By definition, adjunct means, "a thing added to something else as a supplementary rather than an essential part." So, we know what we're getting into. Still, it sucks to be nonessential when you do essential things pretty well. There are 2 or 3 weeks before any given semester begins when adjunct instructors get to feel entirely essential. Today alone I've had two phone interviews and gotten no fewer than three other email inquiries about whether or not I can teach at X institution. Some of these are schools that I approached 6+ weeks ago, when I was putting my schedule for the fall together. I've played this game many times. So! Onward! I'm preparing to teach a class of all men (boys?) business majors at a private college. I'm teaching Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams. I planned this syllabus weeks and weeks ago, before I knew I'd have a class of all men, but now, it seems even more essential. Everyone needs to learn empathy. But maybe especially men. Maybe especially men, empathy toward women. Not that that's what this book is about. It's more about just seeing other people for who they are. Understanding lives that seem entirely different from your own. Jamison investigates super weird communities: people with obsessions and diseases, and biases. She writes beautifully about them. She becomes them, in a way. Someday I'd like to become a real teacher, with a living wage and reasonable benefits; but until then, I'll do my best at being essential, in a supplementary way.
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Everyone knows that I'm a runner. It's not that I'm remarkably great at it, at least not anymore. But it's a thing that I do, and have done, for a better part of my life. It wasn't until I moved to New York City--where it's pretty tough to get by with fewer than 3 jobs (especially adjunct teaching jobs)--that I turned to running for income. I led group runs around Brooklyn and Manhattan, and I learned about the biomechanics of feet. In my 20+ years of pounding the pavement, I've broken most of my metatarsals and strained a good number of muscles: so I decided to try to help people avoid that. I started working part-time for JackRabbit Sports: what I discovered was a pretty amazing network of people--many of them artists with other careers and goals--all of them interested in running. But alas, change happens: JackRabbit was bought out, most of the great people left, and the focus is now on the numbers a lot more than on the community and helping people find their fit. But the New York Times published an article today, about choosing the right running shoe. They're throwing a lot of what we know about pronation and science out the window: maybe that's a good thing. Maybe sometimes we study something to death and figure out exactly why it should work, and then it still doesn't. Maybe we should always be focused on what just feels good, and what makes us feel strong and necessary. Maybe sometimes we need to break a few bones in order to know how to heal.
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Fifth from the left!
Yesterday, July 26th, thousands of women around the world biked 100 kilometers. That's 60 miles. They met at cycling shops and street corners, and collectively ventured into the streets, up and down hills, and through various versions of July weather. In NYC, we met at Rapha Cycling Club and Cafe. If you haven't been, it's like the hippest place in the Meatpacking District. We were greeted with croissants and coffee and images of Le Tour de France beaming on the walls. We set out. There were hills: 2,200 feet of elevation gain, to be exact. About 2 miles into the ride, a man biked up next to me and said, "How far are you going?" "Nyack. And back." "That's a long way. And it's all women?" "All women." He drifted off, or sped up in front of us: but he was impressed. There were water breaks and Clif bars and electrolyte mixes. There were tan lines. It was indeed impressive.
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Tig Notaro says, "I feel very lucky; this is what being alive is all about: just, that idea of taking risks and seeing the payoff. You know, this is so cliche but it's like, you're alive so you might as well take chances." This was after being diagnosed with C-Diff, a super rare condition in which one's intestinal track essentially gets eaten by the disease. This was after losing her mother to a sudden death. This was after being told that she had breast cancer that would require a double mastectomy. Her response to all of this loss and grief and depression, was pretty remarkable. She made people laugh, because really, what else is there? Tig's comedy has sort of blown up since she went public with her serial bad news, but she's stayed true to herself and to what she does best: helping us laugh at how weird and amazing we all are. Watch her film, buy her album, be sure that you live as much as Tig does in her live performances.
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Iron and Wine, and Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses), have a new album, Sing Into my Mouth. The 12 songs are all covers of some of Sam Beam and Ben Bridwell's favorite tunes. They cover Talking Heads, Sade, Spiritualized, and Bonnie Raitt, among others. If you didn't know these were covers, you might have a hard time recognizing them. A lot of slide guitar. A lot of slowing things down. Their take on "This Must Be the Place" is great: totally folksy in a way that Talking Heads isn't. The rest of the songs are interesting, sometimes too slow and rambling, but certainly different than anything you've heard. Rolling Stone calls this a mixtape put together by a pair of old friends, which pretty much nails it. When musicians, who are also long time friends, collaborate for the hell of doing something different and weird, we should appreciate that.
