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| 1668046997
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| 1668046997
| 4.02
| 1,913
| Feb 13, 2024
| Feb 13, 2024
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really liked it
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Published in 2024, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is a terrific filmmaking memoir by writer/producer/director Ed Zwick, who climbed from a story edi
Published in 2024, Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions is a terrific filmmaking memoir by writer/producer/director Ed Zwick, who climbed from a story editor and writer on the TV series Family in the 1970s to co-creating, writing, and directing (with his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz) thirtysomething in the '80s to directing classic movies, including Glory, Legends of the Fall, and The Last Samurai. My knowledge of Zwick's work began with Special Bulletin, a 1983 TV movie about a reporter and cameraman taken hostage by eco-terrorists in the Port of Charleston who threaten to detonate what they claim is a nuclear device unless their disarmament demands are met. It's slicker and more terrifying than The Day After. It was informative to read about Zwick's arrival in LA (from Chicago) and inconspicuous start in show business, as well as his account of projects that were nearly made, like a 1994 version of Shakespeare In Love that would've starred Julia Roberts with Zwick directing (he stepped aside to produce and won an Academy Award for Best Picture). Zwick has great stories to tell and in a fashion that reminded me of his writing for television and film, for which the word "craftsmanlike" could apply, stays out of his way and gets to his stories, and to the characters in those stories. These include melting down at Woody Allen's New Year's Eve party after breaking up with the girlfriend we was in attendance with, Zwick's instruction by acting coach Nina Foch and mentorship by director Sydney Pollack. Zwick uses this book as an opportunity to mentor writers or directors coming after him. He admits to pining for relationships with the movie stars he's cultivated great working relationships with, only to never see or speak to them after the show wraps. Zwick praises first assistant directors and attempts to give a job few people can really define their due. He is candid about how difficult it was working with Matthew Broderick (and his mother) and Julia Roberts, litigating Harvey Weinstein into acceptable professional and human behavior, and how producing eighty hours of television gave him the tools to make movies. Between chapters, Zwick includes little lists of advice for writers and directors, or shares show business anecdotes in which the names have been removed. NINE LESSONS FROM NINA The oracle speaks 1. A HELPING HAND If an actor is nervous, tell him his power emanates from the ground, rising from the earth into the sky like lightning. If he's scared, insist "This is going to be fun." Appeal to the child in the actor, who then appeals to the child in himself. 2. BE HERE NOW Everything is happening for the first time. There's never time in real life to think. Throw in a curve ball before a take now and then. Create an unforeseen obstacle. Watch life happen. If something is easy, it's usually wrong. 3. THE DIALECTIC Every scene has two truths that collide and change each other. Pretty much every scene should go from dark to light, or light to dark. Try to identify the moment in a scene that a dark bird flies in and flies out. Everything else is just slight of hand. 4. THE GLASS IS HALF FULL When we say a performance is "generous" it means the actor is constantly giving the audience little gifts. Unexpected humor, sudden rage, mysterious secrets, unflagging intensity. That's the actor you want to cast. 5. THE LUCKY ONES The best actors can be reading items from a dinner menu and leave you breathless as you wait to hear the entrées. Some people simply appear to have more vivid inner lives than others even wen they don't. The life in their eyes never seems to dim, and the camera wants to know why. We call this Being Kissed by the Angel. 6. VINTAGE NINA, Part I As they grow older, actors tend to become less than men and actresses become more than women. She hastened to add, "They used to tell me I didn't have enough cleavage. Now I do but it's on my face." 7. VINTAGE NINA, Part II Cut scenes whenever you can. There are only two things that are too short: life and penises. Everything else is too long. 8. VINTAGE NINA, Part III One evening, after a cocktail or two, Nina whispered to me. "If you've ever listened to actors talk in private, you won't let them improvise." 9. DEFAULT MODE If the script and the staging and the set and the costumes are right, it should feel like cheating. The key to acting is to stop acting. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Apr 06, 2024
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Apr 07, 2024
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Mar 13, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0525508848
| 9780525508847
| B07PZ4H1N2
| 3.85
| 95,642
| Oct 15, 2019
| Oct 15, 2019
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really liked it
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Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life was a stocking stuffer I was happy to treat myself to. Published in 2
Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets, and Advice for Living Your Best Life was a stocking stuffer I was happy to treat myself to. Published in 2019, Ali Wong captures the verve of her stage act in print, the hook being it's a family history and wisdom for her daughters, Mari, born in 2015, and Nikki, in 2017. There's no avoiding that this is another stand-up comedian fulfilling the terms of a book deal, but I find satisfaction in studying how a performer's childhood, love life, and writing process varies from case to case, and Wong is especially candid. Warning: There are parts raunchier than her Netflix specials. I laughed often. -- Well, let's just get right to it: I dated a series of men who had issues getting it up. It felt like a curse. Five guys in a row lost their boners in the middle of getting busy. Part of me blamed Raynaud's disease, a condition that was passed on to me by my father. I have extremely poor circulation to my hands and feet, to the point where, in the cold, they will turn blue and feel like pain icicles. So, especially in the New York fall or wintertime, my bare hands, much like the hands of Rogue from the X-Men, could suck the life out of a man's erect penis. -- I made it to thirty-seven weeks and they tried to induce me. I had contractions for twenty-four hours but my cervix was still only dilated half a centimeter. It hurt like hell because I was trying to push a cantaloupe out of a hole the size of an apple stem. The doctor offered to put some medical balloon up my pussy to open up the cervix more, which to me sounded like some sort of interrogation torture tactic. Clowns have always scared me and while I've slept with two homeless people, I really didn't want to get fucked by a balloon. Despite the nurse's discouragement, I decided to go straight to the C-section. It was the first lesson in having kids: You cannot control anything. -- Stand-up is not supposed to be warm and fuzzy or welcoming. If it was, everyone would do it. Some people think that stand-ups are all dysfunctional or have mental health problems or bad families. But I think all you need to be a good stand-up is to have a unique point of view, be funny, and enjoy bombing in front of strangers. You really do have to learn to like bombing a lot. Even now, when the audience is too good, sometimes I think, I didn't deserve that. You'll know you're a stand-up when, after a spectacular bomb, you don't feel like you want to quit, but instead the opposite: You want to go up again. -- As a female comic, it was always hard to not date a stand-up comedian. Mostly because when I dated men outside of stand-up comedy, their attempts at funny made me cringe. One guy pointed to an escalator that was out of order and said to me, "Escalators that are out of order are basically temporary stairs." I said to him, "That's a Mitch Hedberg joke." He said to me, "Oh, I just came up with that thought on my own by myself." Shut up, you fucking liar. -- Pretty much the worst thing about being a woman in stand-up is that you are always forced to socialize with male stand-up comics' girlfriends. You become a babysitter for these poor women. At a club once, this comic dumped his life-sized Barbie doll of a girlfriend next to me, like, Hey, can you watch this? To be fair, she was perfectly nice and was showing me all this fancy stuff on her body that her boyfriend had bought her. "I mean, just look at this diamond. It's a honey diamond, which I think is a very chic alternative to a basic diamond. Honey because it's the color of honey!" she exclaimed as she searched for light to rotate her wrist in, to maximize the sparkle on her finger. "Look at my Casio digital watch," I replied as I offered my wrist to her hands. "It cost me $19.99, and it displays the time AND the date!" She didn't get the sarcasm and instead pretended to just be super impressed. "Oh my God! That's really umm ... useful and such a neat retro watch! You're like one of those kids riding a bike in E.T.!" -- Cuisine: Vietnamese Good Signs: Opens at seven A.M.; closes at eight P.M. The back of the menu features advertisements for local dentists, lawyers, and real estate agents. All the employees wear open-toed shoes. There's a Buddha by the cash register. There are red fake candles with incense burning. Waiters have long fingernails that may touch your food and that's okay. Cash only. The name has a number in it (yes, I know this is already in Baby Cobra but it's important, dammit!). Bad Signs: Customers are eating pho with a fork. The waiters are white. They take American Express. They don't serve tripe or tendon. They serve chicken breast. The name is some unfunny punny bullshit like "Pho Gettaboutit" or "What the Pho." -- The movie High Fidelity came out when I was a junior in high school. John Cusack's character goes through five different relationships. The statistics teacher asked us how we felt about it. Everyone except me said they found it depressing. They all thought they were going to marry their high school sweethearts (so naïve!). Older people know that you have to go through multiple relationships to find the right one. You will probably go through three to five serious relationships in your life before finding your person, if you're even lucky enough. Older people found the movie relatable and uplifting because even though John Cusack's character doesn't end up getting married, he does end up with a woman where he can comfortable and himself. But I didn't have to see High Fidelity to know this was true. I had witnessed it all through my siblings. -- Have your bachelorette party at Disneyland. After I had my miscarriage, my best friend came to L.A. I wanted to feel like my old self and be able to make light of the situation so we got extremely high. We each ate half of a chocolate cannabis heart. Later, a co-worker told me I should have eaten an eighth of the heart. Soaring over California was magical, because I was so high. And It's a Small World made me feel like the world really was small, after all (I was high as shit). Space Mountain made me feel like I was in space (I don't think I've ever been that high). But then Indiana Jones was awful. That big ball threatening to crush me and that huge snake hissing in my face felt like I was about to die in the worst way possible. Do not get high and then go on Indiana Jones. Consider this your one and only warning. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Dec 15, 2022
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Dec 18, 2022
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Dec 05, 2022
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ebook
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| 0063112582
| 9780063112582
| 0063112582
| 4.06
| 11,284
| Oct 2022
| Oct 25, 2022
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it was amazing
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Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award
Cinema Speculation is everything I hoped it might be and more. Published in 2022, this book of film history and criticism is by two-time Academy Award winning screenwriter Quentin Tarantino, who's directed nine feature films from his screenplays--Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill among them--with no bad ones. The "worst" feature in Tarantino's filmography--my vote there is for Django Unchained--is better than the very best some other filmmakers can boast of theirs, and as this book demonstrates, his ideas for movies he could make but would prefer just to speculate about are more compelling than a lot of what gets produced. Tarantino bookends with a memoir, sketching for the reader what "Little Q" was up to in Los Angeles of the 1970s, not only what movies he was watching as a boy, but where he was watching them, who he was with, and how those adults impacted his development. The core of the book are enthusiastic essays on more than a dozen films he bought tickets for in this formative period, from 1972 to 1981, with many footnotes and asides along the way, as well as sourcing from directors he's talked to, like Peter Bogdanovich, Walter Hill and "Big" John Milius. -- Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren't, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren't letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, "Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie's not going to hurt you." Right fucking on, Connie! After being exposed to all these images, did any of them disturb me? Of course, some did! But that didn't mean I didn't like the movie. When they removed the naked dead girl out of the hole in Dirty Harry, it was totally disturbing. But I understood it. Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. But just listing grotesque moments--out of context of the movies they were in--isn't entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother's point of view--that she later explained to me--was always a question of context. In those films, I could handle the imagery, because I understood the story. -- Now, I knew of Super Fly because she already owned the smash hit soundtrack album, and it was played constantly in the apartment. The movie was also advertised heavily on Soul Train. And in our apartment, come Saturday, we never missed Soul Train. By this point I was living with my mother in a pretty hip apartment building that she shared with two cocktail waitresses that were her best friends at the time, Jackie (black) and Lillian (Mexican). All three were young, hip, good-looking women in the funky seventies, with a penchant for dating athletes. Three sexy women (at the time my mother looked like a cross between Cher and Barbara Steele), one white, one black, one Mexican, sharing an apartment with the white one's ten-year-old son: we were practically a sitcom. -- The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve's success as a movie star can't be overemphasized. It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve. Steve's agent, Stan Kamen, would read ten scripts that were being offered, then narrow that down to five and send those off to Neile. She'd read those five scripts, write a synopsis on the material, narrow it down to the two she liked best, and then tell Steve the stories and explain her reasons why she liked them for him. Which would usually end up in him reading the one Neile liked the most. Now of course the director was important, how much they were paying him, the location they were shooting the film at--all those things were important. But so was Neile weighing in. Naturally, directors who'd worked with Steve before--that he liked--got preferential treatment. But if Neile didn't like the script, it was an uphill battle. And it was thanks to Neile's good taste and her keen understanding of her husband's ability and his iconic persona that she steered her husband, starting with The Cincinnati Kid, into the biggest winning streak of the second half of the sixties (a Neile McQueen is what Elvis needed). -- I've always had an alternative reading of the Body Snatchers movies (Siegel's, Kaufman's, and Ferrara's). Each movie presents the Pod People in a sinister light. Yet really, almost nothing they do on screen bears out this sinister interpretation. If you're one who believes that your soul is what makes you you, then I suppose the Pod People are murdering the Earthlings they duplicate and replace. However, if you're more of the mind that it is your intellect and your consciousness that make you who you are, then the Pod People transformation is closer to a rebirth than a murder. You're reborn as straight intellect, with a complete possession of your past and your abilities, but unburdened by messy human emotions. You also possess a complete fidelity to your fellow beings and a total commitment to the survival of your species. Are you inhuman? Of course, they're vegetables. But the movies try to present their lack of humanity (they don't have a sense of humor, they're unmoved when a dog is hit by a car) as evidence of some deep-seated sinisterness. That's a rather species-specific point of view. As human beings it may be our emotions that make us human, but it's a stretch to say it's what makes us great. Along with those positive emotions--love, joy, happiness, amusement--come negative emotions--hate, selfishness, racism, depression, violence, and rage. -- I saw Alligator three times that year (one of those times was on a triple feature with Rolling Thunder and a Canadian trucker flick called High-Ballin' with Peter Fonda and Jerry Reed), and I agreed wholeheartedly with Kevin Thomas about the charm of Forster and Riker. So much so, when I did my top ten movies at the end of the year, and wrote my little awards (best actress, best actor, best director) it was Robert Forster who was my choice for best male performance of that year (Robert DeNiro for Raging Bull was number two). Fifteen years later, I was writing my adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch (which I retitled Jackie Brown), and I had to consider who was to play the novel's likable lead male character, bail bondsman Max Cherry. I had a few choices. Gene Hackman was an obvious choice, as was Paul Newman. I also considered John Saxon. But there was something about Forster in Alligator that really stuck with me. I watched the movie again and felt that the character from Alligator could be Max Cherry, just fifteen years earlier. So I started writing the script as if he was, right down to the discussion with Jackie about his thinning hair. Would I have done that without Kevin Thomas highlighting Forster so positively in his review? No. In the end, what made Kevin Thomas so unique in the world of seventies and eighties film criticism, he seemed liked one of the only few practitioners who truly enjoyed their job, and consequently, their life. I loved reading him growing up and practically considered him a friend. In 1994 I won an