Snapshots

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, which used to be a regular feature.

— I went to the beach on Saturday to escape the mugginess, the stickiness, and because I am bogged down with two deadlines, huge ones, and my apartment felt like a prison. I hate the summer except for the prospect of ocean-swimming, and I haven’t swum in the ocean once this summer. I tried to go to my normal beach but the street-parking was impossible. There was no way I would ever find a spot. I drove on along the coast until I found a parking spot, and then just went onto whatever beach it was at the end of the road. Love the Shore like that. I brought some work to do, because I like it when the beach is my office. It was a blaring summer day, and I was covered in SPF 50 because if I get yet another freckle I will jump off the Triboro Bridge. I swam in the ocean and wept salty tears of gratitude for how awesome it felt. Not really. But you know. An hour after I got there, I felt …. something approaching. I turned around.

Huh. So … clearly rain is coming. I don’t care about that, it also looked like it would pass pretty quickly. So I turned back around. Then things started getting more dramatic as the cloud moved directly overhead. The light out at sea got cold and almost … white. It looked very very still out there. Eerie, because it was the last light before it got snuffed out. Because then this started happening.

The cloud rumbled with thunder. It was beautiful and I took 972 pictures of the cloud’s progression. Behind me now, there was a clear black line where the cloud ended, and the sky underneath that black line glowed bright white-orange-y, which looked distinctly tornado-ish. For the first time I thought, “Yeah. This is a bit more than your everyday summer shower.” Finally, the hot lifeguards started bellowing through megaphones and over the loud-speakers that it was time to evacuate the beach. What was happening was so magnificent I almost disobeyed. I love dangerous weather. I drove to the beach on Block Island in the middle of a nor’easter – a storm so strong that the shutters were ripped off of my house by the wind – so I could watch the waves roll in. I have never seen such a chaotic ocean in my life, the waves heaving about like monsters. It was stupid of me to be there. When I got back into my car, my hair was crusted with sand and sea-foam, because all of that shit was up in the air as opposed to down on the land or in the water. So. Sunday. I saw the black line of cloud with the clear sky beneath and felt: Danger. Reluctantly, I gathered up my stuff to head back to my car. As I walked by the little inland body of water right next to the beach, this is what I saw.

And although my camera never captured it, huge white forks of lightning were shooting out of that black cloud and coming directly down onto the earth. It was GORGEOUS. It wasn’t even raining yet, although that would come, just as I reached my car. It rained so torrentially that I hung out in my car for a while waiting for it to pass. In about 40 minutes, the sun came out again. I drove home.

Yesterday morning I woke up and saw some headlines on my FB page from the town I had been in the day before. Two women had been struck by lightning as they walked back to their cars. At the same moment (2:35) that I was walking back to my car. One was struck by lightning IN her car. They were half a football field away from me, IF that. They were both rushed to the hospital (I do remember sirens), and it appears they’re both going to be okay, thankfully.

Sometimes a sky really is as dangerous as it looks.

— I have spent the last two weeks immersed in Leonardo DiCaprio and Dean Stockwell for these two upcoming essays, both of which I pitched to different outlets. Sometimes you pitch stuff and you don’t hear back, or you hear, “Thanks but no thanks.” I’ve got skin as tough as a rhino: try being an actress for 15, 20 years. NOTHING gets to you after that. But sometimes – on the same day – two separate editors say, “Yes! Would love for you to write that piece!” Then begins the hard work and of course I overdo the hard work, and practically pull out the Dead Sea Scrolls to find out if there might be a relevant quote in there I could use. Nevertheless, it’s been super-fun and I feel so strongly about both of those guys that it was a pleasure to write about them.

— Vacation next week. Going off the grid. Buh-bye world.

— Had a wonderful time last Thursday night at a screening for the Polish film Into the Spiral at the Tribeca Film Center (trailer below). Directed by Konrad Aksinowicz, and starring Kasia Warnke, Piotr Stramowski and Tamir Halperin, it tells the story of a couple on the rocks taking a road trip to an isolated country house, and they pick up a hippie-ish-guru Jewish man named Tamir. Told in a non-linear way, looping back on itself like a spiral, the film runs only 70 minutes and uses each second well. It feels like a much longer movie, considering how much happens: but overall it is spare, taut, gripping, and gorgeous. Shot on 35 mm by cinematographer Wojtek Zielinski, Into the Spiral is a strange and beautiful psychological thriller, and the acting is superb. The characters unfold by stealth: the film withholds information, then loops back so you can see more, more context provided, before looping back forward in time to push the story forward. It hasn’t been released here in the States yet, and if I’m not mistaken the screening at the Tribeca Film Center was the first time it screened in the US. Kasia and Piotr, the two stars – who fell in love during the film shoot and are getting married in two weeks’ time – were in attendance. It was their first time in New York City (and maybe America too? I can’t remember.) I was there to moderate the audience QA afterwards, which was a ton of fun. The actors are both super-smart, kind, excited, and forthcoming about the film, their process, the talented director (who had directed a feature before, but it was more “for hire”, and Into the Spiral represents his own vision). They both looked stunning – Piotr in a tuxedo, with his mohawk growing out (he’s starring in a hugely popular Polish franchise right now, where he appears in full-on mohawk. It’s going to be a trilogy, apparently. Piotr gave me a copy of the first installment, called Pit Bull and I look forward to watching it!) Stars in Poland (and you can see why: both are magnificent actors) Kasia and Piotr were thrilled to show their film here, maybe a bit nervous beforehand, but beautifully relaxed onstage answering questions, so happy to share their work. Afterwards there was a reception down in DeNiro’s Tribeca Grill, and I met a super cool filmmaker, of Polish descent (as most people present were), who told me about his projects (they sound AMAZING), and I told him the films I’ve seen that I flipped over this year (The Fits, Krisha), he typed the titles into his phone, we discussed The Lobster, we discussed film financing, distribution issues, documentary series. He mentioned a short film he had done, where he tricked out his apartment “to look like a Polish apartment.” “What does that mean?” He gave me a look and I said, “I’m Irish. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He said, “Well, you know, pictures of Pope John Paul II everywhere.” “Of course. Well, Irish houses all have that too so I get what you’re saying.” I’ve done a couple of QAs for this organization, Polish Filmmakers NYC basically because I was on an Ida panel up at Columbia last year. I love this organization, and I love the films I’ve been lucky enough to see because of my participation. Keep your eyes peeled for Into the Spiral.

