Dancer in the Dark is a musical written and directed by Lars von Trier. It stars Bjork as a Czechoslovakian immigrant named Selma Jezkova, who works in a factory and is slowly going blind.
Cut for spoilers and further discussion. Please stop reading if you haven’t seen the film.
Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar by Cheryl Strayed
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I stay away from self-help books, advice columns, or any collection of articles that purport to bring you enlightenment. It’s not just the subject matter (enraging judgment-filled pieces that tell you to stay away from the gays and find Jesus to make your depression go away); it’s that most of these books are unfortunately not well written.
Enter Cheryl Strayed, who introduced herself as advice columnist Sugar on The Rumpus in 2010. It’s easy to write her off as one of those eager old ladies who calls everyone “sweet pea”, but her beautifully written reply to this letter shows that she won’t be saccharine when she needs to be blunt:
WTF? WTF? WTF? I’m asking this question as it applies to everything every day.
Her reply begins:
Dear WTF,
My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn’t want to do it. Knew it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel the same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat.
The best advice we get in life comes from experience – our own and other people’s. Tiny Beautiful Things 
Like most of us.
I don’t know if all of her anecdotes are true. She seems to always have a ready story that just happens to be a perfect match for a letter writer’s problem. But you know what? Who gives a shit. I’m not here to double-check a stranger’s life. I’m here to listen, and she tells the best stories.
This is my favorite, because this is Sugar’s advice to herself:
The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming.
One Christmas at the very beginning of your twenties when your mother gives you a warm coat that she saved for months to buy, don’t look at her skeptically after she tells you she thought the coat was perfect for you. Don’t hold it up and say it’s longer than you like your coats to be and too puffy and possibly even too warm. Your mother will be dead by spring. That coat will be the last gift she gave you. You will regret the small thing you didn’t say for the rest of your life.
Say thank you.
Extra reading: I also love this advice from Stephen Fry: “It will be sunny one day.”
I don’t know why I’m mentioned here! (Thank you?)
This is from Nikki Alfar:
The Amazing Tripartite Book Launch
The UST Publishing House, Flipside Publishing, and Kestrel DDM invite you to the launch of ‘Philippine Speculative Fiction volume 8’, edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar, ‘Now, Then, and Elsewhen’, a short story collection by Nikki Alfar, and the digital edition of the ‘Best of Philippine Speculative Fiction, 2005 – 2010’, edited by Dean Francis Alfar and Nikki Alfar.
Ours has regularly been called “the most fun book launch of the year”, so do join us for an afternoon of laughter, merienda, and the inevitable teasing of Eliza Victoria.
And probably you. And probably me. But, you know, we believe that mockery is the sincerest form of friendship.
(Please note that this will be held at The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf at EDSA Shangri-La MALL, not the hotel, and also not the 26th Street Bistro at the new wing. It’s the ground-level Coffee Bean, facing the driveway.)
Do feel free to invite everyone you want, and post this indiscriminately!
| When | Sat, July 27, 2:00pm – 4:30pm GMT+08:00 |
| Where | The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, ground floor, EDSA Shangri-La Plaza Mall, Shaw Boulevard corner EDSA, Mandaluyong |
I have a story in PSF 8 called “A Fire That Cannot Be Touched”. It starts like this:
HER NAME WAS Nemeli of the Firelands, and she saw the Moirae Shade approaching while she was peddling bird bones at a Christmas bazaar.
“Ah, shit,” Nemeli said, because a visit from the Shade like this—without warning, among mortals—had never been known to be pleasant. She turned to her fire-companion, and saw that Dene’s face had turned the color of brackwater.
I’m going with J. See you there!
PS Please don’t tease me.
When I heard that Monsters, Inc. is going to have a prequel, I wondered what the epiphany (this is Pixar – characters always reach an epiphany) will be in Monsters University. How could Pixar make this prequel enjoyable, when the characters – Mike Wazowski and James Sullivan – have yet to realize that power (literal, in their world) comes not from a place of terror, but a place that gives you delight and laughter? Will Monsters U end with the protagonists understanding how to effectively scare children shitless? That’s going to take a dark turn pretty quickly.
