Review: Phoenix Rising (2022)

Posted on March 11, 2022 by sheila

I reviewed the two-part documentary Phoenix Rising for Ebert.

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Review: Calendar Girl (2022)

Posted on March 8, 2022 by sheila

A fascinating documentary about a woman I knew nothing about: Ruth Finley, whose Fashion Calendar was published for almost 70 years, and a backbone of the New York fashion industry. I learned a lot! I reviewed for Ebert.

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Review: Huda’s Salon (2022)

Posted on March 4, 2022 by sheila

Such a fantastic film by Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad (I recommend his other films too, particularly Paradise Now and Omar). Huda’s Salon features four tremendous performances (there are really only four characters in it – creating a claustrophobic belljar, a microcosm of the much larger picture). I reviewed for Ebert.

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Sunflowers uprightly burning

Posted on March 3, 2022 by sheila

from Ukrainian Soviet director Oleksander Dovzhenko’s “Earth” (1930), one of the greatest of silent films.

The Sunflowers, by Mary Oliver
Come with me
into the field of sunflowers.
Their faces are burnished disks,
their dry spines
creak like ship masts,
their green leaves,
so heavy and many,
fill all day with the sticky
sugars of the sun.
Come with me
to visit the sunflowers,
they are shy
but want to be friends;
they have wonderful stories
of when they were young –
the important weather,
the wandering crows.
Don’t be afraid
to ask them questions!
Their bright faces,
which follow the sun,
will listen, and all
those rows of seeds –
each one a new life! –
hope for a deeper acquaintance;
each of them, though it stands
in a crowd of many,
like a separate universe,
is lonely, the long work
of turning their lives
into a celebration
is not easy. Come
and let us talk with those modest faces,
the simple garments of leaves,
the coarse roots in the earth
so uprightly burning.

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“He’s baseball’s exorcist, scares the devil out of you.” – Dick Sharon on Nolan Ryan

Posted on March 3, 2022 by sheila

WELL. I can’t wait for THIS one. It has “me” written all over it.

Years ago, I reviewed the doc Fastball – which I highly recommend. It’s about the history of the fastball, and profiling the great fastball pitchers. The best part was the interviews with current and past players about what it was like to face off against one of these guys. Some of them still shiver – literally – at the memory of being “pitched to” by Bob Gibson. He was, by far, the most intimidating pitcher any of them had ever faced. These big burly jocks are saying stuff like, “I felt like he hated me.” Gibson pitched with hatred. He wanted to humiliate you, make you look stupid. Bob Gibson is interviewed for Fastball (he passed away just a couple of years ago) and he said, giving a glimpse of who he was as a player, “Half of that plate is mine. Now you gotta figure out which part I’m coming after.” (I wrote a thing about Bob Gibson once.)

Another part of the doc I remember is when fastballs started to creep up into the 100mph range, as opposed to the more standard high 80s, low 90s. 100 mph, or at least high 90s, was unheard of back in the day – deemed unattainable – but it’s now a regular thing. Brandon Phillips described what the difference is as a batter. He said that at 90mph he can see the logo on the baseball. At 100 mph, the baseball looks like a golf ball.

If you love this kind of stuff – and I do – MADLY – Fastball is like crack.

Facing Nolan came on my radar because it’s screening at SXSW. It’s about – of course – Nolan Ryan – a name who comes up again and again in Fastball (Ryan was also interviewed for Fastball). Ryan’s stellar heyday – where he set records which probably will never be broken, it was almost otherworldly what he did – was decades ago and the players interviewed remember their at-bats vividly and how frustrating and often frightening it was facing Ryan. You just could not defeat him, you could not get a piece of his fastball. It was unhittable.

“You don’t face Ryan without your rest. He’s the only guy I go against that makes me go to bed before midnight.” – Reggie Jackson

Facing Ryan looks to be similar to Fastball, featuring interviews with players about Ryan as a pitcher, their memories of at-bats against him, their analysis of who he was as a player.

I can’t wait.

