Milk - Highly Recommended

What a movie! I cried my way through this beautiful, sad, uplifting, and important work. As I expected it was almost overwhelming in terms of personal history and resonance, but of course, it's so much greater than that. Just a great piece - great acting, great directing, vitality, sensitivity but also, of course, its politics. Go see it. Amen.

Young Rob in 1978

I just need to copy this photo here (snagged from Indiewire...no pun intended :)) because I love it so much. Young Rob Epstein!!! This is 1978. We met in 1973, our very first day of college. We were inseparable for months, then life shifted. But our paths kept crossing, and have still been crossing all these years later. I couldn't be more proud of Rob's career - he's made some incredible, deeply affecting films.

How I wish I had at least one picture of us young together!!

Thrilled to see the renewed attention Rob is getting for his superb The Times of Harvey Milk. And chomping at the bit to immerse in Gus Van Sant's Milk. I've missed several advanced screenings. A great subject, a great director. And I lived in SF 1975-1980. I remember that moment very well. I was spending all my time outside of my day job (distributing experimental films) up off Castro at a small lesbian run theatre company. I'm pre-disposed to go crazy for this film on so many, many levels. Really looking forward to it.

2008 Pre-Thanksgiving Mull

Just back from a late night trip to the 24 hour grocery. Not that I needed to. Not really. I just like going to the supermarket on a high traffic, pre-holiday moment. Somehow it gets me into the mood. I like the random human interaction. I like the smiles between strangers, and the little courtesies. It grounds me, amuses and delights. Lost in the anonymity, I just feel very very human. Didn't Oprah say that's what she most misses in her life? Shopping by herself in the supermarket?

I started the day early (early enough to still get a parking space) at the Central Market, the upscale sister to the more mainstream 24 hour HEB. It's a different picture tonight. The shelves are rummaged, bare, and disheveled, though employees are hard at work guiding and unpacking stacked carts full of fresh goods for the post-Thanksgiving rush. In the aisles wander young couples and Hispanics of all ages. I like the contrast. I feel at home in both environments. Satisfying bookends. Indulging in my own economic stimulus package, and human recharge.

On Cassie's daily visit to the office (yesterday when we kidded her boyfriend of 5 years, once apparently an active bachelor, now seemingly incapable of spending more than 45 minutes away from her, he smiled, "45 minutes is a LONG time." But I digress....) Cassie and I find ourselves talking about giving thanks. I realize I've blogged about what I'm talking about previously and go back to send her the easy link. Funny enough, the sentiments are exactly what I wrote about on this day last year. The pre-Thanksgiving mull.

But I also find myself lingering on a couple of different recent conversations with some younger women friends. Ages 28, 24, 21. In each case, they're wondering about their life, and how good or down they feel, and what seems to be missing. The common refrain is, "I need some new friends...some better friends for who I am now." And it makes me wonder...in this day of incessant social networks, is it still so hard to find people that feed and inspire you? Has it always been this hard? Is that the journey? As you mine for important connections, is that how you discover who you are? Have the social networks made it easier or harder? Interesting questions as I peer from my generation to the younger.

austin kleon's big move and the sweetness of perspective

Sadly I've been too busy to keep up as much as I like with Austin Kleon's blog and tumblelog but had a chance this weekend on the 7 hour drive to and back from Lubbock for that amazing UT/Texas Tech football game Friday night -- and came across this. What a lovely sentiment -- and so true..... Here's wishing them continued closeness and intriguing perspective along with larger pacing territory.


From austinkleon.com:


SKETCHBOOK

THE NEW HOUSE

Friday, October 31st, 2008

In the midst of the mortgage crisis, Meg and I went out and bought a house. We closed today, we move in this weekend. In the five years that we’ve known each other, we’ve never lived in anything bigger than a one-bedroom apartment. Now we both have offices, a washer/dryer, a two-car garage…it’s very surreal.

When you live with someone in a tiny apartment, you’re always in close proximity. You never see that person more than 10 or 20 feet away, because there isn’t 10 or 20 feet to gain between you. You get used to seeing them from a particular distance.

Meg and I often meet each other for lunch on campus. When I see her from far away, walking towards me, often she looks like a different person—she looks like a stranger, or someone I just met. It’s like a visual refresh. (I wonder if this visual element isn’t part of the hidden magic of what self-help couples books tell you to do: meet for dinner, but take separate cars…)

I’m reminded of this passage from Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville:

Maps are of two kinds. Some seek to represent the location of things in space. That is the first kind - the geography of space. But others represent the location of things in time - or perhaps their progression through time. These maps tell stories, which is to say they are the geography of time. [...] But these days I have begun to feel that stories, too, are basically concerned with spatial relationships. The proximity of bodies. Time is simply what interferes with that, yes?

