than they already are. I also hate that these private schools have no responsibility toward those with disabilities -- that's a no-brainer for me -- and why would I want my sons to attend a school that wouldn't accept my daughter?

But enough rambling. The review has knocked me over a head with a sledgehammer and underlined the necessity of really studying an issue, backwards and forwards. Above all, the reviewer emphasizes that poverty, not bad teachers is the indicator of poor educational outcomes, and this was an important reminder for me, if not startling (given the work that I do in healthcare, I am already aware that poverty is a primary indicator for developmental disability and poor outcomes). Ravitch points out that while the movie extols Finland as a country whose educational system is to be admired, it fails to point out that Finland seldom tests its students and has a completely unionized teaching force. Finland also has a national curriculum and has strengthened its social programs for children and families -- only 5% of children live in poverty in Finland while 20% do so here in the United States. That's the BIG BAD SOCIALISTIC STATE, any trolls out there reading this.

I'm off, now, booting Superman with at least one foot and looking for more edification.