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Library: Organized

Posted on March 3, 2022 by sheila

It took me about five days. And I had to tolerate accelerating levels of chaos in order to get to organization because once the bookcases were built, I threw books onto the shelves in any old order, mainly to get rid of the BOXES, which had been stacked up against the wall for months. I maybe should have taken the time initially to organize the books and put them on the shelves in the proper order, but … I did not have the patience. So. Organizing the books ON the shelves required me to take them all OFF the shelves yet AGAIN, and stack them in genre-based piles on the floor. Biographies in a stack, novels in a stack, scripts in a stack … I was tiptoeing through teetering book stacks for a couple of days. Finally, I got it done, shelf by shelf, a little bit a day. It took much longer than I anticipated. The books were so scattered, I had to track them down in their little stacks so I didn’t leave any stragglers. But finally. It’s done. Every book has its home. Everything is put away. Things are even in alphabetical order. I give a lot of thought to how I organize things. Where books are placed is very important, since this is a LIBRARY, not just BACKGROUND DECORATION. I need to be able to find stuff, and I don’t want the books I dip into most often – for research – to be on the top shelves where I need a step ladder. I need them to be at eye level. So. I sat around staring at the empty shelves for a while, envisioning where each section should go, how it would make the most sense. An additional concern was the height of shelves (which vary – by design). I love the varying height because books are different sizes. You want big books to be on the shelves built for big books. If you have tiny paperbacks – as I do – you don’t want them to be lined up on a shelf built for art books. It’s a waste of space.

It’s all done. And everything feels different now. It’s a calm space. It’s a ME space.

Fiction bookcase! With my children’s books and YA books – many of which I actually owned when I was in grade school/middle school – the original copies – on the bottom shelf. I also put all my plays and scripts in this bookcase.

Non-fiction bookcase!

Represented here, moving from top down and then back up again, through the four bookcases:

Biographies (world leaders, etc.). After that, biographies of people like Montgomery Clift and Rudolf Valentino. In other words: Show business people and Everybody Else.

The same organizing principle goes for Memoirs, which come next. Everybody Else and then Show Trash.

A sub-set of memoirs: harrowing memoirs of those who lived under Stalin and/or Hitler or at least experienced the rise. Evgenia Ginzberg. Stefan Zweig. Heda Kovály. I keep these in their own section.

History. Stalin-era Russia dominating, including a book on the famine in Ukraine, and Russia’s long history of domination and annexation. So. There’s THAT. Then, lots of WWII books, lots of books about the American Revolutionary war. You’ve got your niche interests, I’ve got mine.

Elvis shelf interrupts everything. Elvis is front and center.

Below Elvis: History continued. Much space is given to four authors – people whom I will read whatever it is they write, on whatever subject. So I have all their books. Robert Kaplan. Robert Conquest. Rebecca West. Ryzsard Kaupscinski (In 2007, after he died, I went to the memorial for him at the NYPL, hosted by Philip Gourevitch and Salman Rushdie! unforgettable).

Next: general books on specific events and/or phases/movements. Chernobyl. The dot com speculative bubble. Charlie Manson. The fall of Lehman Brothers (I haven’t read the book yet but am looking forward to it). Bobby Fischer. The history of poisons. The cultural history of tomboys. This section is all over the place but I don’t want to put it into the regular history section.

Then: film criticism. I admit I mostly have Pauline Kael, not because she’s my favorite or anything, but because there are just more volumes of her work out there than other critics. Also represented – Truffaut, Agee, Manny Farber.

Next comes random mini-sections:
— Baseball writing
— Science books – planets, physics for dummies, etc.
— Bipolar information and CBT books

The next section I still need to organize, but at least they’re all together: Hollywood history, the Movies.

Then, a separate section, very important, because it’s one of the ones I “use” the most: Directors on directing. Books on specific directors. Collections of interviews with this or that director. I will organize this shelf by subject matter, not author. So, all Howard Hawks books kept together. All Cassavetes books. Etc.

Second Elvis shelf after that.

Below Elvis: all my acting books, some of which I have owned since I was a teenager. Acting technique books. Audition books. Acting history. Stanislavsky, Artaud, etc.

Narrow bookcase at the very end is where I have put all the volumes I own of diaries/correspondence. I love reading people’s diaries/correspondence. So I have Clifford Odets’ 1940 diary (essential, for artists in particular. Required reading. Non-negotiable.) Evelyn Waugh’s letters, LM Montgomery’s diaries, to Sylvia Plath’s diaries and correspondence. Ellen Terry and George Bernard Shaw’s correspondence. Yeats and Maud Gonne’s correspondence, etc.

So it’s all up there, with room to spare which – frankly – I cannot believe, all things considered.