I wonder about this proximity of bodies. I wonder how we will grow in a bigger space, with an upstairs and downstairs. How our changing spatial relationships might alter our story…

Above is a sketch of the house, superimposed over a page from William Maxwell’s wonderful short novel, So Long, See You Tomorrow.

awwww

my work associate jarod's kid is just too cute!!!!

Go: See Zack and Miri with a fullhouse

Go!!

And do yourself a favor - see Zack and Miri in a crowded movie theatre, with lot of others laughing their heads off. It's a group experience you won't want to miss.

Newspapers, the primal love along with radio and movies

We get the NYT delivered to our home here in Texas. $58/month. That's a lot, but we love it. But we're old school newspaper lovers. I probably started reading the Times when I was 12. It's what being a grown up was all about. And later, the career media I aspired to. I went another direction, but still love the New York Times. Though i don't quite read it everyday anymore, and haven't for awhile. I skim. But relish in the moments when we can sit together and the smart world comes to me to interact with. I love the online edition too - it's particularly great for easy sharing like I'm about to do here: But it's not the paper itself. You don't get the same easy happenstance. I hate to be an old codger mourning, but I love newspapers and magazines, and really don't want to see them disappear. I feel the same way about smart movies in movie theatres and radio programmed by real individuals in my community. But newspapers, primal.

The Media Equation

Mourning Old Media’s Decline

By DAVID CARR

Published: October 28, 2008

The news that Google settled two longstanding suits with book authors and publishers over its plans to digitize the world’s great libraries suggests that some level of détente could be reached between old media and new.

Skip to next paragraph

Enlarge This Image

Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor

Employees of The Monitor looking through a prototype of a weekly newsmagazine that will supplement the Web site.

If true, it can’t come soon enough for the news business.

It’s been an especially rotten few days for people who type on deadline. On Tuesday, The Christian Science Monitor announced that, after a century, it would cease publishing a weekday paper. Time Inc., the Olympian home of Time magazine, Fortune, People and Sports Illustrated, announced that it was cutting 600 jobs and reorganizing its staff. And Gannett, the largest newspaper publisher in the country, compounded the grimness by announcing it was laying off 10 percent of its work force — up to 3,000 people.

Clearly, the sky is falling. The question now is how many people will be left to cover it.

(continued)

Michael Barnes on Paul Woodruff's "The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched."

I really enjoyed this Michael Barnes Out and About column in the Statesman today about Paul Woodruff's book, “The Necessity of Theater: The Art of Watching and Being Watched,” which will be discussed at the Texas Book Festival on Sunday.

The Statesman page isn't linking properly, but I found this particularly interesting:

“People need theater,” Woodruff writes. “They need it the way they need each other — the way they need to gather, to talk things over, to have stories in common, to share friends and enemies. They need to watch, together, something human.”

Woodruff ranks theater alongside religion and language as essential distinguishing human characteristics. I’d add socializing to the list, for many of the same reasons.

Both kinds of watching and being watched, social and theatrical, start early in life. “We hardly take ourselves very seriously unless we can get others’ attention,” the slender, hesitant Woodruff says at rain-splashed Mozart’s Coffee Roasters on Lake Austin Boulevard. “The first thing we know as an infant, after finding a mother’s breast, is how to get her attention. And newborns are excellent at that.”

Yet the process doesn’t stop there.

“Learning how to give attention is a little harder,” he says. “We are naturally wired for getting it more than giving it.”

Thriller in Austin syncronized worldwide

Ok, I wasn't there. And the Thriller video isn't even a personal touchstone for me. But still totally cracks me up, and makes me proud of my Austin buds. Go Alamo Drafthouse.

SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK Highly Recommended!!

I first saw Synecdoche, New York at the Toronto Film Festival this year. I found it breathtaking, heartbreaking, funny, moving, romantic -- completely engaging on every level. The acting is sublime! I saw it again tonight and loved every single minute again.

In this time of decreasing art house audiences, megawatt blockbusters, and fractured niche comfort zones, I wonder how much room there is for a movie like this. This is a movie that I find so utterly satisfying. This is a movie that I know is not for everyone. But this is a movie that totally speaks to me. Go see it.