Nic Cage + Ethan Hawke + Snoopy + small reads
New year, new socks
How were your holidays? Did you eat many breads? I got an unexplained rash AND …
This morning I typed my to-do list, and it only took like two hours.
Assorted thoughts:
nic cage / ethan hawke
I saw many movies over the break, including Dream Scenario, in which Nicolas Cage pops up in everyone’s dreams and nightmares. (Here’s the first seven minutes.) I’d love a Dream Scenario film series featuring various actors in dream sequences: Dream Scenario 2 with Judith Light, Dream Scenario 3 with a John Candy hologram, on and on.
I dig Nic Cage because he’s talented — but also because that dude loves to work. His filmography is longer than a CVS receipt; he has appeared in at least one movie each year for the last 37 years. A lot of folks knock actors/musicians/any artists if they work “too much,” because with high productivity, some of it will surely be shit. But quantity and momentum turn me on, especially if they come from someone who can afford to slow down. If you enjoy making six films or three albums or 10,000 paintings a year, why wouldn’t you?
Ethan Hawke also likes to work, and if I could only watch his movies for the rest of my life, I’d be OK. Last week I finally saw First Reformed, the Paul Schrader-written and -directed drama where Hawke plays a small-town minister grappling with faith and humanity as our environment crumbles. Good lord (excuse the pun), these are the biggest and heaviest topics of all — which makes it all the more impressive that Schrader executes it so well. And holy holy, what an ending.
Cage and Hawke have been working nonstop for nearly my entire moviegoing life. There aren’t many actors you can say that about (and way fewer women than men, by the way). How many hours have I spent planning/contemplating/worrying about my future while staring at the deepening lines on their faces?
failing spectacularly
I clenched my teeth so hard through Maestro and The Crown’s final season that I may need oral surgery. I wanted to love Maestro, but somehow it failed to provoke any emotional reaction — a stunning achievement since it’s about music and love, two things that make me cry all the time. The Crown was once a great series, but it really tumbled down the Sarlacc pit as it heaved to the finish line.
I usually hold my tongue if I dislike something, because I don’t want to discourage others from experiencing it themselves. But if anything, take my extreme distaste as a recommendation. Watch them and find bits to love, like the Snoopy scene (below) or your sudden inexplicable attraction to Prince Charles.
little books
Storybook ND is a new-ish line of books from New Directions that transforms short novels into charming hardcover “storybooks.” The publisher says the titles aim to “deliver the pleasure one felt as a child reading a marvelous book from cover to cover in an afternoon,” and I experienced just that when I plowed through César Aira’s The Famous Magician one morning in bed.
Recently I also read Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day in a day. Many of us don’t read as much as we’d like and spend too much time scrolling or on work Zooms or with small people. The answer? Like kickboxing, slim books are the sport of the future.
ladies & lovers
Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict is a 2015 documentary about the electric and eccentric patron of the arts who had a massive appetite for acquiring contemporary art and getting frisky with contemporary artists. While watching the film, I was reminded of Patricia Highsmith’s diaries, which are just as entertaining and sexy and revolutionary.
Cartoonist Ali Fitzgerald recently drew a comic for The New Yorker about Highsmith’s career in comics, which — unlike her hookups — she never really spoke or wrote about. And here’s a story about Highsmith’s New York youth, of which she didn’t waste a damn second.
in the ears
I subscribed to Audible because this year I’m resolving to listen to fewer goofball podcasters. My first purchase was Robert Gottlieb’s Avid Reader and my next might be Bob Mehr’s Replacements bio, because I suppose I can’t get enough of writers named Bob.
OK, time to give my Olympia ribbons another workout. Happy 2024 to you and your pets!
penning a slim book about you,
(one of us dies in the end),
whit
It’s me. I die in the end.