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So, Wilco released a new, surprise album. Amazing! It's called Star Wars. I won't pretend to be a super-fan of the films: they're fine. But! Wilco! It's been 4 years! Jeff Tweedy explained the surprise by saying, What's more fun than a surprise? Good point! This is like arriving home and finding a note from the one you love. This is like getting a check in the mail. These 11 tracks are just goddamn good. Like songs you already know: like favorite songs. "Random Name Generator" and "The Joke Explained" and "Cold Slope" are why so many people love Wilco. These are short songs, and the album is over before you know it, but it's packed like a perfect poem, and you definitely need to read it again.
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The Warriors just went up on Netflix, and if you've never seen the 1975 classic, you should watch it now. It's a mix between West Side Story and Rocky Horror Picture Show. It's considered a thriller, but, especially if you live in NYC, it's more of a comedy. The plot is amazing: get back to Coney Island from the Bronx. It's as though everyone under the age of 30 is in a gang: some of them wear baseball uniforms and carry bats, some of them are on roller skates, and some of them are legitimately freaks. But they're all (mistakenly) after The Warriors. The catch phrase scene, "Warr-i-ors...come out and playyy," will remain one of the creepiest moments on film. David Patrick Kelly has understandably gone on to play other seedy characters: he may haunt your dreams; he'll certainly make you laugh.
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If you think of USA as a station that airs petty dramas, you may want to take a look at Mr. Robot. One of the one-liners I've seen to promote this show is, "Damn near perfect," and I agree. Rami Malek will seem familiar (Short Term 12, Night at the Museum) but you've never seen him like this: you've never seen anyone like this. He plays the main character, Elliot Alderson--a guy who you have a hard time deciding about--do you want to curl up with him or keep your head down when you see him on the subway? He's cute and psycho. His eyes are huge. Elliot is a hacker, but he has a 9 to 5, at a cyber security firm. His internal dialogues are incredible. "It feels like all our heroes are counterfeit. The world itself is just one big hoax...it's not because Hunger Games books make us happy, but because we want to be sedated...it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck Society." Also, Christian Slater is in this: in fact, he is Mr. Robot. The show, ironically, seems to suggest that people should take their identities back--or, create them in the first place. Too many of us are just blinking eyes behind a screen. (She typed...)
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A Most Wanted Man is a good film to watch on a rainy weekend. It's dark. The big truth of the film isn't revealed until the last scene--not as a gimmick--it gives a worldly view of how slimy the American government can be. The film is star-heavy: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Rachel McAdams, Willem Defoe, Robin Wright. Hoffman's German accent is surprisingly believable. An espionage agent who's looking to smooth over relations between the Muslim community and the Americans, he generally looks awful: a scruffy overweight alcoholic; a chainsmoker. But he's good at what he does. When Issa Karpov shows up in Hamburg from Chechnya illegally, everyone wants a piece of him. Everyone wants to use him as a pawn in their game. Things get complicated: suddenly, words and negotiation mean nothing. Hoffman's last line, "Fuck!" is so full of anger and despair: it's like hearing it for the first time.
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The scenery in Wayward Pines makes you want to leave wherever you are and move to a little town in Idaho (even though it's largely filmed in British Columbia). It's beautiful: it must smell amazing. M. Night Shyamalan's newest creation is very M. Night Shyamalan. Just when you get sort of comfortable with the characters and the pace, something is thrown into the plot that makes you question everything you've come to believe about the show. And then, as always, he makes you realize that this is some genius metaphor for our world: real life. Plus, the cast is spot on. Matt Dillon is remarkably likable: totally believable as flawed FBI agent Ethan Burke (also, Dillon is 51?!) Terrence Howard is hilarious. This is part Truman Show, part Lost: the characters desperately want to get beyond their confines, but that might not be the best idea. It's a realistic, high-drama, science-fiction thriller. (And I still want to go to Idaho).
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I had the great fortune of reviewing Trampled by Turtles back in my Indiana days. I remember that show so well: the weather was hot and stormy, kind of like it is right now in NYC, and throughout much of the country. Rain you're sort of rooting for. Trampled by Turtles opened for The Head and the Heart that night, and they played a pretty rocking show for a band that can be so mellow. Their newest album (which isn't brand new, but still worth noting), Wild Animals is delightful. A little more whispery than Stars and Satellites. These guys are very confident about their instruments: everything is clean. Having spent some time in Indiana, Tennessee, and Montana, I've heard a lot of string music; some of it you get sick of, but not these guys--you can hear the talent. The Current described the new album saying, "this as bluegrass for people who don't necessarily like bluegrass," and I agree. This feels like a summer album: it feels like moving on music.