And finally: the bottom shelf is tall enough for me to be shelve my art books. I have a couple of huge books of movie posters, and one of Soviet-era propaganda posters, the Supernatural book, huge coffee table type books I’ve never had room for.

It’s not a coincidence that I launched this project during the anxiety of this past week. The anger and concern and worry over world events. All-consuming. My concentration is shot to hell. Book organization was an enormous task, involving dry and objective activities like alphabetization, sub-categorization, all very task-oriented and objective. I can’t control what’s going on but I CAN control how I shelve my books.

I was also inspired by this.

As the daughter of a librarian, as a lover of libraries and librarians, my heart exploded with emotion.

Posted in Books, Personal | 2 Comments

February 2022 Viewing Diary

Posted on March 2, 2022 by sheila

Working really really hard on a couple of big things right now. This takes up so much brain space. It’s mentally exhausting. Not complaining, just stating facts. During times like this, I lean towards true crime docuseries, or re-watches. Or comfort food. Hard to absorb anything new.

King Creole (1958; d. Michael Curtiz)
One Elvis’ best films, in an objective structural sense. He’s given a real character to play, it was adapted from a best-selling book – the material suited to him – and he is surrounded by a superb cast, people like Walter Matthau, Carolyn Jones, and Dolores Hart. He’s amazing in it. Oh, and a director who seemed fascinated by Elvis in an aesthetic way – which wasn’t the case so much with all the rest of his movies, as bizarre as that may seem – he’s Elvis, how can you not be fascinated by who he was aesthetically? Anyway, always fun to revisit this one.

Family Reunion Season 1, episodes 1 and 2 (2019; d. Eric Dean Seaton)
My nieces are in love with this television series and showed me the first two episodes. I so love that they get excited about things and can’t wait to show it to me. And this was very witty and amusing. Plus it has the great Loretta Devine.

G.I. Blues (1960; d. Norman Taurog)
The first film post-Army. It’s …….. bizarre. That’s all I can say. It’s the first stab at what would become “the Elvis formula”, and there’s a meta level going on, a sort of “Elvis in the Army” type deal, and the whole thing was made with the cooperation of the US Army – so it’s propaganda for what they were doing in Germany (leching on women, apparently). There really isn’t a plot here. It does provide some humor when Elvis is forced to take care of a sobbing baby. This is a weird one.

Flaming Star (1960; d. Don Siegel)
Also top tier Elvis movie, mainly because it’s not “an Elvis movie”. It’s a Western, and Elvis is part of the ensemble, and he’s absolutely fantastic: all action, completely unselfconscious. If you think back on Love Me Tender and compare to this …. well, there’s no comparison. He doesn’t sing in this, except for the title song.

Wild In the Country (1961; d. Philip Dunne)
A fascinating curio, not very well-known, which is strange considering the talent involved – Elvis and Hope Lange and Millie Perkins and Tuesday Weld. With script by none other than Clifford Odets! You can hear the Odetsian spark in the dialogue – that mix of rough-housing Freudian overly-self-aware personalities. This is a very good movie, with one scene that doesn’t really fit – where Elvis bursts into song – as though suddenly this movie is going to be a musical, even though it’s NOT a musical. Look past that, though, and this is very good. He and Tuesday Weld have insane chemistry.

Blue Hawaii (1961; d. Norman Taurog)
This is the film that changed everything. This film was an enormous hit. The soundtrack was a best-seller, dominating the charts for almost a year. It was a phenomenon. And so every film that followed, the team behind Elvis was chasing Blue Hawaii levels of success.

Reprise (2008; d. Joachim Trier)
Trier’s first film. It’s a “typical” first film, a young man’s film, about a group of friends in Oslo, two of whom are novelists – young ambitious men – and what happens when one becomes successful, while the other struggles to make headway. But it’s really about what it feels like to be a twentysomething man. So well observed, and it’s amazing how confident Trier’s vision and tone is, right out of the gate.

Oslo August 31st (2011; d. Joachim Trier)
This got the world’s attention in re: Trier (and his lead actor and muse Anders Danielsen Lie – who was also in Reprise, and is in Trier’s current film, out now, racking up awards around the world, Worst Person in the World. Oslo August 31st screened at Ebertfest in 2013, the first Ebertfest I attended, with Mum, and Trier was there, so we got to meet him. Lovely man. Open and friendly and smart. Oslo August 31st could be seen as a “sequel” of sorts, to Reprise, with the lead character a little further down the path than the guys in Reprise. He’s also a writer. It is not a pretty picture. A harrowing portrait of a recently clean heroin addict, trying to make amends, but failing every step of the way. The damage his addiction has done is so total.

