In all the summer haze, re-learning to walk away from drama, and interviewing for various jobs, I left some draft blog posts unpublished. They're updated and condensed here...
- Mi Hermana was in town last week, with the new neffy. Mi Pingüinita is talking now! It's so damn cute, as is the new nephew. Perhaps because he has the same genes, he also looks like a penguin to me, so I've started calling him my Pingüinito. ZOMG, SO CUTE!
Influenced by last month's current events, I read the Persepolis books while house-sitting and watching the news, and loved them! They were fairly quick reads, and I couldn't put them down, despite the heavy subject matter. The books are the autobiography of a girl coming of age in the new and changing Islamic Republic, and they're poignant insights into the personal interactions of citizens in an oppressive regime.
I liked the first the best, though they're both excellent. The first had narrative amazement of a child who doesn't quite fully understand the political realities around her, who still plays around in her own filtered ideas about God, nationhood, and communism. The second book has Satrapi first in Austria, then back in Tehran after her life in Europe takes a vastly different turn than expected. The second book addresses more of the "personal is political" aspect behind subversive acts.
In the Company of Men was both brilliant and horrifying at the same time. Aaron Eckhardt is, as always, excellent. Here he plays a complete asshole who makes a deal with his coworker where they both simultaneously date a deaf woman and then dump her at the same time. Eckhardt is the epitome of a smarmball: charming in public and to parents and clients, but the guy who cracks sexist, racist, and other offensive jokes in the company break room and is willing to step all over colleagues in order to get ahead himself. The film is more a harsh critique of corporate culture than of the central misogynist plot.
However, I emphatically recommend watching your Netflix queue closely so that you don't accidentally get it shipped to you during a few weeks in your life where you are extremely cynical and slightly bitter about a certain more personal situation that, after watching this film, you see (perhaps unfairly) in an entirely new and unflattering light.
Just sayin'.
- Ms. Tungsten moved back to upstate New York, in a chaotic apartment-vacating frenzy. I'll miss her in the Emerald City!
1 comment:
I need to read Persepolis - own them, just haven't opened them yet!
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