award for Pulp Fiction from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. When I stepped up to the podium and looked out before the audience of L.A. critics, my first remarks to the room were: "Gee, thanks, now I finally know what Kevin Thomas looks like." -- I remember, before seeing Stallone's film, being at some neighborhood kid's house and the TV spot for Rocky came on. The kid wondered out loud, "What's that?" And his mother glanced at the TV screen and said dismissively, "Oh, just another movie about some guy and his problems." Today it's very easy to romanticize that cynical seventies era--especially since it's long gone--seemingly never to return. But from 1970 to at least 1977, every other movie that came out did seem like it was about "some guy and his problems." Part of the elation tied to the audience's response to the climactic fight in Rocky was after five years of seventies cinema, we didn't really expect things to work out for Balboa. And I don't even mean we didn't expect him to win the heavyweight championship of the world. He was never going to fucking win! We just hoped he didn't look like a fucking joke. That's why the ending was so surprisingly moving and cathartic. That's why when he knocked Apollo Creed flat on his back we hit the roof. Because from that point on, no matter whatever else happened, Rocky proved he wasn't a joke. But by the time you get to the last round--and Rocky has Apollo Creed on the ropes--hitting him with a left and a right and a left and a right and the crowd in the boxing arena was chanting: "Roc-ky ... Roc-ky ..." Oh my fucking god! There had simply never been anything like it. -- So who exactly was this Floyd character I was referring to earlier? His name was Floyd Ray Wilson and he was a black guy of about thirty-seven, who for about a year and a half in the late seventies lived in my house. He used to date my mom's best friend Jackie and he hung around in their circle. Years earlier, from time to time, he would visit the apartment my mom and I shared with her roommates Jackie and Lillian. And every time he came by it was exciting, because I thought Floyd was really cool and I could talk movies with him. And since he was a hip guy who saw a lot of shit, he could keep up (at least compared to the adults I knew). He especially knew all the action movies and Blaxploitation films. I remember when Jackie introduced us (I was ten), she said, "Quentin, Floyd's who you should talk to about movies. He knows as much as you." So I--a ten-year-old white boy--started testing this grown-ass black man on his knowledge of black movies. "Do you know who Brenda Sykes is?" I tested. "Of course I do," he said. I told him, "I think she's the prettiest black actress in movies." "You damn right she is," he answered. "What's your favorite Jim Kelly movie?" Again a test. If he answered Enter the Dragon, he's just like everybody else. "Three the Hard Way, obviously," he answered correctly. Lillian just stared at the two of us and said to the room, "I don't know who any of these people are." So from that moment on, whenever Floyd visited the apartment, it was practically like a holiday for me. Because finally, I was going to be able to talk to somebody about movies who knew what the fuck I was talking about. So when Floyd would come over I'd attach myself to him like a tick. But also during this time, I realized the hard way that Floyd was a flakey guy who couldn't be counted on. On at least two occasions when Floyd was visiting, he played the big man and told me he'd come over next Saturday to take me to the movies. In spite of its fantastic title, Tarantino devotes just one chapter to "cinema speculation,” imagining Brian DePalma—one of his favorite directors from this era or any other—directing Taxi Driver instead of Martin Scorsese. (Tarantino envisions a political thriller in DePalma's hands, with Jeff Bridges playing Travis Bickle instead of Robert DeNiro, Amy Irving or DePalma's future wife Nancy Allen playing Betsy with more screen time, and a bravura assassination attempt edited like the prom massacre in DePalma's Carrie). Diagnosing movies like The Getaway, Deliverance and Rolling Thunder, he does inevitably tease us with what a Tarantino remake of those guy classics might look like. It's the autobiographical sections of Cinema Speculation that struck a chord with me. By no means comprehensive--his biological parents are sketched more like older siblings than parents and with no explanation, Tarantino casually mentions his mother sending him to live with his "alcoholic hillbilly" grandparents in Tennessee--but I recognized the devotion to watching, cataloging, writing about and even making scrapbooks on movies as a child, as well as his education working at a video store (Tarantino refers to Video Archives the way college grads do their alma maters). Cinema Speculation also did something that's almost unheard of when I finish a book. When I was done, I sat down and wrote a film essay of my own, speculating how director John Carpenter's career might've turned out if The Thing, today regarded as a masterpiece, was a commercial or even critical success in 1982. While I wouldn't put Tarantino's book on the shelf right next to On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King (Tarantino doesn't instruct anyone how to write or direct a good movie, per se) they are related in that I came away with a profound appreciation for the craft and my own potential. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 19, 2023
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Nov 26, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1948226227
| 9781948226226
| 1948226227
| 3.97
| 1,678
| Aug 06, 2019
| Aug 06, 2019
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really liked it
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Readers wondering where the John Steinbecks of today are should look no further than Susan Straight. Author of nine novels and much short fiction, Str
Readers wondering where the John Steinbecks of today are should look no further than Susan Straight. Author of nine novels and much short fiction, Straight was raised in Riverside, where she co-founded an MFA program for creative writing at the University of California Riverside and is a Distinguished Professor of Creating Writing. Published in 2019, In the Country of Women is her first work of non-fiction. Her memoir is abundant with beautiful writing and powerful stories, many of them addressed to her three daughters and telling of her family history and their father's African-American family history. -- To my daughters: They never tell us about the odysseys of women. They never say about a woman: "Her passage was worthy of Homer ... her voyage a mythic quest for new lands." Women don't get the Heroine's Journey. Men are accorded the road and the sea and the asphalt. Men get The Iliad and The Odyssey. They get Joseph Campbell. They get The Thousand Faces of the Hero. They get "the epic novel," "the great American story," and Ken Burns documentaries. But our women fought harder than men--they fought men! Men who claimed to love them, to protect them, to help them--men who trapped and tried to kill them. They fought for sons and daughters, they had the battalions of their sisters and mothers and aunts. Some bad-ass aunts. The women used their cunning and their bullets, the power of their ancestors and of the other women in the wagon or the truck with them. They survived passages that would have made a lot of men quit. Sometimes the men did quit. Sometimes the women quit the men--to stay alive. -- Here in the land of tumbleweeds so immense and fiercely mobile, a windstorm in November sent so many skeletal balls of thorn blowing across the fields that the small house where my mother and I lived was buried in brown. It was a valley of granite boulders and turkey ranches. Tumbleweeds six and eight feet across packed in drifts around the windows, which were coated with dust from the famous Santa Ana winds. "It was like a snowstorm," my mother told me years later. "I couldn't even open the door." -- That we could control death and violence by writing about it was transforming. I had seen drug deals, wildfires, a man who held a woman so tightly by her hair that her temple puckered. Sometimes I was terrified. There was the man waiting on the narrow dirt path on the way to school, who opened his coat, a clichéd pervert (who the hell wears an overcoat when it's 100 degrees?), but I'd read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn four times by then, and Francie's mother shoots the pervert (he's called the pervert) in the groin, so I just glanced at him (pale and gross and oddly just like the novel) and ran into the weeds, wishing I had Francie's mother or her gun. The summer of 1970, the bookmobile arrived in far-flung neighborhoods like mine. No one wanted to accompany me, and I was thrilled. I walked alone through fields of wild oats, past the pepper trees under which older kids smoke marijuana and drank Coors and listened to Grand Funk Railroad and James Brown on transistor radios, across the railroad tracks, down into the steep arroyo where a green trickle of water was my creek, and up into the grocery store parking lot where for two hours inside the air-conditioned hum of a converted buis, I read about death. I found S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, with desperate, joking, hardworking boys as close to my own neighborhood as anything I'd ever read, and then, shaken, walked back home as the branches of the pepper trees shivered with electric guitars and laughter. Tulsa, I whispered. -- Fine as wine and just my kind. Bring your fine self over here. So fine you like to blind me when I saw you. This is what she heard, again and again. Daisy's first husband is listed in one census document as Calvin Morris, but no one left here has ever said they actually saw him. Daisy's cousin Jesse Wall, who'd also been born in Sunflower County and brought to California, told me back in 2014, when he was eighty, "Oh, Daisy was fine. Back in Arkansas, that man told her over and over, 'You're so fine, some fool's gonna take you away from me, and I can't have that, so I might just have to kill you first.' He had the gun on the table by the bed, and he'd sit there with it in his hand at night. And Daisy had the baby, Mary Louise. She had to wait until one night when when he left and she could get away. She took the baby and went to Oklahoma to find Sweet Annie." That was Daisy's aunt, Sweet Annie Tillman, legendary in her own right. -- I went to Planned Parenthood the week I turned sixteen because I was terrified almost every day of my life. I went to Planned Parenthood because I was poor and prey, and girls had told me where the building was because they, too, were afraid of the same thing. We were certain we'd be raped at some point, and we didn't want to have babies because of that. We didn't want to have to marry our rapists. -- My husband had become a mystery to me. He wanted more freedom to spend with his brothers and friends; he'd bought the Kawasaki, and a Ford Ranchero, which seemed another message as the back seat clearly couldn't hold three girls, the baby in a car seat. His mother was gone. She could not chase him home from the couch on Michael Street. We had gotten married too young, he said; he wanted to learn to be independent, he said. Every time I heard that word, I imagined Herbie, the elf who wanted to be a dentist, in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I couldn't help it. I heard the word in four syllables--in-de-pen-dent--in Herbie's nasal pronunciation, and had to keep myself from laughing. "You gonna be a dentist?" I'd say, and Dwayne would shake his head. In addition to the beauty of her prose, there are two other aspects of Susan Straight's writing that I draw inspiration from and both are present in In the Country of Women. As in John Steinbeck, Straight's characters desire, come together, get drunk, steal cars, throw punches, break up and struggle against authority (in no particular order). They're not concerned with being "nice." They're concerned with surviving in America. The other aspect that Straight demonstrates is that you don't have to go on expensive vacations to be a writer. You can bloom where you're planted, even if it's just above the poverty line in Riverside, and contribute to American literature. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 16, 2022
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May 28, 2022
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Apr 23, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 125024031X
| 9781250240316
| B0927D84L9
| 3.76
| 17,096
| Mar 15, 2022
| Mar 15, 2022
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it was ok
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My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women i
My Year of (Mostly) Mysterious Women continues with series fiction featuring women detectives. I’m avoiding police procedurals and standalone “women in peril'' thrillers to focus on ladies who are amateur sleuths. Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation is my introduction to writer Erika Krouse and her document of being hired by a Colorado law firm as a private investigator. This memoir published in 2022 was a contrast between insights into the work of a PI and shockingly, developments or descriptions which are not conveyed in a way to be believable. I had to skim to finish this, always a bad sign. On paper, Krouse's background is one I should've found compelling. After earning her MA from the University of Colorado in 1996, her short story collection Come Up and See Me Sometime was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2001. By her account, temp jobs and subsisting at near poverty followed until Krouse encountered an attorney at a bookstore. Hearing himself share confidential matters with her (Krouse claims that she has a face which compels perfect strangers to confess their secrets), the attorney, who Krouse refers to as "Grayson," hires her to work part-time for his firm as a private investigator. With zero training and little guidance, Krouse considers quitting until Grayson asks her to interview his client "Simone Baker." In December 2001 while a student at Krouse's alma mater, Simone was hosting a girls-only party which twenty college football players and recruits crashed. Krouse later learns the players found out about the party from a female coed assigned to schedule activities for the recruits and who herself had been raped by a football player. Drunk, Simone was followed into a bedroom by between five and eight men, several of which raped her too. Grayson believes he can sue the university under Title IX rules for failing to protect the civil rights of its students. Excitement displaced my nervousness. I was going to work on a civil rights case. Me! I wrote down everything Grayson said: pervasive harassment, school's knowledge, deliberate indifference. Inequality. The phrase "deliberate indifference" ricocheted around my mind. Could indifference to crime be a crime? I had never imagined such a thing. Grayson said, "I want you to start discreetly gathering evidence. If we file, it'll be much harder once the university mounts their four-dog defense. So keep it quiet." "What's a four-dog defense?" Grayson recited, "One, that's not my dog. Two, if it was my dog, he didn't bite you. Three, if my dog bit you, it didn't hurt you. And four, if my dog bit you and hurt you, you provoked him." I thought for a second. "So they'll argue they're not responsible for the football players. But if they are, the players didn't rape your client. If they did rape her, it didn't hurt her. And if it did hurt her, she asked for it. Is that it?" Grayson said, "You understand this pretty well." Of course. I understood perfectly. I had to turn down this job. Krouse reveals to the reader that she too is a survivor of sexual assault. Her abuser--who she refers to as "X" and is possibly a father or stepfather--occurred between the ages of 4 and 6. Krouse has cut "X" out of her life but her mother, who is still with him, refuses to acknowledge or in any way help Krouse bring closure to what happened. This is possibly the worst mother ever depicted in print. Krouse even mentions that in the James Bond movies, the henchmen are more dangerous than the villains because they act out of love as opposed to greed. The mother is so deranged and the author so insistent on reconciliation with this person--to the point she has a nervous breakdown during her honeymoon and remains despondent for several years--that it overwhelms the story of the victims she's working with and the system they're trying to change. This is a landmark federal case about football, campus rape and coverup with dozens of victims, but the author--possibly using the same magic she employs to divine confessions--wants the reader to believe that she's the focus of the case. Erika Krouse writes about herself as if generating a character for a roleplaying game. Her ability to conjure secrets from anyone who gazes on her is the type of charisma normally reserved for wizards. Her knack for reconstructing conversations from memory is impressive, yet this power apparently evaded her when it came to earning a living wage. She chronicles her marital arts training, sessions which consist of bones broken and body parts sprained by male sparring partners whose behavior suggests diabolical sexism and sadism. I kept reading because the detail about PI work seemed real. I did have one small advantage: the sentence "I'm a private investigator." Those were words nobody had heard before in real life. I used them whenever I could. They made people feel important, thrown into some larger arena, like a character in a detective novel or noir movie. They agreed to meet with me to make the story real, with themselves at the center of it. They wanted to be the woman in the red dress and big hat, or the man at the bar on his fifth whiskey, paid for by me. A good memoir should leave no doubt that what being portrayed did actually happen. Several of the statements accredited to coaches or players are so brazen, so outrageous, so tone deaf that they stretch credibility even for the '00s. In the middle of all this, Krouse begins dating a marital arts PT who has the patience of a Buddhist monk. Based on the self-loathing the author uses to describe herself, it's baffling why this man stays with her (dating a private investigator is definitely not a reason). Much of the book seemed unbelievable to me, and for what needed to be a chronicle of campus sexual assault, that's bad. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 23, 2022
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Apr 13, 2022
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Mar 18, 2022
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525576258
| 9780525576259
| 0525576258
| 4.12
| 2,755
| Aug 18, 2020
| Aug 18, 2020
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it was amazing
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of m