Thelma (2017; d. Joachim Trier)
Trier’s foray into the horror-supernatural genre: a young woman, raised in a repressed religious household, goes to college, and starts having what appear to be epileptic seizures, seizures which alter reality around her. Her first experience of love and sexual arousal just ups the ante, the seizures become more violent, and she quickly loses control of events. A very tense thriller.

Worst Person in the World (2021; d. Joachim Trier)
See this film. It’s so excellent. I haven’t written about it but I am obviously working on something in re: Trier’s small but impressive body of work. Renate Reinsve is as good as everyone says (she won Best Actress at Cannes), and this is even more amazing since it’s her first lead role. She was on the verge of giving up acting altogether when Trier contacted her. She had been a glorified extra in Oslo August 31st – literally 10 years ago, and she made an impression on Trier. In the intervening years, Trier wondered why her career wasn’t advancing. She should be getting much better roles. And so he did the only thing possible for him to do. He wrote Worst Person in the World for her.

Cold Weather (2010; d. Aaron Katz)
So I was re-building my vanished archive and came across all these reviews I had written in 2010-11 of films I remember loving, but hadn’t seen since. I reviewed Aaron Katz’s Cold Weather at Tribeca and fell in love with it (here’s the review, re-built on my site), but honestly hadn’t thought of it in years. It’s on Amazon Prime so I re-watched it and was captivated all over again. You can check out my review to see what it’s about, but it’s really HOW it’s “about” what it’s about that matters. It’s moody beautiful melancholy tone-poem … mixed with a Sherlock-Holmes style old-fashioned mystery. Please see it! It’s special.

Curfew (2012; d. Shawn Christensen)
Another film I saw at Tribeca. I flipped over all 19 minutes of it. First of all, I reviewed it. Second of all, I interviewed the writer/director/star Shawn Christensen. Because short films don’t normally get this kind of attention, my review was the only one listed on IMDB for a long time. There still aren’t a lot of reviews listed there (see above comment: short films aren’t given this kind of attention). And WHADDYA KNOW it went on to win the Oscar for short film. I was at an Oscar gathering at my friend Jen’s, and I am slightly ashamed to admit I shouted, “I CALLED IT.” Watching Shawn – whom I had had such a nice conversation with – up there on that huge stage, accepting his award … I felt thrilled and excited for him. A well-deserved win. If you want to watch the whole thing, I found it online.

Catch the Fair One (2022; d. Josef Kubota Wladyka)
Reviewed this excellent film for Ebert.

Snowtown Murders (2011; d. Justin Kurzel)
Daniel Henshall was in Catch the Fair One, and I was intrigued by him so I looked him up. His portrayal of serial killer John Bunting in Snowtown Murders was the role most mentioned in the blurbs I found. So I watched it. This is one of the bleakest most despairing films I’ve ever seen. John Bunting’s evil is so all-encompassing it’s hard to even get your mind around it – but Henshall did. It’s an unbelievable performance, detailed, insightful – it’s one of those performances that actually exposes how these people think, how they react to things, their interpersonal relationships, etc. It’s very subtle what he’s doing. I will never watch this film again.

Strawberry Mansion (2022; d. Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney)
I really loved this. Very big fan of Kentucker Audley and Albert Birney’s work. Strawberry Mansion is out now. You should see it. I reviewed for Ebert.

2020 “My Mother’s Sins: Diane Downs”
Allison and I went on a binge-watch of fucked-up-ness. As always, it took us hours to get through this because we kept pausing to discuss. It was a freezing bone-cold New York day, and we hid inside, cozy and warm, watching television episodes about crazy sociopaths.

48 Hours “The Final Hours of Amie Harwick”
After Diane Downs, we moved onto this. A terrible story. That poor woman. She knew what was coming.

