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Come on, compadre. Come on!
There is absolutely nothing about Point Break that is not wonderful. Even the bad parts (there are no bad parts). You can watch this movie with anyone. Your brother. Your boyfriend. Your crappy ex-boyfriend. Your friends (all friends, over twenty years of your life). Your students. Maybe not your mother. But maybe your mother-in-law. The plot…
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Silly Theory
Some years ago, I found myself at 24-hour vegetarian diner in a California college town, breakfasting with a dear friend. We had ordered coffee, but the main course was psychoanalysis. “You can’t read Lacan without Hegel,” I assured her earnestly. She broke into a grin, paused for a brief, dramatic moment, and then sang my…
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Love in the Ruins: or, Should I Go To Grad School?
On a late-spring day sometime in the mid-90s, I found myself sitting with a friend on a stone bench overlooking a prospect of conventional, but nevertheless pretty estimable, pastoral loveliness: green valley and distant hills, cinematic cloudscapes, placid lake, etc. The friend with whom I sat was just then at the collapsing end of a…
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If Cotton Mather Went to Disneyland
One thing is for certain: he would not have caught the measles. This is the case because in 1721, in the midst of a smallpox epidemic that would kill over eight hundred Bostonians within the year, Mather, having learned of inoculation from his African slave Onesimus, began a public campaign to urge Bostonians to be…
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Making Their Way in the World Today
“City’s hard,” my three-year-old son occasionally remarks. He offers those words as mere description, though, no real judgment. (I mean, he’s three; lack of judgment is the best and worst thing about him). He’s no stranger to the strains of urban life. He helpfully reassures my husband and I as we lug ninety pounds of…
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The Interview’s False Choices
Now that the The Interview has been released in limited theaters and on “pay-per-Youtube,” as well as enabled the questionable Margaret Cho yellowface skit during the Golden Globes ceremony, many of us find ourselves asking some form of the question: “this is a movie we are supposed to care about?” There’s been no shortage of…
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The One That Got Away: On Inherent Vice
- Evan Kindley
- Bodies and Minds, Books You Should Read, Close Reading, Popular Fictions, Writing
- 4 responses
“Doc stroked his chin and gazed off into space for a while. ‘You know how some people say they have a ‘gut feeling’? Well, Shasta Fay, what I have is dick feelings, and my dick feeling sez—’”— Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009) “It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the…
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Holiday Baking for Neglected Children
At thirteen I made my first pie crust. Channeled from the back matter of Martha Stewart’s Pies and Tarts, it was a basic pâte brisée: a half cup of cold butter cut into a heaping cup of flour until it resembles coarse meal, then bound into dough with as little ice water as possible. The…
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Essays that we, as ladies of early middle age, would like to see written*
“Witty Meeting Comebacks that Indicate Your Displeasure While Concealing the (Professionally Discrediting) Whirling Dervish of Your Rage” “Throwing Money at Problems: A Justification” “Is This Sex Position Degrading or Just Uncomfortable?” “Age-Concealing Procedures: Talking to Someone While Pretending They Haven’t Had One, or, Injectables: Agreeing to Disagree” “Strangely Funny Moments in The House of…
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A Family Adventures “Into the Woods”
Avidly is very avid about beloved cultural objects — movies and musicals among them. In anticipation of the new movie version of Into the Woods, due in theaters December 25, we asked one of our most beloved families of Sondheim fanatics, the Blum Eburnes, to give us their thoughts. Reporting that they “live in jaundiced anticipation” of…
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A Modest Proposal for Memorable Holiday Cards
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Hansel and Gretel Baby Food Stylists Make Your Baby Look Good Enough to Eat! It’s holiday card season, which means it’s time to show off your plump offspring. While well meaning, many home cooks and amateur photographers make mistakes when staging the all-important roasting pan baby photograph that could have the unfortunate…