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of my research, I wanted to read about a contemporary woman in the male-dominated field of astronomy. A compelling story would have to come from that. The Smallest Lights in the Universe: A Memoir is by Sara Seager, exoplanet hunter and MIT professor who among her professional honors has been profiled by the New York Times with the headline "The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth." I was hesitant because the book (published in 2020) deals with grief and Dr. Seager's recovery following the death of her husband in 2011. I wanted to read about space exploration, not sadness or support groups. I'm so glad I did. This memoir one of the best books I've read in the year of women. Not only did Dr. Seager offer an incredible amount of detail about what an astronomer knows and what she experiences, but she's a fantastic writer, weaving the fascinating story of her professional life with the surprisingly intimate story of her love life and how she's survived in both. -- I can trace my love, too. Why stars instead of horses, or boys, or hockey? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's because the stars are the antithesis of darkness, of abusive stepfathers and imperiled little sisters. Stars are light. Stars are possibility. They are the places where science and magic meet, windows to worlds greater than my own. Stars gave me the hope that I might one day find the right answers. But there's more to my love than that. When I think of the stars I feel an almost physical pull. I don't just want to look at them. I want to know them, every last one of them, a star for every grain of sand on Earth. I want to bask in the hundreds of millions of suns that shine in the thousands of billions of skies in our galaxy alone. Stars represent more than possibility to me; they are probability. On Earth the odds could seem stacked against me--but where you are changes everything. Each star was, and still is, another chance for me to find myself somewhere else. Somewhere new. -- Mike called me again and again after our trip, trying to convince me to go on another adventure with him. He probably called me twice a week for the better part of a month. I rejected him exactly as often. I thought I understood what he saw in me--I really was a pretty good skier--and maybe a little of what he saw in us. We had found plenty to talk about on our long car ride, and we both loved the outdoors. That was it, really. Did that warrant our spending more time together? The truth was, the highest register on the human-companionship spectrum at the time was Tolerate, and I didn’t bring new people into my life unless they gave me a really good reason. -- I would be studying something a large percentage of the community thought didn’t exist or didn’t care to know about, and doing so in a way that made the impossible seem even less likely--like trying to prove that Bigfoot exists not by finding him or even his footprints, but by seeing his breath. How could we see the thin envelope of alien atmospheres when we couldn’t even find the world themselves? I was at a conference when a student from another school approached me in a whisper, asking if I wanted to talk to his adviser. He could explain to me why the Swiss signal couldn't possibly be a planet. A professor from Harvard, my own school, radiated a similar skepticism. We would never be able to detect many exoplanets, let alone their atmospheres. I remember feeling as though people were trying to rescue me from a cult. -- All the while, Mike and I continued our simple shared existence. I would go to school and get lost in space and code. I would come home to boats and piles of paper. Mike grounded my life, long stretches of brain peace. We never raised our voices at each other; I think back on that time and remember the quiet. We spent our evenings and summers in the near-silence of our canoe, making several more long trips north, and at home we lived together the way we paddled: It wasn’t always easy, because in some ways we remained two people who were built to be alone, but we worked to find a natural rhythm. We spent weeks at our respective work and weekends at our shared kind of play. We hiked and cross-country skied and paddled our way across stretches of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont. There was still something almost accidental about our connection, and the increasing seriousness of it all sometimes daunted us both. But our pauses never became breaks. Within a year, we had really started to set up camp. -- “So, Sara, what do you do?” “I teach at MIT.” “What do you teach?” “Planetary physics.” “Wow. Um … what?” “I’m looking for planets outside our solar system. Other stars presumably have planets. I’m looking for them.” “Why?” “Well, I’d like to find other life in the universe.” “You mean aliens? You’re looking for aliens?” “Scientists don’t call them aliens. Other life.” “Right. So … Aliens?" -- The fear at every school, palpable in the room, was that researching exoplanets was an intellectual dead end. Even among some astrophysicists, there can be such a thing as too much stargazing. A few dismissed finding exoplanets as "stamp collecting," an endless, meaningless search for new lights just so that we might name them. I couldn't convince the cynics otherwise. Despite the growing number of known exoplanets--by then about 150--people told me that I would never be able to achieve what I said I would. We would never see enough planets in transit to reach meaningful conclusions about them. The challenges would always be too great. My breakthroughs were mirages; my discoveries were flukes. -- Near the one-year anniversary of Mike’s death, Melissa came over to my house. She led me into the kitchen, made sure we were alone, and told me that I had to pretend, at least, to be interested in men again. Until I started dating, until I looked at a man with the intention of putting my mouth on his, my grieving would remain incomplete. I would always be looking behind me, taking stock of what was missing. I needed to see what else was out there. I knew what was out there. Thousands of billions of planets, orbiting hundreds of billions of stars. What enthralled me about The Smallest Lights in the Universe is how Seager wove her professional and love lives into one compelling story. What surprised me is how strong a writer she is. She communicates astronomy very well and with a certain wit attached. She compares the best pictures of distant objects to the earliest video games: pixels in different shades of white. Contrary to what I thought, astronomers don't gaze through equipment and see objects in deep space. Their targets are too far away for anything we've invented yet to "see." The workarounds are as much art as science. Much like this great book. Sara Seager was born in 1971 in Toronto, Canada. Her father was a family doctor who went on to pioneer hair transplants for men. Her mother was a writer and poet. They divorced when Seager was young and she grew up avoiding the temper of her emotionally abusive stepfather. Diagnosed as an adult as being on the autism spectrum, Seager was socially withdrawn but gifted academically. She earned her BSc degree in Mathematics and Physics from the University of Toronto in 1994 and her PhD in astronomy from Harvard University in 1999. Her research is focused on the discovery and analysis of exoplanets. Her husband and father of her two sons was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and eighteen months later, in 2011, died. With the help of a group she referred to as The Widows of Concord, Seager recovered and ultimately met an amateur astronomer at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada's annual general assembly. They married in 2015. Dr. Seager is Professor of Planetary Science, Professor of Physics, and Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2012, Time magazine named her one of the 25 most influential people in space (below is the photo they shot for the issue). [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey -- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone -- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling -- The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily Levesque ...more |
Notes are private!
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Sep 02, 2021
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Sep 02, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1492681083
| B088P55BM2
| 4.14
| 1,279
| Aug 04, 2020
| Aug 04, 2020
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it was amazing
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of m
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--has taken a summer break while I start work on a new novel. As part of my research, I wanted to know from a woman what an astrophysicist does, why she wanted to go into this field and what experiences she's had there. A compelling story would have to come from that, a woman in a male-dominated scientific field. On this basis, The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque surpassed all my expectations. Published in 2020, I finished this memoir with close to 10,000 words of notes, i.e. material. Here's a sample: -- The love of astronomy stuck in a way that my love of braces didn't. I was an early and voracious reader, and a few years after Haley's Comet, I was learning about star clusters and black holes and the speed of light thanks to Geoffrey T. Williams' Planetron books, which chronicle the adventures of a little boy with a toy that transforms into a magical spaceship and sweeps him off to explore the heavens. I have a strong memory of being five, reading about how fast the speed of light was, and repeatedly flicking the light switch on and off in my room to convince myself that yep, once I flipped it on, the light arrived pretty much instantly. That seemed pretty fast to me. Later, I inhaled every astronomy book I could get my hands on, watched Mr. Wizard and Bill Nye on TV, and went to every movie about scientists and space that came along. I remember particularly enjoying the movie Twister because it gave me an encouraging look at what scientists themselves might actually be like. The fictional tornado researchers on screen were doing cool and exciting research and having fun along the way, and the main character was a woman who rolled around in the mud and was obsessed with science but still managed to end the movie with a great kiss (a combination I'd already been warned might not be tenable in the long run thanks to plenty of other movies featuring women who Had to Choose between Careers and Men). [image] -- My dorm in particular was the stuff of anarchic counterculture geek dreams. When I turned up as a freshman, the residents were busy constructing a gigantic wooden tower that would ultimately stand more than four stories tall. As it turned out, this violated Cambridge building codes, so after a couple of days of climbing all over the thing and hurling water balloons from the top (it was impressively structurally sound; these were MIT engineers building it, after all), the tower was carefully lowered with much fanfare. In the next four years, I'd help my dormmates built giant catapults, human-sized hamster wheels, and even a roller coaster, all purely for entertainment and made primarily out of two-by-fours and optimism. MIT was my first real indication that the road to brilliance sometimes took a few turns that steered well clear of common sense. Through all of this, I remained convinced that despite my battles with coursework, MIT was the place for me. I wanted to be a professional astronomer, despite having only the vaguest sense of what the job actually entailed. I'd worked out early on that it meant being in school for the long haul--most astronomers I'd heard of had PhDs--and that I'd probably be using some very large telescopes at some point, but the details were unclear. I'd seen astronomers on PBS or in movies and imagined people sitting behind some enormous telescope situated inside a dome so they could ... do something. It looked fun, and I'd liked our backyard telescope, so I filed this away as something I'd surely figure out when the time came. -- It took just one night of observing for me to get hooked. I loved it. Loved gearing up and heading out into the cold clear autumn nights, loved juggling a log book and old computer and flashlight with frozen fingers, loved climbing a ladder and wrestling one of those fourteen-inch telescopes to point it perfectly toward a star of my choice. I loved the thrill that came when everything was working and I could leap back off the ladder to peer at some brand-new data and my own hastily scribbled notes, all under the dim red lights of the shed. (Many observatories used deep-red lighting at night to help preserve observers' dark-adapted vision). I have an abiding memory of standing in the November midnight cold, reveling in every perk of my teenaged metabolism as I downed Reese’s peanut butter cups by the handful, and peering through the viewfinder of my telescope at the exact moment that a meteorite went streaking through its field of view from top to bottom. I was pointed at a miniscule area of the sky, and the odds of a meteor passing through that tiny spot at the very moment when I’d pressed my eye to the eyepiece were vanishingly small. I don’t remember crying out or saying anything or even moving. I just stood there, perched on a ladder, eye pointed through the telescope, knowing what I’d just seen. Yes, I thought. This is a good job. [image] -- One colleague has lucky observing socks she dons for every run; another swears eating a banana at roughly the same time every afternoon staves off clouds. People have lucky cookies, lucky snacks, even lucky tables in the dining room they’ll sit at before runs. I’ve developed the strict habit of refusing to check the weather until the day of the run itself. I tell myself that this forces me to always plan for a clear and productive evening, but deep down, it’s just as about not jinxing the night as anything else. Some astronomers also seem to have famously bad luck on observing runs. In a few cases, it’s gotten to the point where colleagues on the mountain will groan if they see one of their supposedly cursed colleagues on the schedule, convinced their mere presence will summon clouds or rain or high winds and extend their bad luck to every telescope unlucky enough to be nearby. -- I’ve disappointed plenty of people who have asked for the name of a random star only to be met with an “um …” or friends who have asked “Hey, what planet is that?” and gotten back “Er … I dunno … Jupiter, probably?” In astronomers’ defense, telescope computers are literally light-years better than we are, combining orbital dynamics and lengthy equations to pinpoint exact sky positions with a precision far exceeding anything we can distinguish with the naked eye. Still, it comes as a surprise to most people that many astronomers can’t really find that much in the naked-eye sky. -- The 3:00 a.m. haze in particular is what makes music choice utterly critical to observing runs. Almost any astronomer you ask will tell you that playing the right music is a vitally important ingredient for any observing run, to the point that it acquires an almost talismanic quality. Many observers have music that they only play at the telescope or set up playlists matched to the steps of the night. Generally, most observers tend toward more energetic music as the night gets later. Someone who might have queued up Bob Dylan at the start of the night will have moved on to AC/DC by the time the early morning hours roll around. -- If astronomers as a community were asked to pick a favorite observatory animal, it would likely be the viscacha. Viscachas are relatives of chinchillas but resemble wise rabbit grandfathers with tall ears, long curled tails, sleepy eyes, and long, drooping whiskers. They frequent many Chilean observatories, and their steady presence over the years has alerted astronomers to a funny quirk of these little creatures: they seem to love watching sunsets. They’re always there, always sitting stock-still, and always gazing directly at the sinking sun on the horizon. [image] Levesque discloses enough about her childhood and her academic and professional career for The Last Stargazers to be considered a memoir, but she also reaches out to a large number of her peers with questions like, Have you ever seen a UFO, or, for women, have you ever been harassed or made uncomfortable by men at work. She looks ahead to where her field is headed and how studying the physical nature of stars is changing. This would be a wonderful book to share with students interested in astrophysics (hint: take as many math classes as you can) or those like me curious about what an astrophysicist does and the adventures they have. Emily Levesque was born in 1984 and grew up in Taunton, Massachusetts. She received her S.B. in physics from MIT in 2006 and her PhD in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2010. She is professor in the University of Washington's astronomy department. Her research focuses on improving our overall understanding of how massive stars evolve and die. She's written two academic books: a professional text on red supergiants and a graduate textbook on stellar interiors and evolution. The Last Stargazers is her first book for everyone. She lives in Seattle, Washington. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey -- The Beauty of Living Twice, Sharon Stone -- Fade Into You, Nikki Darling ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 29, 2021
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Aug 30, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525656766
| 9780525656760
| 0525656766
| 3.70
| 6,767
| Mar 30, 2021
| Mar 30, 2021
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really liked it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Sharon Stone and The Beauty of Living Twice. Published th