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Waiting in line to see Pixar's Inside Out on a rainy Saturday afternoon in Harlem, yeah, it was mostly filled with kids and parents. Tired, tired parents, and kids who smelled like sweat and rain. But this is an important film. We all know about the voices in our heads, but sometimes we forget that everyone is struggling with the same emotions. Pete Doctor, one of Pixar's animators, got the idea for the film when he was trying to figure out what went on inside his 11-year-old daughter's head. This isn't one of Pixar's silly/sarcastic films--it's actually quite sweet from beginning to end. And its overall message centers around the importance of being sad. Welcoming all of the emotions: really feeling them. This film sticks with you because it forces you to think about how your own mind works. Why do we remember every detail from one childhood day but not the rest? Why do we sing the ice cream truck song at random when we're trying to think seriously? There's so much about the brain that even the experts don't know, so why not give personality to our feelings and imagine a whole team helping us each out?
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Ah, the great James Salter has died. In his 90 years he wrote a lot and edited a lot. Among all of his books, A Sport and a Pastime stands out. Salter wrote this book in 1967, and it takes place in France in the early 1960s. The book stands out not because of the perfect sentences and spot-on descriptions (Salter always has those) but because of the narrator: totally unreliable. The third-party observer of a racy affair admits that a lot of it is his own fantasy. The unnamed narrator imagines what the life an American man, Philip Dean, and a French girl, Anne-Marie, is really like. His imagination takes over. What's so attractive about this novel is that we all have a curiosity like the narrator's: we see people in love--happy and enjoying themselves--and we wonder what that reality is like. Salter was also a master of the short story: many times ending in a way that was more tragic than not. He seemed to romanticize the ugliness and celebrate the simple pleasures. I saw him read/talk at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan last year, and he was intelligently frank about his writing and his work. He was a man of routine, discipline, and immense celebration.
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Nightcrawler is billed as a neo-noir crime thriller, which may be a category entirely created for this film. Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) is passionate about finding his niche, and when he does, it's in a job that banks on other people's tragedy. Bloom becomes a stringer: someone who shoots footage of accidents and crime scenes and sells it to news stations. Bloom becomes good at it: too good. He starts aiding his job by contributing to the cause. He's obsessed and sociopathic. Gyllenhaal pegs the creepiness. Bloom gets to the point that he's basically running the show and blackmailing the director of a news channel (Rene Russo). Bloom moves from Toyota Tercel to Dodge Challenger: from handheld camcorder to professional equipment. He transforms into a geeky little monster and stops at nothing. Proof that the good guy doesn't always get ahead. Proof that what we see isn't always as important as how we see it.
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If you're anywhere near the Marlborough Chelsea Gallery, stop by before June 20th. Tony Matelli's "Garden" is on display and it includes several eyebrow raising sculptures. The centerpiece(s) are in the back room and, you might not be able to stay very long. They are a pair of painted cast silicone human figures: a man and a woman, on their heads. The figures are SO REAL that you're sure they're going to move their eyes, or flip onto their feet and ask you why you're looking at their naked bodies. They're so real that you can see the lines where their socks certainly were, just moments before you entered the room. The gallery press release suggests that their being upside down is reminiscent of the distress of a flag flown upside down; there is certainly distress in the room. There's also the question of how and why we've become so uncomfortable dealing with personal space, and bodies, and rules. Both the man and the woman are safely average. Nothing worth gawking at--neither would make a head turn on the street, with clothes. Yet there's something about looking at these pieces--these people--that makes you feel like you're invading: like you've walked in on something you shouldn't have.
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Sharon Van Etten's EP "I Don't Wand to Let You Down" is lovely. Strings and piano. A beautiful voice and a beat. Van Etten always reminds us that when you strip things away, simplicity is much better than fluff and production. The title song was released as a single a few months ago, and it remains one of those tracks to listen to over and over. I also like, "I Always Fall Apart." This has flavors of Lucinda Williams and St. Vincent. I just read that Van Etten loves PJ Harvey, which makes sense--this has just enough rock in it to keep things interesting. I'm a little less than one month older than Sharon Van Etten, which I can't believe; not that she seems old, just wise. She sounds like someone who knows everything--like she should be my mother. It makes sense that she grew up in Clinton, NJ and went to college at Middle Tennessee State University: both of those places are like the movies; like where you'd want to grow up and go to college--where people sit around and chat, sipping cold drinks and watching the river.