BUT: the filmmakers found a way to end this without making us squirm in our seats. (An animated film for children telling children that the monster in the closet is real is bound to make you feel dirty.) Monsters University fleshes out the characters, injects it with humor (“I can’t go back to jail!”), and tells a university story (Harry Potter, anyone?) with an unpredictable plot. It made me nostalgic, actually. You see that guy with multiple limbs chugging down multiple cups of coffee on exam day? Yeah.
So many things to love in this film. Do watch it.
PS The short film, The Blue Umbrella, isn’t the best Pixar short in terms of storyline but the animation is gorgeous. The details! The color! I can’t wait to see the next Pixar film animated in this way.
Here’s the thing: we’ve been eating out nearly every night for dinner last week, either due to laziness, or the need to make the end of the work day seem a little bit more special. (We eat poached chicken for lunch and oatmeal for breakfast – it gets old.) This is not healthy, and eating out regularly is expensive, so on Saturday we did a proper grocery run with ground meat and seasoning and all and promised to only eat what we could make in our kitchen. That same night J had an intense craving for pizza, but I said a firm no. We really need to save some money and keep our poor, abandoned kitchen company.
What we cooked over the weekend: beef giniling (ground beef simmered in beef stock and tomato sauce), nilaga, microwave cake, and a Juicy Lucy (burger with the cheese inside).
They’re not all successful (my microwave cake was a bit dry and the burger was too thick), but we’re learning. (Note: J cooked most of these dishes! I’m the dishwasher.)
Know some easy recipes? (More microwave desserts?) Do share. :)
Something has been brewing in the Flipside Publishing headquarters (publisher of my previous ebooks, Lower Myths and The Viewless Dark), and here’s a preview:
Continue reading ‘a bottle of storm clouds’ – now available online
Man of Steel
Superman/Clark Kent is a boring character. He is corny. His main disguise is a pair of glasses. His weaknesses are kryptonite and super!feelings about alienation and identity. You can’t always use kryptonite to bring this guy down, so the best way to tell his story is to focus on his loneliness and confusion.
The Clark Kent in Zack Snyder and Christopher Nolan’s Man of Steel is relatable, and it helps that Henry Cavill is actually a good actor. I believed him as the still bewildered and vulnerable Superman; Brandon Routh, on the other hand, looked like a talking piece of wood and bored me to tears. This version of the origin story flows with better logic than the origin story we’re used to (the one where he meets Lois Lane in The Daily Planet). Cavill is also supported by a top-notch cast: Amy Adams, Laurence Fishburne, Russell Crowe (and I am reminded by his turn as Jor-El that he is a good actor; damn his singing in Les Miz), and Michael Shannon, who is just menacing and perfect as General Zod. (You should watch him in Revolutionary Road and Take Shelter, if you haven’t already.)
My quibbles: fight scenes that go on so long that they feel repetitive, shaky camerawork.
Overall, still a good watch.
Deliverance
Some Spoilers. This is your typical adventure-goes-horribly-wrong story, with a beautiful reversal of roles in the end (the macho becomes the weakling, and vice-versa). A group led by outdoor fanatic Lewis (Burt Reynolds) goes on a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River, which will soon be flooded by the construction of a dam. The most memorable images to me are the abandoned houses, the tiny church that is driven down the road on the back of a truck to take it away from the flood. “I just want this town to die in peace,” says the sheriff in the end, and it is sad and beautiful and just the perfect line. And the actors (esp. Jon Voight) are fantastic here.
Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father
I won’t tell you anything about this documentary, which is both tribute and a true crime tape, but I’ll say this: this is the single most devastating film I have ever seen in my life. It is incredibly heartbreaking. And I don’t think I can watch it again.
Eliza Victoria 