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Sharon Stone and The Beauty of Living Twice. Published this year, Stone charts the peaks and depressions of her extraordinary life so far, beginning her story at the ER bleeding in her brain and nearing death in 2001. Her childhood in Pennsylvania, modeling and acting career, tempestuous family, ten years of superstardom, sexual abuse by her maternal grandparents, philanthropic work and rehab from her stroke are explored. It's a harrowing trip. -- By not being put in a typical gender role-playing position at home, I was able to learn a lot of traditionally male-oriented skills, such as how to make and pour concrete, and how to lay a stone wall so it didn't fall over. All of us learned how to build a house, and since we grew up in Amish country, we learned it the Amish way, building the frame and the sides and then raising them with ropes. I mowed the lawn, shoveled snow, climbed trees, and played golf. I beat up my brothers, so I didn't get beaten up. Which is not to say there wasn't an absolute rule with Dad about not hitting girls; it was just that the boys didn't think it applied to sisters until we kicked their asses. [image] -- As a model, I was often called in to do the "difficult" jobs. I guess they thought I was the smarter, tougher one. Those jobs where they thought the guy might be tough, or the client hard to deal with. I worked with the Buf-Puf client who put me in a light box: a small box the size of my body lined entirely with lights, with a dish of water in front of me; I was meant to take the sponge out of it and show it to the camera near my face. She just kept telling me a thousand ways to say "Buf-Puf": accent on the "Buf" or on the "Puf," whatever--she kept drilling me as if I were an object in the box. And for her I was. A million-degree box, with an assistant putting cold towels on my back so I didn't pass out. I did jobs famous men who arrived drunk, and with famous men who arrived sober and were terrific and with whom I am friends today, like Bruce Willis, who was spectacular and funny and kind. -- After I was told that I got the part in Basic Instinct, I was asked to come in to meet with Paul Verhoeven, as well as some other people from the production company. I was so nervous and excited I could hardly hear. I met with Paul in the company's offices in Hollywood, then said hello to a few other people on the way down to fill out some paperwork and meet the line producer, an older, kind of dodgy man, in his messy office. He closed the door and sat down and said, "You were not our first choice, Karen. No, you were not even the second or the third. You were the thirteenth choice for this film." He continued to call me Karen all through the making and postproduction of the movie. I left that meeting so messed up that I got into my car in the parking lot, put on my rap music super-loud, and back into a semi three feet behind me. [image] -- Also, for the ten years of the on-fire piece of my career this caused me to skip all medical needs. Dislocated shoulder: suck it up. Root canal in my trailer with no novocaine at lunchtime: that was not a great one, I can say; I had that redone twice--and then had total jaw surgery to repair the damage from this absolutely stupid behavior. Bursting ovarian cyst: get some super-strong meds, and change it from a standing scene to a sitting scene. Broken foot from an overzealous stuntman: get a bigger boot for that foot, finish the show, and then get it rebroken and repaired after the show wraps. In other words, shut up and deal. There isn't room for babies in this biz, especially if I, as a woman, want to prove my mettle. -- Now that I look back on it, the hideousness of all of it, the unbearable pain of recovery, how I could be sitting on the couch and it would feel like someone had punched me in the face; my head would swivel, I would make a sound as if hit, and my face, only on that side, would suddenly turn bright red. Or I would get brutal pains on the top of my head and these inch-high lumps would come up, scattered over my scalp. Or my leg would feel like it was bleeding or wet, or burning. My fuse box was so messed up it was sending all kinds of weird signals all over the place. I was about to find out that I wouldn't be able to read for another two years or remember where I'd put down my teacup. But I was up and I was alive and I had a one-and-a-half-year-old baby boy who needed a mother. I didn't know how I would do it, but I knew I would. Stone's #metoo moments are like practice drills compared to her serious tests: growing up in a lower-middle class family of six in Pennsylvania, three miscarriages, losing custody of her adopted son and the removal of two benign tumors in her breasts, which led to her laying on one side, which led to blood pooling on that side of her brain which nearly killed her. A difficult rehabilitation and a search for inner peace was waiting for her next. Material rewards had been fleeting. Basic Instinct, her most popular film, is cited most often and her account of its opening weekend is one of the more amazing descriptions of the actor's life I've come across: -- When I played a serial killer in Basic Instinct I tapped into that rage. It was terrifying to look into the shadow self and to release it onto film for the world to see. To allow people to believe that I was "like that." Even more, to let myself know that I have or had that darkness within. I can say that it was and is the most freeing thing I have ever done. To engage my full self so very deeply and to free that dark angel. To know that I was angry--to know that I was so angry that I would have loved to stab Clarence to death--was incredibly freeing. Ultimately, it also let me know that I wasn't really the stabbing type. Letting myself process that rage was magnificent, and I think letting others feel that release was a bit therapeutic for the audience. I know it's not just me. The day Basic Instinct came out in theaters I hired a limo. Mimi and I started in Harlem and went to movie theaters all over NYC, from one side of town to the other, into the wee hours of the morning. We had bought two bowler derbies and wore our hair up inside and both of us wore our glasses. We watched about twenty minutes at each theater. Harlem was my favorite. People were yelling and screaming at the screen. Cheering my character on. We were having a ball, seeing the reactions all over town. We stopped in the Upper East and West Sides, Hell's Kitchen, all the way into the Bowery. We were running in and out of theaters at various points during the film and fleeing like thieves into the day and night. And the audiences went wild, they loved this movie! It was one of the best times. The next morning while we had a glorious, celebratory breakfast, the horrible reviews came out. [image] I found The Beauty of Living Twice compelling not by virtue of its writing, its study of the acting craft or even its potential for backstage intrigue. Stone admits that actresses have a reputation for "faking it"--which made her diagnosis nearly fatal and far more difficult than it should've been--but even taking that into account, I was moved by the strength this woman has summoned to complete the many trials of her life. She should not be alive. We shouldn't even know her name. Sharon Stone was born in 1958 in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Her father was a tool-and-die manufacturer. Her mother was a homemaker and briefly an accountant. Considered academically gifted as a child, Stone was awarded a creative writing scholarship to Edinboro University of Pennsylvania at the age of 15. Crowned Miss Crawford County in 1975, Stone was drawn to the film industry and dropped out of college. Initially interested in directing, she moved to New York to pursue a modeling and acting career. She was plucked as an extra on Woody Allen's Stardust Memories for a larger, memorable but non-speaking role in the 1980 film. Stone spent a year in Zimbabwe and South Africa for her first film leading role in King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quatermain and the Lost City of Gold. Supporting roles in two more action films led to a break playing a treacherous spy in the blockbuster Total Recall for director Paul Verhoeven. When as many as twelve leading ladies passed on the role of Catherine Trammell in Verhoeven's next film Basic Instinct, Stone fought for a screen test and won the part. Superstardom ensued. The prestige of her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress opposite Robert DeNiro and Joe Pesci in Casino led to Stone producing and starring in The Quick and the Dead, for which she plucked Russell Crowe and Leonardo DiCaprio out of obscurity to co-star with her. Stone has served as Global Campaign Chair for amfAR for twenty years, heightening awareness for AIDS research. In 2013, she was honored by the Nobel Peace Laureates with the Peace Summit Award for her work. Stone lives in San Francisco. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz -- You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir, Parker Posey ...more |
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| 0440023394
| 9780440023395
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| 3.92
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| 1974
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it was amazing
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Eve Babitz and her essay collection Ev
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Eve Babitz and her essay collection Eve's Hollywood. Published in 1974, there have been few authors I've read this year whom I've liked personally as much as Babitz. I have zero interest in a fictional character being "likable," as long as she's compelling, but not since Ottessa Moshfegh have I felt this much a groupie while reading a book. I marveled at Babitz's writing, grinned often and felt transported back to the era portrayed in Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. -- So there I was, nearing my 18th birthday, so Hollywooded up that I aspired to be a kind of Scheherazade/ Sheena combination with Mme. Rècarmier and Elizabeth Taylor thrown in. I hadn't really liked Elizabeth Taylor until she took Debbie Reynolds' husband away from her, and then I began to love Elizabeth Taylor. It wasn't until I got to Rome and Elizabeth Taylor's dalliances made 20,000 extras be paid ten thousand lire a day for six additional months and the rents skyrocketed that I began to wish Elizabeth Taylor would calm down, but still ... it was worth it. Every time I thought how the rent had been so much cheaper before Cleopatra, I remembered those horrible bones in Debbie Reynolds' eye sockets. Elizabeth Taylor served everyone right. -- My friend Annie told me that when she was in New York last time she'd been doing so many things that when she finally found herself alone she decided to just take a kind of here-and-there ramble "just to think," she said, "you know." Rounding the corner, she was confronted with a wino wielding a broken glass bottle, so she threw five dollars at him and ran. That always seemed like the whole thing; they'll let you have stories, but you can't ever think in a certain way. There are no spaces between the words, it's one of the charms of the place. Certain things don't have to be thought about carefully because you're always being pushed from behind. It's like a tunnel where there's no sky. -- The beach from that summer was called Roadside. It was 1958 and a lot of kids from West L.A. went there--tough kids with knives, razors, tire irons and lowered cars. No kids from my school or any of the schools nearby went to Roadside, they went to Sorrento where there were never any fights and where most of the kids from Hollywood High, Fairfax and Beverly spent their summers listening to "Venus" on the radio or playing volleyball. If I had only known about Sorrento, I never would have gone to the beach so passionately, since Sorrento was a disapassionate beach involved mainly in the junior high and high school ramifications of polite society, sororities, Seventeen magazine, football players and not getting your hair wet. -- These were the daughters of people who were beautiful, brave, and foolhardy, who had left their homes and traveled to movie dreams. In the Depression, when most of them came here, people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West. After being born of parents who believed in physical beauty as a fact of power, and being born beautiful themselves, these were then raised in California, where statistically the children grow taller, have better teeth and are stronger than anywhere else in the country. When they reach the age of 15 and their beauty arrives, it's very exciting--like coming into an inheritance and, as with inheritances, it's fun to be around when they first come into the money and watch how they spend it and on what. Among the hundreds of anecdotes in the marvelous Live from New York: An Oral History of Saturday Night Live by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales, several stand out, one much more than the others now that I've read Eve's Hollywood. Here's film director John Landis, who dropped by Studio 8H to visit John Belushi prior to beginning production on National Lampoon's Animal House in 1977. I went up to the SNL offices. John was giving me a tour, when a very sexy girl walks by. Tight jeans and a T-shirt, no bra, curly hair. "Oh my God, who is that?" And John says, "That's Rosie Shuster. That's Lorne's wife and Danny's girlfriend." Which is true. It was wild. Rosie's the one who coined the best line about Aykroyd. Danny had studied in a seminary to be a Jesuit priest the same time he was doing second story jobs in and around Ontario. Rosie's the one who said, "Danny's epiphany would be to commit a crime and arrest himself." [image] Wherever a highly successful or talented man is to be found, so is a Rosie Shuster or Eve Babitz. They might not consider themselves writers, but they're recording. Eve's Hollywood gives these magnificent women their due. Who are they? "Wife," "Girlfriend" or "Groupie" are typically used terms. Some achieve success as writers or producers, like Shuster, while Babitz is in a class by herself as a memoirist. Her quips are radiant. Her ability to illustrate an emotional landscape is skilled. Her defense of her hometown as a city with culture is commendable. Babitz is not a gossip and if she were once a world class party girl, her adventures here remain relatively clean and sober. Her topics range from the mystique of violin players, the oddity of girls you went to high school with becoming film ingenues, the effect Marlon Brando had on her as a teenager (in Viva Zapata!), Xerox machines and the wonders of taquitos. In "The Landmark," she extols the virtues of small taco stands on Olvera Street and how if Janis Joplin had known about them, she wouldn't have overdosed alone in a nearby motel room. The 1960s and '70s are viewed as a boys' club compared to the workplace of today, which is considered much more equal. The office of the mid-20th century in all its chauvinism is dramatized across many seasons of Mad Men. Yet Babitz writes with such passion, articulating such a strong sense of independence and freedom that it makes me reconsider how much progress has really been made. People are under such intense scrutiny today and most of us long for a time when our personality or comments could wander free. Eve's Hollywood lets us revisit that world. I'd recommend nibbling at Eve Babitz, I mean, nibbling at her writing, reading one essay per week, as they were originally intended to be read. "Eve's Hollywood" reminds me of a magazine column and binging her essays in one week adds up to much ado about nothing. Taken piece by piece with the proper space, I felt I would've had even more appreciation for her yearnings and passions, her supreme confidence, her wit and wonderful sense of freedom she conveys on the page. Eve Babitz was born in 1943 in Hollywood, California. Her father was a classical violinist under contract to 20th Century Fox and both parents were friends with composer Ivor Stravinsky, who was Eve's godfather. A graduate of Hollywood High School--which she attended begrudgingly for two years--Babitz gained notoriety at age 20 posing for photographer Julian Wasser playing chess in the nude. She continued partying on the Sunset Strip for another ten years, using a Brownie box camera to photograph rock groups, which led to designing album covers for Buffalo Springfield, Leon Russell and ultimately Linda Ronstadt. In 1971, Joan Didion passed a personal essay Babitz had written about Hollywood High to an editor at Rolling Stone. Babitz would be commissioned to write many magazine articles. Unlike Didion, she was appreciated less for her writing and more for her openness to discuss her social life. In 2014, a tribute in Vanity Fair by Lili Anolik launched a revival that includes magazine profiles, Babitz's books reissued by the New York Review Books Classics, a biography by Anolik and a TV series in development at Hulu based on Babitz's memoirs. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion ...more |
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Jun 14, 2021
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Mar 28, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0544648943
| 9780544648944
| 0544648943
| 3.88
| 1,590
| Aug 08, 2017
| Aug 08, 2017
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it was amazing
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As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian wr
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for looks at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in popular culture. While I'd never followed the reviews of Carina Chocano during her tenure at the Los Angeles Times from 2003-2008, like Manohla Dargis--whose departure to the New York Times slid Chocano over from TV to film--Chocano was a trustworthy voice from my generation, thoughtful, analytical and enjoyable to read. Chocano's memoir You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks & Other Mixed Messages mixes stories of her childhood (she was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1968 and moved to New Jersey at the age of 5 when her father, a marketing executive for a pharmaceutical company, was transferred to New York), school days, marriage and motherhood (she gave birth to a daughter the year she was laid off from the Times) with criticism of how women are portrayed in a dozen or so pop culture institutions. Nearly every print publication be it ink or electronic has someone like Chocano reviewing film and TV daily. What makes her book special is how much I realized I had in common with her beyond her impressions of Ghostbusters 2016 (good but not great summer movie). Like me, Chocano grew up in the suburbs in the '70s and '80s, went to school, dated and all the while absorbed many of the same magazines, books and movies that I did. Her book is sharp, creative, passionate and candid. She lays it all out there. She taught me a great deal about how women are misrepresented in film. Even better, she's often very funny. On discovering Katharine Hepburn when she was 12 years old: Before watching The Philadelphia Story, it had never occurred to me that femininity and femaleness were not one and the same thing. I'd dutifully absorbed the lessons embedded in movies, TV shows, ads, magazines, commercials, and cartoons. The frillier, flightier, wilier, sweeter, gentler, kinder, bitchier, more nurturing, scarier, more insecure, more insincere a character was, the more of a "girl" she was. I'd learned to rank female characters by prettiness. Little girls like to claim their heroines' beauty as their own. It's like picking a team, though it's unclear what's being won. The Philadelphia Story marked the first time I remember encountering the idea that this ephemeral but familiar thing I'd recognized all my life as the feminine ideal might be not just distinct from but also possibly oppressive to women. It came as a shock. Here was Tracy, a heroine--a bride, no less--and she was different. She was experienced. She had learned from her youthful mistakes and was making deliberate choices. She had agency. She had a horse. (Not that this was germane, but I really loved horses.) She was comfortable in her own skin, secure, and she believed in herself. She radiated confidence of a kind I'd never seen before in a movie heroine. It wasn't the kind of confidence you usually saw in movie stars. It wasn't just that she was secure in her sexiness. On the contrary, she didn't seem to think about her sexiness at all. What made her attractive was that she acted like a person, not a girl. I did think it was strange to be encountering this in 1980, given that The Philadelphia Story was