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Blue Valentine
The truth is I didn’t love Bluets at first. I had given up on blue at the time. I had given up on longing, though that’s not quite the right word. I had given up on feeling, I suppose.
I wanted to love and then I wanted to leave. I don’t regret my choices and faults, but I wish I had been kinder in my choosing. I’m sorry to have left so many times only to return, hands outstretched. Encircled so many things only to give up the good stuff.
Blue, I still don’t know how I could deserve you. You are the only thing I’d like to possess.
5.1: LA Weather & the End of the World
My mother handed over Faulkner to him as I hand it to you now, past and future folded and stabbed like a letter, twin holes gaping. The book transcribes the end but Los Angeles embodies it, the end itself.
For the last 25 years, Sofia Coppola has dissected the psyche of women and their dependence on men. This year’s Priscilla, starring Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla and Jacob Elordi as Elvis Presley, is a testament to this exploration—a meditative and restrained portrait of a woman in the shadow of a Great Man. Even now, Priscilla Presley’s legacy is enmeshed with her former husband’s. She is forever known as Priscilla of Graceland, tethered to a man she chose before she was old enough to vote
While addiction looks thrilling in print, there’s something grotesque in its nature. It conjures ideas of lack of control, a parasite capable of marring its host forever. In her early days, Cat Marnell was known as a woman on the brink, whose beauty and comparative privilege only added to the drama. Marnell, the daughter of a psychologist and a psychiatrist, grew up with a tennis court in her backyard and a penchant for staying thin. When artfully composed, a trainwreck is something to behold.
Fuck Your Boy Genius, He Doesn’t Exist
He could turn serious like Leo, or sexy like Harry. He can work forever like P.T.A, become a Zaddy like Brad, or hold an air of well-earned tragedy under his belt and utilize it for his next tour-de-force performance like Joaquin. He might be a singer or an actor, a mathematician, a CEO, your favorite guitarist, novelist, director, or poet. Wielding his craft like a gun, we cower at his fame and awesomeness. True, he’s skilled; he might even be brilliant. He might write women and queer characters with empathy and finesse. He might even be a good person. But a poet, for all he might resemble a prophet, is only a man—and powerful men have a remarkable knack for disappointing us.