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Broad City. Watch it. You might be disturbed by how much you like it. Everyone I've talked to likes it. My boyfriend likes it. His co-workers like it. Gay friends like it. Straight friends like it. We all goddamn like it. But why? It's about 20-something women living in New York City, but not in the Girls sense: it's a lot less in your face than that. It's easy to watch because it's so silly, and so sharp. Lines from the show will come back to you days after watching it, and have you laughing in the shower (just, for instance). The writing is so good that it will always take you off guard. They're slackers, but as anyone who lives in NYC knows, even slackers have to work pretty hard to keep their heads above water. This show has been renewed for its third season on Comedy Central, but was developed as a web series from 2009-2011 by Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson, who star in the show. Amy Poehler took notice, and is now one of the executive producers. Just in the first two seasons there are a number of cameos (Amy Sedaris, Fred Armisen, Seth Rogen, Janeane Garofalo), suggesting, these women, in all of their raunchiness and oddity, are getting at some raw truth.
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When a runner gets injured they sulk: they get depressed and stressed and confused. When anyone loses part of what defines them, they have to deal with an emptiness, or refill it. I've been running since I was 10 years old: my dad ran marathons before marathons were crazy events with 50,000+ runners. My dad was the hipster of runners. Before there was Gu or Bonk Breakers or stability shoes. My dad ran miles and miles and miles as a meditation. So I mimicked him. I never ran to compete, although I'm very competitive. The cross country coach at my (Division III university) found me in the cafeteria one day and told me that I ran more miles than his team, and that I might as well come run for him. So I did. We ran 70+ mile weeks. I loved it. I was never the fastest: usually the 4th runner in at best, but we watched Prefontaine a billion times, and it all made me feel normal. I kept running more and more miles: entering races, giving myself goals. I've put in way more miles than my father, although I still think of HIM as the runner. Now, after 20 years of a lot of miles, I'm trying something new. A bike. I'm not new to the bike, necessarily. I went to graduate school in Bloomington, Indiana: the town made famous by Breaking Away. I biked the Hilly Hundred and wrote articles for the alternative newspaper about local bike events. But now I'm doing it as a new meditation. Now I'm admitting that it's never a bad time to redefine yourself.
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This past weekend, 30 or so people gathered at 383 West Broadway in SoHo to smoke cigars and catch up. This is the site of the now permanently closed OK Cigars, where guys (and a few gals) had been smoking, and (more importantly) becoming friends for the past 17 years. The building has sold, and H&M or some other big box store will take over soon: it's tough making a living in retail in New York City. But locally owned places to gather are important for New Yorkers--vital; whether it's a cigar shop or a barbershop or a deli or a running store: New Yorkers find THEIR place, and then visit it religiously. I would argue that community is treasured most in big cities: we want to be part of something small and significant amid the chaos. So when those places close up shop, or get bought out by something bigger, customers take it personally. People--maybe especially New Yorkers--have a need to tell their story. This happened to me today, this is what I'm working on, this is where I've been and what I've seen. And if shop owners and workers are smart, they'll listen, and care: they'll learn something. Jackrabbit Sports joins the ranks of locally owned stores, where people stopped by just to chat and laugh, that has been bought out by a bigger entity. Maybe all of the conversations won't end: maybe some of the employees who went through 3 months of training in order to talk about the biomechanics of feet will stick around. But probably, this store won't remain a religion; probably, the customers will find a new place to have community.
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It's a remarkable thing when an ad actually works. There are so many horrible examples of ads that don't. My boyfriend works in ads: brands. It's difficult to balance all that needs to be accomplished in a few words, or a few seconds. Ads can be the poetry of the media spew. More often than not, though, they're just ignored. We recently got Hulu, which means we watch ads after not doing so for a long time. Mostly, the experience is groaning and wanting to get on with the show, but a few stand out. Or, they do for me. (But then, I imagine every dog I pass on the street is humming a little tune and giving commentary on the day). JetBlue works. Pigeons taking on the voice of people on planes is adorable and sharp. It's funny. On the same note, an ad by the Argentina Liver Transplant Foundation is even better. It pulls on emotions. It uses the same music from the movie UP, which so many adults realized was NOT just a kids movie. It might bring you to tears in under 2 minutes, mostly because it's true. If you've ever had a dog, especially as a single adult person going through tough times, you can say for sure, that your dog saved you: maybe even literally saved your life. Dogs know things. You might actually WANT to watch this ad, which is pretty impressive.