released in 1940. [image] On revisiting a movie she was obsessed with at 15: Only now, decades later, do I see Flashdance for what it was: a fantasy of self-creation ungrounded in political, material, or economic reality. It was a feature length music video hawking the individualist, bootstrapping Reagan-era fantasy. It said you can do anything (in your imagination). All it takes to lift yourself off the lowest social rung and be borne aloft on wings of stardom and true love is a big dream, a flashy style, a psychotic belief in yourself, and a willingness to sleep with your boss. You just have to want it. You can do it! Girl power! Dream on, sister! And hey, if it doesn't work out, remember you have only yourself to blame. Maybe you weren't good enough, did you ever consider that? Here are some tips for self-improvement. Flashdance taught us that stripping was cool and a great way to put yourself through school. It taught us that the window to success is open for a very short time. Without Nick, Alex would have curdled into something monstrous in no time. [image] I must pause to give Chocano credit for some awesome chapter titles: A Modest Proposal for More Backstabbing in Preschool The Kick-Ass The Bronze Statue of the Virgin Slut Ice Queen Bitch Goddess You Play the Girl was already good but when Chocano turned her lens on the Seth Rogen-Katherine Heigl comedy Knocked Up, which she saw while trying to have a baby, her memoir really took off for me. The problem with Knocked Up wasn't that it was full of moments that made it more than a little bit sexist, even though it was. The problem was that it presented an adolescent boy's perspective of what it means to be an adult woman in a world that has not yet come to terms with the idea of women as autonomous subjects. The problem was that it reveled in its hero's unearned advantage in this world while at the same time refusing to acknowledge what it's like on the other side. The movie refused to so much as utter the word abortion. (It makes somebody say "smashmorshun" instead.) Knocked Up wasn't interested in Alison's life or in her experience or in her options; it was the life stages of a woman as they are seen in fairy tales: child, maiden (hot chick), mother, and crone. Alison was an incubator, not only for her baby but for Ben's maturity. The trouble wasn't only Knocked Up, of course. This take on gender relations circa 2007 was the only perspective anyone got. It was the most suffocating dude-bro imperialism; patriarchy rebranded as "fratiarchy." Watching it, I felt the way I imagine Khrushchev must have felt as Nixon tried to undermine his self-esteem with a tour of the modern American kitchen. Khrushchev was, like, we have kitchens in Russia, too, you know ... But nobody listened. I'm listening and I'd like to hope that content creators either have a jewel like Chocano reading their work before it's shipped worldwide, or has her terrific book on their shelf. [image] ...more |
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Jul 16, 2020
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| 006289059X
| 9780062890597
| 006289059X
| 4.31
| 855
| Jun 30, 2020
| Jun 30, 2020
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really liked it
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As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for l
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but branching out to read women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for looks at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in culture. Next up is my introduction to Shayla Lawson. This Is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls, and Being Dope caught my eye on Goodreads. I curate a good title almost as much as I do a book cover. Reading this book I felt like I was dating someone who's eighteen years younger than me. That might not be everyone's ideal and certainly isn't my preference. I was often lost here but also learned a lot and enjoyed my time with a talented writer. My favorite essays were easily those in which Lawson recounts or dramatizes her experiences as the only black employee at the advertising agency, or the only black person on her Tinder date. These are great stories with antagonists, obstacles and perhaps lessons learned, certainly for me as a reader. My least favorite essays were dedicated to celebrities, playwright Ntozake Shange and musical artist SZA in particular. Having never heard of either and unable to see their play or listen to their music in the essay, I was as lost as I would be if someone from Gen Z were trying to describe a DJ or an app that came out two minutes ago to me. When I was able to relate to what Lawson was interested in exploring, her writing took off for me. -- From Tammy From HR: Becky has not had the time to come up with any ideas. She has been too busy. You say you understand this, this project being a less-important part of her workflow (it's not) than the obviously rigorous schedule she's been maintaining (she hasn't). She grunts, knowing you have seen her empty Google Calendar. She blurts a half-assed idea off the top of her head. You think, that's a stupid idea, and agree it's a great idea, directing her toward the list of reasonably executable advertising campaigns you spent most of the night working up, looking for the thought most similar to hers. She says if you'd been in creative longer, you would know why your idea wouldn't work. That may be so. You ask her if the two of you can keep cracking at hers. You tighten up your smile face and pull out a new piece of blank paper, diving in to her piece of an idea with a preschool teacher's enthusiasm. You know you sound pedantic, but past Beckys have made it clear to you that Beckys like to be spoken to this way. It reminds them of The Help. You have spoken to Beckys other ways in offices and it was always resulted in You made Becky feel like she knows less than you do with her associate's degree and your graduate school education and her previous service customer service job at Macy's and your more senior position in this company and so you bob up and down on the pink carousel horse of Becky's preferred communication style, holding close to its spiral pole. -- From No, My First Name Ain't Whoopi: I've spent enough time living around European and Americans to know that white people, especially white men, tend to think that by pointing out black women in public, they're doing us a favor. Aside from Whoopi, I have been called Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, and Macy Gray. I have been called Janelle Monáe, Erykah Badu, Serena Williams, Kelly Rowland, and Gabrielle Union. I have been called "that black woman from Mr. Robot." I have been called a number of black women who look nothing like me or each other. And yet, a few weeks after my Realtor "Whoopi Goldberg" encounter, I was at the Red Bull Crashed Ice Valkenburg games and could identify my husband in a crowd of tall, twenty-something white men, from the back. How do I do it? With a little effort and self awareness, it is quite easy to recognize anybody. The reason why so many white men misidentify me is because they consider black women generic. One dark blob of a face. -- From "Black Lives Matter" Yard Signs Matter: Despite my having grown up in the south, Portland is the most racist place I have ever lived. This is because being anti-racist isn't about using politically correct buzzwords and giving lip-service to sensitive conservation topics. Being anti-racist is about constructing a landscape that is safe for dark people to inhabit. It is not about white people trying to prove they are "woke" by putting up yard signs. That is not even what "woke" means. "Woke" is a territory of open-eyed, unsuperficial, cultural awareness white people are nowhere close to occupying; they are not even in the neighborhood. But being anti-racist in this dangerous era is something they can do, by going out of their way to make non-white people feel safe. -- From Diana Ross Is Major: But casting a thirty-three-year-old in the role of Dorothy was not a foregone conclusion. At fifteen, Stephanie Mills was receiving stellar reviews in the Broadway musical and a lot of people couldn't see how a thirty-something like Ms. Ross could compete with the young ingenue for the role. One of those skeptics was Berry Gordy Jr., the head of Motown, whom Diana Ross had worked with ever since she was a teenager, the man who helped make her a star. Up until then, Gordy had been one of Ms. Ross' biggest advocates; Diana Ross, Gordy's muse. A few years before The Wiz, the two had had huge success on the big screen with her Oscar-nominated film debut as Billie Holiday in the 1972 biopic Lady Sings the Blues. But Gordy did not see Diana Ross as Dorothy, he thought she was too old. What Gordy didn't understand is that Diana Ross is from the future. Diana Ross couldn't have predicted this, but her portrayal of Dorothy as a single adult who can't seem to move out of her family's house is a pretty accurate forecast of black girl millennials. We've grown up in an era where the space between 18-35 has looked less like adulthood and much more like an extended adolescence. Many of us, like Diana/Dorothy, have had to move back home into our childhood bedrooms, as we take inventory of our college degrees, career goals, and the constantly rising cost of living, while we try to figure stuff out. When I watch The Wiz now, I see a twenty-something school teacher living with her aunt and uncle and understand this Dorothy so much better. She is much more relevant to use than any other Dorothy could be. Lawson seems to emphasize her own evolution and observations she's made about being a black woman along the way, both from self-analysis and her analysis of art that impacted her. I couldn't readily follow her references or share her interest in a topic like Black Twitter, but the writing took me out of my suburban white television culture raised background and made me see how it would feel to be made invisible by that culture. ...more |
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Aug 06, 2020
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Jun 27, 2020
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| 1250194725
| 9781250194725
| B07QPHS1YH
| 4.30
| 9,118
| Apr 21, 2020
| Apr 21, 2020
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it was amazing
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As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but reading memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for view
As research for a novel I'm writing, I'm not only reading detective fiction but reading memoirs by women or Black, Hispanic and Asian writers for views at how they see, or don't see, themselves reflected in popular culture. Last on my list is Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In by Phuc Tran. Published in April 2020, I was surprised not only to discover that I'm exactly the same age as Tran and went through public school at the same time he did, but how much I related to his experiences growing up a second generation American, like several of my childhood friends, who were Indian or Vietnamese. Punk rock, skateboarding and brushes with rednecks and the law do factor into Tran's account of his teenage years, but so does fleeing Saigon with his father and mother in 1975 before his first memory, growing up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania against his will and most impressively, books. Alfred Camus is the first author Tran discovers, his freshman year of high school, after a skateboarding buddy named Philip who perplexed him by valuing education suggests that if he likes The Cure he should read The Stranger. Laced through is Tran's desire to fit in, which goes beyond being a weird teenage boy and is embedded in his name, his ethnicity and his very different life at home. There was tremendous amount about Tran's memories that I related to as he took me through his adolescence. Phuc covets wristbands like the cool kid in 2nd grade. Denied by his mother due to their cost, he makes his own out of a pair of socks, which not only gets him mocked at school but beaten so badly by his father that he can't sit. His teacher Mrs Boose pays a visit to his parents, which makes Phuc fear she'll be beaten too. His childhood was filled with such episodes, feeling like he didn't fit in out there or in here, always related through pop culture and trends that I recall from growing up in the 1980s. Do kids know whether they're rich or poor? Do rich kids know that they grow up without any wants or needs? That they get everything they desire? What about poor kids? I can tell you that I knew we were poor early on. I knew that I was wearing discarded clothing that someone had donated us. I knew what no meant when I asked for a two-dollar Han Solo action figure at the store--it meant we didn't have enough money for it. Like the violence I lived in, our poverty had no contest. Adults like to say that kids are resilient, and that's true, but it's because they don't know anything different. Kids are kids, and their ignorance allows them to accept things as they are. That's their difference. Maybe if I read more non-fiction I wouldn't have been as surprised to see my thoughts or concerns reflected so accurately by an author. Lately, I've been wondering what it might be like to wander through the huge house I spent 1976-1979 in, the place of my very first memories, of when my mother and father were still together. Finding out I had to go to a place called school with people I didn't know, working on things I didn't want to, where people judged you because you didn't know how to tie your shoes yet, used words you weren't familiar with. Like, what the hell was that all about? And how did I survive? I didn't pray for my father to be different or kinder or more loving, because I couldn't imagine him that way. He never spoke to us with affection or tenderness. His anger and his violence shaped how I saw him, and I wasn't sure he would even be my father without the anger and violence. But I didn't want him as he was--"as is" was the terms of sale for parents and children. The wish for different parents fuels the archetypal fairy tales about evil stepmothers and children left in the woods. These fairy tales pivot around the wish that our parents, irascible and imperfect, aren't even our real parents, that a fairy godmother will reveal to us our true royal bloodline or magical lineage. Whether you're Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker or Cinderella, the fantasy is that the adults who are raising you aren't even your real parents, that your real parents are kinder and magical. The fantasy is that you have a destiny that is greater and more splendid than your current fate's contours. On that car ride home, I dismissed that unbridled fantasy with stiff, sobering logic: if this was the worst that could transpire , I would be okay because I had known worse. My father hadn't beaten me or Lou in months--that was already an improvement, and I could live through the punishment of getting kicked out of the car. My past was worse than my present, and if my present indicated my future, I could live with that. Tran pens a Pulitzer-worthy account of his first sexual experience, at age 14 with Charlotte, one of his school's two "vampire chicks," later to be known as goth girls when "goth" reached the popular vernacular. We should all have been so lucky with our first time. I loved Tran's account of trying to convince his mother that he wanted to go back-to-school shopping for high school at Goodwill, rather than the department stores where the family finally had money to spend on nice, new things. Highly recommend for those amazed that they survived childhood as a perpetual outsider. ...more |
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Aug 22, 2020
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Jun 20, 2020
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525560726
| 9780525560722
| B07FC47R8D
| 4.02
| 26,729
| Jan 08, 2019
| Jan 08, 2019
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it was amazing
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I bought The Truths We Hold: An American Journey because I'm settling on a U.S. presidential candidate to volunteer for. My mom's experience volunteer
I bought The Truths We Hold: An American Journey because I'm settling on a U.S. presidential candidate to volunteer for. My mom's experience volunteering for Beto O'Rourke's Senate campaign showed me how rewarding that experience can be (and also got me a rad T-shirt). With California bumping its primary up to March 2020, the Golden State will finally help decide who the Democratic nominee will be and I want to help the candidate who best represents my interests win. Twenty-three have entered the race and I've settled on my top three. I've voted for Kamala Harris in every election she's been on a ballot--for California Attorney General in 2010 and 2014 and U.S Senate in 2016, all races she won--but there was much about her background that I learned from this spirited memoir, which is as straight-forward and minces few words as most campaign year books do, but takes the reader through Harris's personal, educational and professional life up to her candidacy for U.S. president in January 2019. Her main ideas are there in the title: the value of truth from our public office holders and her unique journey there. Say It Right -- First, my name is pronounced "comma-la," like the punctuation mark. It means "lotus flower," which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture. A lotus grows underwater, its flower rising above the surface while its roots are planted firmly in the river bottom. Second Generation -- My mother had been raised in a household where political activism and civic leadership came naturally. Her mother, my grandmother Rajam Gopalan, had never attended high school, but she was a skilled community organizer. She would take in women who were being abused by their husbands, and then she'd call the husbands and tell them they'd better shape up or she would take care of them. She used to gather the village women together, educating them about contraception. My grandfather P.V. Gopalan had been part of the movement to win India's independence. Eventually, as a senior diplomat in the Indian government, he and my grandmother had spent time living in Zambia after it gained independence, helping settle refugees. Rainbow Sign -- The Bay Area was home to so many extraordinary black leaders and was bursting with black pride in some places. People had migrated there from all over the country. This meant that kids like me who spent time at Rainbow Sign were exposed to dozens of extraordinary men and women who showed us what we could become. In 1971, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm paid a visit while she was exploring a run for president. Talk about strength! "Unbought and Unbossed," just as her campaign slogan promised. Alice Walker, who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple, did a reading at Rainbow Sign. So did Maya Angelou, the first black female bestselling author, thanks to her autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Nina Simone performed at Rainbow Sign when I was seven years old. Career Day -- Though the seed was