Inventing Anna (2022; d. David Frankel, Tom Verica, Daisy von Scherler Mayer, Nzingha Stewart, Ellen Kuras)
This was fine and it’s an interesting story – which I got caught up in at the time, like so many people did – and Julia Garner is great but did it need to be nine hours long? Really? NINE episodes? What, a 2-hour movie isn’t good enough? You need to stretch it out and pad it within an inch of its life? This is current trend, probably to keep people glued to their screens, but it’s extremely irritating. Inventing Anna is one of many – it’s the new thing, primarily in documentary – where you could tell the story in two hours, but instead it is drawwwwwwn out into 5 episodes, 6. Allison and I watched Inventing Anna together and we were like, “We have FIVE episodes to go??” It went on forever. Anna Delvey was a minor event, all things considered, and I don’t think the series makes the case in re: what Anna Delvey has to say about “How We Live Now”. There was just no need for this to be longer than freakin’ Roots.

Tinder Swindler (2022; d. Felicity Morris)
At first Allison and I did not care for the style of this series. There was a breathless romanticism about it, like all women are looking for a Prince, and “isn’t that the way it is”, and etc. I guess if you buy into that crap, you’d nod in agreement and sympathy. But we almost immediately got totally sucked into this story.

The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman (2022; d. Sam Benstead, Gareth Johnson)
This was part of our inadvertent binge-watch having to do with “conmen and grifters”. This is what Allison and I do. We scroll around. We watch the first five minutes of whatever it is. We make a decision. We are always in sync with whether or not to continue. It’s hilarious. “Okay I don’t like this.” “Me neither.” The Puppet Master is almost too outrageous to be believed. An INCREDIBLE long con pulled by this guy pretending to be MI5, roping people into his spy shenanigans – to insane lengths. He has ruined multiple peoples’ lives. The “case” is unresolved. He’s still out there.

The Ripper (2020; d. Jesse Vile and Ellena Wood)
Four-part investigative series about the Yorkshire Ripper. At least it wasn’t nine or ten episodes! I’ve read books on this one, also read David Peace’s WILD book series. It was well-done, particularly in the portrayal of how preconceived notions and assumptions and rushing-to-judgment can impact an investigation. They were looking in the wrong places, they discounted victims who didn’t fit their profile, and etc.

Posted in Monthly Viewing Diary, Movies, Television | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Review: Cyrano (2022)

Posted on February 25, 2022 by sheila

The new adaptation of the famous play features musical numbers by The National (the whole thing started as an off-Broadway production in 2019), and stars Peter Dinklage in the title role, where Cyrano’s nose problem is now a height “problem”. This transference really works, for multiple reasons, the main one being Dinklage can bring himself to the role without any prosthetic help (as is customary for other actors playing Cyrano). The transference also works because the themes of the play are universal. It’s not about a guy with a big nose. It’s about what happens when you fear rejection to such a degree that you basically choose loneliness and isolation. It’s not a comedy, it’s a cautionary tale. I reviewed for Ebert.

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Jack Palance: “I feel like I walked into the wrong room by mistake.”

Posted on February 24, 2022 by sheila

This incident should be much more well-known. I remember hearing about it when it happened (2004) and if you Google it, you find this full report – not sure what’s going on with that page, it was clearly uploaded to the Internet either long after the fact – the page is not connected to anything else, so I don’t know, it feels very early 2000s, but it’s good that we have it. The article appeared in the English-language supplement of Natsional’na Trybuna (National Tribune), the newspaper for the enormous Ukrainian population in New York. I’m re-printing it here word for word. This is not just about an actor making a stand – although it is that (I love that he WENT to the awards show. That’s the biggest flex. He didn’t just decline the invitation and issue a statement, he WENT). It’s a very important story and I thought it would be good to “store” it here as well. I’ve shared this before and a lot of people don’t know about it, so I thought it would be good to spread the word, especially today.

Declaring ‘I’m Ukrainian, not Russian’, Palance Walks Out of Russian Film Festival in Hollywood

(NT) – A week of “Russian Nights” in Los Angeles culminated with an awards ceremony on April 22 at the prestigious Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood. The gala event was held at the end of a weeklong “festival that celebrates Russian contributions to the world of art.” The program of cinema, theater and music visual arts was sponsored in part by the Russian Ministry of Culture and enjoyed the support of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Scheduled to receive “narodny artyst” awards (cleverly translated as “the Russian People’s Choice Award”) were two Oscar winning actors: Dustin Hoffman and Jack Palance – both of whom trace their roots to Ukraine.

In accepting his award, Dustin Hoffman noted that his grandparents came from “Kiev, Russia” and expressed gratitude to the “Russian people” for helping defeat Germany. He thanked them for saving his grandmother who otherwise “may have ended up as a bar of soap.”

