Within the first ten seconds of You Won’t Be Alone, an intriguing-enough sounding movie with Noomi Rapace concerning a witch in Macedonia, a cat is eaten alive by some creature off-screen. I didn’t find out what the creature was because I turned off the movie after listening to its little bones get pulverized in the monster’s maw.
And ya know? I’m fucking tired of watching cats die in movies.
It feels like this piece has been a long time comin’.
On-screen cat deaths are usually a punchline, a mistake, or the product of a sadist’s gruesome machination. They are the animal equivalent of the dead prostitute who is merely a stepping-stone to catching “the killer”.
In Dogtooth, a criminally sheltered teenager stabs a cat to death with a pair of garden shears because his father told him they are evil.…
Within the industrial design world, Eva Zeisel is a legend, but I had no idea when I began working for her. It was 2000, I was 24, and had recently moved to Manhattan. I responded to an ad in the Village Voice that promised $12 an hour for an administrative assistant to a designer. The next day, I took the number 1 train to 116th & Broadway and entered her large, cluttered apartment for an interview. Immediately inside were floor-to-ceiling overstuffed bookcases. “Come in dah-ling,” I followed the voice through a maze of tables dotted with lamps, vases, and bowls (which I’d learn were all her own designs) to find an ancient-looking woman. With fluffy white hair and cloudy eyes, Eva sat in a pink and gold wingback chair.…
My reticent leanings began at a young age. I was about eight years old when my younger sister died from leukemia. Life for us before that was idyllic. Our father worked for a multinational oil company and we’d lived abroad starting soon after I was born, with all the benefits bestowed upon expatriates. My sister, Gail, was born in Jamacia, which for us in the 1950s was a paradise, very safe and very British. Gail’s cancer put an end to all of that. We returned to the United States.
Gail’s death was my fault, as far as I knew. I’d failed to do what a big brother was supposed to do: keep her safe. Sixty years later, I’ve not convinced myself that isn’t true. And I don’t expect I ever will.…
I’ve never actually listened to Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Nevertheless, the 1973 album made a lasting impression on me starting in the mid-90s. That’s when “MTV News” host Kurt Loder reported the music’s surprising synchronicity with the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
We were still on dial-up at this point. No one downloaded (much less streamed) albums and movies. With neither the music nor the film available to me, I simply marveled at the notion that two works—separated by decades—could be brought together by the happy, accidental discovery of a (probably stoned) fan.
Even now, with the internet at my fingertips, I have yet to test the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz theory. I worry the reality will never match my childhood reverie.…
All the boys of my class thought Miss Eliza beautiful and mysterious. Like an American film actress, she had pale skin and wore skirts or jeans. The other teachers wore saris or dresses more concealing than the nun headmistress’s black blankets. She was also kindhearted. For the two slum kids in class, she sometimes brought food. And before going home, she gave everyone a hug.
Despite being written and published decades apart, Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Shena McAuliffe’s The Good Echo bear similarities in how each novel breaks the fourth wall in order to engross the reader. While the novels also have differences in this approach (Vonnegut’s work utilizes drawings while McAuliffe’s novel utilizes a father’s dentistry notes where his story is told in his journal’s footnotes), the most notable similarity is that each novel utilizes a first-person narrator who at first seems disassociated from the story but slowly becomes more and more involved. In the case of Breakfast of Champions, the first-person narrator can be interpreted as the author; in The Good Echo, the first-person narrator is 12-year old Ben, the deceased son of Cliff and Frances Bell, who died from a botched root canal performed by his father.…
In a recent interview, New York punk poet Eileen Myles calls for men to stop writing. “I think it would be a great time for men, basically, to go on vacation,” Myles says. “There isn’t enough work for everybody. Certainly in the arts, in all genres, I think that men should step away. I think men should stop writing books.”
Since the day in 1440 when Johannes Gutenberg popped the tab on a can of pilsner and congratulated himself for having invented the printing press, readers and writers and people who aren’t either have been telling us what we should or shouldn’t read. When one Caliph Omar was asked what was to be done with the library of Alexandria, he was reported to have said that, if the books in that library contained doctrine opposed to the Qur’an, they were bad and must be burned, whereas if those books supported the most important text of Islam, they should be burned anyway, for they are superfluous.…