planted very early on, I'm not sure, exactly, when I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. Some of my greatest heroes were lawyers: Thurgood Marshall, Charles Hamilton Houston, Constance Baker Motley--giants of the civil rights movement. I cared a lot about fairness, and I saw the law as a tool that can help make things fair. But I think what drew me to the profession was the way people around me trusted and relied on lawyers. Uncle Sherman and our close friend Henry were lawyers, and any time someone had a problem, within the family or neighborhood, the first thing you'd hear was "Call Henry. Call Sherman. They'll know what to do. They'll know how to make sense of this." I wanted to be able to do that. I wanted to be one of the people called. I wanted to be the one who could help. Harris tees off on criminal justice reform first, particularly her efforts to reform the nation's bail system, as well as need to rethink the war on drugs and how we address police brutality. She considers herself a progressive prosecutor, representing the people and using discretion to dismiss cases as well as put criminals behind bars. Her contentious negotiations with Bank of America and phone duel with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon over a settlement award for California is a highlight of the book. Immigration reform, protecting DACA recipients and her opposition to a border wall in the Senate comes in next. But there is a bigger reason to oppose the border wall. A useless wall on the southern border would be nothing more than a symbol, a monument standing in opposition to not just everything I value, but the fundamental values upon which this country was built. The Statue of Liberty is the monument that defines to the world who we are. Emma Lazarus's words--"Give me your tired, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free"--speak to our true character: a generous country that respects and embraces those who have made the difficult journey to our shores, often fleeing harm; that sees our quintessentially optimistic, can-do spirit in those who aspire to make the American Dream their own. How could I vote to build what would be little more than a monument, designed to send the cold, hard message "KEEP OUT"? The immigration debate is so often defined by false choices. I remember a town hall I held in Sacramento, where a group of the president's supporters showed up. One man said he thought I cared more about undocumented immigrants than I cared about the American people. It was a false choice. I care deeply about them both. Similarly, the budget debate was offering a false choice: fund the government or oppose the wall. I believed we could do both. Harris writes what she would do to strengthen the Affordable Care Act, expand Medicare for all and leverage the bargaining power of the federal government to lower prescription drug prices. Without mentioning the acting president by name, she attacks his policy agenda as well as his controversial appointments, which as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and Homeland Security Committee, Harris has questioned in public hearings. Her differences with the regime are made very clear. What's the result of all this? It's been great for the richest 1 percent of American households, who now own 40 percent of the nation's wealth, which adds up to roughly $40 trillion. But it's been a financial nightmare for the middle class. According to research done by United Way, 43 percent of households can't afford basic expenses: a roof over their head, food on the table, child care, transportation, and a cell phone. And yet with millions of Americans hanging by a thread, the White House reached for scissors. In 2017, the administration cut taxes for people who didn't need it and raised taxes on people who can't afford it. They sabotaged the Affordable Care Act, driving up premiums. They ignited a trade war that could lead to higher prices on things we all buy, from groceries to cars. They nominated judges intent on destroying organized labor. They cancelled a pay raise for federal civil servants--everyone from transportation security officers to food inspectors, park rangers, medical personnel, and more. They even halted the debt relief policy that we put in place to help Corinthian Colleges' victims. And for good measure, they did away with net neutrality, which will allow internet companies to charge a premium for popular websites for the first time, adding an unacceptable new bill to the stack. If, like me, you're looking for information about the candidates running for U.S. president in 2020, without the media playing gatekeeper, I highly recommend this memoir. Harris offers a progressive public policy agenda, albeit one lacking in details, and her personal history strongly contrasts with the background of the current president. I believe she'd make a tough campaigner and excellent chief executive. Harris would not only be the first female president of the United States, but the first in an interracial marriage. She has two stepchildren from her husband's previous marriage but like me, no lineal descendants, which is also rare for politicians. Here's a college photo, graduating from Howard University in 1986, with Harris in the center. [image] ...more |
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| 4,893
| Apr 18, 2017
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really liked it
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I bought This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class because I'm settling on a U.S. presidential candidate to volunteer for. My
I bought This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class because I'm settling on a U.S. presidential candidate to volunteer for. My mom's experience volunteering for Beto O'Rourke's Texas Senate campaign showed me how rewarding that experience can be (and also got me a cool T-shirt). With California moving its primary up to March 2020, the Golden State will finally help decide who the Democratic nominee will be and I want to help the candidate who best represents my interests win. Twenty have entered the race and I've settled on my top three. Elizabeth Warren is currently #1 on my scorecard. Her performances on Monday, April 22 at a CNN town hall in New Hampshire and the She the People forum Wednesday, April 24 in Houston were by far the strongest of those candidates who participated: energetic, inspiring, progressive, bold, with specific answers to direct questions. I'd read Warren's 2014 memoir A Fighting Chance which covered her life up to being elected by Massachusetts to the U.S. Senate, so I wasn't necessarily looking for information about her as I was a strong closing argument I can spend months making to undecided voters. Published in 2017, this book is short, with five chapters and an epilogue comprising 61% of the Kindle version and notes constituting the rest. The book is a business card pitched at those who don't follow politics yet or who have never watched Stephen Colbert or Trevor Noah's talk shows when Warren has been a guest. Who's Warren? The Battle to Save America's Middle Class says why she's running for president and illustrates her strengths and priorities: affordable college education, income inequality, consumer protection, policing Wall Street and using government to help give every full-time worker a shot at the American middle class. -- I'm pretty hard-core about this issue. The way I see it, no one in this country should work full-time and still live in poverty--period. But at $7.25 an hour, a mom working a forty-hour-a-week minimum-wage job cannot keep herself and her baby above the poverty-line. This is wrong--and this was something the U.S. Congress could make better if we'd just raise the minimum wage. We could fix this now. -- Walmart isn't alone. Every year, employers like retailers and fast-food outlets pay wages that are so low that the rest of America ponies up a collective $153 billion to subsidize their workers. That's $153 billion every year. Anyone want to guess what we could do with that mountain of money? We could make every public college tuition-free and pay for preschool for every child--and still have tens of billions left over. We could almost double the amount we spend on services for veterans, such as disability, long-term care, and ending homelessness. We could double all federal research and development-- everything: medical, scientific, engineering, climate science, behavioral health, chemistry, brain mapping, drug addiction, even defense research. Or we could more than double federal spending on transportation and water infrastructure--roads, bridges, airports, mass transit, dams and levees, water treatment plants, safe new water pipes. -- Ah, the debt. The bone-crunching, never-ending debt. Kai works every day just to tread water on her student loans. Her $90,000 adds just a tiny bump to the giant ball of outstanding student loan debt nationwide. She has joined an army of Americans who are struggling to pay back money they borrowed to get an education. The way I see it, every happy-face story about this economy should include a footnote that tags this fact: forty million people are trying to figure out how to pay off a combined $1.4 trillion in student loan debt. -- Giant corporations now dominate much of our lives. Why does this matter? Because when a handful of giants dominate, markets don't work very well. The whole free-enterprise system is built on the idea that when markets are competitive, we'll get lower prices, better services, cool new innovations, and many other benefits as companies vie for our business. Antitrust laws help keep markets strong. -- The failure to invest in education is trickle-down economics at its ugliest. Cut taxes for those at the top and then pay for part of the resulting gap in federal revenues by forcing kids who need student loans for college to borrow more and more? That sure sounds like a plan to make America proud: crush the dreams and opportunities of millions of young people so that rich people and big corporations can pile up even more wealth. What kind of country does something like that? If you follow the news, you don't need a book to tell you that Elizabeth Warren is a progressive U.S. senator who's big on consumer protection and policing giant corporations. You know what she thinks about the acting president. This book is for the uninitiated and as such, is on-the-nose. There's no vivid prose or thick detail here. Its strengths are where Warren discusses the impact her father's heart attack and mother's entry into the labor force at age fifty had on their family, as well as passages about three constituents and their struggles. Photos are included. College photos of public servants before politics got them are a reminder that far from TV people, they're also real people. [image] ...more |
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it was amazing
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My introduction to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir is the first of several memoirs she wrote. Published in 1958, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter takes
My introduction to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir is the first of several memoirs she wrote. Published in 1958, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter takes place during the Great War and the postwar years, with de Beauvoir an intellectually ravenous, morally prudish and eternally questioning teenage daughter of a bourgeois family in Paris. Lit with tremendous desire, but, as a child of privilege, very little drama, I related to her life immediately. My childhood in suburban Houston of the 1980s was filled with great anticipation but very little in the way of anything actually happening. The author relates all of this in writing that is absolutely jeweled. -- One day in the place Saint-Sulpice, walking along hand-in-hand with my Aunt Marguerite who hadn't the remotest idea how to talk to me, I suddenly wondered: 'How does she see me?' and felt a sharp sense of superiority: for I knew what I was like inside; she didn't. Deceived by outward appearances, she never suspected that inside my immature body nothing was lacking; and I made up my mind that when I was older I would never forget that a five-year-old is a complete individual, a character in his own right. But that was precisely what adults refused to admit, and whenever they treated me with condescension I at once took offence. -- One evening, however, I was chilled to the marrow by the idea of personal extinction. I was reading about a mermaid who was dying by the sad sea waves; for the love of a handsome prince, she had renounced her immortal soul, and was being changed into sea-foam. That inner voice which had always told her 'Here I am' had been silenced for ever, and it seemed to me that the entire universe had foundered in the ensuing stillness. But--no it couldn't be. God had given me the promise of eternity; I could not ever cease to see, to hear, to talk to myself. Always I should be able to say: 'Here I am.' There could be no end. -- In the afternoons I would sit out on the balcony outside the dining-room; there, level with the tops of the trees that shaded the boulevard Raspail, I would watch the passers-by. I knew too little of the habits of adults to be able to guess where they were going in such a hurry, or what the hopes and fears were that drove them along. But their faces, their appearance, and the sound of their voices captivated me; I find it hard now to explain what the particular pleasure was that they gave me; but when my parents decided to move to the fifth-floor flat in the rue de Rennes, I remember the despairing cry I gave: 'But I won't be able to see the people in the street any more!' -- Papa used to say with pride: 'Simone has a man's brain; she thinks like a man; she is a man.' And yet everyone treated me like a girl. Jacques and his friends read real books and were abreast of all current problems; they lived out in the open; I was confined to the nursery. But I did not give up all hope. I had confidence in my future. Women, by the exercise of talent or knowledge, had carved out a place for themselves in the universe of men. But I felt impatient of the delays I had to endure. Whenever I happened to pass by the Collège Stanislas my heart would sink; I tried to imagine the mystery that was being celebrated behind those walls, in a classroom full of boys, and I would feel like an outcast. -- My father, the majority of writers, and the universal consensus of opinion encouraged young men to sow their wild oats. When the time came, they would marry a young woman of their own social class; but in the meanwhile it was quite in order for them to amuse themselves with girls from the lowest ranks of society--women of easy virtue, young milliners' assistants, work-girls, sewing-maids, shopgirls. This custom made me feel sick. It had been driven into me that the lower classes have no morals: the misconduct of a laundry-woman or a flower-girl therefore seemed to me to be so natural that it didn't even shock me; I felt a certain sympathy for those poor young women whom novelists endowed with such touching virtues. Yet their love was always doomed from the state; one day or other, their lover would throw them over for a well-bred young lady. I was a democrat and a romantic; I found it revolting that, just because he was a man and had money, he should be authorized to play around with a girl's heart. Much of Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter is devoted to Simone de Beauvoir's best friend Elizabeth "Zaza" Mabille, a bookworm whose mother grows to fear that Simone's preference for a ideals will corrupt daughter. The girls grow closer, pull apart and come together again as they move through college. The same goes for Simone's cousin Jacques, who she alternatively detests, loves and decides she'd be grossly incompatible with as a wife. The book is absent of drama and those hoping for a pageant of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll are encouraged to look elsewhere, but de Beauvoir's prism of introspection, intellectual curiosity, virtue, integrity and honesty are an intoxicating read. Translation by James Kirkup. ...more |
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| 0735218218
| 9780735218215
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| 3.15
| 3,896
| Jul 24, 2018
| Jul 24, 2018
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really liked it
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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Parker Posey and You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologiz
The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with Parker Posey and You're on an Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir. Published in 2018, this book is predominantly for those familiar with the actor's scene stealing romps in films like Dazed and Confused or Best In Show, or her four-episode arc in Season 3 of Louie playing a bookstore clerk who succumbs to cancer. Words on a page simply can't do her unique performances across three decades justice, but fans should savor this dryly manic peek into the life of one of the most prolific actors of her generation. -- So, my name: When mom was eleven, she was a Girl Scout, and her friend's older sister had a daughter named Parker. Back then my mom thought to herself, "If I ever have a little girl I will give her a strong name like Parker." Her own name was Lynda, spelled with a "Y," and she always hated it. "The obligatory Y," my mom called it. Why, Y, why? So when the doctor asked for a name, my mom said Parker for my first name and Christian for my middle name, because they wanted the help of Jesus and of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Posey was from my father, obviously. My mother says she thought the name Posey was silly, and it really is. I know, my name sounds made up. -- Anyway, the focus and energy to shoot in film, which is costly material and not disposable, made the work happen differently. Everyone whirled around like dervishes. Actors hit their marks, made their cues, and knew their lines--there wasn't time to spare. No dillydallying by the crew but horses at the gate, reflexes on, moving large equipment like C-stands and ladders and sandbags to blast off the shot as quickly as possible. "Time is money!" was shouted all day long. Sometimes, I'd sing back, "GE, we bring good things to life." "GE" is short for the grips and electrical department--the ones doing the heavy lifting and loading of the lighting and electrical equipment. -- I was skeptical about Blade: Trinity but when I got my fangs, I got more into it. I put them on and ordered a sandwich at the deli and walked the sidewalks in the East Village, doing errands and acting natural--just another reason to love New York. I got on the phone with the wardrobe designer and shared all these ideas about what a thousand-year-old vampire would wear: talismans of various skulls of the people and animals she'd sucked the life out of, multinational monk garb, crucifixes, grunge Elizabethan, a monkey's head on some monk beads that she'd swing around like Bette Davis. I wanted to be a dirty and chic cavewoman with hair extensions that varied in length and texture--for my vampire to be moody and nihilistic, yet romantic and emotional. I went to set only to have all this nixed, and I ended up as a corporate vampire. I wore designer clothes and dyed my eyebrows blond, wore blue contacts, and sported mainly a tight all-business ponytail. It was actually enough of a change to get me going. -- As I stood there in Mountain Pose, more memories and repressed feelings came up. The biggest thing, probably, was that I recognized myself--or my life. I stood there in prayer, with hands at my heart center, and just felt my life up to that point. I saw the speed of my life and all this running. How I'd grab on to parts and my work as if it were real, as if it were something I could hold on to. I just wanted to be distracted and absorbed at the same time and have it be about something or someone else. I was reaching outside myself, mostly. It's so weird because really I want to disappear and acting allows for that, but at the same time you can see me on the screen of this airplane. Anyway, I started to realize stuff. -- Best In Show is a movie everyone loves. No one's ever said they didn't like it, and if they did I would run away from that person. I'm always shocked when I hear, "The person you played is my sister!" or "She's just like my wife!" I mean, that's nuts! The woman I played screamed at her husband at airports, was maniacally entitled and demanding, and threw fits and yelled at hotel managers and pet store owners. I guess we all get to that point sometimes, though? I have, obviously. Probably the best compliment I ever received was in the parking lot of a Lowe's hardware store in upstate New York. This man had his five-year-old son with him, and he said, pointing at me, "This is the crazy dog lady from Best In Show, and the little kid started laughing. I mean, done. Nothing makes me happier than a five-year-old boy laughing at a grown woman acting like a five-year-old. It's an honor to be a part of this group and to have made so many people laugh. Parker Posey has never married or had biological children (many illustrated photos of her 14-year-old bichon frise/ poodle/ Maltese dog Gracie are included), so You're on an Airplane is devoted entirely to Posey's larger than life childhood, her idiosyncratic career and the spaces that fall in between when she's just her own person, for better or for worse. She recounts being "famous" and having to admit to her director Nora Ephron that she had $1.75 in her checking account. She admits that she's been wrong for roles she's wanted but been rejected for (the female lead in Speed that made Sandra Bullock a star is cited). I was encouraged to read how Posey grew up without connections to show business in rural Louisiana and Mississippi, so discouraged in her hometowns that she didn't want to go outside. She doesn't offer much acting or career advice, but in writing about her journey, does illustrate why she's been so successful. It says something about her uniqueness that so many directors from Richard Linklater to Christopher Guest to Nora Ephron to Woody Allen cast her over and over again. Her whole energy and style reminds me of a character on her way to visit Pee-wee's Playhouse and her book is a lot of fun in that spirit. Parker Posey was born in 1968 in Baltimore but grew up in Monroe, Louisiana and Laurel, Mississippi. Her father was drafted into the U.S. Army and served as a captain liaison officer in Vietnam. Coming home, he ultimately opened a Chevy dealership. Her mother became a junior high school teacher. After studying ballet as a teenager, Posey attended State University of New York at Purchase to study drama, where she spent three years on academic probation due to her tendency to skip rehearsals. Her senior year, an agent landed her a recurring role on the soap opera As the World Turns playing a troublesome teenager. Posey's film work led to the thankless honorary "Queen of the Indies" during the 1990s in low budget movies like Dazed and Confused, Party Girl, The House of Yes, The Daytrippers and Clockwatchers. She was chosen to join Christopher Guest's repertory company with roles in all of his mockumentaries, including Best In Show. She also appeared in You've Got Mail, Josie and the Pussycats, Scream 3, Blade: Trinity and Superman Returns. She recently played Dr. Smith in Netflix's reboot of Lost In Space. Posey currently lives in New York City, where she's resided most of her life. [image] Previous reviews in the Year of Women: -- Come Closer, Sara Gran -- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill -- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine -- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier -- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh -- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg -- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George -- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart -- Beast in View, Margaret Millar -- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent -- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie -- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox -- You, Caroline Kepnes -- Deep Water, Patricia Highsmith -- Don't Look Now and Other Stories, Daphne du Maurier -- You May See a Stranger: Stories, Paula Whyman -- The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha Philyaw -- White Teeth, Zadie Smith -- Eva Luna, Isabel Allende -- Slouching Toward Bethlehem: Essays, Joan Didion -- Eve's Hollywood, Eve Babitz ...more |
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| 0446584967
| 9780446584968
| 0446584967
| 3.91
| 6,522
| Sep 13, 2011
| Sep 04, 2012
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it was amazing
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Life Itself is the 2011 memoir by film critic Roger Ebert, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times who through partnership with fi
Life Itself is the 2011 memoir by film critic Roger Ebert, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times who through partnership with film critic Gene Siskel, co-hosted a nationally syndicated TV talk show that made him a household name as a critic, with his insights, interviews and patented thumbs up/ thumbs down summary of movies. Multiple failed operations to combat cancer in Ebert's salivary gland resulted in his inability to eat, drink or talk, as well as permanent disfigurement of his lower face, which would seem to be a terrible turn of events for a man who loved to travel, to dine and above all, to talk. Ebert turned to blogging late in life, which led him to this passionate memoir, published two years before his death. Siskel & Ebert were instrumental in the development of my love for cinema. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, in an era before channel surfing, the Internet or supplemental feature rich DVDs, Siskel & Ebert were literally the only subject matter experts discussing film on any mass medium. At the age of eight, my parents enrolled me in an evening YMCA class (I chose judo) and part of the reason I quit after one class was that it preempted Sneak Previews, airing on PBS at 7:30 p.m. The visual arts trumped any interest I had in the martial arts. As a book reviewer, everything I write to this day is a poor man's Roger Ebert, a style I picked up from his weekly talk show as well the many editions of Ebert's Movie Home Companion I devoured as a kid. Ebert is as a compelling tour guide of a life as a reader could hope. He grew up an only child in Urbana, Illinois in the 1950s. He just missed the birth of the Baby Boomer generation and as a teenager, his impaired vision earned him a draft exemption from the Vietnam War. His father was an electrician who did extensive contracting on the University of Illinois campus and maintained a close relationship with his son until his death when Ebert was eighteen. Ebert's mother, a Roman Catholic, raised her son in the church and held hopes he'd enter the priesthood. A self-described "smartass" and voracious reader, he took a part-time job with the News-Gazette at the age of sixteen and graduating from UI Urbana-Champaign, was hired as a reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. The city room was a noisy place to work. Typewriters hammered at carbon-copy books that made an impatient slap-slap-slap. Phones rang the way phones used to ring in the movies. Reporters shouted into them. They called out "Boy!" and held up a story and a copykid ran to snatch it and deliver it to an editor. Reporters would shout out questions on deadline. "Quick! Who was governor before Walker?" There were no cubicles, except for Royko's. We worked at desks democratically lined up next to one another, row after row. Ann Landers (actually Eppie Lederer) had an office full of assistants somewhere else in the building but insisted on sitting in the middle of this chaos, next to the TV-radio critic, Paul Molloy. Once Paul was talking on a telephone headset, tilted back in his chair, and fell to the floor and kept on talking. Eppie reached in a file drawer and handed down her pamphlet Drinking Problem? Take This Test of Twenty Questions. In March 1967, Ebert's editor Bob Zonka notified him that their film critic Eleanor Keen was taking early retirement and Ebert had been promoted. His ambition had been to become a columnist like Mike Royko, the street smart newsman who held court at the city desk of the Sun-Times. Unknown to Ebert at the time, the film industry was transitioning out of the factory conformity of the 1930s and into the wide open counterculture of the '60s with landmark films like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate that challenged societal norms and ushered in an era of director as auteur, many of whom were no older than Ebert. -- Martin Scorsese. He was slight and filled with energy. He was funny. He was a creature of New York. The first time I went to his house, he was living in a high-rise next to the Russian Tea Room and his living room was jammed with video equipment that I had never seen before, allowing him to project on a big screen. Of course there was also a 16 mm film projector. To some degree his house was a screening room with sleeping and kitchen accommodations. -- Woody Allen. "I don't care about my lifework for a second," he told me once. "When I die, I don't care what they do with it. They can flush it down the toilet. There's that delusion that it's going to have some meaning to you when, in fact, you'll be a nonexistent thing; there'll be not a trace of consciousness. So it becomes completely irrelevant, what happens after your death. Totally. It doesn't mean a thing." -- Werner Herzog. Here was a young man unlike any I had ever met. He spoke clearly and directly of unusual ideas. I didn't get the impression of an enlarged ego. There was no boasting. He wasn't pitching or promoting. It was clear to him what his mission was. It was to film the world through the personalities of exalted eccentrics who defied all ordinary categories and sought a transcendent vision. Every one of his films has followed that same mission. Every one, I believe, is autobiographical--reflecting not the facts of his life, but his spirit. He is in the medieval sense a mystic. More so than the movies, Life Itself detours into two alleys of Ebert's life I never knew about. He discusses his alcoholism, the disease his father kicked before Ebert's birth through the machinations of his charismatic mother, a bookkeeper and businesswoman who, ironically, descended into drink the same time as her son following her husband's death. Sober since 1979, Ebert writes about thirty years of AA meetings and how the oft criticized program benefited him. A creature of Chicago, he surprised me with chapters devoted to his spiritual connection with the cities of London and Venice and his experiences there over the years; these are as laser sharp as any travelogue. I sailed into Venice for the first time a little after dawn, standing at the bow, the fog so thick San Giorgio Maggiore seemed to float in the clouds. From Venice I went by train to Munich and then to London, where at American Express there was a letter from Dan Curley saying that he and his family were spending the year on sabbatical. Dan was a walker. He had waterproof shoes, a slicker, and a knapsack containing binoculars and a bird guide. Our first day he took me for the walk we later wrote about in our guidebook The Perfect London Walk. We started from the Belsize Park Tube stop and walked past Keats House and into Hampstead Heath and to the top of Parliament Hill, where all of London was at our feet. Aside from mentioning his former television partner and friend a couple of times, Ebert holds off discussing Gene Siskel until page 312/415. This built a terrific sense of anticipation for me personally. While I inherently mimic Ebert's writing style, I've found that I more often share the opinions of Siskel--he gave ecstatic endorsements to Blue Velvet and Boogie Nights while Ebert qualified his praise at the time--and my favorite chapters are the two or three devoted to his pugilistic partner. Siskel passed away in 1999 of a cancerous brain tumor, the details of which he never discussed with Ebert, even privately. The way Ebert sees it, they had the conversations that mattered. The night after that appearance we had dinner together in a hotel in Cambridge and had our longest and deep philosophical discussion. We talked about life and death, the cosmos, our place in the grand scheme of things, the meaning of it all. He spoke about his Judaism, which he took very seriously. "I had a lot of long talks with my father about religion," Gene told me. "He said it wasn't necessary to think too much about an afterlife. What was important was this life, how we live it, what we contribute, our families, and the memories that we leave. The importance of Judaism isn't simply theological or, in the minds of some Jews, necessarily theological at all. It is that we have stayed together and respected these things for thousands of years, and so it is important that we continue." This was one of the most touching descriptions of Judaism I had ever heard. I also found great courage and insight in the final chapters devoted to Ebert's cancer, his medical procedures and the gradual loss of his voice and part of his face. This may be the first memoir I've read where the author deals with his or her own mortality in such candid terms. Ebert writes about his physical and mental trials, his addiction, rehabilitation and realizations, while devoting many paragraphs to the love and support of his wife Chaz, a Chicago litigator and single mother of four who became his full-time business manager and remained by his side through his hospital ordeals. I came away from Life Itself with an impression of Ebert as a Chicago newspaperman first and foremost, a critic who was far better educated and traveled than the majority of media personalities who've followed in his wake. He quotes Gene Siskel as saying, "You may be an asshole, but you're my asshole," and I detected that as well. I imagine Ebert could've at times seemed like a bastard to many thin-skinned directors or actors whose movie he'd gutted. Evocatively contrasted with how his extended family and peers viewed him, as well as how Ebert influenced me as a writer and reader, this book offers a full picture of the man. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 07, 2016
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Aug 12, 2016
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Aug 04, 2016
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0330484559
| 9780330484558
| 0330484559
| 3.69
| 181,659
| Feb 17, 2000
| 2001
|
did not like it
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A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, the 2000 memoir by Dave Eggers, was recommended to me by a college student I've gotten to know at McClain's
A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, the 2000 memoir by Dave Eggers, was recommended to me by a college student I've gotten to know at McClain's Coffeehouse. I spend my weekends there writing and wasting time on social media while this guy is studying French or wasting time playing poker. We use each other as a sounding board when we're writing. We both love to read; he can't believe I've never read William Faulkner or Philip Roth. I can't believe he's never read Elmore Leonard or Stephen King. We agree that John Steinbeck and Flannery O'Connor are our people. I feel it's also relevant to mention that I'm forty-three and this guy is twenty-three. He's intelligent and could be a really good writer, but he's also twenty-three, and does shit that you do in your twenties, like disgrace yourself with alcohol or drugs, misplace valuable items and stress over things that you can't control. It occurs to me that I'm old enough to be this guy's dad and have motive and opportunity every now and then to give him a Father-Son Talk, but try not to. It might make me feel a little better but I'm not sure it would help him right now. If he asks for advice I'll offer it, but I don't want to father my friends. The other thing I don't want to father is the books I read. Like this one. What are we going to do about Dave? I don't really know, but I resent an author who turns me into a guidance counselor or youth pastor on my day off. In this imaginative account of his early life, Eggers was on track to earn a journalism degree until the deaths of his parents within the same year--his father from brain and lung cancer, his mother from stomach cancer--force him to take time for himself to Question Everything. Dave's hiatus is exacerbated by his eight-year-old brother Topher, who he assumes guardianship of while his sister Beth finishes her law degree at the University of Berkeley and his brother Bill works in Los Angeles. Dave and Toph relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area, where the tech boom is transforming the country and his generation. Sounds like the basis for a compelling book. Except this edition begins with two pages of suggestions from Eggers on how to enjoy the book (including, "There is no overwhelming need to read the preface. Really. It exists mostly for the author .."), followed by a nine page preface, followed by twenty-five pages of acknowledgments which includes a sketch of a stapler. EXT. MCCLAIN'S COFFEEHOUSE--DAY Joe storms onto the patio of the cafe. The sunlight forces his eyelids into slits and the sound of industrial dryers of the car wash across Harbor Blvd. disorient him. Joe is able to locate Bryan under the canopy of the building, smoking a cigarette and studying. Joe stomps over to his friend with a book in his hand. JOE: There's like thirty pages of preface and introductions to this book you recommended, man. BRYAN: Oh, you don't need to read any of that. JOE: You're telling me he wrote this book for himself? BRYAN: You can skip it. Skip it! Eggers even tells the reader it's okay to. It's good, man! Trust me. Bryan emits a plume of nicotine onto the patio. Joe turns and returns to the cafe. I read a great deal of A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, 270/437 pages, before abandoning this hooptedoodle. It is not for me. I am not the demographic for navel gazing, no matter how literary it aspires to be. If I was still questioning my place on the planet, or through controlled substances and poor decisions had forgotten what planet I was on, then sure, I could appreciate the self-obsessed shit storm Eggers unloads here, resisting the conventional memoir or comic narratives commonly found in them. I'm glad he got this out of his system and figured things out. It was worth it for McSweeney's. I just don't want to have to read it. The fact that I plowed through as much of the book as I did is a testament to the hand drawn, DIY look and feel of it, more like pages ripped out of a spiral notebook rather than a memoir intended for the masses. I was with the book in the beginning. Eggers throws the reader into his experiences caring for his cancer-stricken mother at home, with limited help from his sister while also having responsibility for his young brother. It probably isn't a spoiler that after Dave's mother dies, he and Topher move to the Bay Area, where much ennui ensues. For many, many, many pages. This book becomes an incessantly self-obsessed, irritating and boring account of White Man's Problems in the United States. I ran out of reasons to keep reading. No one who braves this volume should expect a comic memoir. Humor isn't really what Dave Eggers does. "Irony" and "self-revelation" are way ahead of "humor" on the list. There's a recurring motif where he devotes paragraphs to how amazingly talented he is at things--singing, Frisbee throwing--and I get it. You're a child trying to entertain the child you've been given responsibility for. Point made. I'm over it. Move on. Eggers lost both his parents at a young age. Many people do. Eggers doesn't know what he wants to do with his life. Not many people do. Tell me a story. Let's go. Otherwise, as an adult, you're wasting my motherfucking time. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 05, 2016