Next in line for the Russian government’s highest artistic award was Jack Palance. Born Walter Palahniuk in Pennsylvania in 1918, Palance won the Academy Award in 1992 for his memorable portrayal of Curly in “City Slickers”. Palance, proud as a Kozak of his Ukrainian heritage, is chairman of the Hollywood Trident Foundation.

After being introduced, Palance said “I feel like I walked into the wrong room by mistake. I think that Russian film is interesting, but I have nothing to do with Russia or Russian film. My parents were born in Ukraine: I’m Ukrainian. I’m not Russian. So, excuse me, but I don’t belong here. It’s best if we leave.”

Palance and his entourage proceeded to get up and go. He was accompanied by four other guests that included his wife Elaine, and the Hollywood Trident Foundation’s president, Peter Borisow. Palance refused to accept the award, even in private, or to view “72 Meters”, the movie being screened as the festival finale.

Speaking from Los Angeles, Borisow commented on Hoffman’s statements: “I don’t think it’s necessarily Hoffman’s fault. I think it’s tragic that he doesn’t even know his own family history. His ignorance of the basic facts is shocking. That Hoffman lends himself, hopefully unwittingly, to denigration of Ukrainians (and thus of himself), as he did by endorsing a festival that featured the highly offensive and racist movie ’72 Meters’ is very disappointing.”

Borisow is referring to Vladmir Khotinenko’s 2003 film “Syemdesyat-dva metra.” A drama surrounding events on the submarine “Slavianka”, the film portrays Ukrainians as bumbling fools and repeatedly refers to Ukrainians with the racist pejorative ‘kh’ word. As part of the film’s plot development, the Ukrainian submarine’s Russian officers refuse allegiance to newly independent Ukraine, steal the ship and sail it to Russia.

“This is a continuation of a centuries old effort to invent a history and culture for Russia by hijacking first the Ukrainian church, then Ukrainian history and finally Ukrainian culture,” Borisow said. Borisow considered the festival to be part of a “coordinated, worldwide campaign to promote Russia and Russian culture and, in so doing, to make Ukraine seem part and parcel of Russia. “I’m certain that in Russia, Jack’s acceptance of the mislabeled award would have been sold as his accepting being a ‘National Artist’ of Russia,” according to Borisow. “Jack is very proud to be Ukrainian and will not let anyone hijack his name or persona,” he said. In total, twenty films were screened at the Pacific Design Center’s Silver Screen Theatre, including Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksander Dovzhenko’s “Aerograd” (1935). The festival program did not mention that Dovzhenko was Ukrainian, and instead described him as “the son of illiterate peasants” who “incorporates elements of peasant lore and pastoral tradition.”

“This latest incident is just another part of a long history of genocide that killed 10 million Ukrainians in 1933 and continues in more subtle form to this day – all of it still actively promoted and financed by Russia,” Borisow said. Putin knows there can be no Russian Empire without Ukraine, so he is pushing the assault from all angles: military, industrial, energy, economic, religious and cultural.

In addition to Russia’s Ministry of Culture, other sponsors of “Russian Nights” included East-West Foundation for Culture and Education, LA Weekly, Panorama Media, 7 Arts, Adelphia, Rodnik Vodka, Samuel Adams Beer, Movieline’s Hollywood Life, IN! Magazine and the National Bartenders School. The festival was organized by the Stas Namin Centre.

The festival’s website includes letters of greeting from actors Leonardo Dicaprio, Liv Tyler and producer-director Francis Ford Coppola. Previously held once in Germany in 2003, “Russian Nights” are scheduled to descend upon New York between October 23 and 30 later this year. (NT)

Posted in Actors | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Reunion with my STUFF

Posted on February 22, 2022 by sheila

I have lived in a state of flux for a year and a half now, starting in the fall of 2020. It has not been pleasant and it has been detrimental to my not-strong-anyway mental health, which requires stability. Stability. Lol.

Most of my stuff has been in storage since the fall of 2020. I have missed my beautiful bed. I have missed my couch. My dad’s reading chair. All of my framed pictures. All of the things I have acquired over the years to make my apartments little havens of creativity and mental calm. I’ve worked hard to do this. It’s hard for me to just settle down. But I love looking around and seeing all my things, things I’ve had for years, my framed Sam Shaw photograph of Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes, the framed print of Elvis kissing the woman (see my blog banner), my framed Hamilton poster, and etc., each with a memory attached to it.