— Thanks to Jessie, I have discovered the 2010 TV series Terriers. This all came about because I just saw Michael Raymond-James as Brick in the production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof in the Berkshires, and was so impressed by him. I have never seen True Blood, even though Sam Trammell is a part of my brother/cousins circle of friends in Los Angeles. (Sam’s partner, Missy Yager, brilliant actress, was the first to play “Neve” in the very first reading of one of the scenes in my script – please excuse how crazy I sound there – or, don’t excuse it. I was extremely sick at the time and about to descend into such craziness that in looking back I should have been hospitalized in July of that year. I’m lucky I’m still topside after July 2009. So, you know. There it is. Missy also directed the LA workshop of my script in 2011– and was such an enormous help in script analysis that I can’t thank her enough. Initially we had talked about Missy and Sam playing the lead roles, they were both perfect for them, but then Missy got pregnant so the timing was off, and when she directed the workshop, she was extremely pregnant – like Third Trimester pregnant. She had her flip-flopped feet up over the seat in front of her in the little theatre we rehearsed in, and someone remarked that they looked like blown-up surgical gloves. Or maybe she said it. Tears of laughter all around.) ANYWAY. Jessie mentioned Terriers and it’s streaming on Netflix. It’s the Donal Logue-Michael Raymond-James Show, and from the pilot I was hooked. It only ran for one season, but it’s an extremely rich and eccentric season. Noel Murray (whose Terriers re-caps on AV Club I devoured after I saw the whole thing) said that there had been a proposed Rockford Files re-boot and then it fell through, and he was kind of bummed, but then he realized that the next best thing, as well as a similar thing, was to watch Terriers. I loved Rockford Files, appointment television for my parents, and I totally see what Murray was saying in that comparison. A scrappy detective, no resources, a lone wolf, having to fly by the seat of his pants. Terriers was a terrific series and I highly recommend it if you missed it the first time around.

— My illness acts up in the summer. And in the late fall. And in the early spring. So basically I’m screwed all year round. Doing my best, though. It’s all you can do.

— My nephew Cashel – who has basically grown up in the time I have had this site – when I first started my site, I was going out to Brooklyn every weekend to baby-sit the guy!! And now he’s a high school graduate. He’s coming East for college. I can’t believe it. I’ve seen him once a year ever since they moved to California. And we have a very good relationship, and we have very good talks, and we text each other from time to time, but there’s nothing like a little Face Time. I think he’s excited too.

— I am currently reading a wonderful book by Timothy Egan called The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero, sent to me by my cousin Kerry (sister to cousin Mike. My life is – and always has been – about the juggernaut of O’Malley cousins.) The book is about Thomas Francis Meagher, an Irish (and American) hero whom I know nothing about. A rich kid in 1840s Ireland, with a father in Parliament, he was radicalized (as so many were) by Black ’47. He tried to organize Ireland into a proper rebellion, but he wasn’t a soldier. His talent was in oratory and writing. (He was a Hamilton-esque figure: a prodigy). He had a love affair with the woman known as “Speranza,” an Irish radical – or, a woman who completely re-invented herself as an Irish radical (one of my favorite things about Ireland’s various rebellions is that women were always included. In the prose, and on the front-lines. Egalitarian. In the announcement of the new free Irish Republic post-the Easter rising, it starts with the address: “IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN.” Nice to be included explicitly in any political storm.) Speranza, of course, would go on to give birth to a man you might heard of, Oscar Wilde. But before Oscar came along, his mother was also famous around Ireland and the British Isles, a radical fire-breathing patriot. Meagher was arrested, sentenced to death, and this fact got worldwide attention from the massive Irish diaspora who had fled Ireland during Black ’47. The British balked, and reduced the sentence to a lifetime of imprisonment down on Tasmania (then known as Van Diemen’s Land.) So off he goes around the globe to live in the prison colony with all the other Irish patriots. And THEN Meagher escaped – and you can’t even believe he got away with it, it was extremely complicated – and arrived in New York to much fanfare. He arrived in America just in time for the breakout of the Civil War, and he threw himself into the fight, organizing Irish brigades with fervor. The whole thing is fascinating. He died pretty young, and I’m not reading ahead, so don’t tell me what happens. I wish my father were still alive so I could talk to him about this because I’m sure he knew everything about all of this and could walk to his bookshelf, taking down a book without hesitation, because he knew where it was in all his 100s of books, he knew where to find the quote he wanted to share with me.