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Aug 06, 2016
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Jul 31, 2016
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Paperback
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| 1594486638
| 9781594486630
| 1594486638
| 3.83
| 35,653
| Oct 27, 2015
| Oct 27, 2015
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it was amazing
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This 2015 memoir by Carrie Brownstein, co-founder of grunge rock trio Sleater-Kinney (and known far and wide today for the IFC sketch comedy series Po
This 2015 memoir by Carrie Brownstein, co-founder of grunge rock trio Sleater-Kinney (and known far and wide today for the IFC sketch comedy series Portlandia she acts in, writes and created with Fred Armisen) is devoted purely to Brownstein's emergence from uncool teenager and suburban music geek in Redmond, Washington to recording and touring with what a critic at Time Magazine called in 2002 the best rock 'n' roll band in America. Rather than promoting Sleater-Kinney's import as artists or blowing smoke around her legacy, Brownstein delivers a stoic, tough and vibrantly unapologetic account of her singular experiences as a rock artist. Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl was a treat for myself after taking ten days (though it felt longer) to finish reading Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. I read and reviewed Brownstein's book on Super Bowl Sunday, and in addition to tending a sweet tooth I have for performing arts memoirs -- studying how artists create and hone an act and later, reconcile creativity and freedom with commercial success -- I amused myself by picturing Miss Lily Bart traveling ninety years into the future to hang out with Brownstein. Not even the most visionary science fiction author of Wharton's age could have imagined suburbs, MTV or riot grrrls by the end of the century. [image] There are cultural trends that have emerged from my generation, Generation X, that I'm critical of, and with reason. Carrie Brownstein passes every metric for what I'd consider a hero. I could identify with a lot of her experiences, namely the pull of conformity as a knee jerk reaction to a fractured family (her mother was hospitalized for an eating disorder when Brownstein was 14 and a year later left her father, who came out of the closet to his daughter in 1998.) I grew up in the suburbs without a cause or culture and thought I was most uncool person in my postal district. I still kind of do. Brownstein's triumphs knock all those excuses down like dominoes. The biggest impact Brownstein made on me was her willingness to unsettle herself again and again throughout her life; creatively, emotionally, moving to a new city each time she could sense she was in danger of settling into a pattern; relocating to Olympia to try to get in a band, to Melbourne to record her first album and to Portland to shake loose feelings of peer pressure. These life changes were initiated regardless of what she would have to give up or how foreign her new environment was. In doing this, she strips away the pageantry of being a touring musician and instead shows how much work creativity is and how intimidating it should be. [image] My favorite passage of the book is this one: Sleater-Kinney was nearing the decade mark of being a band. It felt like we knew our capabilities, that they were approaching something finite and fixed. And our audience knew what we were capable of, what we were going to sound like, who our label was; the people who didn't like us would continue not to like us, and the people who liked us would feel the same, ad infinitum. I could imagine that the journalists had already written their reviews, like the obituaries on deck for the nearly dead; someone could just plug in the name of our latest album and the review would be done. I didn't want to be the Mr. Rogers of music, where we could open a closet and see the same ten sweaters, and everyone would know what we were going to wear since there was a predetermined set of choices. None of us were that excited about that anymore. I don't want to know what's going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it's a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it's also disheartening and uninspiring. We needed a sense of rediscovery, for the audience and for ourselves. [image] Scroll down to my incessant status updates for more awesome quotes from this book, which I highly recommend for anyone with more than a passing interest in performing arts. In all honesty, I've never heard a Sleater-Kinney single -- I was obsessed with hip hop when grunge rock was big -- or even watched a full episode of Portlandia, but don't feel a reader needs to be a Brownstein superfan in order to enjoy the book. As a postscript, she reveals what recording artists who take breaks from music at the age of 35 do with their life; they volunteer for their state humane society and inevitably adopt dogs and cats. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 07, 2016
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Feb 07, 2016
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Jan 13, 2016
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0911858083
| 9780911858082
| 0911858083
| 3.84
| 250
| 1941
| Jan 01, 1971
|
really liked it
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[image] On March 11, 1940, John Steinbeck and his good friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts (who served as Steinbeck's inspiration for the characte [image] On March 11, 1940, John Steinbeck and his good friend, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts (who served as Steinbeck's inspiration for the character of "Doc" in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday) cast off from Monterey Bay with a chartered crew of four aboard a 75-foot purse seiner christened the Western Flyer. Their makeshift expedition made way for the Gulf of California. Or, as the narration goes, "Once it was called the Sea of Cortez, and that is a better-sounding and a more exciting name. We stopped in many little harbors and near barren coasts to collect and preserve the marine invetrebraes of the littoral." The expedition concluded on April 20, 1940 and the following year, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research was published on the heels of Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Grapes of Wrath. The book consisted of Ricketts' log, based on notes he took on the voyage and that Steinbeck edited, as well as an appendix that Ricketts compiled with photographs and drawings of specimens. Ricketts would be killed in 1948 three days after a passenger train struck his car in Monterey. To honor his friend's memory, Steinbeck republished the book as The Log from the Sea of Cortez in 1951, removing the appendix and adding a preface dedicated to his friend. If Ricketts or Steinbeck only published Sea of Cortez, they'd have contributed more to marine biology, geography and the humanities than most. As recently as 1940, the Gulf of California had been documented with only varying degrees of accuracy; the work of an 18th century Jesuit priest named Clavigero rates higher in Ricketts' esteem than the Coast Pilot, the maritime guidebook he begrudges for its "austere tone." There was no sonar, no satellite imagery. Photographic records were poor. Communication along Lower California was primitive. Ricketts and Steinbeck sailed one of the most dangerous bodies of water in the world for a month (albeit the month of calmest seas) with less technology than I'm using to write this book review. [image] Though my mother might get a dizzy spell to see me admit this (she's a retired science teacher), the scientific passages of the book were ones that my eyes tended to glaze over. Crustaceans and other invetrebraes are simply not fascinating subject matter for me to read about. They may be for you. The marine biology portions of the book are far from dense or jargon-filled and do have a pleasant knack for appealing to the ten-year-old explorer in all of us. Many of the classifications simply started to pass by my eyes like something Willy Wonka would make up during a tour of the Chocolate Factory. We found extremely large sponges, a yellow form (probably Cliona), superficially resembling the Monterey Lissodendoryx noxiosa, and a white one, Steletta, of the wicked spines. There were brilliant-orange nudibranchs, giant terebellid worms, some shell-less air-breathing (pulmonate) snails, a ribbon-worm, and a number of solitary corals. These were common animals and the ones in which we were most interested, for while we took rarities when we came upon them in normal observation, our interest lay in the large groups and their associations--the word "association" implying a biological assemblage, all the animals in a given habitat. Initially, the boats that Ricketts and Steinbeck attempt to charter in Monterey Bay are owned by Italian, Slav or Japanese sardine fishermen uneasy about anything not related to fishing. The Western Flyer proves game. Her captain, Tony Berry, is intelligent and tolerant. "He was willing to let us do any crazy thing we wanted so long as we (1) paid a fair price, (2) told him where to go, (3) did not insist that he endanger the boat, (4) got back on time, and (5) didn't mix him up in our nonsense." The rest of the crew consists of "Tex" Travis, the engineer, who demonstrates an aversion to sharing dish washing duties, and two able seamen, "Sparky" Enea and "Tiny" Colletto, who "grew up together in Monterey and they were bad little boys and very happy about it." [image] The highlights of Sea of Cortez for me were Ricketts' picturesque accounts of his experiences in the Gulf, which transported me to that place and time. I was reminded of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in the sense that the further the boat travels, the further back in time it seems to travel. In ports of call like Cape San Lucas, the Western Flyer is welcomed with pomp by authorities as if the shrimper was the Queen Mary. In La Paz, little boys swarm the deck once word gets out that gringos are throwing away money on worthless sea creatures. In Puetro Escondido, a rancher invites the crew on a hunting trip with Indian guides in which no hunting takes place. In Loreto, a little boy takes them on a tour. This small boy could have been an ambassador to almost any country in the world. His straight-seeing dark eyes were courteous, yet firm. He was kind and dignified. He told us something of Loreto; of its poverty, and how its church was tumbled down now; and he walked with us to the destroyed mission. The roof had fallen in and the main body of the church was a mass of rubble. From the walls hung the shreds of old paintings. But the bell-tower was intact, and we wormed our way deviously up to look at the old bells and to strike them softly with the palms of our hands so that they glowed a little with tone. I can imagine that the only thing grander than Ricketts and Steinbeck exploring the Sea of Cortez for a month was editing Sea of Cortez. Even though Steinbeck refused to take any credit whatsoever for the log, I was able to connect this book with the travelogue Steinbeck wrote twenty years later, Travels with Charley: In Search of America. While that book was about a successful author trying to rediscover the country he'd been writing about from the comfort of his home in Long Island and autumnal in tone, Sea of Cortez is full of spring's youthful vigor, of living in the present, exploring the flora and fauna of Old Mexico with your best friend and other men. [image] My list of John Steinbeck books ranked from favorite to least favorite: 1. East of Eden (1952) 2. The Grapes of Wrath (1939) 3. Sweet Thursday (1954) 4. Of Mice and Men (1937) 5. The Wayward Bus (1947) 6. Tortilla Flat (1935) 7. The Winter of Our Discontent (1961) 8. Cannery Row (1945) 9. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941) 10. Travels with Charley: In Search of America (1962) 11. The Pastures of Heaven (1932) ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 05, 2016
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Mar 18, 2016
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Oct 29, 2015
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.02
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really liked it
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Apr 07, 2024
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Mar 13, 2024
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| 3.85
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really liked it
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Dec 18, 2022
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Dec 05, 2022
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| 4.06
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it was amazing
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Jan 19, 2023
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Nov 26, 2022
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| 3.97
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really liked it
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May 28, 2022
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Apr 23, 2022
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| 3.76
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it was ok
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Apr 13, 2022
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Mar 18, 2022
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|||||
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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Sep 02, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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|||||
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| 4.14
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it was amazing
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Aug 30, 2021
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Aug 25, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.70
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really liked it
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Jun 28, 2021
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Mar 30, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.92
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it was amazing
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Jun 14, 2021
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Mar 28, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.88
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it was amazing
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Jul 30, 2020
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Jul 16, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.31
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really liked it
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Aug 06, 2020
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Jun 27, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.30
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it was amazing
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Aug 22, 2020
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Jun 20, 2020
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|||||
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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May 06, 2019
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May 03, 2019
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|||||
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| 4.19
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really liked it
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Apr 26, 2019
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Apr 23, 2019
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|||||
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| 4.12
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it was amazing
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May 2019
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Apr 22, 2019
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| 3.15
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really liked it
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Jun 21, 2021
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Jul 24, 2018
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|||||
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| 3.91
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it was amazing
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Aug 12, 2016
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Aug 04, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.69
|
did not like it
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Aug 06, 2016
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Jul 31, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.83
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it was amazing
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Feb 07, 2016
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Jan 13, 2016
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|||||
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| 3.84
|
really liked it
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Mar 18, 2016
|
Oct 29, 2015
|
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