And then there are the books. I packed up the majority of them, keeping just a handful, the ones I use most for research and writing. But my books aren’t there just to be used. They’re there because I love having a library. I may not be re-reading John Banville’s novels any time soon, but I love to have them AROUND. Just in CASE, yes, but also because … each book, again, has memories attached to it, meaning. Over the past couple of years, I’ve had to just grit my teeth and deal with the fact that I don’t have access to my books. Sometimes I’ll be like, “Dammit, I know there’s a quote from Billy Wilder that’s perfect for what I’m trying to convey, but that book is in a storage unit in the middle of a Connecticut forest and I can’t get to it.”

So. I finally am in a position to get my place in order. I had all the books in boxes, stacked up against practically every wall in this new apartment, creating an inherently temporary feel to everything in my life … which has been very difficult to deal with. I had to wait to put them away until I could get my shelves re-built. These bookshelves are your basic Ikea shelving – and if I were rich, I would get rid of them immediately and purchase better ones. I have my ideal bookcases in my head and Ikea shelves AIN’T IT. But I am not rich, and therefore … these are the shelves I have. But they too have tremendous meaning attached to them, because of the circumstances in which they were built. The Twitter thread I fired off about that experience has gone around the world five times over, and is still going strong. Seriously. Nothing I have written has traveled as far as that Twitter thread. So the shelves are filled with the love of my friends, who gathered together to help me while I was in the middle of a gigantic crack-up. It’s almost tangible, the feeling these shelves give off, because of that memory.

When I moved, not the last time but the time before that (two moves in one year) I had the bookshelves dismantled and I considered getting rid of all of it, but a cooler head prevailed. I kept all the “lumber” and it too has been sitting in that storage unit. I finally – finally – after months – got a guy to come in and build them again. And LOOK at this.

That’s only the half of it. There’s more, but I couldn’t fit it in when taking the picture, and there’s another WALL of books in the other room.

There was then an orgy of opening all the cardboard boxes and throwing the books up onto the shelves, willy-nilly, without any organizing principle (well, I organized my two shelves of Elvis books/DVDs. First things first). I just wanted all the books OUT of the boxes and UP THERE where they belonged. I will eventually have to organize everything – which will involve taking all the books OFF the shelves again, and I just cannot face it right now. In the meantime, I have to deal with the chaos of shelves like this:

The incongruities are very entertaining.

Baseball anthology next to Lehman Brothers collapse. Charlie Manson sitting in between Cary Grant and Jean Renoir is particularly hilarious. Maud Hart Lovelace’s Heaven to Betsy, a fave when I was a teenager, perches next to a book called Evil Genes, and I cannot stop laughing. Evil Genes??? (It’s a very good book though!) Plus, randomly, there are two books by friends in these pictures, one of whom was my senior prom date, because life is a very strange thing indeed.

This has been a reunion with my books. I sit on my couch and stare up at the walls and feel relaxed in a way I haven’t in almost three years. I don’t just like to have bookshelves, I like to have bookshelves be the actual wall. It’s also important to follow my dad’s advice, given to me long ago: “Get bookshelves that go to the ceiling. Otherwise, you have all that wasted space at the top.”

The best part is: my library fits, with room to spare. I do periodic purges, so the number of books in general remains about the same.

And now … if I need to use a Billy Wilder quote, from some interview he gave in 1971, I can find it. Easily.

There’s another up-side to finally getting my place in order.

I’m feeling ready for a new cat. No one can replace Hope. (I was cooking chicken the other day, standing at the stove, and I literally heard her footsteps coming down the hall. She would always follow me into the kitchen, particularly when MEAT was involved. Hope never lived here. There are no associations with Hope in this apartment. But she’s still in my heart and soul. I haven’t heard her footsteps before, though!) Hope’s death was just part of the total fucking shitshow that was 2020 … and not only was I not ready for another cat, I also just wasn’t in a position to have a pet. I feel like I am now. I will go the “rescue” route again, because one of the pleasures of getting to know Hope was watching her blossom after her abusive beginnings. She had a happy safe life with me and I loved being a part of that. It’s still a little tender because Hope was so much a part of my life, and she was such a specific loving little creature, with a huge personality, and we were so close it was insane. Especially since I mostly work from home. Like, I was always home. We were always together.

So. Nothing can replace her. But I think I’m ready to accept another cat into my world, especially since my place now feels more like an actual place, as opposed to an extension of my storage unit.

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